All they have to do is roll out Indie world wide, and keep the price down at the current price point. Maya LT is dead and argument about its restrictions become irrelevant. Blender is free, but £275 a year for a full Maya licence is very affordable. These indie price points are a good strategy as many who would pirate or illegally use a student licence or use Blender, will be happy to now pay.
Except your indie price will skyrocket to the regular price-point if you forget to turn off auto-renewal, and there’s no guarantee Autodesk will even have that price a year from now.
Blender will still have the financial advantage because you will never see a situation where you are locked out of it.
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Agree you have to be careful about the auto-renew! I believe this is a problem since they have introduced this experiment without the infrastructure supporting the licensing model. If they choose to roll it out I am sure they will fix that.
The way I see it is they will either keep it at current price point or kill it. It makes no sense to price it out of the market. I personally think they will keep it. Maya LT has been around for years. It will be cheaper to maintain one code base. All the Maya LT users will clearly convert. Also look at Houdini Indie that is going from strength to strength over a number of year.
I personally think they will keep it. Paid software needs to find a way to coexist with open source source. Neither will kill each other off.
Yeah it’s real time super smooth playback!
The same scene in blender will probably run with 1-3 fps max
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Let me put it this way: how long do you think their infrastructure would be in this state if the auto-renew system would bill indie prices instead of regular prices?
I know one should always apply Hanlon’s razor, but that’s not incompetence on their part, there might be no intention behind it, but it’s at least a case of wilful blindness.
If they roll out the indie model to the whole world they absolutely have to fix this shit or they might face problems in the EU where this kind of auto renewal system is probably seen as fraud (and lets be honest here it IS fraud if they don’t allow people to step back from the contract).
I was well impressed. Maya is far better at rigging and animation, which forces me to use it I’m afraid.
But I’m currently exporting the animation to Blender for rendering.
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If they roll out this indie version then they have to put a system where the seats are limited per person/Studio otherwise who would pay for the full version.
I think this is a tricky situation for Autodesk as they’re already selling Maya lt.