∞ The Last Unity 5 Release Will be 5.6
From the Unity blog:
We’ve just announced availability of the Unity 5.6 beta, and we are planning to release 5.6 in March 2017. We can confirm now that 5.6 will be the last version in the Unity 5 cycle.
What’s next in 2017
After Unity 5.6, we will introduce a new version numbering system starting with the 2017.x cycle for all releases in 2017. We’ve made this change to clearly mark the end of the Unity 5 cycle, and align with our release cadence. With Unity 2017 we will continue shipping new versions regularly, to ensure a steady stream of new tech and improvements. We think a date-based version numbering system better reflects this approach to ship and iterate faster. For the context on this approach, check out Joachim’s blog post from earlier this year.
I wondered why Unity hadn't changed their versioning story since the pricing model change in May. Now, they decided to use the year number.
I understand that this is probably for users who want to stop subscribing at certain point and keep the current version. But this is not a great strategy. If you hope the majority would use the latest, just make the number meaningless.