Autodesk Stingray

Time is your most precious commodity not money. Think about the amount of time and man-hours you’ll spend googling and researching how to do the most basic things that you could do in an existing engine in seconds. By the time you’ve trained your team to use a new engine and be efficient with it, you’ve always wasted months of man hours and wages on adopting it. When you do the math, it’s a hella-lot more expensive than $30 a month.

Unless Autodesk are putting a small team of people into a studio who are always on-hand and can teach you how to use the Engine, you’ll be wasting a lot of time and bleeding money in the process. I imagine they will be doing that for at least a short while for early adopters but even then, most of the largest companies that could even afford that make their own tools. Ubisoft, EA / DICE, Naughty Dog etc. all have their own engines.

Fair enough if you’re a very small team or you just feel like taking on something new, but I highly doubt it’s going to make any real headway for several years yet. Judging by how they’re marketing it, they’re biggest iron in the fire is that it has seamless integration with Max, Maya and Mudbox etc. That’s pretty much a null factor IMO. In my experience you’re better off learning one great tool and sticking with it, rather than trying to spread yourself too thin. All this aside, I’m interested in seeing how it does anyway, it’s pretty rare we see a new tool like this come out so would be interesting to see the effect of that.