Blender is bleeding 100s of donors

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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Why is Blender losing individual donors?

According to what Pablo mentioned during the last livestream, Blender has been steadily losing hundreds of individual subscriptions over the last few releases.

He hinted that the rise of AI might be the cause, but the bleeding actually started way before that. Because of the timing, I don’t think AI is the main reason (though it could have had some impact in the last few weeks for sure).

I’d love to hear your opinions on this, especially if you are a former donor.

Why are hundreds of people stopping their donations? Keep in mind, we’re talking about amounts as small as $5 a month.

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As the economy gets worse and worse, even small donations start to be a lot.

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I can tell you exactly why I stopped donating- ever since 4.2, Eevee is broken and all the bug reports for it have been brushed off or forgotten:

I still use 4.1 because of that. I have no reason to pay for development for software I’m not using

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I believe that it is entirely fair to restrict disclosures on this matter to the Blender Foundation. As, and when, they wish to disclose or discuss it.

If they now perceive themselves to be faced with “financial matters,” then I will expect them to timely bring the matter to public discussion, to be properly dealt with.

(After all, the long-ago originators of this project … began … with bankruptcy. Which “Ton” certainly remembers.)

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I don’t think the loss of donors is because of AI or the quality of the releases. It’s more likely due to the current state of the industry, where only a few subfields are actually hiring. The field is getting harder to break into and harder to sustain a career in.

Some areas of CG just aren’t that encouraging right now. Also, keep in mind that most hobbyists probably aren’t donating anyway, and they’re likely the same people who would rely on genAI and eventually move away from Blender.

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Blender donor fund is losing subscription donors only IMO, but the one time donators have been steady amount since last year. The loss can be attributed to different factors like economic situation, believe that Blender has enough money, the AI drama etc.

The figure Pablo mentioned doesn’t count one time donators, in January campaign 28,000 individual donated(plus subscribers), then it dropped to its normal figure of around 14k to 15k donators (plus 8k subscribers) a month, this figure has been stable as of today from 10th May to 11th June the figure is 13,662 (plus 7.3k subscribers) individual donators. I believe the drop is from the subscribers who have ended their donation plans

Reference,
https://x.com/Blender/status/2001345623107248207/photo/1

image
image1472×722 80.7 KB

other data is from this graph on https://fund.blender.org/

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image604×302 12.6 KB

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I imagine Blender attracted a lot of donations in recent years when it became vastly more popular after the release of 2.8. If so it might just be the hype dying down somewhat. What do donor numbers look like now compared to pre-2.8 times?

To me it sure looks like 3D overall has stalled to some degree and it all kinda feels like AI might burn this whole field down in a few iterations.

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The development fund was created 6 months prior to the 2.8. release. There were donation campaigns before then that raised a few tens of thousands of dollars, but there were no individual donors that we know of. So we can only really look at the numbers of the dev fund on the web archive.
At the time of the 2.8 release, Blender had around 2.7k individual & company donors. A year after (2020), it had 4.5k individual donors. And another year after (2021) it dropped to 2.6k (probably COVID). Today the individual donors sit at 7.3k. So the initial growth has slowed, but that’s probably expected.

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Honestly, who knows. Probably a range of factors and not one major reason. I am also curious to know. In my case, I barely touched Blender in quite a while and now fully working in another DCC. Plus 3D market and economy is a sh*tshow in my region and every penny counts.

If BF really cares to know the best possible way is to run a questionnaire among donors inquiring why they stopped donating, what can make them return/increase donations etc. Everything else is a pure guessing.

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That’s a borderline false statement. “All the bug reports for it have been brushed off or forgotten” is a pretty hefty accusation that doesn’t hold true at all. EEVEE has received over 300 bug fixes since then.

If you meant to say “The issues that I care about have not been fixed” then I’d understand.

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I said what I meant

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Pretty disappointed to see a false statement like this from a moderator.. :confused:

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I’m disappointed that the the material compile time in Eevee Next is 10x Legacy, that shadows of all types have artifacts, and that Next brings the viewport to a screeching halt by constantly recalculating material preview spheres, but hey, life is disappointing sometimes :wink:

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That’s very different from absolute statements like:

and then stating

Also

Source?

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I’m not doing this with you. You can pick out phrases and try and debate me but I won’t engage. I said exactly what I meant, three times now, you can be as upset at it as you want, the meaning of my words is clear, I stand by them, and you and anyone else are welcome to feel however you want about them

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Not the one that he directly linked to a discussion about.

