Annual to Perpetual - and also vica verca

[BBB3]

I understand why vendors are all moving to rental once they reach a critical market share. The problem for customers is that if you stop paying (or if for any reason ChaosGroup decides to stop offering the software, or to massively raise rents), you don't just lose access to a service, you lose access to your entire library of assets.
One way to make the deal a little less unappealing would be for rental customers to accrue rights to a permanent license over time, à la Substance3D. If that's not lucrative enough, you could even offer the option to convert a rental into a permanent license in exchange for a lump payment that would be smaller than the price of a full new license. All this would offer an exit and an insurance policy. The way the model is designed now, the risk of renting is too high and it will rise over time as you build your asset library.
The sad truth is that software isn't a service, even if you call it that.

[racoonart]

Thanks for your honest response Ivan, much appreciated. Unfortunately also what I feared. With 2 year release cycles and the upgrade prices (+VAT in my case) I don't think I can afford keeping my license, especially in the current times.

Another thing we as a studio are interested in are the Vray collections. We are planning on investing in Houdini in the future and thus we might want to exchange one of our existing Vray (and phoenix) GUI licences for a collection. Are there any deals planned for that? Generally, right now there is not much for the perpetual users in terms of crossgrade incentives, maybe something to improve on.

[edit] I also fully agree to BBB3's post above. We avoid rental as much as possible (but in terms of the vray collection we don't have a choice if we want multi-dcc licenses). With rental, we customers give up a lever we had on the vendor before (being the option to not upgrade).

[oglu]

Not where I live they don't

Its coming worldwhide later this year.

[BBB3]

Its coming worldwhide later this year.

That's great news.

[rikou]

That's great news.

Well...
Even if it's true, given the evolution of Autodesk policy in recent years, I find it hard to trust again in the medium term
i'm totally agree with what you said previously and you're right "The sad truth is that software isn't a service, even if you call it that."
What is also true is this whole market is taking the same path