Autodesk to raise price of maintenance plans
Mar 06, 2017 by CGP Staff
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Autodesk has announced that it will be raising the prices of its maintenance plans for those customers who chose to stay on those plans and kept their perpetual licenses instead of adopting the rental-only licensing system the company is transitioning to. Citing increasing costs due to maintaining two business models, the company has stated that beginning May 7, 2017, renewal prices will increase by 5% in 2017, 10% in 2018, and 20% in 2019. The numbers are cumulative. Also, it will only be possible to renew maintenance plans for one year at a time. Autodesk is offering discounted prices to those who choose to give up their perpetual licenses and join the rental-only plans.
The news has been met with heated reactions such as “If before this email I was hesitant to start learning another software, now all my doubts have completely dissipated”, “You still haven’t switched to Blender/C4D/’insert another app here’ yet? Then here’s some more price increases and changes in licensing”.
More information can be found on Autodesk’s Important Updates on Maintenance Plans FAQ. Reactions to the announcement can be found on CGTalk, Autodesk Area, Steve Johnson’s CAD Nauseam blog (Part 1–Part 2).
The news has been met with heated reactions such as “If before this email I was hesitant to start learning another software, now all my doubts have completely dissipated”, “You still haven’t switched to Blender/C4D/’insert another app here’ yet? Then here’s some more price increases and changes in licensing”.
More information can be found on Autodesk’s Important Updates on Maintenance Plans FAQ. Reactions to the announcement can be found on CGTalk, Autodesk Area, Steve Johnson’s CAD Nauseam blog (Part 1–Part 2).
Source: Jason Knott, Stephen Green, Anonymous
What a joke … “increased cost because of maintaining two business models” …
How dumb Autodesk assumes their customers to be?
Josef you know they think we are just open wallets and incapable of rational thought.
i do find it incredibely insulting and really an perfects barometer how they view the userbase.
Makes perfect sense, it is the implicit cost of maintenance vs. rental. Users are resources and resources must be exploited to their fullest potential.
The ONLY thing keeping my studio with Autodesk is the phenomenal third-party plugin developers. On the same day I received this *@#! from Autodesk, I received announcement emails from two great plug-in developers, both of which added awesome features to their products (one’s a free upgrade, the other is a nominal fee)… don’t you dare take responsibility for their advancements Autodesk, the enabling frameworks were WAY before your time.
In regard to Autodesk’s actions, the only thing that has left me surprised is why they haven’t embraced the trend to “Free-to-Play” … maybe they just haven’t figured out the “Pay-to-Win” angle.
There are costs associated with every company activity so what they say is true. But of course it’s a thin excuse to cover the strong-arm tactics of pushing stragglers into accepting the inevitable. It’s been clear for years now that rental is the future with Autodesk. Everyone has had plenty of time to plan for this, so I suggest we stop being angry and do something positive.
I guess “it’s costly to maintain two models” means “we could earn more if we only offered rental licenses”, then the difference is redefined as loss.
For me it’s a wake up call. For the first time ever I am really questioning giving any money to this company. I am also heavily questioning my beta membership, since spending a lot of time (thus money) on the beta and being kicked where it hurts don’t go together well.
I feel sorry for the 3dsmax dev team who don’t deserve this and the 3rd party dev community who’ll be affected in the long run. The saddest things is you could have made the worst assumptions of what the future holds years ago and you wouldn’t have been wrong. Autodesk WILL kill their entertainment section, no matter how many times they reassure their commitment, either by will or out of sheer incompetence.
Autodesk have a lot of worries on their plate. The product that has sustained Autodesk (AutoCAD) is approaching the end of its life as a major source of revenue. Their answer to the BIM movement (Revit) is arguably clumsy and not really a BIM package. So I would guess they have an eye on a new generation of heavy investments/acquisitions to make once all this move to rental stuff has settled. Mid-long term they need to remain competitive in their core market (architecture/design). Entertainment, less so I suspect.
People on all fronts have been complaining to Autodesk for years about the withdrawal of perpetual licenses. Nothing has changed. The only message they will listen to is sustained falls in revenue. It will take big numbers in red ink on the balance sheet year on year – and certainly not the voice of users. In my opinion, if you care about having choice in how you license 3dsMax the only sensible thing is to bake into your current version, stop supporting Autodesk and get on with your work (and in any spare time keep an eye on what else is on the table).
As a side note, some people have voiced concerns about how safe their perpetual licenses are. At this point I can see how this nervousness is useful to Autodesk for helping to tip a few perpetuals into the rental bag. Don’t be nervous. If Autodesk were to revoke all perpetual licenses it would be commercial suicide. It would annoy too many people (to put it mildly). If the proportion of perpetual licenses vs rental, and the pool of people that would sue them falls massively, then I still wouldn’t be worried. In that case surely it wouldn’t be worth the effort to attack perpetual license holders who are no longer customers. With a bit of luck they would see us as potential future customers and wag some carrots under our noses (while hitting us with the stick of continued software audits).
To quote someonde from SI-Community: “And percentages are on top of each other so that 20% is actually 38%.”.
