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Well, for reasons I explained earlier in this thread, companies love the subscription model more than they love their customers. So what market forces does this create if EVERY perpetual license we have goes to subscription? We all know that hobbyists hate this model but for professional production houses it is a windfall. They can add/scale back seats at will depending on the needs of their business. They just love the flexibility. They have no sentimentality to past projects nor will they care if a lapsed subscription means that they cannot access them. They will only need to visit that project again if they have a client paying them to do so. On the other hand, hobbyists do care about being able to access past projects. So the only people who really want perpetual license options are the hobbyists. So how big is that market? Does our buying power...in essence our voice to those that only care about profit....have any impact on what a company offers? Given the continuing move to subscription I have to conclude that is does not. Face it --- the hobbyist is no longer a market that anyone cares about..... ...except for Blender. Blender's origins was with the hobbyist. Those CG lovers who desperately wanted to get into 3D back when Lightwave was $5000 per license (how times have changed...glad to know that C4D has lowered its prices since then....err...maybe not). Blender was really quirky then and while a lot less quirky now, still holds onto its unique UI which does get better and more mainstream with each release. Plus...and this is very important...Blender is innovating faster than its rivals. That is something that should not be taken for granted. Even more important than their innovation is that Blender is becoming more production worthy. Why else would Octane, RenderMan and Redshift be porting their render engines to Blender? Not to appease the hobbyists but rather because Blender is proving itself where time and dollars count: mainstream production. Blender is starting to become part of the production pipeline. A big part of production houses decision to hold onto a piece of software is how well it fits into their pipeline. I do believe that at some point as companies get comfortable with the guaranteed revenue streams that subscriptions provide, the incentive to innovate will decrease because the need to compete on cutting edge features goes away. Carry that thought a bit further and the leap to some pin-headed exec cutting expenses by cutting their software development team is not that far off. This leaves users with paying annually just to use the same old software with the same old issues longer than they have patience to endure. The frustration of using a piece of software that is not keeping up with your needs is an issue for the professional as well as the hobbyist. Meanwhile, Blender just keeps getting more established, more capable, more dependable and still free. What keeps pay-to-use software developers up at night is watching Blender become part of a proven production pipeline. Blender would have been foolish not to have that goal always in mind....and they are not foolish. You can see that initiative with the creation of their mini movies they started a few years ago - exercises that show quality long format animations are possible with Blender. Those mini movies were messages that Blender is to be taken seriously. So what would happen if more production houses move to Blender from other "Pay to use" apps? Where would that leave the "pay-to-use" apps who stopped caring about the hobby market when they moved to subscriptions? Would the hobby market now be important to them? By then, it could be too late. Dave

You´ll find premium training in your account since it´s product you´ve bought before introducing Fused. Info from FAQ ------ What happens when my INSYDIUM Fused Maintenance Agreement expires? If your INSYDIUM Fused Maintenance Agreement expires and you do not renew, you will retain access to the latest X-Particles Build released by this date and lose access to all other items in the INSYDIUM Fused Collection. Any extras purchased prior to the introduction of INSYDIUM Fused will also remain available. ------ ...and there are also few another questions about licencing, maintenance etc... https://insydium.ltd/support-home/faqs/?q=fused

At this rate, we'll have only one or two megacorps left in September... o_O

As we are far from stagnating in software, which big innovations every few years have proven again and again, the only reason IS money, I have absolutely zero doubt about it. "Oh man, our software barely had any updates worth mentioning in three years.. you sure wish you had a perpetual right now, right? Well, too bad... so sad we don't offer that anymore..."

