Quote:
Originally Posted by samtrino
*** From Avid's official announcement:
"For those of you that are currently on Perpetual Licenses, the increase ranges from 0-33% on new licenses depending on the product and type of license"
*** From Avid's official "Pro Tools - Summary of Pricing Changes":
PT SW Perpetual Renewal --- Current Price: $99 --- New Price: $199
Seriously?
So customers who committed to Pro Tools by purchasing a perpetual license are the most penalized with this change?
And the excuse is because the "industry" is moving to a subscription model?
Actually, before moving to a subscription model, technology companies need to transition their software development model, PM, processes, release management, etc. to an agile methodology that supports such a subscription model. This leads to more frequent software updates/upgrades releases, which provides customers adequate and fair value against their recurring payments.
In the last year, the frequency of Pro Tools updates does not indicate Avid made that transition yet (at least not successfully) - Case in point, the almost one year delay before PT got Mojave support - And yet, we kept on paying our software update fees hoping that eventually they'll get there.
But now, they go on and double the price of software updates for perpetual licenses, and only for the standard/vanilla version.
Yet, there's no information in that announcement regarding what Avid did to improve their software development framework nor their release schedules, so if last year is any indication it's pretty certain next year won't be any better. Except that now we'll pay twice the price! Nice.
The message is loud and clear.
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There was no stability improvement. Every GD year, Avid says, "oh, we've fixed this and improved that..." Wrong. All we got were some minor opt-click fill items and more cloud/social media nonsense. They've never fixed the Quicktime Media Server process, and they've never fixed the 6101 error.
I was on the fence about my renewal next fall. Avid has confirmed where they stand: More of the same (maybe some more Facebook integration or an Instagram plugin) but no serious technical fixes that actually matter. All of that for more money. PT 6.4 and 7 are still more stable.
Time to go deeper into Logic X. Maybe I'll try DaVinci Resolve's Fairlight integration. Anyway, I can't blame Avid's exec team: The new Gulfstream G650ER's are coming out and they're not cheap.