3ds max - monthly desktop subscription model - warning!!!!

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Hi guys,

i am here to give you a heads up on the problems that appear when you want to cancel the monthly auto renew and the subscription.

1.
from AD account you get prompted to their store where you have to log in again using order number.
Since they change order number every month and if you have more that one of these subscriptions, this alone might be a problem and you dont know what you re canceling actually

2.
once in, there is a ON/OFF auto renew tick....when you select off, a confirmation pop up should appear....BUT IT DOES NOT!!!! (grrr)
so nothing gets turned of as there is no confirmation, if you go back to your account nothing changes.

3.
if you are not one of these luckier ones who live in a country where they can actually easily call AD support and solve this, youre screwed

4.
you have to write to the support hoping as i am now that it gets picked up by the agent sooner, than your subscription is renewed automatically again.

The subscription system is a huge mess with huge mistakes in the web code, so i ve been told by our reseller.
Its better to buy one of the 3month licences directly from the reseller and completely forget about the AD store site for some time when buying subscriptions until they sort it out.

AD has clearly grown into one of these companies that doesnt give a SH*T about anything anymore....currently waiting to get my support case processed.

Will keep you informed.

Martin

[squintnic]

xforce is much less hassle sadly

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

:-/
when it should be vice versa with multiple controled backdoors so the piracy is really controled and the prices are not undermined by the capable freelancers who dont give a damn about paying SW.

[LudvikKoutny]

Yeah,

I am also getting more and more sick of Autodesk lately. I was almost ready to jump on the subscription bandwagon when they frustrated me once again. They started to provide significant discount for subscription, but ONLY for US, the country with one of highest average salaries for CG artists and cheapest AD software at the same time.

So let's take a look:

Just the other day I was browsing around CGTalk as usually, minding my own business, trolling around, when I noticed this!:

An incredibly ugly banner of very noisy beginner work, with some failed attempt of denoising. I guess the demo artist wanted use iRay for the banner artwork and realized somewhere in the middle how slow iRay was. BUT, the point it caught my attention was that it's just 123 USD... WOW! They really wen't down with the subs price, probably some promo action, so hoooray! let's click tha AD! (a thing I rarely do, unless it concerns enlargement of certain body part)

Once we click a banner, we are greeted with a good old nice "FUCK YOU foreigner!" overlay which brings us to the local Autodesk EU store:


So now we are in the European store, hunting down that discount, but instead, what we get is this:


Two hundred forty six Euros. Not dollars, ladies and gentlemen, Euros. So not only they are so impudent to double the price for region with significantly lower average salary, they also stick currency of a noticeably larger value behind it. If we use Google to convert current €uros to USD at current rate, we will arrive to a nice sum of 280 USD. That's quite far from 123 USD that banner promised me.

Now let's do some simple elementary school math. I will be extremely optimistic, and say that average yearly salary of a CG artists here in Czech Republic (the end of a world i live in) is about 480 000 CZK, which converted to dollars makes about 20 000 USD a year. According to my experience gained on a few evenings of bored browsing of Glassdoor.com, average salary of CG artists in US would be about 80 000 USD/year. That's 4 times as much.

Now if an average Czech CG artists makes 20 000 USD a year, and subscription of 3ds Max for one year costs 3360 USD, that means such artist will spend 2 months of every year working just to pay his 3ds Max licence. Yes, that's right. You will be waking up every work day of a week for duration of two months and spending 9 to 6 at workplace or home working hard to pay your 3ds Max. For two entire months of every single year, majority of your time will be spent to make money to afford Max for another year.

I am not by any means saying that 3ds Max should be cheaper here than it is in US. If they value their product at that price, then it's fine, and it should have that value everywhere, regardless if it's US or India. But it should not be over twice as expensive in region with 1/4 of US average salary god dammit!

[/rant]

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

I share your pain and i have been through this unpleasant surprise too around September .
I too am from Czech and i know how much expensive everything is, considering that the central bank is keeping the CZK/EUR rate very high.
I ve been told that the reason behind the price difference of MAX is 3D market size (really? come on...)
Unfortunatelly we are stuck with 3 permanent licence with maintenance subscriptions that we pay every year (quite costly by itself for the updates theyre doing).
We ll at leas we got rid of those 3 more extra desktop licences...they finally responded to my request...
And by the way....no refund offer of course....i just missed 2 renews in those 3 days i tried to tackle this.

[AndresAhumada]

Long Life ESANTI

[Morbid Angel]

yeah,

i am also getting more and more sick of autodesk lately. I was almost ready to jump on the subscription bandwagon when they frustrated me once again. They started to provide significant discount for subscription, but only for us, the country with one of highest average salaries for cg artists and cheapest ad software at the same time.

