I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What you have to understand
is Autodesk doesn't want customers running concurrent sessions off a single
license as in a Maya/Max and a Softimage session running in parallel. that
would effectively allow double the users to work while paying only half the
price. eg; if a customer has 50 licenses it would allow 50 maya + 50 softimage
users to run concurrently, but pay for only 50 licenses. Some studios are
ethical and wouldn't do something like that, but as someone mentioned just the
other day, other studios in lesser affluent places might not be so ethical.
Even if Softimage were included for free, it still consumes some amount of
resources to ensure it still installs and runs as advertised.
I agree in principle Autodesk should continue Softimage until one of their
other products can replace the functionality. If anything, that's the ball
that was dropped in this whole debacle. Of all companies on the planet, you'd
think the one with all the accumulated experience of all the products that went
through this process in the 1990's would know better and be more prepared than
anyone else. But what's done is done.
The problem with the theory of disgruntled users leaving and hurting Autodesk
is that the Softimage user base isn't large enough to really be missed on
Autodesk's bottom line. think about it. Only 8% of Autodesk's revenue comes
from media and entertainment. Of that 8%, about 5% of it is from Softimage
(0.4% total) - and that might be a generous number. For every $100 Autodesk
earns in revenue, 40 cents comes from Softimage. Take out expenses and you're
looking at much less.
I don't remember the actual number, but I thought somebody recently reported
Autodesk earned $392 million last year. So, let's run that through the
calculator:
$392,000,000 USD * 0.004 = $1,568,000 Softimage gross revenue
I don't know what 10 developers in Singapore get paid, so I'll use conservative
values based on USA rates:
10 * $100,000 = $1,000,000
subtract expenses from revenue:
$1,568,000 - $1,000,000 = $568,000
I don't know what marketing of Softimage costs, but I'm willing to bet
$568,000 USD doesn't go very far for a product that needs a lot of attention to
survive. Even if tripled, that's still lean. See the problem?
One item of note that probably hasn't been brought up in discussion yet is that
Softimage has been included in the Max and Maya suites the past few years, so
some sales of Max and Maya may actually be Softimage sales in a certain light -
I know of at least one studio where that is the case. In that scenario
Softimage is getting the short end of the stick when it comes to accounting.
I mourn the loss of Softimage as much as anybody having dedicated 21+ years of
my life to it both as professional user and former owner of a Softimage
certified training center. Sometimes life sucks.
Matt
