While many users have update to the latest version of iClone (and CC) there are many users still using older versions of iClone (such as iClone 5.x and iClone 6.x). However, content made in newer versions cannot be loaded in iClone of previous (significant) versions (e.g. iClone 6 can't load iClone 7 content). While in some cases this makes sense (e.g. any iClone 7 content that uses PBR can't be loaded in iClone 6 because it did not have PBR), there is a lot of content (especially props) which don't make use of the latest features and thus could be usable by previous iClone versions.

Ideal Suggestion:

iClone would save content with the lowest iClone version which supports all of the features needed for that content. For example, if a iClone 7 user makes a simple prop with traditional material scheme, when saving, iClone would detect that the content is compatible with iClone 6 (or even iClone 5) and save it using that file format so that the content could also be used by previous iClone versions. If on the other hand the content contained PBR (or some other feratures not available in previous versions), when saving, iClone would save it as iClone 7 because previous versions could not support the content. These examples use iClone 5, 6 and 7 but the concept should be generic applying the same to future versions.

Less Ideal Suggestion:

If auto detection of the contents would be too complex to implement then, when saving, provide an enumeration of versions that the content can be saved under (similar to how CC has an export for iClone 6 and an export for iClone 7). The different save versions could even be "plugin files" so that the user could have all of the present (to allow saving to previous version format) or remove them (except for the latest one) to only support saving to the latest version.