In reply to Neo.

There are a bunch of issues here. Let's start on the chronological basis

1) Item support was suggested due to some authors complaining that a percentage of buyers wanted stuff like customisation, installation and troubleshooting. And some of these trouble shooting took hours and the culprit theme/plugin isn't the authors.

And these buyers will give a bad rating to authors that don't listen to their requests.

2) So Envato proposed a new licensing term, with limited support, which can be renewed. This caused some authors to start pushing for yearly renewals of all licences INCLUDING previous purchases.

So, if you've invested $ 5000 on Envato, you'll need to reinvest $2500 yearly, just to keep your license.

The biggest winners would be major sellers. After all, digital products do not cost a cent to distribute. If you have 10,000 sales yearly for themes, you would be filthy rich after 3 years.

Here's why
1st year - 10,000 x $20 = $200,000
2nd year - 10,000 x $20 + 10,000 x $10 = $300,000
3rd year - 10,000 x $20 + 20,000 x $10 = $400,000
4th year = $500,000
5th year = $600,000

This was rejected by Envato, but some authors are still pushing for it :(