It’s undeniable that the vast majority of Autodesk’s customers don’t want to give up their perpetual licenses to sign up with Autodesk’s subscription (rental) model. I’ve gone through the evidence for this in an earlier post.

To bring that up to date a little, here are the final results from the poll “Autodesk is ending the sale of perpetual licenses. This is: (Good/Bad)”:

People are clearly attached to their perpetual licenses, regardless of what Autodesk does to manipulate prices.

A while ago I floated the idea that Autodesk might possibly come up with a better offer; one that lets you keep your existing non-upgraded perpetual license when signing up for subscription. I wanted to know if there was any more interest in that, so I wrote a post around that and created another poll, “Would you be interested in switching to Autodesk subscription if you could keep your old (non-upgraded) perpetual license? (Yes/Maybe/No)”. Here’s how the results ended up:

While the level of interest in this idea appears higher than in Autodesk’s current unappealing offer, it’s still not great. It seems most people don’t just want perpetual licenses for the sake of it, they want an escape route: the option to stop paying and keep playing, regardless of file format and OS compatibility issues. That means they want those perpetual licences to remain current.

The upshot is that Autodesk is going to find it very difficult to push most of its existing customers onto subscription, no matter what the offer.