The consumer version of Animaze has two main ways of being licensed:

1. Via its Live Service version, which has a free service tier for casual users, and optional paid subs (Plus at 20 USD per an entire year year for all the features, or Pro, needed only for those who already make serious money with Animaze)  for unlocking its full power and for supporting ongoing updates.
2. via buying a perpetual access license to one of its yearly historical snapshots, as a one-time DLC purchase. This is meant for those users who do not wish to support the development effort in an ongoing manner, and would rather buy access to a fixed body of work, for a fixed sum, with no further obligations on either side. On this path you get a perpetual license to use that yearly standalone iteration, without a sub-fee, forever (these historical snapshot versions are exclusive to Steam).

Use whichever one you like best.

The key difference between the two is that everyone on the Live Service version receives new features and content updates in an ongoing manner, while the yearly iterations are “snapshots” of how Animaze was in that respective year, so the yearly iterations feature set will forever be the feature set corresponding to the year in its name (up to the month when it was launched).

• Animaze 22 gets all features we’ve built from 2020 to 2022
• Animaze 23 gets all features we’ve built from 2020 to 2023
• Animaze 24 (to be renamed Animaze 2024-2026 as it covers a wider chunk of time) gets all features we’ve built from 2020 to 2026 (yes even if you had purchased Animaze 2024 it back in 2024, you get it all, including the 2026 features without a new purchase)
• …and so on.

Worth noting that the Live Service subscribers who are on a valid yearly sub at the time when the yearly iteration gets published, get that yearly iteration too at no additional cost, to use forever, (even if their subscription then lapses).