the name and the marketing

ArtRage Vitae is really a strange name for this project of transitioning ArtRage to a new platform like the app stores. It’s neither easy to pronounce nor catchy. To put it mildly, to me this name is not exactly amenable to getting my attention and making me want to transition and feel "yes, I want to have this". Any other odd name like ArtRage Pro would have worked better IMHO. But that’s just my feeling.

the app store

As a long time user of ArtRage, the goals behinds switching to app stores are very unclear to me. I understand the argument that serial numbers and updating might be cumbersome for a certain small group of people. But there seem to be so many unanswered questions.

With the traditional versioning scheme, I was able to buy a new version of ArtRage every x years, and I would gladly do so. At the same time, I had full control whether I wanted to update and had full freedom over the purchased software without being tied so some form of app store that can change without notice in any future OS update and make my current purchases unusable. I could even use ArtRage on Linux under Wine and it worked fine! This option is now gone for good, which is quite sad.

Most disturbingly, with the App Store scheme now, the whole thing seems not sustainable for Ambient Design for me. If ArtRage Vitae really stays as one version in the app stores, and you only pay once and for all future updates - as has been stated by Andy in this forum - how is Ambient’s plan to ever finance future upgrades, once the ArtRage community has switched to ArtRage Vitae and paid it once? I find this extremely fishy to be frank and I don’t see that it will work this way. This is the main reason I’m extremely reluctant to purchase ArtRage Vitae at this point, because I do not understand the scope of what I am actually buying.

the communication

What is really missing at the moment in my opinion is a clear and longier statement on the main web site where this is going. Something like „we are switching to the App Store and this is how we are going to pay future upgrades“. As stated before in this forum, why is there no banner on ArtRage’s web site that ArtRage desktop is now ArtRage Vitae? Why is ArtRage 6 still marketed - with a holiday discount - as current desktop version for new users if there will be no feature updates? If ArtRage Vitae is the future, then please state it clearly.

I love ArtRage and hope that there is a sustainable future for it, but at the moment there seems to be a rather large uncertainty where this will go. I’m quite willing to switch to the App Store if I can trust that what is happening here, but right now this feels to me like ArtRage has entered unpredictable terrain.