Autodesk going all rental?

[luceric]

http://static.autodesk.net/dc/content/dam/autodesk/www/campaigns/startsmart/autodesk_pay-as-you-go_185SmartStart-Outlined.pdf

I saw this on my newsfeed. is this what you where talking about?

These products are way over priced to begin with. Mostly because only studios buy them and they can afford the huge ass price. the average person who wants to create fun animations can go broke trying to pay for either this or the full price

Mays's expensive (125$/month for a year) for an "average person" not working, but you can rent Maya LT for 20$/month and there is really no polygon count limit if your output is game engine. They just released their quarterly extension release today

[angus_davidson]

I did understand that and what I'm saying is that people see whatever comes from Autodesk with negativity, different from what other companies may be doing.

So from Autodesk, a newsletter for subscription users is elitism. From Foundry, it's just a special feature, enhanced communication.

The big difference is that the foundary newsletter is one a a myriad of avenues that it uses to communicate with its customers. The amount of time that they spend in the forums, modcasts , hell just answering emails and tweets outpaces anything autodesk has ever done. For most Modo folks who are active in the forums, what is on the newsletters etc is old news.

Autodesk has always hidden behind, the we cant tell you anything mantra. And given the SeC regulations havent changed I am somewhat interested in just how much they will be able to reveal to subscription customers now, that they couldn't before the whole Softimage EoL debacle.

The point being that news of that kind from Autodesk has been very rare in the past, so to now saying yes we are going to be more open etc (which is great and much needed - which to their credit is one of the lessons they have learnt from the EoL.) to then saying well its only for subscription users, is

*** stil a dick move. Its there as a carrot to drive more people to subscriptions.

The benefit of being on subscription, should purely be that its affordable and priced correctly for the market, easy to scale up and down with what you need. You shouldnt gimp your non subscription versions of the products. see point *** for my views on that as well.

[Hirazi Blue]

Autodesk Plans to Go Subscription-Only Over Next One to Two Years

[Shredder565]

Autodesk Plans to Go Subscription-Only Over Next One to Two Years

good thing my software got discontinued

[Firebird]

A quote from the link
"The number of customers that are one to five releases back on our software stays relatively consistent year after year after year," he said. They are real customers …. They just happen to purchase from us perpetual licenses on an infrequent basis because they can. This isn't really good for our ecosystem [because] we would like to see everybody on our most current release. We think that's good for customers."

Epic

Im happy that we are out of AD.
(still using Softimage btw)

[Rork]

It just shows AD has -no- clue what's going on inside the industry.

Often people/companies just -cannot- upgrade due to longterm projects that span several years/versions....
Forcing people to cough up subscription and upgrading without proper testing is a sure way to aggravate and loose customers.

Ask Adobe... I know lots of people clinging on to their CS4/5 CD's as if their lives depended on it.
And these rapid dev cycles do make a lot of unhappy customers when it comes to 'new and improved' features...

I was called this week by a AD helpdesk employee, telling me about the new maintenance system, and if I wanted to get back into 'the program' again as I dind't have maintenance atm for my Softimage license?????
After my chat/rant that ended with 'Never going to buy anything AD again' his only response was 'Well.. that's unfortunate, but understandable...' ;)

It's another sign AD just doesn't understand it's customers... Hey, we killed Softimage, but here's Maya or 3DSMAX for you....
Really? If I wanted to use one of those, don't you think I already switched?? Jeez....

[Shredder565]

A quote from the link
"The number of customers that are one to five releases back on our software stays relatively consistent year after year after year," he said. They are real customers …. They just happen to purchase from us perpetual licenses on an infrequent basis because they can. This isn't really good for our ecosystem [because] we would like to see everybody on our most current release. We think that's good for customers."

Epic

Im happy that we are out of AD.
(still using Softimage btw)

well, at least they are honest about their stupidity and greed.

