Autodesk announced a restructuring plan that will reduce staffing levels in the near-term by approximately 10%, or approximately 925 positions, and will consolidate certain leased facilities. The company expects that this will result in additional cost savings in fiscal year 2017 and beyond, and intends to reinvest a portion of the savings in areas critical to its platform and business model transition.
According to Autodesk’s CEO Carl Bass, the restructuring “is not related to anything we are seeing in the macro-economic environment. We ended fiscal 2016 on a high note with very strong fourth-quarter billings growth and continued demand for our subscription offerings.”
The restructuring plan is intended to accelerate the move to the cloud and its transition to a rental-based business model.
As of February 1st, Autodesk is offering most of its individual desktop software through rental licensing only. Artists are no longer able to purchase and own individual perpetual licenses of 3DS Max or Maya, for example.
It’s interesting to note the context in which these changes are taking place: competing companies in the 3D arena have remained committed to offering perpetual licenses, in some cases providing rental licensing as an option. This is hardly a surprise, as they are the ones who may benefit the most from users disappointed by the licensing changes. The visible trend of artists testing the waters of other 3D applications, including strong growth of Blender and Houdini (among others) seems to signal that the rental-only strategy (along with the discontinuation of Softimage) may be boosting competing software.
More on Business Wire.
And more layoffs will come if they insist on this rental only policy, the bigger in size the bigger it’s fall.
I really hope they realize this problem and start reverting it to a mixed model, for sure we are migrating over off Autodesk even when it’s becoming an enormous effort 😛
Cheers.
In the End will be only Maya, Revit for work and other small cloud-based app for fun.
Goodbye 3d max, Mudbox, XSI, Motionbuilder.
Hello Houdini and Blender.
I completely agree with Patrick that Houdini and maybe- Blender would be my move if Max were to fail. It seems Autodesk tried to shape the market by moving so much towards Maya at the expense of their best selling software- 3dsMax. This was because a big Hollywood name had an interest in Maya. Instead of letting the market choose a winner, Autodesk tried to rig the game. Max is the better software, Maya gets all the development and resources. Seems like there are a lot of angry Max users (and Softimage users as well).
Like Steve said, they have alienated their user base.
Last time I heard 3ds Max sold a lot more copies than Maya, so I wouldn’t assume Max would be the first to go. But I don’t know today’s sales numbers.
I’m not sure acknowledging anything is something Autodesk recognises.
They just keep blundering on and alienating their user base.
I’m already using Blender and Houdini, and I dont want other thing, it’s the best cost/benefit.
I’m think about this for years, with Mudbox sculpting going to Maya, Maya Indie for games, killing XSI, Revit… the Autodesk long term plan is based on Maya/Revit.
This is our plan too, the only problem we found is the lack of Alembic and VDB support in Blender, how do you transfer things from Houdini back to Blender?
Cheers.
you are a lucky guy then,Blender is implementing both Alembic and VDB this year .
Same. Switched to Blender and Houdini few years ago, could not be happier. Only problem is lack of Alembic import for Blender. I hope this gets urgently addressed.
“the Autodesk long term plan is based on Maya/Revit.”
-Really?
I used to be one of those artists that relied on Autodesk products (used Maya/3DSMAX for 15 years and even taught it).
You are fooling yourself if you think Autodesk will keep 3DSMAX and Maya forever… Like a previous poster said, eventually it will just be Maya unless they find a better (AKA cheaper) alternative to that. The day they announced Softimage was being discontinued I started evaluating competing products. Autodesk lied to their customers and their partners when they said they would keep Softimage around. They even openly lied to Chaos Group when they were considering porting V-ray to Softimage telling them it wasn’t going anywhere… Less than a year later it was dead. Look it up! Why trust a company like that with your livelihood?
Autodesk is toxic for our industry and the sooner you jump off that ship the better! There are tons of great alternatives including MODO, Cinema 4D, Blender, etc. You’ll probably find a better product in your search when you consider how bloated Maya and 3DSMAX have become.
Now if only we could get Affinity Photo/Designer ported to Windows so I can also ditch Adobe then I’d be a REAL happy camper! 🙂
I’m a max user since 20 years but now I’m learning Houdini and I also want to learn Blender. In fact it’s not just “I want” but it seems like I just have no choice. Blender being free and Houdini Indie only 199$ a year. Houdini and blender do a lot of things max can’t do. I think max is greatly overpriced not to mention if you use max for FX and commercial production you will tens of thousands $$$ worth of plugins. I really wonder what is Autodesk plan to avoid users going to Blender and Houdini? If they don’t react with a 199$ annually max and maya indie, those soft will disapear, slowly but surely.
