It´s just a rumor, let´s keep that in mind. But with Autodesk.. everything is possible.
My thread in the area forum was closed within some minutes with the reason “another thread exists”
wich is basically a thread about the 7% people they fired.
http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-3ds-max/autodesk-3ds-max\-\-3ds-max-design-2013/dear-autodesk-is-it-true-/
It’s really big bomb! haha
Wow f1ck me !!! Vray hit a jackpot when they started developing for maya. Now as it pains me to say it we need more push on maya side chaps ! 
- now that I have moved to maya too… sadly.. bye bye max…
I just dont want to think what will happen to the rest of coding comunity for max. FumeFX, forest pack pro, krakatoa, etc etc…
ugh…LOL!
http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-3ds-max/autodesk-3ds-max\-\-3ds-max-design-2013/goodbye-max/
well its a slightly older thread but kens post halfway down seems pretty clear… although deciding to stop developing the animation side of max isnt ruled out by his answer. that would also be a disaster since max is currently an amazing jack of all trades. may not be the best at anything, but does it all. hope they appreciate this.
to be honest i can see why ken needed a holiday, what a lot of negative crap he has to put up with! (although i really wish they would sort out the max developement , as i agree with most of the negative comments.)
not good… I tried at some point Maya but couldn’t go around the UI especially materials. I’m getting too old for this stuff 
What hurts the most are all my investments in plugins.
I see a lot of people all over the place talking as if 3ds Max is dead already. But where did you read that? This is entirely not the case. It’s nothing more than a rumour from an unknown source! And it ONLY speaks about moving (some?) animation tools at that. It’s just that the title is severely misleading and seems to want to cause uproar (again).
Let’s use some common sense here 
3ds Max is not going to go away, simply because it’s the application that sells the most seats of all of the M&E applications with Autodesk. They are not going to shoot themselves in the foot especially in a economic recession. Is 3ds Max going to change? Sure thing! 100%. And I really do hope so because if it wouldn’t then it would be up for becoming obsolete in the near future. And I think change is actually for the best. That way we would gradually move to applications that do what they are supposed to do, instead of merely being a “place holder” for many tools that are not up to par on current standards.
Other than that 3ds Max is working wonderfully well for me! I have absolultely ZERO problems with it. I’m not kidding. The few crashes I had were always caused by third party plugins or simply user error (false expectations being one of those). The fact that I do very little animation might have something to do with that. Obviously the application has problems. Which application hasn’t. Especially applications that are as complicated and have to be (public demand!) so extremely diverse as 3ds Max.
Mind you, I’m not saying we should accept those problems but you should expect there to be problems. The way AD handles those problems doesn’t always deserve an award. In that regard I sometimes have issues with AD as well. But I also know they are working VERY hard to solve these issues and improve their workflow to be better able to handle the MASSIVE amounts of requests and incidents they have to process on a daily basis. Which I would easily believe if they told me it were tens of thousands each day. Imagine the kind resources required to handle just that aspect of the company. So what I’m saying is, I understand if things sometimes go wrong. My country’s postal service has much worse customer service, for instance
The fact that AD is laying off employees has nothing to do with anything. This is happening to a lot of companies World wide at the moment. The company I work for went bankrupt last year and we lost 50% of our entire staff after the reboot… that’s like 200 people out of a job plus valuable knowledge lost… the company now kind of flourishes again because it was able to adapt. If companies don’t adapt, they will not survive. This is exactly what AD is doing at the moment. On the other hand AD has also attracted some pretty well known people that could benefit future development. One prime example being Kees Rijnen, the person behind Lumonix (Puppet Shop, etc.). He is now working for Autodesk. So there’s two sides to this and some people look at it negatively while others take the positive approach. I am one of the latter.
The fact that noone from AD is posting a response may have something to do with the fact that people are going to say what they want at any given time. There’s no stopping it and people like Ken Pimentel have been trying to reassure people for a long time only to pretty much get slammed in the face constantly… I have the deepest respect and admiration for him BTW! Maybe they have simply given up trying to combat the negativity and false information leaks everywhere, all of the time… I wouldn’t blame them to be honest.
And like Lukx says, plugins… amongst many other things. There’s an entire economic community built around 3ds Max. Killing 3ds Max would cause a small (economic) disaster World wide. They can’t just kill off an application that has been integrated deeply into pipelines with literally hundreds of thousands of shops, which includes some pretty large and very well known ones as well! It would cause an uproar and probably a couple of cases in court. If anything, Autodesk may stop development in the far distant future (any app can become obsolete after all) but they would still need to keep continue to support it for many years to come. And even then one would still be able to use 3ds Max as it stands at that time plus continue to use the plugins they have. So nothing would be lost while you look for an alternative solution (or use the one provided by Autodesk because I’m confident they would provide such an alternative solution).
