Hi Klingbeil, actually SketchUp did not have a free version until after their company was purchased by Google. From what I understand the main goal of the free SketchUp version was not at all to drive sales of the Pro version but rather to encourage a lot of content to be created for Google Earth.

But I have thought some about having 2 versions of MoI, like a "lite" and "pro" version, but I don't really have enough time to develop them separately so that's something that kind of needs to wait until the single version is mature enough. I'm not quite sure when that will happen, maybe around MoI v4 it could be more feasible.

If that does happen, the lite version would likely be just less expensive, not free - I don't think it would work very well for me to put out a free version because of all the support burden that would add to me. Since I'm just a single person developing MoI it kind of puts some additional limits on what kinds of things I can do like that.

For SketchUp, Google had a much different goal in mind of trying to generate a whole lot of content. That goal along with their incredibly deep financial resources is pretty different from what I'm doing - it wasn't an issue to them that their sales of their Pro version would decrease due to a pretty capable free version being available.

- Michael