EdGrip wrote: ↑07 Jul 2020
I'm which case, we revert to "it doesn't matter which way round you buy-then-crossgrade."
I might be misunderstanding your comment, and if so, apologies, but based on my read of it it kind of does matter.
It only reliably works for sure if you buy the RE first. To get the VST first you have to
hope that the dev has enough free licenses available to graciously offer it the other way. In practice, that means fewer than 80 crossgrades
from VST purchase are available, as 5-10 of those licenses will be for beta testers, one each for your direct staff, obviously, at least 5 to offer to the press (though they ignore REs anyway, so .... those will
always be spare
) and for safety you'd need to keep a few back just in case. Now, there might be a good chance, maybe even a strong chance, that the number of people needing a crossgrade from VST to RE will be fewer than 80 forever, or at least for long enough that it's never a problem, but if your product is good enough and the Reason and RE format are successful as RS say it is, that 80 would be reached fairly quickly.
However, the moment that limit is reached either there's no more crossgrading in that direction—in effect it's an indefinite time offer but limited in numbers—
or the developer crawls to RS and requests more free licenses.
The problem is, if RS grant them more licenses, RS are now effectively permitting the sale of REs outside of the shop, as they're not receiving income on the sale. So, at that point, if the dev gets those extra free licenses, then the rest of us would have to take Reason Studios to court as they'd be breaching the contract that we can't sell REs sold outside the shop, because that's
explicitly what the developer would be doing. From 80 available free licenses, one can call it a courtesy offer. The moment more licenses are given, it becomes explicit. This is a crucial distinction.
Since a VST sold direct isn't subject to RS tax, a user could theoretically buy a VST for a fraction of the price that the dev has to sell the RE for,
just to get the more expensive RE version via a free crossgrade. RS earns nothing on the deal, but the VST producer effectively earns more.