Unless Autodesk is publishing an actual and official statement AND start contacting their subscribers (and yes, they would do that because something like that would have a HUGE impact on their customer base), nothing is going to happen and this remains just what it is: a rumour from an unknown source. How reliable is the source anyway? “Heard from a friend?”. Come on… really…?
Autodesk may act crazy at times (according to some) but killing off 3ds Max would be WAY beyond crazy. It is not going to happen.
All of this stricktly IMHO of course!
I can assure you that this is a completely false rumor. I’m very tempted to delete this thread actually…
Best regards,
Vlado
Hi Vlado,
I think you should now probably keep the thead, as your response adds a lot of debunking value to this nonsense. Also to prevent new similar threads from appearing again after you delete this one.
Yes, guys. 1. It´s just a rumor. 2. It´s not about killing Max but about character animation features.
Well not even killing them but not developing the tools any further. Wich “IN CASE”! it´s true wouldn´t be a real surprise
So please read further than the headline
The good news about those hilarious rumors. Autodesk has responded, here.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=7406885&postcount=55
Next to a lot of hurf blurf about how awesome they are there is some real interesting info.
“For 3dsmax, we have brought on
Frank Delise who was one of the original product designers and managers
after ten years of making games like Homefront.”
As far as I know he was the product manager or designer for 3dsmax version 3 and 4. Remember those times
when actually development happend within Max ? This is actually good news.
It’s not even a rumour it’s a completely false and fabricated lie.
The problem with any response Autodesk will publish is that the naysayers and conspiracy theorists will not believe it no matter what :roll:
Thanks for the link, Samuel, hadn’t seen it yet. That is indeed very interesting and really good news. Indeed, if anyone can make things happen like they used to, then it’s him!
I heard the same kind of rumor when Autodesk acquired Revit. The rumor was that Autodesk was going to abandon Autocad, but 7 years later, Autocad is still here.
I really don;t want to see max abandon character animation
Ah yes! Killing Autocad, now that would be end of Autodesk…
3dsMax Rumours – Response
http://jamiesjewels.typepad.com/jamies_jewels/2012/09/3dsmax-rumours-response.html
LOL! Yeah! 
Lukx, since no official statement has been made by AD to imply they are stopping any kind of development on 3ds Max (on the contrary), there is no reason to assume they will. And really, they won’t. Don’t worry about it. In fact, over the last few years AD has tried very hard to reassure everyone with concerns with many statements that development will continue and even be intensified. Except of course, when they say so (Ken Pimentel has tried many many many many times), most won’t believe them and rather deem them evil corporation out to mess with their customers :roll:
1. 3ds Max is heavily used in the games industry, which kind of requires animation tools to be present
2. Even if they gear 3ds Max towards the archviz industry, that is also pretty much an animation oriented industry.
3. 3ds Max is not only used for games or archviz. What about the tons of other animation oriented applications 3ds Max is used for/in, like vfx, product viz, advertisement, medical, industrial viz, music video, etc. etc. They are even packaging 3ds Max in suits pretty much geared towards those industries.
4. Even if 3ds Max would lose its animation features, I bet there would be several third party vendors willing and able to close the gap. You could for instance buy into a rigging solution like 3D-IO Bones Pro, which is really good for a lot of character based animation purposes. Or Puppet Shop! Hey now… didn’t Kees Rijnen went to work for Autodesk? Yes he did. So what does that mean for future development, ey?
The way I see it is that 3ds Max is and will always be a really good and solid foundation for all kinds of CG related applications which can and should be extended with specialized tools to get the exact results one is looking for. Not one application in the World is able to fulfill all wishes of all their customers by default. I mean, I could definitely not do without my beloved VRay and Forest Pro! Both doing some pretty amazing things that were not available in 3ds Max before they came along!! Does that mean 3ds Max was bad before? No!
Seeing how 3ds Max has a theoretical user base of millions with a lot of very specialized shops amongst them, it is well-nigh impossible to satisfy everyone. So what I’m saying is that if you chose 3ds Max as your primary tool, one would need to extend the functionality of 3ds Max no matter what, even as it is right now. So even if they were to cut animation tools from 3ds Max we would still be able to bring it back by using plugins.
Look on the bright side: maybe they will cut the price of 3ds Max along with the animation tools? haha, neh, now I’m dreaming … animation tools will stay forever.
rumor or not…for a lot people here It sounds possible (myself included)…All the companies go thru the same pattern in different scales… Expansion and contraction, They are in expansion mode for several years and in one point they should go in contraction mode, Simplifying what they have…merging products that are a like…Controlling the industry like they do, They can control the direction of where everything is going on…It’s taking some time, like Autocad users moving to Revit because the market is asking for that…or MAX users moving to MAYA because MAYA is moving faster(intentionally)…well, We will see what is going to happen in the next years.
Anyways, I feel trap inside Autodesk…even if I choose where to go, It seems like they put arrows everywhere showing me where I should go.
Fernando