ZBrush 2023 Complaints to Maxon

[ragajones]

I am a public high school teacher in Arizona and a hardcore zbrush amateur since 2009. I have loved zbrush so much over the years and have recommended it to my students and gotten so many hooked on its wonderful interface, tools, abilities and community.

Maxon, you have taken that away. I cannot recommend zbrush anymore to anyone for any reason - not even a little bit.

This system was a thriving ecosystem and you have now put your stamp of greed on it. The sculpting tools in Blender are rudimentary compared to zbrush but I will gladly switch over with my students and never look back because at least we will have something that moves fast, is unrestricted and has potential moving forward.

I feel so sorry for the employees of zbrush - what a beautiful, thriving, community they built over the years with such an amazing tool and now it is this -

Good bye - I cannot believe this has happened - what a shame

[jonestation]

I own the legacy version of zbrush until 2022. I was planning to buy the perpetual license again next year, then i see this in the perpetual policy:

“Perpetual users purchase a license to use the current base version (e.g. ZBrush 2023.0) of the software and are entitled to receive bug fixes and security patches for that version. These updates are essential for maintaining the stability and security of the software, but they do not include any new features or functionality.”

I am sorry but don’t we at least get 12 months of feature updates?

The annual update fees are like getting a new license all over again.

To make it even obvious, there is no discount for perpetual license during zbrush summit.

[LordPotus]

Haha… yeah i own a perpetual that lasted until 2023 and i thought no point in upgrading when the “upgrade” is basically the same price i paid for the first license… but had plans to “milk it” a little more until upgrading but as of today reading something different where a perpetual is year based… and to THAT amount? You got to be kidding Maxxon… Putting this into perspective for any serious Music Sequencer like Cubase i have upgraded almost every year since 15 years where a yearly upgrade is about a fraction of the full cost.
Why can’t a perpetual license be set to a sensible amount?
And here i thought Adobe was bad… You are clearly taking the cake here Maxxon

[DannyMcGrath]

@LordPotus and now they’ve made updates exclusive to subs. It was always coming. The over-priced perpetual upgrade was always a thinly-veiled and clumsy attempt to force everyone onto subs. It didn’t work so now they’ve just abandoned perpetual users altogether. And STILL Redfshift GPU is an extra sub. A year on and I still haven’t seen any Zbrush user using Redshift.

The whole sordid affair has been pretty much a disgrace, but expected from a company like Maxon.

[Meathelix1]

I am currrently in the process of getting a license transfer and the seller and I have been going back and forth with Maxon for over 3 weeks!

Their process of a license transfer is terrible. I would say one of the worse companies I have had to deal with. We have screenshots of the process from both ends, I even created a new support ticket and that has not been responded to either.

[x-space]

A lot of money for Maxon for Zbrush, but no real multiprocessing.
Decimation Master, ZRemesher takes too much time and uses only a few CPU cores and, to be honest, not even sensibly. The program should be reprogrammed from the interface up before so much money is spent. I also find it an impertinence how complicated it is to rotate and zoom. No other 3D program has implemented this so stupidly.

P.S. I’m sure that 3D will be obsolete in the near future thanks to new AI tools like Midjourney. So spending weeks on a simple portrait would be a waste of time.

[zber2]

Maxon aquisition? This whole thing is just one big disappointment. Ever since Maxon took over, I have noticed a steady decline in forum usage. The Community Forum is basically non-existent anymore and the other forums are slowly following suit. I can see it eventually becoming a ZBrush Artworks forum only. Hardly anybody helps out on the ZBrush Usage Forum and you don’t see @Spyndel anymore and I am seriously thinking of leaving also. Why should I help? I don’t see one red cent for my efforts and nobody really cares anyway. Also, I see Maxon is no longer providing a perpetual license for ZBrush anymore. The bloody price for an upgrade was ridiculous anyway. I am still using version 2022.0.8 and I have no doubt that Maxon is going to get rid of that eventually also. Thanks for nothing Maxon.

[aurick]

Forum activity has been tricky. It’s just not something that people use much, anymore. Everything seems to be moving towards the instant gratification of social media. The decline in firm activity has been going on for a long time. Since well before Maxon. We’ve been trying different things to get people to engage, but haven’t found that magic something yet. As for the questions category, we saw that the more we answered, the less the community did. By answering less, we’ve hoped that more members of the community would step in and be like you.

As for ZBrush, Maxon doesn’t sell any perpetual licenses anymore, for any software. We do continue to support existing perpetual licenses, and I have seen no indications that will change. But for new features, it is necessary to buy a subscription.