That’s a LOT of money. I hope clients are open to 40% price increase in services for the next 03 years. 🙂
Well yes of course it would be, that makes it more expensive than the discounted Subscription price in order to entice us incapable of basic math artist types drool over the price break.
guess we will have to stay on max 2016 for ever! 🙁
I already warned here many many times about the danger of the rental only licensing scheme, and this is becoming true, the ultimate target is to remove your tool from your hands and force you to pay to touch your work or art… it´s time to leave Autodesk boat…
I´m sure many people that was against my reasoning in the past is not opening their eyes, and even when they might not fully agree with me I´m sure they can raise their own reasoning to see why this is entirely bad…
Cheers!
Sooner or later, only big companies or wealthy freelance workers will stay on the Autodesk boat. The rest will either turn to Maxon ( soon to be acquired by Adobe ) or Blender which is becoming a serious altenative.
I think you underestimate Maxon (just one company of the Nementschek group which also has Vectorworks, Allplan and others). And Maxon itself employed a lot of new developers for C4D recently. I’m completely happy with C4D and its future looks bright.
I think you don’t have much knowledge of your industry.
Yeah, but his Blender point still applies. Blender is improving a lot and I keep seeing great stuff done it it that rivals work from Max/Maya/C4D.
Gone full circle.
Back in the day I moved from Prisms/ Houdini to 3ds Max V1 because it was cheep and fast. PlugIns could fill the gap.
20 years later the 3d landscape has changed again.
Now Max is the most expensive 3d program and can’t do anything with out expensive 3rd party applications.
It’s just a matter of economics. I am now moving back to Houdini. For me merely a user, 3ds Max has reached EOL.
I am curious to see what the next update offers but the writing is already on the wall.
So Long, and Thanks for all the fish.
Is 3ds Max the most expensive? A max subscription if you don’t have a perpetual license is currently $1470, I think we paid in the ballpark of $1500 last year to maintain two seats. I went to the SideFX website to check prices. The prices I’m seeing are higher than 3ds Max. Houdini FX is $4495 + $2495 yearly upgrade plan. That is higher than our 3ds Max maintenance and plugin updates, by far. I can’t seem to find an upgrade price if you don’t want all of the maintenance benefits, and just want to update to a new version at your own discretion. If I didn’t use particles or rigid body effects, Houdini Core would be closer, but you don’t get any of the simulation effects, not even particles. Indie is dirt cheap, but there aren’t too many established studios that would qualify for that pricing, and also that 1080p limitation. I’d love to switch to Houdini, but that up front price difference isn’t something the small studio I work for can justify. I haven’t looked too much into C4D yet, but just a glance at the bloated buy page tells me its not that much better.
If you are seeing prices I’m not, please share as I’d love to move away from 3ds Max before I get too old to learn another piece of software.
The comparison between max and Houdini is not so easy in my opinion. Of course the price for Houdini seems to be a little higher at first but a houdiniFX license doesn´t only replace small plugins like Multiscatter/Railclone etc. but also FumeFX, Realflow, Krakatoa, Thinking Particles… And with all these ( of course only if you need them ) I think you are much cheaper. And keep in mind you can simulate particles, RBDs etc. with an FX license and use the output data in pipeline with houdini Core so you don´t have to arm your complete studio with FX licenses.
kind regards
Jonathan
Common
470$ it’s just 3d max. And Plus Much more (in several times) for plugins.
What 3d max can to do ? – Only Archviz.
No fluids, phisics, no muscles, no VFX, no awrythin.
3d max only studio for rendering. And it cost 1500 $ !!!
Patrick, saying 3ds Max is only archviz is ignoring a huge part of the userbase – much like Autodesk is doing. Me and many many others are using Max for character animation, vfx, games and much much more. 3ds Max a major player in both VFX, TV animation and games, you just don’t hear those aspects advertised as much anymore.
I’d frankly be amazed if AD take 3ds max seriously themselves as a VFX / animation toolkit. There milking it for an archviz tool now, and putting VFX/character resource on their special one.
3dsmax points to a lot of scenarios, not only archviz. And out of the box is quite versatile. No physics? You get MassFX (Physx), also massFx integrated inside Pflow, and Bullet inside MCG…. And after that an infinite number of plugins complementing this…
Just to add some precision to something you are saying. Indie has a limitation to 1080p only for animation. If you do stills, there is no limit to the size you can render with Indie. I just discovered this this week in fact!
Houdini Indie $199 fits my needs at the moment.
My budgets are getting endlessly squeezed. I can not keep up payments with all the 3ds max plugins and scant 3ds Max development. Indie looks like it will fill the gaps and keep my skills up to date.
Does 3ds Max offer indie prices, or do the plugin developers? The answer is no. I see Houdini also as a way of staying in the game.
Some one on here said as a way of keeping costs down buy it and only upgrade every 4.
I have just started doing my first Houdini project. I’ve just worked out how to do all my smoke FX and combine it with my max renders and it looks great. By Houdini standards its very basic but its light years away from what you can do in native 3ds Max.
I should do a tutorial.
I can’t imagine 2018 will be any great shakes – I’m not even sure they have a PM at the moment, seems like Eddie has gone.
Seems like chaos at Autodesk with some frantic scaremongering price rises to try to bully users into rental.
Oh well, the rest of the news seems like a slow-motion car crash, they may as well join in.