So let's take a look:

Just the other day i was browsing around cgtalk as usually, minding my own business, trolling around, when i noticed this!:
[ATTACH=CONFIG]28469[/ATTACH]
an incredibly ugly banner of very noisy beginner work, with some failed attempt of denoising. I guess the demo artist wanted use iray for the banner artwork and realized somewhere in the middle how slow iray was. But, the point it caught my attention was that it's just 123 usd... Wow! They really wen't down with the subs price, probably some promo action, so hoooray! Let's click tha ad! (a thing i rarely do, unless it concerns enlargement of certain body part)

once we click a banner, we are greeted with a good old nice "fuck you foreigner!" overlay which brings us to the local autodesk eu store:
[ATTACH=CONFIG]28470[/ATTACH]

so now we are in the european store, hunting down that discount, but instead, what we get is this:
[ATTACH=CONFIG]28471[/ATTACH]

two hundred forty six euros. Not dollars, ladies and gentlemen, euros. So not only they are so impudent to double the price for region with significantly lower average salary, they also stick currency of a noticeably larger value behind it. If we use google to convert current €uros to usd at current rate, we will arrive to a nice sum of 280 usd. That's quite far from 123 usd that banner promised me.

Now let's do some simple elementary school math. I will be extremely optimistic, and say that average yearly salary of a cg artists here in czech republic (the end of a world i live in) is about 480 000 czk, which converted to dollars makes about 20 000 usd a year. According to my experience gained on a few evenings of bored browsing of glassdoor.com, average salary of cg artists in us would be about 80 000 usd/year. That's 4 times as much.

Now if an average czech cg artists makes 20 000 usd a year, and subscription of 3ds max for one year costs 3360 usd, that means such artist will spend 2 months of every year working just to pay his 3ds max licence. yes, that's right. You will be waking up every work day of a week for duration of two months and spending 9 to 6 at workplace or home working hard to pay your 3ds max. For two entire months of every single year, majority of your time will be spent to make money to afford max for another year.

I am not by any means saying that 3ds max should be cheaper here than it is in us. If they value their product at that price, then it's fine, and it should have that value everywhere, regardless if it's us or india. But it should not be over twice as expensive in region with 1/4 of us average salary god dammit!

[/rant]

ouch!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[joecharon]

Hi Recon442, i`m not Autodesk fan and i just want to point that you compare two different subscription plans...
The ugly banner offers price for minimum one year subscription.
I have attached screenshot of one year subsrciption for european customers which is 1968 € VAT included so it is realy final price.
The result is 164 € per month which is 184 $ today. This is still much more then price for American customers
but also much less then you have calculated.
Just fair-minded comparison.

[LudvikKoutny]

Hi Recon442, i`m not Autodesk fan and i just want to point that you compare two different subscription plans...
The ugly banner offers price for minimum one year subscription.
I have attached screenshot of one year subsrciption for european customers which is 1968 € VAT included so it is realy final price.
The result is 164 € per month which is 184 $ today. This is still much more then price for American customers
but also much less then you have calculated.
Just fair-minded comparison.

Yep, I know. My post was mainly meant to be funny, not necessarily fair comparison. I arrived at the same price in the end, which is around 1900€. But I am still not very happy about being punished for making less money

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Hi Recon442, i`m not Autodesk fan and i just want to point that you compare two different subscription plans...
The ugly banner offers price for minimum one year subscription.
I have attached screenshot of one year subsrciption for european customers which is 1968 € VAT included so it is realy final price.
The result is 164 € per month which is 184 $ today. This is still much more then price for American customers
but also much less then you have calculated.
Just fair-minded comparison.

Sure Jozef, its a lot better price but in our dynamic environment we dont want to be stuck with yearly licences...thats the purpose of the monthly subscription to give you this advantage...and its simply unfair the monthly rate is double the price and in EUR

Thank god we have 3 licences on maintenance subscription at least.

They gonna have to do something about the prices here in EU though .... its pure nonsense and it will only make a lot of people to warez their SW.

[lukx]

Autodesk just love to dig its own grave, while cinema, mode, blender are rubbing their hands

[vlado]

Autodesk just love to dig its own grave, while cinema, modo, blender are rubbing their hands

I think they are all watching with interest what happens with Autodesk; if it turns out to be a success, you can be certain that everyone will follow sooner or later. As for Blender, I have my own opinion on that... don't think that finding money to sponsor Blender development is an easy task - while you don't pay for it, that money has to come from somewhere Good software engineers are expensive.

Best regards,
Vlado

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

cant agree more Luke, but when you have a studio where everyone knows max, all the assets are max, the pipeline has been built for 10 years, then youre pretty much just like a sitting duck :-/

[LudvikKoutny]

I think they are all watching with interest what happens with Autodesk; if it turns out to be a success, you can be certain that everyone will follow sooner or later. As for Blender, I have my own opinion on that... don't think that finding money to sponsor Blender development is an easy task - while you don't pay for it, that money has to come from somewhere Good software engineers are expensive.

Best regards,
Vlado

Any conspiracy theory you want to let us know about? :]

[vlado]

Any conspiracy theory you want to let us know about? :]

I don't believe in conspiracy theories...

Best regards,
Vlado