Tens of thousands to do good FX in Max? I’d say you’d need TP, FumeFX, Krakatoa, Stoke, maybe PhoenixFD now for Flip water and Vray for rendering with Volumegrid. Lucid is a bonus plugin for fast turnarounds with soft-bodies and rigid bodies and is super cheap. With Stoke 2 you got Houdini level velocity control over all FX in Max. That hardly adds up to tens of thousands. A rough guess those tools would set you back ~$2,500-$3,000. That’s not a huge amount of money for a studio. That’s about a week’s pay for a decent seasoned artist in California. With these tools a good artist can do pretty much anything Houdini can do.
I don’t know where the future is heading, but I think at the moment 3ds Max has a very solid tool set. MCG was a great addition. Houdini is developing at a faster rate at the moment, Max seems to not nearly get the same attention/resources for its yearly releases.
All I know is I am at this point very happy with the tools I got at my disposal. Sure I use other tools and learn what I can to be on the safe side, but you can do great things in Max.
I agree that rental-only is not a great idea however and we’ll see how that impacts what software studios use.
i’ve taken today the decision to learn blender. The last few projects they have released kind of prove that it’s ready for production.
I wonder what’s the general opinion on this.
as a 3dsmax user i’ve also added blender and modo…blender is pretty cool if you use the max viewport key option on the splash screen..much simpler to use than the blender way in my opinion. Cycle renderer is great and makes mental and iray feel rather ‘old’…there’s a ton of training videos out for blender..try blender guru’s free ones to get up up n running…modo is also anothe roption..for me i like it’s renderer but just hope they sort out fur and hair to be MUCH faster/better workflows in the next version…blender makes modo’s fur look awful…and sloooooooow
my opinion of course!.
18 years of max, around 10 of maya. Switched to Houdini 2-3 years ago and to Blender last year to help houdini on modeling front. I am absolutely blown away by Blenders capability as it has now become primary tool. It has modifiers just like max, it has some of the richest modeling tools and very deep python integration that will enable you to execute any task with speed of the though. It’s very hard software to learn and apply correctly, but push through and you will never regret it.
It sounds for me like as everything is going according to plan. The main intention for switching to to a rental policy was for me to reduce devolpement cost to minimum. This was the first though I had when I heard about it and the announcement confirms this.
So, laying off jobs is not a reaction due to bad acceptance of the new policy, but was the plan right from the beginning.
I also think it was part of the plan. They’re rocking the corporate boat with the transition to cloud/subs, so (sad as it is) it makes sense to cut costs and help support the share price… From the outside the timing looks carefully calculated: wait until until after the perpetual license cut-off date to announce any negative press to avoid bad smells that might give any of those last-minute perpetual buyers second thoughts. Well, they certainly didn’t waste any time.
You have product X which brings $100.
You have product M which brings $30.
If you ever want to kill one of them, why would you kill X?
Well, by the info they share, Max outsells Maya by a long percentage, so it’ll take a LOT of time if they want to kill Max in favour of Maya.
In any case, I wish Maxon would speed up the improvements in Cinema 4D. For me, it would be the perfect contender for Max and Maya.
These 925 workers could create a new company to take Autodesk out of business…
Well, I’m going to make a case right now for Mudbox, Autodesk… If MudBox is on life support and about to be retired, please sell it off.. It has no direct competition with any of your existing products and lets face it, you didnt do much with it.
I could do the same with Softimage, you mentioned you have some development and IP tied in there from the time you owned it, how about you sell the version you bought at the time of purchase? That was all Softimage code.
So to recap, #FreeMudbox and #FreeSoftimage ! <- not free free, sell it off 🙂
If you’ve seen any of the “Future of Maya” videos it seems pretty evident that all of Mudbox’s features (plus a zillion more) will be rolled in to Maya soon. So, while nice, HIGHLY unlikely they’d ever sell Mudbox.
Meanwhile, no real sculpting at all in Max and none in the plans either, as far as I’ve been able to gather. Would love to be wrong.
I don’t know how competitive it is but the sculpting toolset in Blender looks to be pretty dang capable. I’ve been watching a ton of tutorials. I think I’ll be jumping on the Blender train.
I don’t think the “Future” will come “soon”.
Autodesk not need competitors.
They killing all and give a way to Maya.
odd..it’s says 10 comments but only 4 were listed….
Hit your browsers refresh button. Worked for me.
