CrossOver Support - Community Forums

So let me get this straight.

Because i updated Lion (OS i payed for), now i can't use my 10.1.2 CrossOver (application i payed for) that has been working perfectly for ever??

And the only way to play the windows games i have is to buy the last version of Crossover?? Is this correct?

In a nutshell, yes. Crossover has always had a time-based (or "subscription model") license, which means that as long as your license is valid, all updates are yours for free. If your license is valid when we upgrade from 10.3.0 to 11.0.0, that upgrade is yours for free. If it's expired as of when we upgrade from 11.2.0 to 11.2.2, that upgrade will not be yours for free.

Most software companies use a "version-based" license structure (i.e. you purchased CX 10, so all updates on the 10 branch are yours for free), but such a license would also leave you with the present predicament.

Note that in the vast majority of cases a simple upgrade of your existing OS shouldn't break Crossover - the 10.7.5/10.8.2 upgrade is an anomaly in that regard. Because of this, we've been pretty lenient in giving discounts and deals to returning customers who've been bitten by this bug, particularly if your license only expired a short while ago. I'd recommend that you write to "sales@codeweavers.com", tell them the situation, and ask for a deal, they should be obliging.

(Note that you'll want to either write from the account that has your Crossover purchase attached to it, or reference the invoice number of your purchased license.)

I had the same problem (like a lot of users) and I'm not willing to buy an upgrade only for this.
My crude solution if disk space is no obstruction: Create an additional partition with the older "Lion" system and insert your previous CrossOver arrangement from a TimeMachine backup.

It is NOT unusual for an Operating System upgrade to cause 3rd party software to break. It happens all the time.
In some cases the broken software can be trivially patched, and the vendor may quickly provide an update free of charge to "registered users."
What it takes to be a "registered user" varies from vendor to vendor. Most, like Codeweavers, require an active, annual service contract, for
you to be considered a "registered user."

In other cases, the vendor's problems are more complex and the time it takes them to find and fix the incompatibility can be extensive.
When that happens, the vendor typically releases an entire new version, not merely a patch, and charges for the new version accordingly.

Snow Leopard broke quite a large number of third-party software packages when it was released. It well over six months before some of them were fixed.
Many of them never ran again on OSX. Mountain Lion caused many fewer problems, but I have one program from a long-time Mac vendor
who took well over six months to come up with a new version all the while contending that there was nothing wrong with their program,
that it was all Apple's responsibility to fix. Needless to say, Apple never did, and they finally came out with a new version to solve the problem.

it's not all that unusual for a point release of an os to break some third party applications "designed" for that os version. it all depends what the application is doing. emulators, virtual machines, and their associated environments are going to be more susceptible to breakage than a typical productivity app.