worth a watch
11 Likes
worth a watch
Very few things are. Can you provide a text summary?
9 Likes
basically, superhive is gonna change things so that creators are only obligated to provide 1 year of support for products released, then if people want to update, they have to buy the product again albeit, at a 50% discount available for the next year, before it returns to full price. The version you bought will always be available, so if you donât update blender, or just keep an old install, it will always work as it did. But the dude in the video says if you do update blender, with how often updates break addons, this is kind of turning every addon into an annual subscription service.
I get where heâs coming from on the consumer side of things this sounds like a much worse deal, apparently he uses an enormous amount of addons and consistently updates blender and expects this will cost him $190 a year.
On the other hand, I get that it benefits addon creators who will consistently be getting paid for updates from the people that use it, rather than potentially providing free perpetual support and only making money from new customers.
Iâll note that personally, I donât really use a lot of blender addons, in no small part because I donât want to be reliant on tools that may disappear like the guy in the video is worried about.
8 Likes
Yeah saw the news regarding this that started few days ago on various discord servers. Having it being forced instead of being âopt inâ is just a load of BS.
The relevant links related to the video and this whole mess:
https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/1rjtavg/can_we_talk_about_the_blender_creator_economy/
2 Likes
Autotroph (owner of SuperHive) doing this two weeks before they put on Blender Conference Austin is certainly an interesting marketing choice
14 Likes
Imagine you buy something at year 1 for $50, then year 2 you get a free update, then year 3 you get a free update ⌠year 10 you get a free update? Year 20?
In other words, year 1 developer got paid $50, year 2 developer didnât get paid, year 3 developer didnât get paid ⌠year 10 developer didnât get paid?
Do you expect a developer to live on that initial $50 forever? Itâs unfortunately just not sustainable.
It made sense to have one time purchases when each year you got the same amount of first-time customers, but as Superhiveâs graph shows, the number of first-time customers is going down.
Iâm assuming this is the same type of graph that companies like Adobe saw, before they implemented subscriptions.
16 Likes
I donât mind upgrading add-ons and assets I use from decent developers at a cost.
Iâm not that eager to pay for the survival of Superhiveâs profit margins, though.
11 Likes
I now can, Superhive is now a Blender addon subscription service.
18 Likes
That is not the issue, yes not everything is sustainable, but that should be the sellers responsible not the markets. And I welcome the possibility to do this even if I dont really like it from a buyers perspective(tho I understand that it makes sense for some products, but not all), and as a developer for now I dont have any plans on enabling it (if they decide to have it opt in later on).
The issue is that they are retroactively activating this for all purchases, without the developers input of it this should or should not be enabled for their product.
19 Likes
Conflating Superhive and developers into a single thing is misleading. Not saying misleading necessarily in bad faith, here, mind you.
Weâre not all just a single âcommunityâ entity because conditions of existence (economic and otherwise) for Superhive, developers, asset publishers, customers, users and even the Blender Foundation are not the same. Iâd say.
3 Likes
Yeah, I donât have a problem with subscribing to support for an addon. I do have a problem with how Autotroph is handling this
10 Likes
Maybe I shouldnât say this, but Iâve been dreaming about alternatives to Superhive for months now.
@Roberddd Wouldnât be the first time, they already tried to default opt-in my addon into a âbundleâ, even though my promise of free updates went completely against their bundle promise of no updates. My addon has an update button inside the addon! I donât understand a lot of their decisions, and Iâm also starting to wonder why exactly am I paying them to host my addon and what do I really get out of it. 
11 Likes
I disagree with âdudeâsâ premise.
You bought an addon that works in 4.2. Thatâs what you received. If it works until 5.2 without breaking, thatâs a free gift and enjoy the fact it didnât break.
If if breaks in 5.3, then return to Step One and buy the version that works in 5.3.
Thereâs no âpseudo subscriptionâ here. The addon, as sold, will continue to work forever with the version it was sold to work with.
13 Likes
At one point, Bart was working on Blender Nation Bazaar, which is supposed to be exactly that. Iâm not sure the current status, but the site is up and you can visit it
3 Likes
I feel that the main issue is that uploading my addon to a market was meant to reduce my headache, so that I could focus on development, but the size of the headache has remained roughly the same, and in some cases has actually increased.
If I have to do everything myself, then I might as well just make my own website.
10 Likes
I really get that- I stopped using SuperHive a long time ago, I just put my add-ons on GitHub
8 Likes
And if you did that (a couple of years ago now or whatever it was), then in many (maybe all) cases, there was text that said "Lifetime updates includedâ.
Well, now, no they arenât, they are all now a subscription for on going Blender versions.
Now sure, I somewhat get it, one sale is not a continuous revenue stream, hence why Adobe went full subscription, but itâs still a pretty big, forced change.
Personally, Iâd be more OK with it being split. Maybe not âlifetimeâ but 5 or 10 years, or maybe two major Blender releases or something where you continue to get a working update of the addon you purchased, but all it does is work with the latest Blender version and maybe minor forced changes (think something like bone layers going to collections).
However, what you donât get, is the latest new addon features. If you want those, then you âbuyâ again. If you donât want the latest features or just dontâ need them for your work, then it doesnât matter, but at least that addon you got for Blender 4.2, still works with Blender 5.3.
Since as Adobe showed, the moment it becomes pure subscription, the actual number of new/great features, tends to âdropâ. Since what does it matter, you still have to keep paying just to keep it working.
6 Likes
But, didnât even that depend on the developer to actually UPDATE it? I mean - you canât exactly force someone to make their addon compatible with blender for the rest of their life.
For that matter, you could just call your addon âSuper WidgetThing 4.2â. And next year, sell another addon called âSuper WidgetThing 4.4â.
Blender themselves break things in major ways, and sometimes (in a pragmatic sense) - they just donât fix it, and artist has to a) live with the broken or b) keep using the old.
I donât think Addon devs should be held to a higher standard of âyou arenât allowed for things to break, and must fix stuffâ than Blender itself is. Especially when the Addon dev isnât the reason it stopped working.
9 Likes
Yes it did. If it was an old-ish addon, then you had a track record to show that happened.
If it was something and someone new, then I guess you rolled the dice and took them at their word at the time.
OK, then it becomes the Adobe model, unless you think that since itâs the Blender community, they wouldnât do that?
1 Like
I donât quite understand what youâre saying here (and, I wish to. Thatâs not a snark.)
If you stop paying Adobe, everything stops working. All of it. Not just Photostop 2026, but also Photoshop 2021 (which iâm using.)
Older version of Blender/Blender Addon keeps working. Itâs not comparable.
9 Likes