None of the Steinberg instrument plug-ins have required the dongle for years. All of them besides the full versions of Halion 6 and Halion Sonic 3 have also made the transition to the new Steinberg Licensing system.
I don’t believe that’s strictly accurate ? Some of the plugins only transitioned to SAM very recently (such as The Grand last October IIRC)
Some plugins are still Elicencer only (eg, Absolute bundle )
Some sound content still hasn’t moved across (eg. Iconica)
As you know, a log of SAM based sound content also has issues with licensing when using older hosts (cubase/neudo 11).
To answer the original question - yes Backbone has transitioned to SAM but depending on the exact setup (host version) it’s possible that going dongle-less might mean you lose access to sound content you have within SAM.
This only affects Retrologue 2 and Padshop 2 on Cubase 11 or earlier, because the current versions don’t have their own preset browser. Backbone isn’t affected.
yes - my post wasn’t entirely clear ! (or indeed entirely accurate !!)
I was just flagging that moving licences to, or buying SAM content set licences may have ‘unpredictable’ results, resulting in missing content - but as you say Backbone doesn’t actually have any additional sound content sets (AFAIK?) so is unaffected.
Just to add to this as it’s slightly more nuanced - moving a soft-elicenser to a USB-elicenser is a one way process - no going back - so if your licences are currently ‘dongle based’ they remain ‘dongle based’ until/if you move to SAM.
For many (most?) that use a dongle it effectively means that using a soft-elicenser ceased to be an option - (if that makes sense?)