Hi Angus,
Apparently the issue here was that 1) the software was purposedly designed to stop working by the end of 2020, 2) this information was obviously not communicated clearly enough (or not at all), and 3) the replacement version was not made available until the second week of 2021, meanwhile leaving regular users hanging out to dry.
And again, that's the nature of beta software and why beta software should not be used in production. I don't think that Olympus deliberately stopped the software from working, it's possible that a hard arbitrary EOL date was required in their code, and that Olympus either planned to have a new version out or didn't document this in their internal technical documentation and at the time, end of 2020 was as good as date as any.
I am not sure I can recognize the wisdom of hard-coding the end-of-life date into a piece of freely available beta software, which is by definition expected to be replaced with the (freely available) finalized version that everyone is eager install as soon as it is available.
That is never a garantuee with beta software. There is no garantuee that a final production release will ever come to be. Olympus could at any time decide that the beta program's not working out and pull the plug without warning or explanation.
There are no "regular users" when it comes to a public beta, we're all beta testers here.
I run the webcam beta for video conferences with my team, but if that drops out it's no biggie. Would I run it for something that's imperative to have video for? Hell no.