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Personally I think eevee next is much better, but for NPR it’s still not on par because they don’t care about all the cool stuff next brings, and on the other hand shader to rgb is still slow to compile and the Sun sharp shadow issue is probably their most used shadow type.

The NPR experimental branch was seen as “let’s make NPR a first class citizen in blender”, and the fact that it was stopped and postponed can be interpreted as it’s really not a priority. While for some artists it’s the only style they’re working with.

I think this brings a lot of frustration and hanger from some users as they can’t really benefit from the progress made in last versions.
Yes NPR is worked on with stuff like the raycast node, but NPR integration is probably not making enough progress for the NPR community that are stuck between slow current blender or old blender / goo engine.

Personally I’m not impacted by that but I can put myself in their own shoes.
However, I think there would be a real benefit to explore more that part, yes it’s already the case to some extent. But since the removal of blender internal NPR has never been really developed and still it really fit blender in many aspects and it’s also where many animation projects are moving to (hybrid 2D /3D stylised render) .

The per object compositor project is awesome in the meantime, but maybe we need intermediate set of tools for more basic shading stuff and compositor might take a while before it’s suited for NPR stuff. At least it’s how it looks from a distance…

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I discussed my reasons in another thread, but will answer it here too.

Eevee Next has regressions that haven’t been dealt with for 2 years; these were known before release. Over the passing months, when I would occasionally mention/complain/beg for these to finally get some attention - invariably, I’d be told by someone or some-many to be patient. Blender doesn’t have enough staff, or money, or will likely address those problem as soon as they’re done with Project XYZ, which was crucial to finish now.

After 2 years, the Eevee module has started quite a few other new things, and those problems remain in the box of “It’s known, and we aren’t giving it any priority.”

When I originally reported a specific bug and was told "So this is planned but we have no time for 4.2." - my reply was then, as it still is today: "Well, honestly - this sort of thing is in the area of “Ok, I suppose I will not be able to adopt using 4.2”.

Blender devs and diehard fans are really, really good at making you feel like you shouldn’t complain too much about something, with words like “fix is planned, time is needed”. I think that trust is somewhat abused, or leveraged at times.

So during the past 2 years, I was donating to support development of software I couldn’t even use. Some might say, “But thorn, look at all the new features with the new light probes!” - ok, i never used light probes, never asked for better ones, never will, and would trade “light probes” for “clean sun shadows” every day of the week.

Taking away my pencil, and handing me a paintbrush … then 2 years later, telling me “we fixed 300 bugs in that new paintbrush” - ok, great. I still don’t have a pencil.

The NPR Engine started development - It had so much promise, and worked so awesome in several ways, that I absolutely wanted to help fund it to make it happen. That saga, and the killing of that prototype by people who didn’t like the idea - that’s already well-documented. Development of that engine was a key reason i was STILL donating, in spite of the above 4.2 issues.

And yet, for some reason I still kept donating.

Finally last month was the whole fire of accepting the Anthropic $500K donation. For me, this was the final straw. You’ve accepted my money, aren’t fixing things that you broke with the release of Eevee Next, and now you’re taking money from an AI company that built their empire on stolen ideas.

So - there’s my reasons. It wasn’t a kneejerk reaction to a single thing. It was a long, slow burn over 2 years.

PS: Just for the record, I continue to donate monthly to this forum, as well as the studio developing Goo Engine (which, I use exclusively) just as I have going on 3(?) years now. For me, this isn’t about “I don’t have money”, “bad economy”.

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AI (and recent Anthropic donation) might have something to do with it, but for me this rings true:

Eg. as anecdote - I cancelled all of my donations in last few months (and limited number of paid services) due to overall economical situation and how it affects my personal finances.

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The economy getting worse is one thing, but I think another thing that may be the cause is that Blender has reached its maximum audience potential. There is a limited number of people in the world, and only a limited number of people that are interested and willing to donate to Blender. Once you have reached the maximum, then that’s it.

It’s like Hollywood movies. Their box office grew a massive amount since decades ago. But now, they are likely to have reached the top in terms of box office. You just don’t see them growing anymore. They even dropped for many blockbusters. The games industry is also like that. The best selling games sell a few million copies at most. It won’t grow to a billion. Every industry is like that. When an industry starts to take off, it looks great, then it plateaus.

As VertexMachine said, maybe the Anthropic drama has something to do with it. Regardless of what you think about the ethics of AI, it can’t be denied that a lot of money has been shifting to companies like Nvidia, AI companies, Micron and other companies making RAM. The economy is shifting, and the people holding a big portion of the money now decide where the money goes. So the individuals have less money to spend, some corporations have more money to spend. It makes sense there is less contribution from individuals.

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