And one day we may receive an email saying zbrushcentral/pixologic websites will no longer be available… got one from adobe about substance.
When will there be a Zbrush update?
I’m entitled to free updates for a year, but nothing is being released.
Theo
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…
“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
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.
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.
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…
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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.
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.
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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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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!
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The end of Zbrush and its community by Maxon.
I get weekly aggressive mails from Maxon where they try to push me into a cash cow subscription. Extremely annoying! It was never a given to always get free updates from you guys, but that along with the genius of the software is what made Zbrush successful. I think that’s why Zbrush is so strong in its community. Now a greedy software company is destroying that.
As a user of the first alpha version, I surprisingly was able to use Zbrush very rarely for projects, but was always involved. That’s over now.
No one needs a subscription. We are not all Disney, EA, Blur…
P.S. I also stopped buying 3dsMAx from 2014, because 2000 Euro/year was just crazy…and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one, because now there is suddenly a cheap indie license. 
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I never rent anything out, software based or real world based. I never use credit, I never ‘buy a subscription’.
I will never give any company like maxon any money. For me, it’s quite simple.
Having a very limited budget is my driving force with most things. I don’t have money to throw away on greedy companies month after month forever.
As soon as the final free update is available, that will be my final use of zbrush, and they have one less user.
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sadly welcome to capitalism…
If you can’t afford it …Then go enjoy blender dude! - …Maxon is a company not a charity…shrug …not sure what to say otherwise.
I stopped Maya 2014 (Autodesk start subscription) . Afer over 20 Years I stopped CINEMA4D R21 (when Maxon starts Subscription) and the actual Zbrush Version is the next stopp 
I will miss the GoZ functionality (first part that wouldnt work anymore with Update of your 3D Software…) I like to buy my software and use it offline and not to rent my software and has to be online with my worstation every time to check the licence…
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There’s an official FAQ here on the Maxon discount offer that also indicates perpetual licences are not dead and will continue to be supported (at a price yet to be determined).
FAQ Regarding Maxon Email to Legacy Perpetual License Users - ZBrush
I’m afraid I don’t get it. Why doesn’t someone from Pixo/Maxon post that here to help with all the uncertainty, speculation and misinformation that’s rife in this thread.
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Easy to say that. I am a professional user and already pay/ afford needed subscriptions for Adobe Full collection, 3dsMax (finally an affordable indie version - to mention…. I paid more than 20k € for mostly lousy updates to Autodesk over the decades and I am not a full time user!), Key Shot, Vray, itoo Forest Pack, Rail Clone, and a lot more even so for PlugIns for AfterEffects and Premiere….ah forgot to mention CUBASE, Native Instrument and other Plugins….then Hardware…
Except of Photoshop/Illustrator/ Indesign…I use the other software not daily - ZBrush seldom…but don’t want to miss it….because I spent plenty hours with it….
But there is the other side…you need to earn money to be able to afford all of that nice tools. I always would have paid Pixologic for there updates. It was never a matter of course for me to get it for free but I would never have paid for subscriptions…there is a limit for me.
P.S. But one thing is clear…Keyshot is no more available via the Pixologic Store. I am sure Luxion will offer a great subscription for the subscription! Yeah!
The end of a great area…
Well, Maxon sent out very inconsiderate and very limited duration “50% off subscription” emails - inconsiderate as it provokes undue stress.
For me 50% off is not a good deal because I only use Zbrush in the winter season. So 1y subscription schemes mean I pay double per month of use. Also one is penalized with +32% on standard monthly price if subscribing for shorter period than a year.
Kudos to Pixologic to give free perpetual upgrades for so many years as it allowed me as a hobbyist to explore new cool functionality. But $32/month that Maxon asks is simply too much.
Will keep my “perpetual” version and see how long it works.
Former experience when Autodesk aquired Softimage XSI that I had just purchased before the hostile takeover; They quickly called it a “historic version” and a couple of years later found it was too costly (hard to believe with AD earnings) to keep the licensing server running - so the “perpetual” license was a joke. That’s the achilles heel of software license validation these days… I have a feeling Maxon will do something similar - given past experiences.
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