I don’t think this has anything to do with MAX or MAYA… have you seen how many products Autodesk owns? Many dozens.
come back in april 2017 and see how the maya and 3dsmax new feature list looks…
It will look just like the AE/Photoshop new features list since it went on subscription only… Smaaaaaaaaall pretty pretty smaaaaaaall… And withou any innovation…
I beg to differ, at least for Maya. That’s where they seem to be focusing their development efforts.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3biu7r_future-of-modeling-in-maya-andrew-camenisch-autodesk-vision-series_creation
Yeah, this is IF they don’t fire the person responsible of this, ot already happened with other areas, I would like to see a public list about the people fired on each team, and meanwhile they keep rising prices…
I totally agree with you Nossgrr, mudbox is dead and it doesn’t realize it.
take a look at this link for more info
https://www.thelayoff.com/autodesk
I am pushing for a Houdini plus one solution my self. Not sure what the plus one will be yet. I am unhappy to be moving away from some max plugins though.
If you still had a perpetual license, you can keep a max version just for some plugins, that’s what I will do.
Lightwave is a great alternative to Modo. I stopped using Maya some time ago. I tried to buy a perpetual licence and was told by the vendor that it was expensive for what it was.
C4D too expensive, but nice enough.
Modo did not want to allow proper exporting.
LW was (and is) fine.
What do you mean with proper exporter?
The main problem for me in LW is it’s UI, IMO it’s old, text based and clumky, coming from Max and Maya I find much more friendly packages like Blender and Houdini, but it’s a matter of personal taste I think 🙂
I considered Modo at one point, but for some reason the interface seemed a big jump from Maya and Max. I’m kind of glad I didn’t go for it too after hearing about the issues some studios had with the Foundry and licensing. At the moment Blender and Houdini are looking attractive for the future – assuming I can find the time to get to grips with them properly. But one thing is for certain, I won’t be paying the prices Autodesk are asking ‘to stay current’ each month.
Excuse me, but what are you talking about?? There is certainly no issue with Modo (The Foundry) and licensing. Install Modo on every computer you got, but do not use it simultaneously.
The problem comes when they broke your privacy knowing exactly wich software do you have in your computer.
It’s not about theyr rules of use, those are OK, it’s about their practices and rights they give themselves in their licenses, at least is what I think was the problem last time I heard about this (a few montsh ago)
Basically it seems to install some kind of spyware, and that is not cool at all, and people with legal and valid licenses have received warning and such things, mistakes I suposse, but it’s problematic and it brokes privacy IMO
@cantankerous were you referring to this? I think this was the problem
@Juang3d, yes that’s exactly what I was referring to. I was quite upset about it as Modo was creeping back onto my list of possible alternatives to Max. My problem is more to do with casting the net over license holders because its easy to pin them down, even if the infringement is due to some third party. It seems lazy, overzealous and smacks of short-termism (I’ve no idea if its got anything to do with the new city investors looking for extra revenue streams).
I have to agree, I don’t like them doing this, and that is one of the key reasons why we don’t use Modo, Mari or Nuke, I’m amazed on how the companies think they own you just because you buy a license… I hope The Foundry re-thinks this and remove that part of the license at some point, it’s a non sense.
Cheers.
Hi MK, I’m talking about this:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php?t-1151366.html
I don’t know that I would specifically blame moving to rental as the thing that is going to destroy Max/Autodesk…not when it’s probably more accurate to more broadly blame their new policy of not really listening to the users on ANY aspect of the products. For a short time, after they hired some new folks in, they did a decent job of convincing folks they were really serious about making Max better…now cricket noises. Fluids are the #1 request and they continue to just do what they feel like, and high five each other when what they were going to do anyway turns out to be #135 on the list…victory!
I don’t want 3ds max dev waste resourceson Fluids.
If I need Fluids, I’ll just buy FumeFX or whatever.
Maybe 3ds max dev could considering to get BiFrost when it become usable stage.
Before that, they should not waste their resources.
While I understand that you don’t have the need for a fluid simulation, there are tons of users that have the need for that feature since a lot of releases, and it keeps being ignored, fluid are not just for FX, they are also for motion graphics, for ad work, even for arch viz to make the productions prettier and more eye candy, so in the end, better.
Anyways, it doesn’t matter too much, at least for us, we are already training ourselves for new software, Houdini + Blender, we just need Alembic in blender,but we will get there soon I hope 🙂
Cheers!
Why Shares of Autodesk, Inc. Plunged 23% in January
Interesting article on The Motley fool.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/02/06/why-shares-of-autodesk-inc-plunged-23-in-january.aspx
A company moves to a rental model when the development will never justify the money to upgrade. This is why I have moved to Houdini, it’s a much more powerful app and you can model in Blender for anything that you don’t need the procedural capacity. Everything else is just amazing. All I want is Vray, I haven’t got my head around Mantra as yet.