After griping for multiple years about the lack of solid INTERNAL development of Max, and being ready to jump ship each year, this year I ONCE AGAIN renewed, and grumbled as this renewal was 3x the cost of my Indie license. I don’t like rental, but how do you argue with $200 year and Sidefx’s development? So this is my last year…they brought in Hudson, and so far all we got for it was “here is MCG, yet another way the users can do our development for us!” Explain to me how an accelerated/cumulative price increase over multiple years with NO knowledge of what the market will bring is anything but essentially extortion?
whats scary (to me) now is if autodesk or say adobe go on a spending spree and say buy houdini or unreal engine,c4d,vray etc shutting down escape routes from their tools
The companies you mention would have to want to sell.
hmm… I got an email from my dealer this morning and it’s a bit confusing.
As far as I know I’m not on maintenance. I’ve been on 3DS Max subscription pretty much since it started (10 years?) So what is the difference between, Maintenance, Subscription and Rental?
Hi Garry,
Maintenance Subscription is the old subscription, paying a yearly amount to stay current with a perpetual licence (currently around £600-700 per year I think) If you stop paying you still have the last version you paid for.
Desktop Subscription is rental, so if you stop paying you don’t have anything at the end of it. Cost for that is around double Maintenance Subscription (more if you go month to month)
So they’re planning to increase Maintenance subs by 5% this year, then 10% the next, then 20% the year after that.
For those switching from a maintenance to a desktop they get a discount, but once you stop paying you lose your perpetual as it’s downgraded to a rental.
Also the 5+10+20 % is cumulative.
Just had a quick look at what I paid in Jan.
Maintenance (old style subscription) is £610 ex VAT
After May 2017 it will be £640.50
2018 it will be £704.55
2019 it will be £845
Rental/Desktop Subscription is £1370 annually
They’re talking about a maximum 60% discount on that if you swap now (although they’ve been vague as to whether that’s for suites or standalone products)
All prices ex VAT
The terminology has changed, going by their FAQ it’s this now:
– The old subscription is now called Maintenance
– Rental is now called Subscription
Imagine the anger when someone says he wants to stay on subscription and they convert his old contract to rental, because that’s the new name of rental. No reason to change names in such a confusing way, other than if you plan to confuse and cheat on… customers.
I don’t like the last updates, and don’t find this video reassuring : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-03-04/autodesk-co-ceos-confident-about-long-term-growth
I’ll keep Max 2018 and slowly migrate to Modo and Cinema. Houdini is not for me.
XSI, Mudbox… Now this. Sad.
Is it just me or does Autodesk never provide a positive reason to be in the press.
Corporates only concern appears to be the well being of its shareholders. This is the problem of a share model that does not pay dividend, share prices need to continually grow at an above better than inflation rate in order to keep investors jolly. A dividend model needs only to maintain a small growth as share profits are paid out as a quarterly dividend based on a percentage of how well the company did the previous quarter. Of course, there are many smaller differences but that is the gist of it.
The problem is that everybody thinks that Autodesk is a software company. It is not. Its number one product is ADSK stock.
The most important customers are here
http://investors.morningstar.com/ownership/shareholders-major.html?t=ADSK
Thanks Steve for the explanation. I didn’t realise what ‘subscription’ I was on as they seemed to have been changing the names.
This truly sucks big time.
I don’t personally pay for my subscription anymore so a slight increase in cost is not a bother, but these increases are horrific. Even tho it’s not my money I just can’t justify the cost.
So I’ll keep paying the ‘maintenance subscription’ until it gets too much. Then I’ll just stop and stay on the last version. There’s no way I’ll give up a permanent license. In the meantime I’ll start looking at other software, Blender, C4D and Houdini all sound interesting. [Edited]
There’s been very little innovation in the last few years so I wouldn’t be missing anything. If at any point in the future Autodesk come up with something worth paying for (I seriously doubt it) I’ll get my company to pay for a copy, but I really can’t see that happening.
Does anyone know of an equivalent to biped? That was one of the reasons I got Max in the first place. Does any other package offer the same simple handling of motion capture files?
What you do with biped? full animation on your own?
Biped gets to be the underdog these days.
But I have to tell you that I have yet to see a rig as robust and solid as Biped that comes out of the box from any app, despite some of its shortcomings more related with certain workflow issues, TCB vs Euler etc… The amount of things you could do with Biped you wouldn’t be able to do without months of custom rig investment time plus tons of R&D for a small to medium sized team. Especially when it comes to humanoid semi to realistic characters (not cartoon). Biped has saved our butts countless times on more projects than we could remember. No strange break ups in the rig, copy paste anything, poses, animation mirroring, pivot based locking for fingers and feet, no interference with UI handles, seamless and incredible IK FK switching, Mocap editing directly, file format exchanges , retargeting, the list goes on. Biped plus custom rig on top can be a very powerful combo. The fact that it’s been neglected for a decade and is still so powerful is a testament to the devs behind the system. Of course Autodesk wouldn’t bother with it, nor would they bother with other character animation tools in Max, they have far more important things to do.
I always wanted them to develop biped, but they never did. They even started a crowd system that has not been touched since it appeared. Glad someone else appreciates one of Max’x greatest features.
Isn’t that just the way that most features evolve in Max. There’s the initial release in the yearly version or advantage pack, then a clean up patch the following year and then maintenance mode.