[Maximus]

I seriously wish people would stop giving money to Autodesk. That is the only way to change things. but sadly people keep paying for this crap and so they have the power to do whatever they want. Useless to complain.

[Shredder565]

I seriously wish people would stop giving money to Autodesk. That is the only way to change things. but sadly people keep paying for this crap and so they have the power to do whatever they want. Useless to complain.

when they control all the good ones, what choice do you have? Then when you only b uy every few years, they institute policies like this to make up for perceived lost revenue, so either way you can't win ;o)

People sure arn't going to migrate to Animation master (tried that in 2008 and it was horrible to learn)

[Rork]

What do you mean.... All the good ones??

3DSMax is a overdeveloped plugin container -which often don't properly work together- , and Maya is the VHS of the 3D community.

For small(er) shops, Cinema and Modo are excellent alternatives, not bogged down by the need for tons of scripts and scripters to get work done.
Bigger shops can go for a mixed pipeline with Houdini, also remving the need for AD's solutions.

The world is changing, and after the EOL of Softimage there's a lot of 'buzz' in the 'other camps'.

Look around, the grass might indeed be greener on the other side when you decide to switch.

P.S. And all switching of apps is painfull ;-)

[Hirazi Blue]

While the news I linked to in my previous post obviously wasn't news at all (hence posted on page 6 of an ongoing thread), the real news was that someone from Autodesk actually called out a time frame for all of this to happen. Such lack of vagueness will ultimately cost Autodesk Senior Vice President of Industry Strategy and Marketing Andrew Anagnost his job, I'm afraid...

[angus_davidson]

While the news I linked to in my previous post obviously wasn't news at all (hence posted on page 6 of an ongoing thread), the real news was that someone from Autodesk actually called out a time frame for all of this to happen. Such lack of vagueness will ultimately cost Autodesk Senior Vice President of Industry Strategy and Marketing Andrew Anagnost his job, I'm afraid...

he was asked a specific chain of questions during an investor call. He wasnt really given much dodge room at all. That being said I have a tendency to agree with your final statement.

[talent103]

I wonder if this was the REAL reason for Softimage's demise. They didn't want to invest in its upkeep going forward as rental and they didn't want to have an alternative non rental License model around. This is why they were giving it 2 years of so called support knowing exactly what was coming all along.

[luceric]

While the news I linked to in my previous post obviously wasn't news at all (hence posted on page 6 of an ongoing thread), the real news was that someone from Autodesk actually called out a time frame for all of this to happen. Such lack of vagueness will ultimately cost Autodesk Senior Vice President of Industry Strategy and Marketing Andrew Anagnost his job, I'm afraid...

he was asked a specific chain of questions during an investor call. He wasnt really given much dodge room at all. That being said I have a tendency to agree with your final statement.

I can't tell from this comment if you guys understand the news that's been posted or not. As Hirazi said, this thread started following remarks from the CEO suggesting in an investor call , well, you can read the quote in the first post. And it also said that there would be more information at October's investor Days, which is what just happened. And all the presentations from that are public and downloadable http://investors.autodesk.com

[talent103]

I can't tell from your comment if you understand what a bunch of horse manure this is.

"The number of customers that are one to five releases back on our software stays relatively consistent year after year after year," he said. "They are real customers …. They just happen to purchase from us perpetual licenses on an infrequent basis because they can. This isn't really good for our ecosystem [because] we would like to see everybody on our most current release. We think that's good for customers."

http://www.studiodaily.com/2014/10/auto ... -two-years

[luceric]

That's not particularly horse manure, as any developer in the Apple or console ecosystem will tell you they are they love the fact that most clients are on either of the last two versions of the OS, unlike windows where customer still require support for OS going back to 2002 and ten years old server addons. Luckily, plugins for XSI work for many versions and compatibility has been retained - to be honest, in large part due to lack of development - but that's kind of an odd case. Developers need to recompile plugins for each versions of most apps (even daily builds are incompatible with one another in houdini, from what I've heard)