Business-wise it is not feasible to drop all support, especially for a relatively new software release. Customers hate having support for their product dropped. For exactly this reason, we are continuing to maintain Construct 2 for the foreseeable future. We could never say we'd dropped support for it - there would be a huge backlash.
I am sure the same thing would happen if we dropped support for the product every year and asked people to pay again. It would be a regular, annual backlash. I dread to think of that. I am certain we would be forced to maintain old versions at least a couple of years. Maintaining multiple versions would cause a significant engineering overhead and considerably slow down our ability to progress with new features.
You could use something akin to Unity's pay-to-own:
http://www.cgchannel.com/2016/06/unity- ... ing-model/
[quote:fd0h7nlb]Exisiting owners of perpetual licences will get the option to buy either a 24-month or 36-month Pro subscription that “allows them to keep the software as a perpetual version at the end of their commitment periodâ€.
Pricing for this pay-to-own model hasn’t been announced yet, but Unity has said that you’ll pre-pay the full cost of the subscription, so it’s effectively still a perpetual licence plus maintenance by another name.
New customers will also have access to the 36-month pay-to-own scheme.
Pay up-front for a two or three year subscription and two/three years of updates. If you communicate this clearly there shouldn't be any user backlash.