I think judging by the response to 2 years, and who is fine with it and who isn't. if I had never heard of construct I'd find it very unattractive, too. I think it's just because I'm a loyal scirra guy who wants to see you guys succeed that I'm fine with it.
you're going to need a steady stream of newcomers to make it profitable. plus if you can use it for free with a simple nag as a deterrent, well for examplt..I forgot winrar was shareware. the people aren't paying for upgrades, those are free. you're paying to stop being nagged. people will just wait until they are ready to publish a full game to pay. there won't be many. you need to make money off the people who will never finish a game, too.
give out html in the free version, plug nag, plus ads, plus scirra arcade with ad support there, too. get rid of nags and ads for a cheap price
charge for exporters. I think it's a more user acceptable way, and also, a great way to have people continue to pay for it. After a crapload of initial awesome plugs, profitshare to host usermade plugins on scirra. in c1 for example, with just 3 or 4 users making plugs, I probably would have bought a better version of spritefont, custom controls, the camera plug, definitely perlin noise, and s, and probably the ik plug back before s came out. if you made just one dollar off of each sale that'd be 5 from me. you said there have been 200,000 downloads? imagine if half those people bought 5 plugs. that'd be 500,000$
oh yeah, and up the tiered license system. don't sell yourself short. if c2 had been out now for years already, angry birds, doodle jump, xxxxxxxxxx, and a crapload of other awesomely selling indie games wouldv probably been made in c2. make the multitiered license go up, like $10,000 in sales is the $150, $100,000 is a $500 license, and over $500,000 is the $2000. I guess that would be a company wide license with added per seat licenses for each running copy.
those games and users will be rare especially at first, but the whole idea of this is that c2 is good. they will come eventually and even one of the $100,000 would be worth over 10 normal users, not to mention whatever plugins, and exporters they bought.
in 4 years instead of having everyone just pay for the same program again, eventually it will be stable, and you'll have time to just release a boatload of new plugins, exporters, etc, all at the same time, and charge for this new bundle.
edit: sorry megatron, I reread my previous post, and got bored halfway through so I reworded it