I’m not concerned about that, because it is not possible that Autodesk and Maxon will offer anything for free without a book of restrictions and catches attached to it (such as not being allowed to sell any work made with it or even having ownership of it). Besides EULA clauses, a free license of Maya would likely be every bit as crippled as Zbrush Core Mini (which became famous for implementing artificial performance slowdowns as a snide remark for not paying).
A fairly unrestricted free version of Max, Maya, and Cinema4D? Not a chance when you look at the current price trends combined with shareholder expectations.
You mentioned another key player - shareholders, or more specifically, the almighty SHARE PRICE.
We can’t blame businesses wanting/achieving profitability, but more often than not, the moment a ticker symbol is associated, MAXIMUM profitability becomes the vision.
Couple that with the parasitical subscription model, tech companies have been bumping share prices using “projected revenue” based on the number of licenses. Result is Account Execs with a budget to wine and dine a CTO into signing X licenses for another Y years.
In contrast, who advocates for adopting Blender?
My guess? At best the modellers, maybe the concept/sculpting guy, highly doubtful the animators/riggers will join them, and the texturing team’s probably asking for Substance Painter.
If a bunch of Blender users moved in to buy Autodesk stock and raise money for the BF via a good-ole pump-and-dump, then you might change your mind on companies being beholden to shareholders (because it might suck a bit for customers but is a pathway to big money for yourself if you know what to buy and when to sell, more than enough to obtain and keep a subscription until you die).
Specifically games sector of the entertainment industry, just from my personal learning’s coupled with senior freelance artists I know of with ‘AAA’ production experience, that actually utilise Blender as a secondary DCC app would also I think similarly align alongside your observation.
Interesting point, we could argue that if these software where free to use they might suffer the same issues blender is currently having…
In the meantime, blender got it’s special touch that makes it different and attractive compared to their competitors : it’s generally simpler and faster to use and it’s quite versatile. While that doesn’t matters a lot for AAA productions, it’s pretty interesting for small team/studios. High budget productions have a very
task orientated organisation that doesn’t fit very well with blender.
But I’m sure we’ll see more and more “small” productions that are more generalist oriented. All of which with an increasing quality. For that blender is probably the best tool available.
Just by looking at recent blender reels it strikes me that some artists are able to produce small shots of very high quality all by themselves, from modeling to animation / rendering. These kind of inter-disciplinary skills are more and more common in the hobbyist world but I’m sure it will appear in the professional industry as well.
Maya or Houdini are probably not prepared for these way of working and blender is build around that idea from the begining.