Autodesk likely to kill off licenses and switch to only renting the software

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45

This is very interesting. First, everyone should read this original article.

(Maya is not as expensive as I thought. I might even look into the educational version.)

Maya (new) - $3700
Maya (upgrade) - $2600 (for all the way back to Maya 2009)

Maya Subscription
$130-$190 (depending upon sub length)

A subscription is equivalent to buying Maya every 30 months or upgrading every 24 (roughly). They are not getting rid of perpetual licenses, not yet anyway.

The bottom line is that Autodesk wants to make MORE money on licensing. But, it looks like most people will be saving money with the subscription licensing, thus decreasing revenue. Either Autodesk’s math is bad or they intend to kill the perpetual licenses once enough people have started using the subscriptions.

When that happens, only frequent users who upgrade infrequently will be paying more. I expect those users to be smaller studios and freelancers. I don’t see that revenue being enough to compensate for how much money many (if not most) users will save (such as large studios who keep current versions).

Many of those smaller studios and freelancers could be forced to close or switch to other (more affordable) products if prices get too high. Blender may not be production-ready for big studios, but a smaller studio or freelancer may find it to be an acceptable alternative to going out of business. Moreover, Blender could get up to speed very quickly if a considerable group of studios were funding and/or developing it to be production-ready.

Regardless, I am more interested in that graph. I have not found an obvious reason for the decline in net profits despite increasing revenue. I was looking here for a few minutes (I may have missed something), and ADSK’s CAFR for 2013 does not seem to be available yet. I expect that the decline is from acquiring some companies. If that’s the case, I don’t know why they are acting like they have to get revenue back up. It sounds like an excuse to promote the decisions they have already made (possibly by ignorance).

Lastly, Autodesk attributes the recent increased revenue to the subscription service and the announcement of discontinuing upgrades, but it is probably due to Inventor finally maturing as a powerful CAD program for engineering (It went from a “toy” to AMAZING). Autodesk’s “Media and Entertainment” programs are losing revenue and are a small fraction of their income; the increased revenue is from engineering software.

I find it most interesting that Autodesk has been steadily losing income from their media and entertainment software.

46

well when you are from the USA it might be looking cheap(er) due to unfair pricing of Autodesk.

in the EU you have to pay a lot more even if the currency strength of the dollar is so astonishingly low to the strong Euro.
then you look at for example Autralia and you wonder why Autodesk and some other software makers are so stubborn of fair pricing.

another point to be made; if you buy Autodesk products, you are forced to only use it in the country you bought it + you can´t buy overseas, if you want to work in another country or are forced to do so because your job moved, you have to buy the licence again.
Autodesk forbids the aspects of globalisation to its customers.

now anyone tell me about fairness here and how generous and noble Autodesk is … -.-

47

Oh, right. People from all over the world are in the Blender community. :slight_smile: (That cool, but it takes some getting used to.)

That’s some enlightening info, myclay. USD3700 is not exactly light, but AUD6000 is… whoa.

48

There is plenty of evidence over the years to suggest that not only the tools but the marketing is targeting individual artists more and more. And more of a shift away from large pipeline tools that require specialists.

Even in a small to mid sized studio the 3D generalist is a key factor. The focus on many of the promotions from companies (not just Autodesk) is toward “putting more control in the hands of the individual artist to handle more areas of the pipeline”.

It has gotten to the point now that the individual artist is the focus. Pretty much across the boards of most companies.

That large studios still do use a lot of specialists on a large pipeline is really besides the point these days.

Maya and Blender and most tools are designed from the ground up to work well in a group setting to share assets, Linking in Blender, Referencing in Maya and other apps. So even in Blender’s case it is designed to use in a studio and also works well in the hands of a single artist.

Maya is very much the same way. Very easy to learn and move from tool to tool and process within the same program as many of the process are organized the same. Blender more than many people realize is patterned very closely after Maya XSI and so on. Lots ot similar technical terms/technology as well.

As for the price, it may seem daunting to shell out 3 gs for Maya, but for what you are getting it pays for itself very easily.

Blender will have an even more heavy influence over the market in the next 2 to 3 years. I predict after Goosberry there will be a larger shift toward offering “indie” versions of software, and I hope we will see Autodesk tap into this market even more.

It would be great if they ever offered something like Houdini Indie.

I for one enjoy using many tools. I use Blender and Maya side by side in my studio. Most of my artists model in Blender. We use Maya for other things. And then of course we have Zbrush and Mudbox as well as MotionBuilder.

I have also trained about a dozen people in Blender who have come over from Maya. Pretty much one for one, they find it easy to learn and understand and in most cases enjoy modeling in Blender over Maya.

This was not that surprising to me really. As I knew most people saying this was difficult to do in a studio had never actually tried it. And I figured it was not that big of a deal. And I was right.

I have been using Maya for over a year now and I find it very easy to use and even prefer most of the tools over Bender. But economics suggests I use Blender on most seats in my studio.

I think we should embrace all software as artists and splurge in it. Lots of wonderful tools in Maya.

