Thread Regarding Maxon Transition

[Morgaine]

ZBrush Acquisition FAQ

Will there still be free upgrades for ZBrush perpetual license holders?
Moving forward, perpetual licenses will only receive bug fixes, but not additional features or functionality for free. Subscribers will receive all feature updates and other fixes as long as their subscription is active.
To provide the best customer experience and performance, we truly believe all customers should be running the latest version. Cutting-edge technology and performance require agile development and delivery. All Maxon products, including ZBrush are fully dependent upon third-party hardware, operating systems and software solutions. In order to maintain compatibility with the latest hardware, drivers and host application updates, our development teams are constantly updating, optimizing and ensuring stability.

I bought ZBrush over 10 years ago, that means that I have to pay for the updates from (2022) now on?

[Gremlin]

Yeah, you got one free “Update” this year, then any other “Updates” will be paid. they don’t currently know how much any updates will cost, they could be tiny, they could be hundreds of dollars. nobody knows. but they just gave out a free “Patch” that isn’t counted as an Update. so that tells me “Updates” will be Substantial, BIG Updates, and “Patches” Will be Free, little add-ons and bug fixes for free. just my two cents though

[rdrv]

There is a middleground between perpetual licenses and subscriptions that just end access to apps with Your last payment. IntelliJ Idea, on of the most popular IDE’s out there, has a rent-to-own model: You start a subscription for a year. After that, You are free to keep the version You started with indefinitely. The company is confident enough that their updates will be worth it and a large enough batch of customers will keep their subscription. Folks who don’t need the bleeding edge at any time pay effectively once, and are free to use a fully functional, but not the latest, version until they need or want to upgrade again.

I’d love to see more companies adopt this model. It has obvious benefits for all: companies still generate a steady income of revenues, while customers have more choice how and when to upgrade. Also, most importantly, peace of mind: if anything happens and You can’t afford a subscription temporarily, You still have a fully functioning software. It effectively eliminates this end-of-access anxiety that probably many have and which is possibly the reason why the subscription-only model is so, well, hated.

[Crusoe_the_Painter]

Zbrush works great on Wine and wine can run some really really old windows software. Just saying…

[AbyssalSoda]

Yeah it’s definitely not for sculpting, but it looks like it’s all we gonna have left

[Gremlin]

What is Wine, exactly? ive never heard of it. (I mean, of course i know of the Drink, very well lol)

[Crusoe_the_Painter]

It’s a windows emulation layer for Linux.

Linux still supports the old Wacom tablets that Wacom has dropped support for in their drivers. And Wine can run all sorts of windows software. Valve Software ( the game studio ) has poured a lot of work into Wine for supporting windows games on Linux, and now it’s even better at running other windows software.

[KorayAtes]

And one day we may receive an email saying zbrushcentral/pixologic websites will no longer be available… got one from adobe about substance.

[Theobeest]

When will there be a Zbrush update?

I’m entitled to free updates for a year, but nothing is being released.

Theo

[sbmongoose]

Oh gosh, that’s so generous of Maxon. I can get Zbrush up to date to the latest version of ZBrush, 2022.0.5, that I currently have, but for half price, and for a whole year!! Wow!!!

So from this it would imply to me that a perpetual update will be more than 1 year of half price subscrption, so more than 50% of " GBP 322.80 Billed Annually"

While @aurick had denied the price list from here before, this is updated, and dated 25th May 2022…

c4d.pdf

“ZBrush 2022 – Upgrade from Zbrush m2531 € 579.00”
If they misunderstood something in January, they are still “misunderstanding it” with an updated list from late May!

Pixologic has

It’s looking like [quote=“Theobeest, post:104, topic:418100”]
That doesn’t automatically mean that those upgrades must be expensive. Nobody knows as of yet how often perpetual license upgrades will be available or how much they will cost.
[/quote], well, the news is incoming, and it’s not looking so rosy.

Thanks Maxon

[Will_Stone]

So, just so I understand…I’m basically going to have to pay a yearly subscription now just for the program to work properly (ala upgrades)? And I’m not even seeing a price on the 50% off voucher.

Don’t get me wrong, I do get it (cynically). Indeed, I’d always wondered previously how long Pixiologic could sustain the free upgrade model; now we know! Still hard to not feel pretty hosed by this move.

[cjadams]

Well everyone knew it couldn’t last forever…

pixo would have had to do this anyway… so… its just business. in fact them being a much much smaller company with not much resources… the fees might have been even higher than what Maxon is doing…

I just get Maxon one - and will write it off on taxes…

back to working rather than bitching in forums… cost of doing business…

free forever was a loose loose proposition… and wasn’t sustainable anyway.