I use it for motion captured figures, I’m not a character animator.
I like the way you can easily load in mocap files and alter them with the layer system. This looks like a very complex procedure in other packages, or am I wrong?
In C4D you can just drag and drop an FBX mocap file in viewport, then you can edit it. There is even a cheap plugin called People in Motion with many options of behavior like down and up stairs if necessary.
Most apps today have fast rig systems.
You can also check Kraken in Fabric Engine which is free.
Most of this is in youtube/vimeo so check some videos and see if the fills well your work.
In other packages the steps are a little over, Sometimes you have to have two skeletal setups, one for tracking, the other for mapping. The way Biped handles it is unique, it’s the fastest and most efficient i’ve seen.
Biped crowd was probably the first such system to be available off the shelf to users, again it was a feature long neglected long ago.
I feel Max had a small army of extreme minds of devs, things like Biped, Max cloth (again neglected but can easily put ncloth to shame to this day), and many such features were developed by people who have probably left Autodesk long time ago or have retired.
The passion for development has gone, I remember in the late 90’s, early 2000’s we used to be in awe of the new features, nowadays it’s just pure corporate user base milking. We are slowly looking into Blender’s development and testing the waters there, we feel Blender in combination with Houdini indie may be the answer someday.
If it wasn’t for the amazing plugin developers Max would’ve been dead in the waters years ago, Hats off to the key players: Ephere, Chaosgroup, 3D io and Sitni Sati for keeping it alive. You’ll pull out your wallet for those guys with your eyes closed which is more than I could ever say for Autodesk.
They killed Softimage without blinking an eye, just think about that for a sec.
Yep, that’s a pretty unique thing to 3ds Max. But I wonder if Motionbuilder might be able to do some of it?
No,
I can’t think of much from 2013 onwards that I would miss.
It’s more worrying about what the earliest version plugin manufacturers would support – I quite at 2013 for a few years, Autodesk removed the ability to upgrade and then it was only because they were axing perpetual licences that I bought back in with 2016.
So I’ve got 2 perpetual licenses with one person to use them.
MCG looked like it had potential, but with revenue falling I don’t see a continued investment in development on the cards.
By all accounts, Maya gets the resources but doesn’t pull in the revenue.
Would love to know what the split is.
On a slightly different note I keep seeing people going on about how 3DS Max is a big seller for AD. Don’t be taken in by that. I work for a large engineering company and they have over a hundred AutoCAD licenses (in our US offices) They’re all suites that include Max, most of the guys there don’t even know that they have it let alone know how to use it. If max dies they won’t even notice.
It would be interesting to know how many copies of Max are out there and how many are actually used.
Yeah, I take that with a pinch of salt used to convince Max users that the future of the product is healthy because it has a large user base.
They may as well say the same about Composite.
Honestly price increases and the push toward subscription don’t bother me that much, but when you have a price increases AND stagnant development, then it feels like they are just milking us. Max should have triple the new features that Houdini does every year.
Autodesk really needs to invest in their products if they expect customers to invest in them. It will probably be too late before they learn that lesson, it’s definitely a good time to start learning a new software.
so brazen. so devious. straight robbery.
this is some darth vader level ish.
they sure hate their customers. im not gonna reiterate my migration plans.
just a big FU to autodesk.
now i know why eddie perlberg left. decent guy.
Just wanted to dispel any nonsense about Adobe allegedly buying Cinema 4D or Maxon. Maxon is part of the Nemetschek, which is a huge, multi-brand CAD/BIM group (including Graphisoft, Solibri and Vectorworks) and is unlikely to sell C4D or Maxon to Adobe or anyone else for that matter.
I have left the Autodesk boat some time ago already and now with that news it just confirms that I did the right move. And yes, this is completely unfair to max dev and plugin dev too cause that menas they are slowly killing max and probably maya too.
Now Autodesk absolutely wants everyone to use Blender and every indie users to go with Houdini Indie or what?
I used max for 20 years and used to be a strong advocate to max+plugins but now with the few mindblowing updates there was in Houdini in the latest versions and the incredibly low price of Houdini Indie, and still no max Indie. Houdini Indie is ow 10 times more powerful than max+plugin$$$ and cost 10 times less. For sure it always depend on how many plugins you need in your work. But for my part I simply had no choice but to leave max for Houdini Indie (I’m still transitioning and will still be for a while but I can’t go back for sure).
My choice is to use my perpetual max license without upgrading it (and I can still upgrade V-Ray and many awesome plugins for a while if needed) I can even rent max for a month in the future if I really need it. But I will slowly but surely transition to a Zbrush-Blender-Houdini Indie pipeline.
Now Blender has Alembic and will get a powerful layer system pretty soon. Houdini Indie 16 is simply mindblowing! It has got so many new tools for character creation and animation (auto-rigging and auto weigthing) as well as game friendly tools and a mindblowing terrain generation tool with that amazing procedural erosion.
By the way did you know that if you stop paying for max maintenance, you autodesk contract force you to erase and never use again all the previous version except the one you last installed. With sideFX once you buy a perpetual license, you can use it and ALL PREVIOUS version for all your life? Another point that shows that sideFX is a run by people who cares about their users’ community and AD just don’t give a damn about them…
By the way while I am learning Houdini and Blender I am taking notes and I will soon launch an online place to learn Houdini and Blender that I hope max users will really like! Stay tuned on TheArtOfCG.com coming soon!
hey Strob, create a facebook page or a instagram so it’s easier to follow. I always forget to enter websites, but I look forward to see your stuff.
