I get it, I really do. But the point that I am trying to get across is that by focusing on just the arch viz/prod viz, you are ignoring the rest of the UE development community. I never heard about this AT ALL until the SIGGRAPH general email that went out talking about beta registration. I did immediately sign up for it, but still looked like it was open for a couple of weeks before I saw it. Granted, I haven’t been to a SIGGRAPH for a decade and I don’t follow many announcements from it, but all the information on it was buried in this subforum.
I do hope that it is a win-win and I don’t think that you are developing/marketing this randomly. I do think that you are completely ignoring the “bread and butter” game developers though and I’m afraid that products like this will only serve to fragment the engine. Sure, you might be improving the FBX importer (which is good), but it’s still an intermediate format. That’s not to say that certain market segments couldn’t have features introduced for them (e.g. the CAD side of Datasmith), but, to paraphrase a certain game company: “if it’s in the engine, it’s in the engine”.
And my wild-A guess on pricing, based on experience and gut feeling alone, $495/year. Something like that might be reasonable for visualization shops, but it excludes it from a lot of small developer’s budgets (probably including mine). I’d still have to reconsider it if it were $200 flat out, but pretty much any kind of subscription and then you could assume that I don’t want it to exist (don’t be Adobe/Autodesk; they screwed everyone over with their licensing models). A “one price fits all” situation won’t work here and only targeting or getting feedback from the visualization shops would be a poor idea. Those shops have a completely different revenue model and business structure, so you should be looking at having separate licensing agreements for them, not forcing the “normal” licensees to have to deal with this. Even with normal licensees, you are looking at ones of all shapes and sizes. Give me a <$50 plugin that just does 3ds Max and I’ll (begrudgingly) be there.