“Because Maxon is a publicly traded company, free upgrades are no longer possible as they are seen as anti-competition and can result in huge fines. This means that we will have to charge for upgrades that introduce new features.”
That’s so ridiculously wrong and a huge lie on the part of Matthew - absolute nonsense, so much so that he’s either massively ignorant over the roles and responsibilities of publicly traded companies, or he’s trying to knowingly give you bad information to obfuscate and excuse the prices.
You know who else is a publicly traded company? Microsoft. Do you know the last time I paid for Windows? Windows 7. Both Windows 10 and Windows 11 were free upgrades, and every feature upgrade has been free.
Honestly, I’m starting to think that Maxon and Pixologic think their customers are idiots - no one in their right mind could think that free updates are anticompetitive. Lowering prices and providing value is the very essence of competition - it’s not about making sure everyone has the same product. Buying a company like Pixologic with a unique product and then immediately turning on the full price upgrade switch isn’t anything to do with competition - it’s the opposite, it’s taking advantage of a de facto monopoly.
Considering all the other major packages don’t do free upgrades, there’s nothing that could possibly be in competition law that says you have to charge. And there’s nothing in the responsibilities of companies to your shareholders that says that you have to acquire smaller companies and then immediately change things so you charge them nearly the same price to upgrade every year.
Every time I hear Pixologic on this, I come a little closer to just jumping straight over to 3DCoat with both feet. They’re starting to sound like nothing but Maxon shills - probably because now they all work for Maxon and they’re still trying to coast on that Pixologic goodwill.
By the way, this is Maxon’s parent company. They are not hurting for money, but they’ll get absolutely none of mine from now on.
