Software Subscription Fatigue...Are you feeling it yet?

I am. My Game Development budget is exhausted. :frowning:

Thank you Epic for not subscription-ing us to death…

It’s a trend I really dislike, that’s one of the reasons I’m not so keen on game streaming platforms like Stadia

Same goes for video on demand… I really hope Stadia will end up as a niche product. If it ever becomes mainstream I’m out.

Yes I agree. It is worrying to see perpetual licenses disappear from the popular software. It is very inconvenient to have to manage subscriptions and perhaps subscribe for a month when you just need to use it for 5 minutes. I would rather use an older version that persists.

I also don’t see how Stadia is going to be a success with the few benefits it provides.
You don’t need a fast PC and you don’t have to wait for the game to download and install but that’s about it. If your internet connection isn’t fast you will have a poor experience using Stadia anyway so it almost defeats the Pro of having to wait for it to download leaving only one benefit of not needing a fast PC to play the game. Do people really wanna pay a subscription for that?

You could place the subscription fee on a savings account and buy a PC instead and not have to worry about a stable internet connection. If you care about the environment you should also not be streaming your game.
First it has to be executed on a remote machine, then it has to be encoded and compressed, then sent through multiple routers across the internet and decoded into your device instead of simple being executed locally without any compression artifacts or lag.

From my POV it’s plain abuse.
I always go for alternatives… I have been using Corel products since Adobe began this digital trend, for example.

Lets hope that Epic’s $1.2 million grant to Blender closes the workflow gaps when dealing with animations in UE4 so Maya can be left in the dust too.

Thank you Epic for this donation, I really appreciate it.

Blender 2.80 looks nice BUT in order to deliver the same as the main expensive commercial softwares feature a lot more money than that is needed along with many more experienced programmers coding all the needed algorithms and so on.

The worst thing about subscriptions is that you end up paying even expensive rates for months and if you stop your access to the software is gone and you own nothing.
The best thing would be if all subscriptions were rent-to-own instead. Unfortunately only a few software houses do that and it is quickly disappearing. CEOs don’t get it. They are destroying the whole market worldwide alienating customers. The effort they put in trying to destroy the whole Private Property concept is the worst and that is going to backfire badly. They will lose all the money they have been getting sooner than later because most people will reject the subscription madness mess.

For the next decade or so if they keep pushing this BS, I believe it’s going to be massively beneficial for the open source communities.

But the problem is commercial software have patented and secret algorithms, if free software replicate those algorithms it’s a situation for legal battles to take place (when they realize they’re losing potential subscribers)

I don’t see a patent thing being an issue, Autodesk doesn’t really do much in the way of developing new things, their software could use some new features so there’s plenty of room for a cheaper program to innovate. There’s a lot of cool modeling plugins that people have made and sometimes Autodesk just buys them and adds them in rather than developing anything new. It’s taken them years to match the features of the quad chamfer plugin.

True.
It’s hilarious the “new features” in Maya from, for example, v2018 to v2019.
The updates are pretty much nothing lol