I've checked game dev comparison websites and such, and I can't find a comparable product to C3, one that ticks the three boxes that caused my concern when combined:
- Is subscription based only
- Is Web based only
- Creates a file format that is designed to run in one application (yes its a zip file technically, no you cannot easily view or edit it by extracting it if C3 was closed, minus assets)
Dropping in to give my two cents:
Subscription means it can keep getting maintained for years to come as long as the company doesn't explode.
Web based means that the tool is easier to develop. HTML and JS are by far the most productive languages. A lot of other languages are moving towards what web has had for years in terms of productivity.
Web also means cross platform so it will work anywhere as long as you have V8 (or any future version for that matter) which is maintained by a company that is litterally stronger than half the countries on this earth.
Web also means it will NEVER stop working because of an OS/Web engine update. The whole reason you can still look at 1980s websites on the wayback machine is because JS tries to never ever break anything.
Zip is standard on every OS known to man. Any data that isn't asset is JSON which is also now standard on pretty much any modern language known to man. JSON is arguably the most efficient way to store data by being both efficient, and human readable. Also parsing JSON is B R A I N D E A D easy, ESPECIALLY in JS. In MOST languages it's a single line of code to go from JSON to usable variables in code.
All of your points actually prove that C3 is way less likely to randomly stop working than C2.
C2 can break from any windows OS. Heck it's already falling apart for no reason on windows 10. C2 is only compatible on Windows. C2 is pretty much impossible to maintain as a community member because it has proprietary code, and needs really technical skills to be able to decompile. And even if you do, you'll have to deal with whatever the code you get actually looks like. Ashley, with full access to the source code and who wrote it all finds it difficult to work with, I doubt anyone will be able to make any meaningful step towards maintaining C2 if it fails to work.
And while capx are also zip files, most data is stored in XML, which is still very used but not as easy to use and widespread as JSON.
C2 ticks all the boxes of "I will become abandonware in 4 years time", C3 doesn't. The only amazing thing C2 has that C3 hasn't is a completely open source, unminified runtime, and the best stab at maintaining C2 would be to completely rewrite an editor for it and use its runtime. Doesn't that ring a bell? Yeah it's C3.