AD Maintenance plans look like being phased out.......

[Alex_M]

By the way, a little clarification about the price increase from Autodesk (please check Autodesk's announcement in post #1 of this thread). Some of you might be calculating like this: 5%+10%+20% = "just" 35% price increase by 2019. However, the increase won't be 35% but actually 38.6%! This is because the increase is cumulative. This was also officially confirmed by an Autodesk employee but you won't see it in the official announcement, relying to fool you into thinking it's 35%.

Let's say you pay 1000 USD/EUR/GBP for your maintenance per license at the moment. It might not be 1000 but for the sake of simplicity we'll use this nice and round number.

2017 you will pay 1000 + 5% = 1050
2018 you will pay 1050 + 10% = 1155
2019 you will pay 1155 + 20% = 1386

So we went from 1000 to 1386 which is 38.6% increase, not 35%! It's another matter whether Autodesk will make Max 38.6% better by 2019 but I will leave this to your imagination after seeing how "great" release 2017 was (hint - almost no one uses Max 2017).

So nearly 40% increase in upgrade price per license in 2019 based on almost no development results and broken releases (I still demand a refund for 2017 which I paid for and can't use!). Fun times ahead.

EDIT: Does anyone remember this video? Listen carefully at the 1:08 min mark.

https://youtu.be/X7AZpZswJaA?t=1m8s

3 years after this video they do get rid of their perpetual options. This is why I can no longer trust Autodesk. They just make things up as they go if it suits their needs, completely ignoring the needs of their customers. One day they say one thing, the other day - the opposite. So I won't advise anyone to make any future investments based on any statements Autodesk makes. It's highly likely that they will not keep their word, as evident from this video. My guess is in 3 years time they will likely also get rid of the maintenance by ceasing to provide the new version to anyone who is not on the rental plans.

[glorybound]

Class action lawsuit?

[glorybound]

From the horse's mouth

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/video...ng-term-growth

[JezUK]

From the horse's mouth

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/video...ng-term-growth

I'll refrain from using the actual words I'd really like to use to describe how I feel regarding these two.

The question I'd like to ask them is "have you actually ever met any of the *real* people, the freelancers, those small businesses of 3d artists and creatives who are passionate about this 3d software they've spent their working lives mastering ? Or do you see only then in terms of quotas, units and beans to be counted as income revenue.......".

[glorybound]

It was a video to their investors, but there was absolutely no love given to their end users.

[zeronove]

From the horse's mouth

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/video...ng-term-growth

Well, I don't know how it sounds for a mother tougue but in my language this clip it's hilarious, I can't believe any serious investor could trust these two guys

[Alex_M]

A bit off-topic but for those who said they were missing scattering plug-ins like Forest Pack Pro, there's always the particle system in Blender! Maybe people forgot but before plug-ins like Forest appeared, people used particle systems for massively distributing objects. I think that the particle system in Blender is pretty capable for this purpose.

You can check this tutorial. It's no Forest Pack of course, but it should be more than enough for most cases.

This was also made entirely with Blender. I wouldn't have guessed if someone didn't tell me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBjlsSHBLPs&t

[rikou]

There are many others on Blender that are really impressive .... I do not know, but I can easily imagine finding several solutions for this
Here (in this forum) there is some few "Blender guys" that can tell us a lot more !

[flino2004]

After watching the video you can see they are so focus on more revenue using brute force that they don't have any consideration fot the users. I assume that they see us like we don't have options.....the typical path is rent to buy and for AD is buy to rent I'm losing my over 5K that I spent buying software or I already lost it when I had to pay every year to keep using what I already paid. I'm going to wait until 2018 but looking for options to replace them.

[rogerteddy]

If any of you consider moving from 3ds max - like me - check out this:

http://www.bforartists.de/
or this:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/sho...eo-7-Parenting
and this:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/sho...-left-3ds-Max-)

The only bad thing is that I can not use Phoenix FD with Blender

[glorybound]

The family and I went to the Tall Ship show in Duluth, MN. The waits for the ships were over three house, so needless to say, it was a wasted day. It was a paid event, so you paid to get in and touring the ships were part of the admission. The next day the city of Duluth posted an article bragging about how much money the city made with the event. Talk about a revolt! The people spoke up and vowed never to return again. The city over-sold knowing what would happen and didn't care about the people. Hopefully, this year, and for the years to follow, they'll lose money on the event because people don't show up.

[samuel_bubat]

So maybe instead of paying subscription or rental we rather invest the money in some sort of kickstarter campaign, make Vlado drunk, make him sign a contract, bury him in a mountain of money and lock him in

Seriously, the pricing increase really sucks but what concerns me a lot more is where Autodesk and 3dsmax is heading to in the long term. We have seen Autodesk losing quite a few markets with their way of development. Once Autodesk was strong in the editing market with Discreet Edit. It´s probabely a myth but I heard they couldn´t find any Cobol programmers to maintain it Than they lost the compositing market when driving Combustion to the wall. The next dead thing will be Stingray. At a certain point I could imagine they discontinue their media and entertainment division as a whole. There is zero innovation coming from Autodesk. They buy some companies take their innovations an ruin them in the end. Greetings Toxic and Softimage. Now what´s left are two DCC packages Max and Maya that both have cores that are older than some users on the forum. The product manager changes every two years and the first thing every Product manager does, is add a new kind of interface. In my opinion Autodesk will squeeze out both, Max and Maya until they literally fall apart. After that they´ll just sell or discontinue what´s left. There seems to be noone who really cares at Autodesk.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

So maybe instead of paying subscription or rental we rather invest the money in some sort of kickstarter campaign, make Vlado drunk, make him sign a contract, bury him in a mountain of money and lock him in

Hahahah I'm down to that

[dean_dmoo]

From the horse's mouth

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/video...ng-term-growth

Anyone notice the slip of the tongue at 1:26?

"They pay us a bunch of.....fees every year..." Quickly corrected himself from saying a bunch of money.

[trick]

So maybe instead of paying subscription or rental we rather invest the money in some sort of kickstarter campaign....

Why not just start a protest campaign to make users not upgrade and developers not release updates past the Autodesk 2017 line then ? This would level the playing field, stops AD making money and puts focus back on the artist again!

Creativity needs freedom and AD is just plain dictatorship.