Thanks MauricioPC, I already started setting up some social pages for my future online school:
http://www.theartofcg.com
https://twitter.com/TheArtOfCG
https://www.facebook.com/The-Art-of-CG-275830062777216/
https://www.instagram.com/the_art_of_cg/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-art-of-cg
https://plus.google.com/u/1/109749970909380249352
I’ll be really launching it probably within a few weeks.
Thx. Just subscribed on all but Google+ channels. Making the step to Blender here for a while now.
And now Thinkbox just announced they have been acquired by Amazon…
http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/news/
You could be overestimating SideFX’s passion for their users’ community. SideFX does NOT let you upgrade your software unless you enter into a forced yearly maintenance plan, the marvelous Annual Upgrade Plan. Otherwise you have to buy it again to get the latest version. That is NOT customer-friendly. You cannot buy Indie either, yes it’s cheap and that’s good, but it’s pay-the-rent forever.
They could be much better at treating customers.
It’s as much about the how much it costs as to how good it is. 200 per year for houdini is an insanely great deal. 300 something for max a month is much worse. So if max was cheaper and valued for what it brings to the table in comparison to the compedition the discussion would be non existent. We all know we need to pay for professional software but expect fair pricing.
I though about that, and it´s true that Houdini yearly cost is BIG, but here is the thing, you can easily keep your work using 1 license for 2/3 years and upgrade it at third or fourth year by acquiring a new license, so it’s not too dramatic, since Houdini is pretty full of features for the most important part of houdini, wich is simulation, and for the other part you have Blender… so, not too problematic.
In fact this was what a lot of Max/Maya customers were doing, because when you start a movie in Max2015 you don’t want to upgrade to Max2016 or 2017, and that is the reason because a lot of customers were upgrading after three or four versions of max, now with Houdini you can do the same, no need to be in the yearly upgrade program IMO, just acquire a license, use it for some years, and acquire a new one after those years, the cost per year will be lower than the maintenance.
Cheers!
This is a good point.. Its always a pain going through the installation process for Max, customizing the UI, installing and activating plugins etc. especially those that use wibu key 😉 Even in my studio days using Maya with an IT team and tech artists available the update process would take a chunk of time. It might sound crazy but I almost resented having to take time out of my schedule to update the software for features that weren’t really useful to me. Now I don’t get any updates so I only have the hassle once (with luck) each time I buy a new PC. Until the day Autodesk turn off license activation for my version..
For perspective and I have said this before, I tell you if the Maintenance price increases that much I will get a discount paying $2500 a year for Houdini Annual (and the less amount of headaches updating everything to get it all config’d and working).
With Max + my plugins I hover around $2200 a year give or take a couple hundred bucks (stings a bit when there is a major upgrade like VRay). I still can’t bite the extra $600 for the latest TP I still use version 5 on 2014. I have been buying the 3-year Max subs just to save me a couple hundred bucks.
That’s true Johnny, I even heard with Houdini it’s possible to install on a network share and all the slaves can run Houdini from there so you update just one thing and that’s all! (see for example: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/21318/?page=1#post-99735 )
i have just looked into it again, c4d studio runs me at about the same price my reseller is offering the 3 year maintenence.
im sure as hell not giving autodesk 3k as a reward for beeing racketeering mobsters. i knew this moment will come, but not that it will be this clearcut.
adsk is taking a gamble here and have massively overplayed their hand.
Switch to Houdini, a far better and more stable software with major new features in nearly every release. Not cheap but worth the investment.
Autodesk ruins every software under its development.
This is such a shi**y move from Autodesk, showing this aggressive stance towards their customers. Why not just cut the plan altogether instead of threatening with these ridiculous price increases? That would be better PR than this frankly mob-like strategy.
I just checked the prices with my reseller, and subscription costs TWICE the amount than maintenance. Maintenance now costs me 950 dollars a year, subscription will be 2000 dollars. Sounds like I will save a lot of money by staying on maintenance, despite the price penalties.
Adobe’s argument for subscriptions are that studios could save money if they committed in the long run. What is the point of doing like Autodesk, making it cost MORE to stay commited??
Yep, I have to maintenance seats and one rental here and the rental is the same price as 2 maintenance lics, actually slightly more and only because I decided to pay 1 year upfront.
It’s ridiculous to think I’d convert my maintenance licenses to rental, not only would my costs double but I’d also lose the perpetual access. That’s why I think they are announcing their plans bit by bit and the next one will be that perpetual licenses will be forcibly converted to rental. It’s always been this way, they reassure that everything’s good only to stab you in the back in 6 months. This was definitely not the last time they did this.
With the news now, I’m not even sure if I’m going to pay maintenance for another year. Maybe next year… but first let’s see what’s new in 2018 and beyond. I want Max to improve but not at the expense of being treated like… well you know.
hi rune,
well that is the pricing at the moment, however the pricehikes are cumulative and pretty sure they are going for normalisation with subscription here if not worse. btw seeing your hellboy clip back in the day was incredibely inspiring and remains a high watermark in toon shading/animation.