What I have seen is heavy investment in ZBrush. The development team is larger than ever and as they get more and more familiar with the code (which takes time), I’m excited to see what they create. ZBrush for iPad is just the beginning. I can’t say more than that… you’ll just have to wait and see.

[sculptman]

Hello, I see many responses in here from you and do appreciate the transparency but when it comes to this subscription nonsense, Maxon needs to actually listen to all the customers who purchased a perpetual license and supported Zbrush for many years. Look how fast Maxon upset and disappointed many license holders. I’ve read in many forums of users leaving to other tools. I’m a sculptor no matter what tool I use but I will never support a subscription model for any software. I am hoping there will be a new bill created by our representatives and sent for committee review that will require any company to offer a perpetual license in addition to a subscription based license. There are needs for many people from hobbyists to professionals and even studios and we should all have options based on our budgets. Zbrush looks great for iPad but if it also requires a subscription which it mostly will, I’m not interested. There are other tools we can use and I really want to support the Zbrush team but unfortunately not through a subscription. Thank you for listening.

[tobor8man]

@zber2 Well said. This is exactly my sentiment too.

The Maxon acquisition feels exactly like an acquisition I went through years ago. Lots of indicators to demonstrate bigger and better development but in essence the core product remained virtually unchanged, and all the effort was put into expanding the user base through derivative, and generally dumb-downed products. There may be many of the original Pixologic people, plus many new ones on the Zbrush team but development and pricing are driven by shareholders and stock price now. I’m a hobbyist, who would have willingly paid 10-20% of the base price for annual updates but, for years, Pixologic never entertained that option (the rot started there imo) and now I’m locked out of consideration by Maxon. I guess Maxon doesn’t think there’s money to be made from hobbyist/occasional users. Not sure why, as I pay $140/year for Microsoft Office so I can use/write spreadsheets when I want to, and the fee does not kill the budget of a retiree. Even Netflix costs me more and who would be without Netflix these days, or a host of other streaming services. The price of entry for Maxon Zbrush feels like buying a mortgage on a house, when it should feel like tapping into a streaming service. That’s where Maxon is missing out I believe.

I too won’t be long for ZBC. Soon to begin indefinite life on the road with no access to a system that can run Zbrush. So if the 3D sculpting urge strikes it’ll have to be Nomad because sure as hell, I’m not paying a subscription for Zbrush on I-Pad.

Cheers, good luck with your 3D sculpting adventures and thanks for all your support.

[dsloyer]

Latest scam from Maxon is unacceptable.

Purchased 1-year zbrush license 08/25/2023 for $359
Offered Upgrade to Maxon One 1-year for $41.31 on 08/07/2024 > paid
Charged $1199 on 08/15/2024 for Maxon One 1-year (My original Zbrush subscription had not expired yet > 08/25/2024)

No Chat support options
No Contact Number for Phone support
Email support auto-responses only

Cancelled the $1199 order for Maxon One 1-year via the website
All subscription licenses revoked (I’m still active till 08/25/2024)

This is a terrible customer experience and predatory pricing/offers

[aurick]

Please submit a support ticket at Support Center.

Company policy is that all tickets are responded to within one day.

Something is very strange because Maxon has never offered Maxon One at the $41.31 price you mentioned. And canceling never takes away time that you’ve paid for. But we need to actually look at your account to see what happened and, if an error has been made somewhere, get that corrected.

[Wazbaz_the_Weary]

I’m sorry to break it to you, Maxon has acted in bad faith. Students are increasing switching to other tools as a result of this hostility. Piracy has increased, where as shown in:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/isre.2018.0821&hl=en&sa=X&ei=novfZrCcEPSC6rQP05P-mAo&scisig=AFWwaeafQ9spTkmG-vT-PWMQEc1c&oi=scholarrfor
With reasonable, localized prices genuine sales would largely replace those piracies.
Best of luck to the team, this is sad.

[alonso]

Goodbye Maxon, going to Blender 1, 2, 3 …

[pixel]

I really don’t have a problem with perpetual licenses not receiving upgrades. I bought Substance Painter on Steam and that’s what I got with it. The fact there are no more perpetual licenses just rubs me the wrong way.

Subs are terrible. Once you stop paying, you can no longer use your files. And I’m glad I haven’t subscribed because after paying for a year and learning the biggest update was a port to the ipad would be much more than disappointing. I don’t own an ipad and wouldn’t use it anyway after investing heavily in my desktop with large monitors and tablet.

I’d be more than happy to pay even full price for a perpetual license without updates as needed. Not every year, since the updates have been scant, but every other year maybe.