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Since Epic bought ArtStation a few months back this move makes sense. Being a Pro user my upload limit has been increased from 30 to 50 models a month...with no increase in price...we'll see.

Maxon is following the rules and laws of economics principles. In this world, «gratitude» is a foreign word. Financially, a company lives in the present and in the future, the past has no relevance. Faithful customers may be of interest, as long as they stay faithful and generate revenue. It is obvious that the subscription model is what counts now. All over the place. For me it is a tragedy. For several reasons. I am a C++ programmer and have developed several C4D Extensions (plug-ins) which enhances C4D a lot for me. Besides of that, I am a «hobbyist» and use C4D for nonprofit projects only. My profession is programming. The subscription model means that I cannot retire, and use what I already have paid for. It is money out of the window. I jumped the Adobe ship, when they started this, and am stuck with the Adobe Creative Suite CS 6. Almost ten years old now. Additional problems arise in the software world. I have purchased several versions of the Mocha Planar Tracker. Paid versions who I own. Now, Boris has acquired Mocha, and put it on the subscription wagon. This means that the license mechanism is broken, and that I cannot move my Mocha software to a new machine, when I upgrade my hardware. This is horrible, to put it mildly. One may wonder when this happens to my C4D versions, I have them all, C4D Studio full paid from R13 and on.. There are several reasons for this change to the subscription model. One of them, not often mentioned, is that software nowadays eventually has become mature. I can use a ten years old version of Photoshop, it works like magic, and has so many nice features that I will hardly explore and take advantage of more than a fraction of them. The same applies to C4D, and not the least to the aforementioned Mocha Planar Tracker. So the customers may want to skip a version or two. Or five. Which means revenue losses for the software houses. The only way for hem to keep money coming in, then, is to turn their customers into hostages. Also called subscribers. -Ingvar

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..."

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

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