Thanks, man!
To be fair, the guys giving the Houdinin 16 presentation two weeks ago made it very clear the “perpetual licensing is going nowhere”, so they too will adopt a
rental only system in the long run, if I got that right.
What’s more interesting is that everybody keeps mourning about the stagnation of 3dsMax, when the same exact thing has been happening with Maya for years now. Bifrost (initial tech acquired from Naiad) still nowhere close to being a replacement to XSI’s ICE (which was promised to back then existing XSI customers), or Fabric Engine for that matter. XGen (was that originally acquired from Disney?) is a pain in the butt to use, and anything but stable, the new poly modeling tools bolted on and patched into place over various releases to become somewhat reliable, let alone the downright incomplete, bug-riddled and sloppily documented implenetations of Python ( is it already three, or only two Python API’s?), at least one of which was again developed by a third party of volunteers if I recall correctly.
The only real value each year comes in form of small usability fixes adopted from XSI (like the shortcut editor and the ability to repeat the last operation from a menu by MMB-clicking the menu itself (which only seems to work in the main menu bar – why implement it globally if you can do it in little increments, right?)
Looking forward to seeing Arnold’s development in the future.
All of that would not even go down well in a free tool like blender, but paying for it just feels absurd when compared to the reliability (and daily builds!) you get with other tools like Houdini. One more thing that affects cost considerations, apart from the raw functionality you get in Houdini out of the box: Unlimited Mantra render licenses.
As for Max: Abandonware since version 6.0 imho, no surprise there.
Matt DiMichele, Autodesk, wrote here:
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-max-forum/crazy-subscription-charges/td-p/6581283
following:
——————————–
“There are no plans to ever remove maintenance subscription. All current maintenance plan customers can continue to renew their maintenance plan for as long as they wish. You will just need to keep your maintenance plan current to be eligible to renew it. You can learn more about maintenance subscription plans here.
Edit 1/26: I cannot to an infinite amount of time, however no plan currently exist.”
————————————–
I take this as a promise 🙂
They said they weren’t removing perpetuals in Sept 2013, in Oct 2014 they announced that they were stopping selling them.
That said, I don’t think there’s any benefit to Autodesk in them stopping maintenance subscriptions, but that still leaves them room to jack the cost as high as they want and still keep their ‘promise’
“I take this as a promise”
Why you choose to believe that guy? Go to a investors conference and you get a very different take from Autodesk PR.
One year before Autodesk canned Softimage the Manager said on video: “The future of Softimage is bright.”
Oh Maintenance will still exist it will just be to prohibitively expensive… which is exactly what they ate f’kn doing. Gaslighters. >:-(
@StefanK — I think I read the SideFX statement as ‘perpetual license isn’t going anywhere”..so I thought that meant NOT that it’s not successful, but that it’s not leaving/ending.
The vow to never end perpetual by AD could have been written by Bill Clinton or another politician. Keeping perpetual licenses but raising the renewal price to 40 Trillion dollars per year is technically keeping that promise but practically doesn’t help
I’m pretty much done with Max. 2017 + Vray 3.5 is the end of the 3DS road for me. Max 2017 will be sitting along with my CS6 suite for as long as possible. Houdini and Unreal for me now.
I have 0 experience in Houdini but do you think it models as fluent as Max or C4D?
Thanks
Modeling was improved in H16 but I doubt it’s still near max in terms of fluidity. That’s why you need to combine Houdini with Zbrush, Blender (with maybe hard op addon) or max if you have a perpetual license.
But if you need to create hundreds of versions of a buiding for example, it would be wise to model it in Houdini to use its procedural architecture to your advantage.
For modeling better choose Blender, it´s modeling tools are superb, better than max for sure.
For animation houdini is still behind blender too, right now Houdini is graet for effects and procedural content, but for more standard tasks Blender is better IMHO.
Cheers!
I’ve come to realize that Blender problems isn’t the UI.
Its all the rest. With that I mean, selection is a pain in the ass, using the UI, making transformations, etc.
I’ve been playing with it this week and while you certainly can get used to, whenever you go back to other software, be it Max or Maya or C4D or Modo,than you realize how weird Blender usability actually is.
The UI is quite nice, the problem is the commands and clicks,etc, which are very very different.
And if you try to customize it, than all hell breaks loose.
Totally agree with you. It’s so weird they’ve decided to do things almost the opposite of the host OS. I think it looks like a great little program, but I’ve been put off by it every time I have tried (and so has almost everyone else I know). Imagine the incredible amount of users Blender would be able to attract if they fixed the UI!
Forgot to write – mouse clicks and keyboard shortcuts, they are all part of the UI. The GUI is what you’re talking about, that is the visual aspect of an UI.
Yeah, you are correct. The GUI is fine and you can customize it a lot. The problem starts with the UI/UX, shortcuts, etc.
I’m watching this tutorial and while the guy is kind of crazy (in a fun way), at least I’m understanding more the way Blender works.
https://gumroad.com/l/blendingawaythepain
And you could also check this cool Blender for Max users from Mantissa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akWu9_mHgTo
It’s not perfect, but I’m accepting Blender a lot more after seeing this tutorials.
Thanks guys for answering these off topic post.
Well I am in arch, product and automotive viz.