[rachel]

All this has achieved is to kill off the hobbiests…

I’ve owned ZB for many years and now that I’m all but retired I will NOT be paying upgrades/updates . I would far sooner switch to Blender. I have no use for Maxon’s software what so ever. So your offer of a 50% discount for one year for Maxon One is pathetic and pointless.

For shame…

[xradoo]

Hi all,

do you know if the perpetual licenses we have will still be valid?
I mean, do they expire at some point or can we use them indefinitely? Me personally I won’t pay Maxon for a subscription ( even 50% off for one year) and Zbrush as it is, absolutely covers everything for a long time.

P.S. Oh, and thank you Pixologic for almost 20 years of great stuff! I owned Zbrush since version 2. Well, it is what it is.

[sbmongoose]

In the small print down at the bottom of the emails they do state:
"Disclaimer: This offer is being presented to you because you are a ZBrush perpetual license holder. Rest assured, perpetual licenses are not being eliminated. However, perpetual licenses will not receive free upgrades past ZBrush 2022.0.5. Discount is valid for Annual Subscriptions only. "

So for the moment at least there is no direct change to what we have, only for updates that might come after.

[Affable_Ed]

How terribly, terribly sad this all is.

I get the business case; Zbrush is a niche software title and has a finite audience/market, when it achieves dominance, sales plato with only a little growth because, broadly speaking, everyone who needs the software already has it. Pixologic doesn’t care because they make enough and are passionate about what they do, they build a community of devotees whose love, enthusiasm and artistry will always inspire enough new users to make the company profitable.

Maxon has a different model, they’re all about capturing audience/market and ensuring a continued revenue. They see Zbrush and think ‘un-tapped revenue stream’, they make Pixologic an offer too good to refuse. They win, we lose.

There is no version of the unfolding story which is in any way good for current/historic users, the plain facts are that we will now have to pay for something we used to get for ‘free’. And the thing I find really offensive in the modern subscription age is when a company starts charging you for a service you already get, for free, but word it like they are doing you a favour! 50% off is 100% more than I used to pay.

The energy crisis and the cost-of-living crisis have hit hard enough already, there’s no room in my finances for another weighty subscription, I’ll see where we are in a year but I don’t like where we are now.

[Will_Stone]

I just saw the regular price for these subscriptions…about 355$ US/ 460$ CAN per year, and I’m not sure that includes the price of actual Zbrush upgrades. Is anyone here going for this, still?

[Purgebs101]

Let me share my recent experience of Maxon. I own quite a few Trapcode Plugins for After Effects which I bought individually over the years on perpetual licenses. Some of them haven’t had a meaningful update in many years so I’ve only paid for the upgrades I needed. However, since Maxon acquired Red Giant and Trapcode, my plugins are now only usable through the Maxon app using legacy installers which will soon be discontinued. After that I will be expected to shell out $1000 a year for Red Giant Complete in order to continue using individual tools I paid for years ago. Support for these issues has also been predictably thin. So I imagine it will be the same with ZBrush- it will be OK for now, but eventually perpetual licensees will get locked out unless they agree to a yearly or monthly price gouge.
ZBrush is a great piece of software and is my go-to tool for sculpting, but I am not keen on being a Maxon customer to continue using it.

[max_brush_objector]

There is no way I’m going to a Maxon subscription only to be gouged for updates - ridiculous - I suspect in 5 years or less, Maxon is going to either sell the Zbrush assets or kill it due to a lack of anticipated sales. When these companies buy other companies, what they fail to recognize is they are also buying existing customer loyalty, and if the loyalty is not there for the new owners due to unacceptable changes, then that loyalty walks away.

[Joerie]

First of all, let me say that I am very grateful for all the free upgrades that I have received from Pixologic ever since I purchased a license many years ago. The 2022 release does so much more than what I originally paid for.

As a product manager for a - totally unrelated - B2B software company, I always wondered how Pixologic could sustain this generous business model. Because without an ongoing revenue stream, software companies can only afford to keep paying salaries by selling more and more licenses, or by having a more diversified portfolio consisting of hardware, services, etc.

When Pixologic announced the acquisition by Maxon, I gave them the benefit of the doubt, even though I could see the writing on the wall. Acquisitions like this rarely mean good news for existing customers.

Now that I have received the ‘special offer’ Maxon has made, I know that I will probably be using the 2022 version indefinitely. Because as a hobbiest user who doesn’t make any money from modeling with ZBrush, I simply can’t commit to a very expensive subscription model.
Fortunately, ZBrush is a really great product, so I will be fine for many years to come.

Maxon has done an incredibly poor job at explaining the benefits of this ‘unprecedented’ offer. I’d be shocked if they got even 1 ZBrush perpetual license holder to take the bait (I’m not talking about Maxon One, which may be interesting to professional users).

I do wish everyone in the ZBrush team all the best!