If Blender gave me everything I needed that would be awesome. But it can’t, so reality suggests that I have to broaden my horizons.

That’s my take on it.

49

The way I see it, if you are a small studio with say 20-30 seats, maybe you can’t afford $3000+ per month on a Maya subscription. Maybe you can. But sometimes there are lean months and a 3 grand hit when there’s no money coming in is a big deal. I see a lot more small studios closing down, work going to developing countries more, and the bigger studios downsizing to stay competitive.

The subscription thing sounds good on paper, but let’s look at it for what it REALLY is: a way for AD to force people to pay for their software whether they’re using it or not. It’s a way for AD to cash in on the user base they’ve already got. Now they have you over a barrel… you have all this money invested in their software, so it would be a disaster to switch, and if you can’t pay the monthly fee for all the seats you have, you’ll either have to downsize your workforce or charge your clients more.

Not only that, but AD is now under no obligation to improve their software (assuming they go all the all-sub route). Just like Adobe. The last few “upgrades” of Illustrator, for example, were not even worth the monthly subscription fee and if you are part of that model, you had to pay for it whether you needed it or not.

This is all about pleasing the stakeholders, not a better alternative for customers.

50

A rental model can actually be good for some customers, but whether or not the rental model is a “good deal” is not the issue. I don’t mind a rental model as long as it’s an additional option. I want the option to purchase as well. Taking away the option to purchase is anti-consumer, simple as that. It’s a move made solely for the benefit of the business, not the customer.

51

I already got bitten by one software that only offers yearly rental option, I will never get suckered in again. No option to buy, no money from me.

52

Isn’t it, in fact, the opposite of this? Suppose a studio is typically using 20 licenses, but needs to scale up to 50 licenses for two months to finish a bigger show it was just awarded. Being able to rent the additional seats means that they can easily scale up then back down again once the show is over. If perpetual licenses were the only option they would either need to amortize that upfront cost over the two months or find a way to keep those extra licenses busy after the show is finished.

Like most other products where there is an option to rent or buy, whether it’s real estate or automobiles, there can be advantages and disadvantages to both. Renting generally provides more flexibility and ties up less capital but it can be more expensive in the long run.

53

I agree that the next open project will help a lot. Blender is production ready in many ways, but it still has a ways to go, not as much as many may think, though.
I really like your point of using a lot of different tools. That can be easy to forget since Blender tries to do everything.

Most of the independent jobs I see requested seem very low compared to $3k. It seems like it would be tough for a freelance 3D artist.

EDIT: elance.com only has an average of $600/3D job. Maybe I’m slow, but it takes me at least 60 hours to conceptualize, model, texture, and rig a high-quality simple primary character (like a PowerPuff Girls character), including R&D for anatomy/form and rigging challenges unique to the character. That is if I am rushing, too. $600/60hr would not be sustainable. The tax-dodging illegal workers here won’t even work for that. I would have to get at least $900, not counting for the job likely taking longer. That makes Maya look very expensive. I must be missing something about this industry.

54

I saw some interesting comments in the 3rd page of the CGSociety thread I mentioned earlier. There are people who think that the real reason for this rental move is that is makes possible for Autodesk to earn money without doing nothing more than letting your program authenticate with their servers.

I think that this theory is very likely. Nowadays, they need to work significantly on Maya/3DStudio to have an upgrade worthy new release, work which requires pesky developers who pretend to be payed. With rental they can dwindle the updates to nearly nothing (reducing hugely development teams and expenses) and yet have the people to shell out, in a very regular, predetermined way money. It is like the Blazing Saddles toll booth: payed for doing nothing. Managers, bean counters and investers love such idea.

56

In Photoshop’s case, it’s only a matter of time. There are competitors already slowly churning out updates that get them close to Photoshop’s functionality. I’m not sure if they will ever replace Photoshop in the professional sense but for regular non-pro users Photoshop you can replace Photoshop now. When products like Pixelmator, etc. get they asses in gear, photoshop will have lounged around for years with barely an update. In-terms of other things like Illustrator, there are some vector editors out there rearing there heads but none are in the same league as Illustrator yet. Whoever copies Freehand first will kick Adobe all over the place. Freehand is still imo the best vector graphics editor ever made.

In other areas Adobe has competitors already. In the compositor market, you obviously have Nuke, in the video editor market you have Final Cut and Avid. Premier is a pretty decent product though.

However like Cekuhnen I don’t think Blender is a viable option for people coming from Autodesk software. If you do heavy VFX work Blender just doesn’t cut it. If you want to model and texture, then Blender is fine. If Blender had the ability to load proprietary plugins then maybe we would get things like Thinking Particles, Sitni Sati’s FumeFX etc. as it stands, Blender is too weak in certain areas and right now core things like better viewport performance (actually better performance in general) and the ability to work with huge datasets is a drawback for anyone working on multimillion polygonal scenes with a lot going on. Especially since the trend nowadays is to do as much inside of the scene as possible due to how renderers like Arnold work. We are almost to the point where using proxies and such are considered old hat.