Vary 7...........Another Price Increase ................

[philip kelly]

I was reading through the notes on the Future release of Vray 7, and I see an increase in the subscription was mentioned. Is it going to go every year now ?

[Pixelcon]

I was reading through the notes on the Future release of Vray 7, and I see an increase in the subscription was mentioned. Is it going to go every year now ?

It's getting quite expensive. Vray is approaching what? Double it's competitors...even corona?

Vray - €660 p/a (pre v7 increase)
Corona - €360 p/a
FStorm - $360 p/a
Redshift - € 275 p/a

Since chaos is run by suits now it would be interesting to know what their future plans are however I imagine it's pretty grim for us based on how hostile things have gotten in the last year.

[seandunderdale]

To play devils advocate, do other renderers have model and shader libraries? Vray does package up quite a lot of features.

[Pixel_Domain]

To play devils advocate, do other renderers have model and shader libraries? Vray does package up quite a lot of features.

Can't you create your own shader? There are hundreds of websites with pbr materials/textures to use. Same about models. Not to mention creating own textures with Designer for example. Why one have to pay for the libraries if never use them?

[racoonart]

I'd say there's not much uncertainty in that. I have zero trust in chaos at this point.

- Chaos is an investment company. They maximize profits and minimize spending. It's not particularly hard to see already if you look a bit closely. Increasing prices, reducing features, more tiers of "convenient" bundling options... you get the idea. Can't wait to see what they have planned for Vray7 there.
- Chaos is already the market leader with Vray and Corona. There's not much more space you can grow into because you're already dominating the field. So, what are your customers going to do? go somewhere else? There's still some room on the "inflicting pricing pain dial". Why invest in Vray if there are no new customers to get... and you have of course conveniently killed off the option to buy perpetuals, so there's that. Just have to get rid of the remaining ones. It's not like perpetual upgrades are cheap or anything.
- Since Offline rendering is basically saturated, what else can an investment company in that space do? Right! Go full on AI grift! See the cringe-worthy chaos unboxed thing from earlier this year.
- Apart from that, realtime. And I think that's pretty much what they are pushing right now until they have something working with AI (if they ever get there). I don't think that's even a bad idea considering the ruckus that Epic makes with UE, but it's not a good outlook for vray.

So yeah, they will increase the pricing until people quit and they will do as much as they can to make perpetual upgrades unattractive. Frankly, I expected they would kill them outright this round but apparently not, maybe that would be too much backlash for now. Let's see what they choose to make them as unattractive as possible.

[seandunderdale]

Can't you create your own shader? There are hundreds of websites with pbr materials/textures to use. Same about models. Not to mention creating own textures with Designer for example. Why one have to pay for the libraries if never use them?

yeh, I'll be honest, I dont ever use the shader library...if you show textures in the viewport in Maya, so many of those shaders crash Maya...Im just playing devils advocate. I havnt used Redshift, in years and not used any of the others, but I do hear feedback from people that they lack a lot of features that Vray has.

[oglu]

And Renderman is 250 per year. This is getting confusing.

[Pixel_Domain]

yeh, I'll be honest, I dont ever use the shader library...if you show textures in the viewport in Maya, so many of those shaders crash Maya...Im just playing devils advocate. I havnt used Redshift, in years and not used any of the others, but I do hear feedback from people that they lack a lot of features that Vray has.

Each software is different. Would be pointless to make all the same, so... In my opinion - Chaos which i used to admire, now is just another greedy company. And also i think it's just the beginning. Years ago an update used to be an update. Now, when all went subscription, they don't have to put any effort to make significant changes in Vray. To be honest, these day a Vray update looks rather like bug fixing, nothing more. I knew it was going to be that way, so i bought perpetual license of vray 6 and Anima. And i'm going to use it until my last breath. I will never pay a nickle to any company with rental-only plan. Never. I prefer pay several hundreds euros to company with less perfect software, but respecting the customers and OWN the software. I want to feel safe that i can use my software whenever i want. I understand that business is business, but i have principles. If you agree to be a sheep, you'll always be a sheep.

[fixeighted]

Shareholder greed now dictates pricing and that only goes one way.

If like me you use 3dsMax + Vray, then you're still paying for (regardless of want or need) development/implementation into ALL of the other DCCs, licensing deals/curation of Cosmos assets....etc.
I was going to go on, but others have said similar things so I'll go have second breakfast instead

[seandunderdale]

i bought perpetual license of vray 6

Ya tbh I should have done that.

I did used to get excited about Vray updates, now I'll go a few months before even installing a new version since there isnt really anything ground breaking anymore...but isnt that just the law of diminishing returns? How many times can you truly develop a new tool that's needed by the whole community year after year? Wages and costs at chaos will go up, so subscriptions and increasing costs of said subscription is to be expected....I dont know if its justified, I would love to hear someone from Chaos explain why the cost is so much more than other render options.

[racoonart]

I did used to get excited about Vray updates, now I'll go a few months before even installing a new version since there isnt really anything ground breaking anymore...but isnt that just the law of diminishing returns?

It doesn't have to be ground breaking. I would gladly take a solid release that's addressing a good share of the things people have requested for 10 years! There's a lot of workflow enhancements that can still be made and would save me lots of time each week or even enable things I couldn't do before.

[Pixelcon]

It doesn't have to be ground breaking. I would gladly take a solid release that's addressing a good share of the things people have requested for 10 years! There's a lot of workflow enhancements that can still be made and would save me lots of time each week or even enable things I couldn't do before.

Agree with this very much. I don't need or want almost all additions to Vray but I would love just some simple fixes and updates to things I've been asking for for years.

[vlado]

As far as I'm aware, there are no planned pricing changes for the V-Ray 7 release.

Best regards,
Vlado

[racoonart]

Well, pricing changes, as we have seen, can come in different shapes and forms. Putting floating behind a "premium" tier for example is very much a price increase for me - and that's not remedied by putting other stuff into it as well that I wouldn't have bought in the first place.

[vlado]

Well, pricing changes, as we have seen, can come in different shapes and forms. Putting floating behind a "premium" tier for example is very much a price increase for me - and that's not remedied by putting other stuff into it as well that I wouldn't have bought in the first place.

There are no changes planned for this either - as per the EULA, the V-Ray Solo licenses have always been licensed for a single machine whereas the Premium licenses are floating.

Best regards,
Vlado