I meant this differently:
There was a reason for Foundation.
Softimage (the company) didn't invent 3Democracy from the goodness of their hearts.
If big studios (the major income as you say) dropped XSI from their pipeline because they couldn't find enough good artists and artists didn't embrace XSI because it was too expensive and not widespread enough, Softimage was in a lose-lose situation.
It was my impression that Foundation worked in this regard and came in a time when many people were looking for alternatives to - for instance (but not only) - Lightwave.
Like me.
So from a pure 1-dimensional point of view, Foundation may have been idiotic, but from a bigger perspective it may have been what made XSI a major player again (even if the smallest).
I already hear the voices on the mailinglist that this lack-of-artists situation starts to return.
I had a project myself 1.5 years ago where I wasn't able to find any XSI artists on short notice for a job here in Berlin. The project was finished by a maya studio in the end.
I can't imagine this price increase is helping with that, neither does the reduction in different application levels or the missing subscription levels.
I for instance don't need support (other than for Autodesks retarded installers or licensing servers without any hints on usage
) and when I tried to use it in the past I hardly got anything worthwhile back - the solution to the wacom-stops-everything problem came from you on the mailinglist, I never got anything back from official support.
Anyway. I'm actually over it now and made my peace with no longer being on subscription.
Part of me is even relieved, since I never felt comfortable with giving money to Autodesk while being treated like an asshole as a customer (read the software license "agreement" if you don't know what I mean).
I guess as an Autodesk employee, you guys suffer from at least a light Stockholm-syndrome
Could be worse - there are people actually working at Apple
Cheers!
Thomas