For arch viz it would need to be a suitable replacement for Forest pack and Railclone as well.
For automotive and product I need HDR light studio and some good hard surface modeling tools.
But I am in progress of shifting to UE4.
Cheers
the autodesk accounts department have done the math:
“rental is the way forward for autodesk”
“that’s it man, game over man, game over!”
“what do we do now?
….how about we sing a few songs…
“they come out at night..mostly”… (accountants)
RIP Bill Paxton.
RIP ADSK ME
haha well played sir, well played 😉
RIP Bill Paxton
Hey all feel free to jump on in and voice you concerns, don’t be to critical though they will delete your post…
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/moving-to-subscription/buh-bye-permanent-license/td-p/6916387
autodesk’s 60% discount for 3 years offer to give up your perpetual licences
its like renting a house with a 3 year discount if you ‘give them’ your current house you’ve paid for!
ha ha ha — um NO!
Actually, its like renting a slightly different brand new house each year.. which comes with a few new bells and whistles but all the hassle of moving your stuff and putting up with the snagging that always comes with a new build. Meanwhile I pay nothing to stay in my 4 year old house that I’ve payed for in full and I’m very comfortable with.
Listen, everyone needs to get of the Autodesk bandwagon as soon as possible, same thing with Adobe, the only reason these companies are successful is because they’ve managed to get a hold of a huge portion of the industry early and they will continue to thrive as long dumb customers continue to pay for the most uninnovative products. You actually don’t know what your missing by staying with 3DS Max or Maya, these companies are all about money, there’s no passion there, happy userbase is the last thing they care about, unless it affect sales, but it doesn’t because you’ll complain here and continue to buy the product.Are you seriously too lazy to go and learn another software? if so, then don’t complain year after year about shitty software that YOU CHOSE to use, no one is forcing you to use Max . On top of that, Max is the most awful piece of software ever, I’ve used it for years and didn’t realise how horrible it is because I couldn’t compare it with anything else.Houdini’s latest release had more innovations then Max had in 10 years, why? because they’re passionate about they’re product, they’ve got the happiest userbase I’ve ever seen and they actually offer to download they’re program for free.
“Max is the most awful piece of software ever”??
Max is a truly great 3d program that has had an unfortunate upbringing. We’ve all invested a lot of time and money into it because it’s the ideal tool for the stand alone 3d artist who just wants to get a job done. Houdini is amazing, but it’s not just laziness that keeps us using Max. Everyone has different requirements of a 3d package, and I’m sure no two Max configurations are the same. I would be happy if Autodesk gave me a dongle for my license and let me continue with it as is, while new options slowly emerge. Being frogmarched into the future by Autodesk is the problem, not Max itself.
A bit of a conceitedly narrow point of view, isn’t it? We have heard your rhetoric before, fine we are happy you tromped off someplace else. No one is to lazy, the software is just as crappy as every other.
You are entitled to your opinion but f*** you for calling the userbase dumb or lazy, where the hell do you get off thinking you know everyones situation. You need to learn to communicate better.
I went from fulltime and pulling gigs on the weekends to comfortably in one job managing a team, I don’t use what I spent ten of thousands of dollars building and learning, daily any more, I may again, I don’t know, I would like to maintain that pipeline, not be extorted out of it.
Definitely a bad move for freelancers and small studios, would be good to get the perspective of medium to large places. Would this move force them to start thinking of moving away from Autodesk products or would this not make much of a diffenrence for them?
I know that Houdini Indie is rental, but it’s a rental at less than 20USD per month.
I also realize that some people say that ALL companies are going to go that way, or raise the prices for THEIR rentals once AD gets away with it, but I’m wondering if that will be true for companies that are PRIVATELY held. If you own the company, you have a lot more freedom to run things in line with your vision. I’m not sure if Perlberg or Bass loved this idea, or if they left because they hated it, but I know that investors only answer to themselves (as they should), and they were demanding this. So I’m not sure privately held companies will follow suit.
For what it’s worth, I wrote a blurb about this on my company facebook page yesterday. I don’t expect Autodesk or Adobe to care. They’ve proven otherwise as far as I’m concerned. We can vote with our wallets however and it felt good to get some words out…
https://www.facebook.com/notes/framework-animation-ltd/software-choices-exist/1301216856662248
to be fair, the autodesk accounts department have run the numbers and factored in how many people will walk away from autodesk who maybe long time users but don’t buy into the vision of 100% rental going forward.
the numbers say..it’s works, they predict more money and probably bigger than that a consistent income month by month.
Now not depending on a new release date and a good review driving uptake, but instead something much simpler customer contracts will just ‘renew’ for the service of ‘using autodesk products’.
Updates will be your contract renewal not product development.
welcome to the future – one of stagnant development and predictable incomes for autodesk.
innovation just left the building – no longer required.
autodesk is now aligned with:
electricity
water
gas
It’s what happens when you run out of ways to punish your users.
They’ve chipped away at the old guard by restricting ways to upgrade combined with poor updates.
It’s depressing to see how once I was excited by a new Max announcement, now I just dread the latest announcement from AD.
How is it healthy to have a userbase that feels that way about a company?
I’m no great fan of Adobe, but at least they seem to have some clue about how to approach their remaining users.
