Well that happened really fast. Ending free feature upgrades before the acquisition had been finalised, and already Maxon have apparently finalised upgrade costs.
Can PIxologic/Maxon confirm if this reseller’s price list with the €579 upgrade price is legit, and also can you confirm why these were effective from 1st January? So resellers have known for nearly two weeks what the pricing would be but you’ve been telling us that you have no idea and can’t say anything? And why is the upgrade price 2/3 of the purchase price of a new licence? Is it so that you can soft push people onto the subscription plan like Maxon does with C4D?
You probably need to think hard about the price of these upgrades when you consider your hobbyist market and that the most significant update has come in the form of dynamics - which aren’t, let’s be fair, actual cloth physics like you get in Maya, Houdini or Marvellous Designer. I watch you struggle to market the bevel tool as significant - a bevel tool - and although the knife was loved, it was way past due. Considering most people have already been using far superior, actual physics based solutions for dynamics for years, why on earth do you think that the recent history demands a nearly €600 upgrade cost?
And I can’t be the only one seeing this statement as vaguely threatening about compatibility going forward:
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.
That says to me that you’re about ready to grandfather older versions immediately, even if you do provide critical fixes - there’s a point where you simply won’t provide critical fixes because anything but the latest version would be put in the too hard (don’t want to) basket. Oh we’re sorry, ZBrush 2022 is unstable with the latest Ryzen - you’ll just have to upgrade.
Guys, we make our living from ZBrush. I thought you appreciated how many freelancers and self employed people make up ZBrush users, but this whole thing has been cloaked in confusion and omission so far. Up until today I’ve been defending this, but it looks like Maxon are going to move people into subscription models fast, and they’re likely to do it by hurting compatibility and then telling us it’s not their problem that older versions don’t work, and oh, hey, why don’t you subscribe at half the price, huh?
As far as I’m concerned we have a fully functional sculpting program here - I have no reason to upgrade when everyone’s been so disingenuous and every other reason to start exploring alternatives. People have been doing wonderful things with 3DCoat lately, I have enough experience with ZBrush to demonstrate to others I can work with it fine, so right now it’s really about Maxon/Pixologic giving us reasons to stay rather than assuming we’re all trapped in ZBrush.
