Not really.
Winning business is about choice. The company has to win you business to get you to buy the upgrade. With a perpetual license your past work is always accessible and you keep creating if the company doesn’t justify your purchase of the new features in the upgrade.
With a subscription, your software stops working the moment you stop paying, so you lose access your past work as well as the ability to create future work if the software is relatively unique (ZPR format, for example.) Hence, whether the company improves the software or not (e.g. “win[s] your business”) you need to keep paying. Unfortunately, many companies have gone to subscription just to keep a constant revenue stream with relatively ho-hum or minor improvements.
Maxon even warns you that if you go back to your perpetual license from a subscription you need to export your files as they won’t work.
Hence, for a serious user that doesn’t view their work as disposable, there is no choice.
For myself I looked at the choice just offered, but discovered it was actually kind of restrictive: I nearly went for the subscription, but with Maxon’s policies, I don’t get an activation for my workstation and laptop (like I had for the last 20 years with Pixologic.) Instead I get ONE activation and to switch between workstation and laptop I have to 1) be online and 2) deactivate the workstation. To return the workstation, I again have to go through the activation-deactivation hokey-pokey.
Maxon’s solution to this rather practical problem? Buy two subscriptions of course! Even Adobe gives me two activations.
So in terms of “winning my business” Maxon seems to be going to the wrong direction: pay more and get less.
While ZB is still the best sculpting solution today, I can see that Maxon is either unaware or doesn’t care that alternatives are already starting to crop up and accelerate their efforts in market. I’m not sure the digitial sculpting niche is going to survive multiple players trying to slice up the pie.
To me, I feel Maxon is monetizing the Zbrush base while promising very little in return. The 50% one-year offer seemed to only be softening the blow that it will obsolete our perpetual licenses if we jump on the subscription train and the file formats change.
Given that Maxon has had eight months to discuss and lay out their solutions to the future of Zbrush, I can’t conclude that they is much good to say. If there was exciting advantages (and no, intergration with Maxon One does not excite me) Maxon would be, by this time shouting it from the rooftops to increase their market share instead of offering fire-sale, “pay me 50% today for a hamberger Tuesday” promotions. (No functionality offered, just the threat that your perpetual license will become outmoded by upcomming, unamed, undescribed technology which wil have an expressed price if you don’t subscribe.) If there was something good to motivate the customer, I think its a marketing mis-step to not put it forward as motivation towards subscribing.
Instead, we only see the threat of unknown as a motivator.
Considering that Zbrush updates traditionally consider both bug fixes and product features, which will likely force the professional users to subscription model, I don’t hold a lot of hope for perpetual license “upgrades” unless they offer the fixes that will come on top of those upgrades as part of the package. Maxon has been mum on that, but the implication from all their discussion of subscriptions has left me to believe that they believe bug fixes are for subscribers only.
I don’t see how the perpetual license model will survive this transition.
For a symbiosis to be truly symbiotic, both parties need to prosper. So far Maxon isn’t really putting on the table a coherent picture of what that future prosperity will look like (other than Maxon One integration.)
TL; DR
Thus it will ultimately come down to one choice. Subscribe to Maxon Zbrush or look to a different provider. Only at the point of serious competition will Maxon truly have to win the customer’s favor. 