VizRT will be the end of LW. Might not be this year, but definitely within the next few.
Several reasons. First and foremost, Tim Jenison is out of the picture. He sold his NT stock he’s no longer got any sway. Tim Jenison might be the only reason LW has lasted as long as it did. The only other person in management who at all was an advocate of LightWave was Chuck Baker. Now he’s retired. That only leaves Andrew Cross. Who doesn’t care at all for LightWave. The only time he’s stepped into the LightWave fold was when they were in the middle of firing LW heads of development namely Jay Roth after CORE and Rob Powers before 2018 came out.
Next, they have thinned their team. They got rid of their head of rendering right after they spent 3 years rewriting a new renderer for LW. Mark Granger is now gone after NT eliminated his position. They also got rid of David Ikeda, their only modeling engineer. They aren’t replacing either position. They had an ad for a modeling engineer on their site for something like 5 years (and it was filled with impossible qualifications) and they finally removed that last year.
They’ve lost a lot of star talent and key user advocates like William Vaughan, Oliver Hotz, Chris Jones, Lino Grandi among others… These were the kind of people who were keeping LightWave visible. They have all moved on. I’m not seeing any new ones coming along either, because most people in this industry have no idea that LightWave even still exists.
Many users have still not upgraded from 2015 after they created a brand new (CPU) renderer and threw out the old one. They left a lot of users flailing in the wind trying to figure out how best to use the new renderer or deciding they simply didn’t need to upgrade for it.
But another large reason is that LightWave is simply no longer relevant, the software hasn’t moved forward in any meaningful way, and they seem to have no direction or plans for the future. Modeler and Layout are still separated, Modeling has been stagnant now for almost two decades and no procedural options and they created a brand new renderer that is built on the CPU with no possibility for GPU acceleration when most of the industry is now taking advantage of RTX.
The VizRT acquisition is still not even a year old, once they see just how little LightWave contributes to their bottom line (which is probably negative), they’ll shelve it or try and sell it off. Selling it would probably be the best thing that ever happened to LightWave if it goes to a decent company. Its just a question of whether anyone would want to buy it.
I know for a fact that two quite notable companies have made offers to buy LightWave in the past. Newtek (more likely Tim Jenison specifically) refused to sell it. Newtek is a video company that doesn’t care about LightWave, and they were just bought by another video company that doesn’t give a crap about LightWave either.
If anyone is using LightWave, I’d say its finally time to jump ship.