It’s clear that only rental license scheme gives no reason for the software company to further improve it, look Photoshop, After Effects or any other Adobe software, since CC it’s stagnation nearly complete, no real new features, no real improvements in photoshop, no real improvements in After Effects (yes… a puppetier tool… that is not a real improvement in general for After Effects, and I’m talking since CC)
So this is the future to come if our money goes to Adobe or Autodesk, I agree that at least the Adobe price is reasonable, but right now the only tool that keeps me inside CC is inDesign… and it won’t last forever I assure you that…
Cheers.
and to finally complete you’re rubbish year with autodesk…they or rather nvidia have confirmed that mental ray is NOT going to be in 3dsmax 2018, in their pdf they said that autodesk has chosen to remove it.
http://images.nvidia.com/content/technologies/advanced-rendering/pdf/354915-MentalRay-FAQ-Sheet-FNL-WEB.pdf
it too is removed and will going forward be RENTAL only – the maya version is $295 per year btw..so expect similar pricing and restrictions on use.
Very sadly. Mental Ray is one of the best render still even today.
But VERY bad integration into Max – it’s troble not for Nvidia, but for us.
Autodeskraytracer senseless and almost ALL archiviz designers used Corona render.
Not that I use MR much these days, but yeah, remove features and put the price up…
I especially like the way AD keep users in the loop – have we got a product manager or not?
Presumably they’ll actually bother to tell us when 2018 comes out.
I think they dare not to release it 🙂
Apparently Maxon is still keeping perpetual for the future.
http://blog.maxon.co.uk/renting-vs-buying-software-which-is-best
It’s an open goal, Maxon aren’t stupid.
It’s baffling as to why Autodesk would invest in their own render engine when they stand no chance against the competition, no one renting 3ds max will be using Autodesk’s renderer, they will likely have invested in Vray or Corona, yet they complain that they are losing money (other than for the obvious reasons), however from a product management point of view the priorities made here to keep the team busy is highly questionable to say the least.
Same goes for Stingray. What is worse about that one is the fact that they took a skilled dev working on SkinFX for max and put him to do yet another questionable realtime engine instead of integrating his plugin into Max’s workflow. It’s like almost done on purpose to be in the face of Max users begging for a muscle sim for over a decade now.
Max 2017 has also been the buggiest Max from recent releases. Meanwhile a small group of devs working in their basements on donations are doing incredible work on a free software called Blender with new rigging, muscle animation tools plus granular and fluid solvers. You just can’t make this up.
It is sad to see what has happened to MR over the years, that renderer had solid potential. But it’s no surprise they would’ve pulled this move given they also have Arnold now.
3D Studio and 3dsmax were my Swiss knife for over 20 year. Then they ruined the software and were lying to their customers (the whole Xcalibur thing was a lie to me). That was enough to switch to another Swiss knife, which had greatly improved over the years. Cinema 4D is my tool of choice now for 5 years and I didn’t miss 3dsmax one second. Its always a pain to go back to fetch some geometry from old 3ds projects.
I am doing mainly technical animations and sometimes archvis. C4D has anything I need for that. If you need more, you can easily extend it with X-Particles, any renderer or Houdini. Yes, there is a link to the Houdini engine implemented already. (and much much more)
So there are very good alternatives for everyone. Since years! So please just stop complaining, stop whining, stop finding excuses for not quitting the Autodesk path now. If you don´t change your behaviour, you are just as dumb as Autodesk wishes. Good Luck with that!
>It’s baffling as to why Autodesk would invest in their
>own render engine when they stand no chance against the
>competition,
My guess, they eventually want a Keyshot-like renderer in Max. i.e. a minimal button-pressing/drag-and-drop material assigner and renderer, ideal for small architectural firms.
TC
What they really want is to hook users into the A360 cloud render service. ART render is the first step to have a standardized rendering framework across A\E\C and M&E. You’ll probably have ART with backburner to fill in the hole left by removing MR in 2018 and eventually Arnold with A360, or something similar, for users who need more advanced features.
Say what you like about the Autodesk pricing strategy. It’s still industry standard software for any major company developing games, or TV/Movie graphics, as well as for the architects and designers.
I am still surprised that they are shipping both Max and Maya when there is so much cross-over between the two packages, and they are so similar under the hood.
Lightwave was pretty dominant in broadcast at one time.
Autodesk’s is a legacy position, based on their previous pricing they can’t take anything for granted.
Maya and Max have been treading on each others toes for years – in my opinion they never really sat well together in the same stable. I’m not sure they’re all that similar under the hood though – the underlying nuts and bolts might have evolved from a similar era but (at least in my experience) they’re quite different under the hood. Also, its a pointless exercise, but I wonder where each package would be today if it had been developed under the real competition of separate ownership and management rather than (what I’m guessing has been years of internal wrangling for resources) under Autodesk.
Well they must have had a good 8 years of dev in separate companies before acquisition of Maya in 2005.
I remember when the acquisition was first announced, someone from AD talked about the ‘software wars being over’ – I may be misremembering but being given the impression that features were thrown in to compete, being a bit rushed and this would give an opportunity for more measured development.
What seems to have happened, judging by people I speak to is that Maya seems to get more attention – from PR to an LT version to the number of people working on it. The decision to acquire a 3rd DCC app in Softimage didn’t help matters.