I haven’t argued for 2. That was someone else (unless you mean someone who cannot upgrade to Sierra and wants to buy Scrivener? Those would HAVE to be able to buy v2 and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t - it’s either that or no Scrivener at all, and L&L wouldn’t want that.).
You just argued for 2. It would be fun, but unrealistic.
I have a 2002 white iBook running Jaguar. It would be fun if I could upgrade all software on it to the latest possible (Tiger?) but unreasonable to expect all software companies to maintain back copies of all versions of all software.
Since we have no way to verify a user’s operating system, any proposal that involves selling new v2 licenses equates to option #2.
Katherine
I don’t know why you can’t sell a v2 license to someone who can’t use v3?
You’d do like many software companies do, and you’d have v3 as the main version for sale on your Home page. There it would outline the minimum requirements (hardware and software i.e. OS). In small print - as many companies do - you would refer users who don’t meet the minimum requirements to a ‘legacy version’ for which you would still charge of course. I’ve seen this so often, I don’t see why it should be an issue?
Users running Sierra or later wouldn’t even see or look for that small print and would purchase v3 as a matter of course. But obviously L&L would want to sell licenses to those who can’t use v3 - it makes no commercial sense not to, and involves very little effort.
Ah, but it’s not obvious, hence the whole conversation. L&L seems to not want to sell further v2 licenses once v3 is released, otherwise they would have planned to. And we are not privy to the financial reasons (and other reasons) why they have come to this decision.
And while you are correct that merely selling the license may involve “very little effort”, it is almost certain that supporting such users could be drastically more expensive.
No support is required. All the software suppliers that provide downloads of legacy software have a strict condition that it’s sold on the understanding that no further upgrades will be provided and that any support is provided on a limited basis. For S2 this would be either through the user forums, or via the usual ticketing system if no v2 user has an answer to any problem (and as the user response will generally be “This is a known Apple bug which is resolved in Sierra and Scrivener 3 - in version 2 there is no further solution sadly”, a ticket would be a rare thing indeed).
If it’s a general Scrivener query/confusion common to any version, these forums will be able to answer.
By now this question will appear to be off topic ( 
) but: somebody mentioned a test at the beginning of this thread…? Any idea when we will see the beta?
To provide a formal update on what our policy will be going forward: no, we aren’t going to sell Scrivener 2 licences specifically. I know a few here feel otherwise, but we don’t think it’s good idea to sell software with no intention of revisiting or releasing at least bug patches for. Even if you state that in the fine print. And I don’t agree that such is incredibly common practice. I have never seen that done myself, which doesn’t mean it isn’t out there, but at least among the software stores I’ve been through in the past few years: they sell what they are developing, not older versions of it that they stopped developing years ago.
But, this is something we’ve been thinking about for a while now otherwise. There are two issues to consider:
- Windows, although made available as a beta on day one… will be a beta. Those wishing to work cross-platform or to collaborate with Windows users may not be able to use 3.0 immediately for that reason. Not everyone wants to dive straight into a beta.
- It is a hard cut off at a present-tense macOS version. I’ve seen the 50% number thrown about a bit here, but I wonder what that number looks like if you count the last two releases? Given the support information and crash report tracking we have available, it is increasing rare to see anyone on anything less than last year’s macOS release. We get scattered few 10.9 users, rarer few from 10.7 and .8, and long, long stretches of time go by between 10.6 users asking for help (and this despite it having some of the worst AppleDecay problems—among one of which makes PDF viewing 100% utterly broken, you’d think we’d be hearing a lot about that if lots of people still used it). I think, these days a huge chunk of Mac users are on the two more recent versions. But it is still a near cut-off and Apple has recently made it so older hardware is more recently made unsupported.
So here is how things will be: if one purchases a copy of Scrivener 3 from the new site they will find that they can download a copy of Scrivener 2 from our legacy link, plug that serial number in, and it’ll unlock the software. If in two years they get a machine that can run Scrivener 3, they’ll be able to take that same licence number and unlock it. So they won’t be buying a mothballed 2.8—they will be buying Scrivener 3, with the added capability of being able to use 2.x for whatever reason, as well, or instead of.
