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Software | Software > Substance

Changes to substance licensing

Nov 01, 2019 by CGPress Staff
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Adobe has announced changes to licensing of its Substance products. From November 2019 perpetual licenses will no longer be sold through the substance3D.com. Subscribers who started their contract prior to November have until October 31, 2020, to request a perpetual license under the existing rent-to-own scheme. Existing perpetual license owners will also be able to renew their maintenance until the same date. 

From now on, Substance is only available through substance3D.com as a subscription that includes Substance Painter, Substance Alchemist, Substance Designer, and 30 downloads per month from Substance Source. Monthly pricing for the suite has not been changed but the annual Indie license was reduced to $219 from $239. Users with an existing Perpetual license are offered a discounted price of $149 if they take out a plan before 31 December 2019. This will not require the user to give up their existing perpetual license. 

Despite not being sold on Substance3D.com, perpetual Indie licenses for Substance Painter and Substance Designer will remain available to purchase through Steam. The FAQ also makes a point of mentioning that Substance is not a part of Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps.

Read the full post on the Substance forum. 

(Full Disclosure: This news was announced October 1 – we only spotted it today)

Related News

  • Allegorithmic introduce free student licensing
  • Maxon committed to offering perpetual licenses, will be exploring rental licensing as an option
  • Allegorithmic’s Substance Live rent-to-own licensing system now available
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Martin
5 years ago

For every little thing they made a blog post. Not this time. This time it’s a forum post that probably only a handful of people have seen up to this point. Didn’t get an email about it either. Wow, what a surprise. So thanks for posting the news, I would only have noticed when it would’ve been too late some time next year. Bravo Adobe, bravo!

Cantankerous
Reply to  Martin
5 years ago

This somewhat stealthy manoeuvre sneaked under my radar too – well spotted folks. And just in time to muddy the waters while I was starting to plan my annual Black Friday maintenance renewal.

Robert
5 years ago

Adobe is a disease of the cg industry. If only a replacement existed, I would change immediately…

IlyaK
Reply to  Robert
5 years ago

So is Autodesk. For what it’s worth, one might take a look at Material Maker and ArmorPaint. The development progress has been steady so far though it’s too early to call them complete replacements. At least supporting open-source projects protects you from such disgraceful moves and you’ll never be subdued to the greedy ones.

snakebox
Reply to  Robert
5 years ago

it might not be quite there yet, but…
https://armorpaint.org/index.html

Artur
5 years ago

Well well well.. Anyone’s surprised?

IlyaK
5 years ago

No doubt C4D will follow this route.

maxon
Reply to  IlyaK
5 years ago

They already did.

jama
Reply to  IlyaK
5 years ago

Yup. Next step is that they will stop offering perpetual license and only subscription is offered. It couldn’t be better time for blender community to publish 2.8 which had great UI improvements imo. I personally love new UI. I need to support blender in near future. ANd these good news from big big companies supporting blender has been very promising and make it trust blender’s future.

Pieforme
5 years ago

I could be mistaken but I thought they sent an email about this a while back. Dosen`t make it better but we knew this day would come.

David Johansson
5 years ago

so Creative Cloud All Apps is just Creative Cloud Some Apps?

JokerMartini
Reply to  David Johansson
5 years ago

It’s sad that allegorithmic sold out to adobe and now they have just become another greedy cooperate company.

jama
Reply to  David Johansson
5 years ago

😀 It looks like that indeed 😀

Badbullet
5 years ago

Man, I’d hate to be one of the moderators on that forum. This wasn’t their decision, but they have to answer all of the questions as politely as possible, no matter how many times they are asked. Vincent Gault’s avatar says it all, lol.

Kidding aside, this sucks. I was going to buy out my license and go perpetual. If maintenance updates will end in October 2021 for maintenance, then I’d have to go BACK to subscription to keep getting updates. Sure, they are owned by Adobe, which has been lackluster with updates and introducing crazy bugs with their updates; but the Substance team has still been doing a lot of innovative development worthy of upgrades and I’m hopeful that will continue. Well, I have a year to think about it I guess.

Damm
5 years ago

The assh*les start executing their plan.

remmy
5 years ago

OK Mari looking attractive again

jama
Reply to  remmy
5 years ago

yup. Mari is still only one which is taking huge steps in development. But i think its not for me or small freelancers unless need to paint something very high detailed – in that case mari will be much better option than substance products which were more for smaller porjects and for game graphics imo.

maxon
Reply to  jama
5 years ago

Do you really think Foundry would not turn to subscription only?? Good luck.

jama
Reply to  maxon
5 years ago

Well you never know. Modo and Mari are still great products but modo’s development is slow and it looks like they are also trying to force users slowly to subscription only just like Maxon. Most likely it will be same path like adobe and autodesk did unless things change.

Also Houdini is going to be only subscription most likely :/

This is good readon to have open source and big support for blender and other open source softwares. And i think/guess that this trend of subscription only is the reason for that support from many companies – tools which are developed and which are free for users are very affordable for big companies if they offer tools that are needed. And when they put all resources into few softwares it makes development more stable and affordable than putting money there and here and here (like houdini + 3dsmax + maya + mari + nuke + modo + substance + photoshop etc.) – much better to put money into few good developers and especially for open source where you got lower risks to loose all your investements just like that – like software rent – user will lost everything right when user stops service (software as a service) and reason could be that the developer has got nothing new because of empty ideas or because of greedy like adobe and autodesk which just fire people/workers and milk money with poor updates.

Nossgrr
5 years ago

We all saw that coming.. TG for open source. I’m looking at you Armor Paint and Material Maker. Definitely not at the level of the Substance tools yet but they’ll grow.

mortas
Reply to  Nossgrr
5 years ago

I bought the indie version of painter, but I’ll buy into Armour paint now even just to support the developer,

jpl
Reply to  mortas
5 years ago

That armor paint looks very promising! I think i’ll buy it just to support dev as well.

pieforme
Reply to  jpl
5 years ago

armour paint looks intresting. I like the look of the node based material builder.

juang3d
Reply to  jpl
5 years ago

I think one of the most important things for it to suceed is cooperation in generating a huge material library,

jama
Reply to  Nossgrr
5 years ago

Me too and i don’t mean that kind of metoo.
I mean that i am going to open source alternatives also.
I hope blender will get better texture generation and painting features.
And there is armod paint yup and its looks quite nice alternative but i would rather see all in one packeg like blender having same features integrated.

Inskipp
5 years ago

One day they’ll name an extremely disgusting disease after Adobe.

Thomas Cheng
5 years ago

3DCoat is a solid alternative.

Juang3d
Reply to  Thomas Cheng
5 years ago

Does 3DCoat have a good material library available? That’s t powerful feature of Substance in the end for some of us 🙂

jama
Reply to  Juang3d
5 years ago

https://materials.3dcoat.com/scans

Juang3d
Reply to  jama
5 years ago

Thanks Jama.

I’ll take a look 🙂

Juang3d
5 years ago

This was kind of expected since day one of adobe acquisition, now the CEO words are left in the dust about not changing the licensing and caring about the users… (I think he said something along these lines)

jama
5 years ago

“From November 2019 perpetual licenses will no longer be sold through the substance3D.com.”

Say whaaaaAAAT! Who could guess this. Just joking. It was quite obvious.

BernieB
5 years ago

Good grief.

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