Many add-ons merely improve quality of life in Blender rather than anything else. Everything Materializer does can already be done without the addon, but it adds a LOT of convenience and workflow speedup. As for the other tools: arguably the UV tools + UDIM, sculpting tools, viewport, built-in renderers (Cycles and Eevee), compositing are already much of an improvement compared to Cinema4D. (Obviously C4D still steals the show with MoGraph - but what else is there left?) And many free add-ons, including the standard collection that is part of Blender, only improve quality of life further. Then there are additional free render options such as LuxRender, AMD ProRender, Renderman, Appleseed, Yafaray, ... And a free version of Octane for single GPU users. One thing Maxon may have to deal with is the performance boost that Blender v3 is going to provide: in my tests v3 alpha's raw mesh editing is currently far ahead of Cinema4d. I have tested single-mesh models that choke Cinema4D 24 while Blender 3 alpha happily chugs along. I've noticed that B v3 alpha is more or less on par with Houdini. Only Max is a fair bit faster than the rest. B handles scenes with many objects already much better than Cinema4D, and version 3 is only going to further the distance now that the B devs are actively working on improving mesh and sub-d performance. And this is also already true for sculpting mode which performs much much better in B. In effect, Maxon has some work ahead of them to keep Cinema4D's performance on par with the other DCCs. What worries me is that Maxon already has rewritten the core to boost performance, so I am unsure how much more it could be improved. Or if they have the intention to - they may feel that the current performance is fine (which is not the case in my opinion). The base C4D package relies too much on external paid-for tools. The cost of upkeep is too high for what it provides the user with in its current state in my opinion. But perhaps R25 will be a super update 🙂

Maybe you need lots of PlugIns to get Blender "feature-complete". But if you want a competitive C4D, you need at least a 3rd-party-Renderer and X-Particles: C4D + Redshift: ~ 867 €/year (ex VAT) Insydium Fused: ~ 843 €/year (ex VAT) And C4D will still have a lack of features in Modeling, Sculpting and UV (especially UV mapping!). Besides that, the C4D path seems to be subscription all the way: You could buy lot's of plugins for 1.710 €. Every year. You could even buy lot's of plugins, Houdini (Indie) and Modo for 1.710 €. Every year. You could even buy all that stuff, and still rent C4D on a monthly basis, if an old client asks for an update of an old job. In light of this, I totally agree with you. Cinema 4D should really fill it's gaps. Because nowadays it's very costly.

I think there is a slight misconception about Blender. Yes, the software is really becoming great. But as awesome the materializer example is it shows you can easily spend hundreds and hundreds of bucks on modeling, uv, rigging, rendering tools you have by default in other apps. In my opinion Maxon needs to speed up and continue to buy 3rd party tools. The gaps in the software are not acceptable anymore. And I already have Blender and Maya INdie installed. The whole simulation and rendering department is underdevloped. RS needs to be part of default C4D. We bascially have a render engine from 2011 as default.

Quite simple....this decision is NOT made with the customer in mind. Rather, the only ones who benefit from this are the business owners as it creates a guaranteed stream of revenue going into their bank accounts. Subscriptions captures the user base more so than ever before. With perpetual licenses, if you were not happy with the upgrades, etc. you just stop paying for the upgrades and continue to use the software. The developer looses future revenue should the user make the decision to hold fast with what they have. Under a subscription plan, that same decision also takes away the ability to use the software. Regardless of what comes next you must keep paying to just use the software -- even if nothing you care about get's fixed or improved. This is the model every company wants to be in -- especially as a product matures and the technology to stand out amongst your competitors becomes more complex and expensive to develop. Re-occurring revenue streams raises the value of every company and that is why they do it. Remember, new features is NOT a mandate of the subscription license. That is an agreement we imprint on the developers based on history -- but there is nothing legally binding should a new release NOT occur while under subscription. I bring up this (hopefully ludicrous) scenario to make the following point: Where is the incentive to compete on new features released each year when the user base is locked into paying regardless of what the next release provides? We have seen this happen with Max, with Adobe Premiere and to some extent Adobe After Effects as well (based on some of the complaints I have heard) and so there is a precedent. Will this happen with C4D? Not sure....but history is on our side when it comes to justifying our concerns. Dave

time and time again. its okay to introduce subscription option BUT WHY DISCRIMINATE THE PERPETUAL? There's little to no overhead in keeping both. What gives?