I’m not sure why people don’t understand this.
All commercial SW will eventually become subscription only. If you don’t like subscription, go full on open source only. Jumping to other commercial SW is meaningless.
Most commercial software will probably go that way, but I’m sure more than enough developers will keep filling the gap between open source and commercial subscriptions. Look at Affinity for example, they are thriving by offering affordable non-subscription alternatives to Adobe software, and no-one complains about a paid upgrade every once in a while, as long as the price remains reasonable.
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How do you know if “they are thriving”?
How do you know Affinity wouldn’t become subscription only?
Any developer who start at this point has zero reason to sell perpetual license since they have no legacy users.
Well, it’s obvious that Affinity has become a big player in the creative market, with lots of users, including an ongoing exodus of users leaving Photoshop.
I don’t know that of course. I’m just saying that they filled the gap that Adobe left after going subscription-only, and that I expect developers to keep filling similar new gaps in their markets.
Of course, paying for a yearly upgrade is essentially not much different from a subscription, and it has been the way developers could keep developing since the dawn of software. But usually a subscription is more expensive than yearly upgrades, and you never own any version of the software. If you consider ZBrush asking $40 a month, that’s $480 a year, which is pricy for small-scale freelancers and hobbyists. ZBrush will lose a lot of such users, but Maxon will probably still make enough profit from the larger studios.
The new ZBrush presentation doesn’t mention Maxon’s recent modifications behind the curtains. Having been digging deep into 3D Coat the past week, looking at a ZBrush UI and workflow video already feels distant to me.
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The type of comments I’m seeing from people who watched the stream…
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Well, to be honest I also had the impression that Paul wasn’t really his usual self. It feels as if he acts like nothing has happened, but can’t suppress a certain discomfort about the recent developments and/or the predominantly negative response to that.
Joseph Drust’s departure might indeed have something to do with this. Hadn’t thought about that yet. 
I really wonder if 3D Coat will get a boost from the ‘Maxologic’ developments. Those who are interested, please feel free to ask questions in the dedicated 3D Coat thread.
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It really speaks volumes how toxicity of one company can destroy the other. Pixologic couldn’t find the worst company to sell to.
They simply needed to phase out their dumb forever free updates and start charging for it.
I predicted they’d wait a year in the beginning of the topic to start phasing out perpetual licensing but was wrong. So it WAS solely about the money and improving cash flow. I wonder to see where it goes from here…
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I hope this gives them motivation to finally implement the traditional subdivision levels…
I already made a feature request about that on their forums btw… hehehe…
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The ZBrush 2022.03 update(or udpate now I guess 
) email and thread it links to is full of mistakes. This would be comical if it weren’t so sad a situation.
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ZBrush itself also has a number of typos scattered around the UI, brush names and subfolder names.
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Uh, I didn’t know Drust left. One of the best (seriously) communicator of pipelines / workflow I ever saw on any tutorial online.
Blender communinity has many tutorial oriented communicators, but few with accents on the "why"s of a pipeline, or the reasoning behind one pipeline, in short, vision.
I wish there were more like him!
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Paul got back to one of the youtube comments a few hours back to say he had lost his voice over the weekend and that he is still … ‘ the loud guy ‘
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I understand… He’s been drinking away the issues he secretly has with the Maxon takeover of his beloved ZBrush. 
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But no coffee of course 
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Not if you use SW professionally and rely on it. For instance, there is no alternative to Zbrush. At all. Nothing that comes anywhere close to replacing it in my work.
Also, for those of us doing this as a job, it’s a business expense, a write off.
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Drust went to work for Ubisoft. Not sure it was related.
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And some people just don’t need upgrades. I donated some ancient computers running photoshop 6 to some public libraries in the Bahamas. They are still in use today and I’m told hundreds of people use/learn photoshop there every month. One librarian is an expert gimp user and he prefers teaching people photoshop 6 over gimp. People like that are much more likely to buy Affinity products over subscription Adobe or inferior-user-experience Open Source, even though Affinity Photo’s user experience is quite inferior to Photoshop in many ways.
“phase out” would look something like “every year moving forward the oldest zbrush licenses will no longer get free updates”. I can’t imagine anyone who’s been getting free updates since 1999 will actually be mad about it and even if a few are, the more reasonable people will let them know how much of an entitled whiny piece of crap they are. By the time they get to people from 2012 losing their free updates (sometime in 2032) there shouldn’t be anyone complaining.
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Yeah, I’ve had it since ZBrush 2 in like 2003 or so(I can’t even find the original purchase email anymore, I didn’t have Gmail then ) and I wouldn’t have minded kicking $100 or so a year to stay up-to-date. Maybe the owners just got a really good offer and wanted out rather than deal with any financial issues they may or may not have been having.
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If you were to annouce they do, I wouldn’t be surprised.
What I am surprised about is that you do not have affiliate links for 3d coat
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