Giving It To Mirillis, For Free!

My first blog update in a while and one that departs from my usual topics to tell you about my recent experience with a company called Mirillis. Sadly it's not a positive experience and one that I hope they can learn from in future.

On March 19th of this year Mirillis gave away their Action! 1.30 screen recording software via the website www.giveawayoftheday.com, which is a great site from which you can often get some very useful software. This was the page...

I, like many others, downloaded Action! 1.30 as it may have come in handy, though it's not something I would have needed to utilise that frequently. Along with the installation file, those downloading Action! received the following ReadMe.txt file that explains how to register it. Note how this text file included both the required Registration name and key...

The one time I did try Action! 1.30 it seemed pretty good, it did the job and I was happy with it, but I didn't need to use it again until a week or so back. That's when things get a little bit silly because, upon starting the software, I received this dialog box…

My serial was made public and so they have blocked access to the application? I've not made this serial number public (I even obscured it in the screenshots above), but I've a pretty good idea who did – Marillis themselves in the ReadMe.txt that they provided to everybody installing it!

A mistake, surely? So I emailed Marillis, thinking they would put things right. No. They didn't. Here's the first email and their reply…

Okay, so the serial number was only supposed to be valid for one day for installation. Fair enough, that's standard with Giveaway of the Day offers, but I had installed it on that day, as I told them, and it had worked okay! It makes absolutely no sense to give away a piece of software and limit use to the day it is installed, that also isn't the idea of Giveaway of the Day. That's why I was emailing them, so I replied and again they responded...

Now they're saying, as per the dialog box when I attempt to run it, that the serial number was blacklisted due to a terms of use violation; the serial number was made public.

Yes, I know it was made public, Mirillis, BY YOU, just as I had said in my first email. You are the ones who included it in the ReadMe.txt which we all downloaded during the offer period, so you violated your own terms of use and are penalising people who have done nothing wrong as a result because it's obviously flagging as having multiple users!

This is either rank incompetence on the part of Mirillis and now they're unwilling to do the decent thing and provide users with a working application, or it was a cynical and disingenuous ploy to get some publicity by giving away the software on giveawayoftheday and then disabling it shortly after in the hope we would take them up on their discount offer and buy the latest version.

No, Mirillis, I will not be buying your software, discounted or not, neither now or in the future. If this is the standard of customer service you offer I would rather look elsewhere, and I'd recommend anybody else considering your software do the same.