For the record It is always the artist and not the tool, but that’s also half the truth, without the proper tools the artist has to work twice as hard and the results may not be as well as they planned.
As for Max, Autodesk is not going to kill off its second largest cash cow anytime soon that’s for sure.
With that said, I detest Autodesk’s approach on both pricing and so called “innovation” in their software. I had to spend 4500$ on top of max’s bloated price tag to get it to a production ready state. And I would gladly pay double that if I could for the companies behind those plugins. More than I could ever say for Autodesk and their greed infested management.
I don’t even want to start on Maya… I used that thing for years on the side in a production environment. And I can tell you horror stories. But then again we have them in all software, some more than others.
Max was king in games and in cinematics. And so was Softimage before that and before it was chopped off by none other than the brilliant minds at Autodesk. I think max and even Softimage are still great in what they do with many respects. As for popularity in everyday normal workflow It is clear that Autodesk is trying to shove Maya everywhere especially in universities and other learning channels as their primary go to software for games and movies (even if it falls short on so many features that require you to either hire an army of scriptwriters or buy plugins worth more than those sold for max) they are trying to create a new breed of Maya Loyal users so they can isolate their software and put them in packages. Almost all animators graduating these days are Maya oriented people. Why? because Autodesk forces the institutions into a norm corner as in Maya is now the “industry standard”. To back their false claim for the past 10 years they do little to nothing to improve animation features of Max, even with a nearly 20 year old “biped tech” in Max, it is still superior to the human ik found in Maya today. That tells you a lot of what Max could be If Autodesk decides to put a tiny bit of investment into it. It’s internal cloth simulation (year 2002 tech) is far superior in result and approach than that of Maya out of the box one. The studio we worked with had to get a cloth plugin to get anything production ready done in Maya and that cost as much as one Maya perpetual licence per seat. Just look at Cinematics at Blur today all simulated and rendered in Max which has seen little to nothing of a major update since Blizzard did their first cinematics with it for Warcraft 3 back in 1999 - 2001 (talk about artistry vs tools those cinematics from Blizzard hold up easily to this day).
Anyway I could go on forever.
The best case scenario for anyone who has the time or is starting up these days in games is Blender (even if you have to put up with an awkward interface and some shortcomings, maybe those shortcomings may not be that evident in games productions).
But yea it’s the same story with threads like these but many of us can’t help but to express some frustration with large corporations and their monopoly (just head over to Autodesk forums you’ll see some fo the fury). Nothing much you can do about it really in the short term, but in the long term they will be losing that’s for sure. Most freelancers are moving to either Blender, Houdini or Cinema4d. and large studios are slowly building their own tech to stop paying homage to Autodesk. The second one is what would hurt most for Companies like Autodesk and that would take time.