We certainly don’t want to leave anyone out in the cold—but as it has been explained in this thread before, we had to move on because Apple keeps moving on, and making it increasingly difficult to support these older systems. The amount of code overhead it takes to support older systems is definitely not the sort of thing you want to perpetuate into major upgrades if you can at all avoid it. 3.0 will be clean, modern and ready to serve as a platform to build off of for years to come.
Test, as in, you will soon have Scrivener 3 and will want to know how to use it: so read up. 
Great call. Very glad you’ll be keeping that legacy download available to those who license Scrivener 3 for Mac. I expect comparatively few new activations of 2.8, but almost all with some good reason to do so.
Tip of the hat to ScriverTid, whose “ill-considered” (by me) comment got the question out there!
Rgds - Jerome
I will need to have have my head examined-- it took me a scary amount of time to parse the meaning of that statement. 
Does this mean that there won’t be a beta? And also, any ideas about a release date?
There won’t be a public beta of the Mac version. Saying “this will be on the test” is perhaps a colloquial way of saying you better jot down these things in your notes because you’re going to need them in the future. 
Not for beta testing, but for getting real work done.
Yes, that was my intent. – Katherine
Please note, however, that Scrivener 3 projects are not backward compatible to Scrivener 2.x. Using both versions at once for the same project will not be a viable option.
Katherine
That’s inherently true of the App Store. However, text expanders (TypeIt4Me etc), Libre Office, CryptoEdit, WhatSize, SuperDuper!, Alfred, Butler, 1Password, AppZapper … those are the few I’ve looked at, and all make earlier versions available.
Which is exactly what I was saying! Doesn’t matter what you call it, you’re making an older version available for those who need it.
(By the way, I started using Scrivener with 10.6 and never had a problem with it).
I use all three versions of scrivener (Win, Mac, IOS) Will there be any kind of discount if I purchase all three versions when they’re released?
We already offer a cross-grade Mac/Windows discount.
iOS Scrivener will not be issuing a new version to coincide with Mac Scrivener 3.0: it is already compatible with the 3.0 file format and was written with the 3.0 feature set in mind.
Katherine
Looking forward to 3.0 for all my devices: Windows work laptop, home Mac, iPad, and iPhone! I’m not a heavy user of Scrivener even though I bought it a while back, but it’s one of the few programs that allows me to jot and write down thoughts across the various OS platforms I use.
I didn’t read anything about this, but hopefully L&L doesn’t go the way that Ulysses did with its subscription model. When I bought Scrivener, I also bought Ulysses to see which one I wanted to use. Totally ditching Ulysses because of its move to the subscription model. I don’t mind paying for upgrades and so forth, but am NOT willing to pay a recurring fee just to use a program.
The developers have several times made it clear they have no plans to go to a subscription model.
Which brings up a question–anyone heard how that is going for them, financially?
I know Adobe is doing very well with their move to subscription-based pricing (I’m a photographer) but their case may be very different than Ulysses’. Adobe’s products are “standard” across the industry. It’s not easy to go to a different product in large part because the people you need to work with and share files with are not going. Plus all the training infrastructure available for their products.
It would seem a person could switch out of Ulysses much easier than switching out of Adobe.
As far as Scrivener’s prices, it is a strange world indeed when you can buy both the Mac and iOS versions at full price, with all their amazing capabilities, for about the same price as a decent-condition used typewriter.
–Darin
The single biggest reason for that is that Adobe’s “old model” involved selling individual licences for their software at quite absurd prices - several hundreds of pounds just for the latest Photoshop, and 4 figures for the whole Creative Suite. When they went to the CC subscription model, people who baulked at having to pay a price they couldn’t necessarily afford for a single program (or went down the ‘pirated’ route), jumped at the chance to pay a very affordable monthly fee that also gave ‘forever updates’.
Few other software suppliers that are de facto industry standards need to go down that route - MS Office comes to mind, but even there the Home and Student version seems a positive bargain compared to Adobe.
By the way, have you thought of using Affinity Photo instead of Photoshop, or are you a professional photographer?