I may not make as much time to post here as I used to, but I will take a moment to chime in.
I share many of Matt's speculations. Though, I'd suspect the active users on this forum are less than 0.5% of active KeyShot users. That number falls even further when considering who's using legitimate licenses.
You know the saying, "What got you here, won't get you there?" Well, when a business takes actions to grow, they often focus on making the simplest changes that will result in the greatest results. Switching to a subscription-based model fights piracy, and creates more predictable cashflow and automates sales and license management to a degree for Luxion.
To me, the biggest potential upside to moving to a subscription model is that Luxion doesn't need to decide on what glossy features they'll put into a release each year in an effort to gain new customers. If they truly move to ongoing releases and do away with the major releases (i.e. KS11, KS12, KS13 and just the name of the year such as KS22.1, KS22.2, KS22.3) then when a feature is added becomes irrelevant. What's important is customer retention and customer satisfaction.
The risk of adding glossy features for a big annual release is rushing something and releasing it in a half-baked manner, then not continuing to develop it because users don't use it because it never worked well in the first place. Then you get a graveyard of abandoned features.
My optimism says an annual subscription gives Luxion the opportunity to grow their team of developers and other roles to allow them to focus on stability, continual improvement and hopefully more competitive features relative to the CGI landscape.
I think if you're concerned about the price, then you're in the wrong field. CGI is expensive. 3D is expensive. The hardware it takes to run this software well is expensive. Servers and render farms are expensive. Software is expensive. Engineering, production, prototyping, shipping, delivering products are all expensive endeavors.
KeyShot may seem expensive compared to some other software tools, but my electricity bill is about $165/mo ($1980/yr) for a small 3 bedroom house with low to moderate energy consumption. That's more expensive than the $1188/yr KeyShot will cost. If you're a hobbyist, sure, KeyShot may feel expensive. But anyone who uses the tool for his or her business, it's a drop in the bucket.
Anyone who's upset about the move to subscription or the price increase, I think is losing sight of the big picture. I do think there's more to be gained as a user from this move, although it may take a few years for us to feel that as Luxion adapts to this change as well.
And for those who threaten to move to another platform, that's fine too. However, I think you'll quickly find it a bit tedious at best to use another render engine with CAD data. KeyShot's ease-of-use and quick workflow from HDRI editor to studios, to working well with lots of CAD applications is not something many other tools excel at.
As Matt pointed out, hobbyists, freelancers and individuals probably don't have a big impact on Luxion's bottom line.
I've no intentions to criticize anyone here who might feel offended or singled out by this post. I just wanted to share what I think personally stands to be gained by moving to a subscription model.
As for the direction the software moves in, who it's marketed to and what features are implemented and how, that's an entirely different conversation.
Understand that those who post regularly here and often with solutions to questions are the 1%. And those users in the 1% (most competent) are going to want features and tools that the 99% of users aren't aware of or interested in. Unfortunately, a business that's trying to grow, does not focus on the 1%. They focus on the 99%. And I say this as a business owner myself. Again, no harsh feelings toward Luxion. It's just a fact that some of us have to accept. The largest user base is who will be listened to the most for better or worse.
