This sort of thing happens every time a software goes to an SaS model. Every business that makes the transition accounts for the loss of x% of lost customers because of it, they are not planning on losing money on the deal. 2 odd things about this transition about KS though-
1) No monthly payment option- for the smaller fish this is much easier to swallow vs one large outlay per year. Especially when the service is advertised as a "monthly cost" but then requires annual payment. Just odd wording. Pretty much everyone else offers a monthly payment scheme, and usually charges a bit more for that to cover ongoing transaction costs.
2) Pretty sure that 99% of the people that bought the maintenance did is soley for the yearly free upgrade. This is the first time that i know of where the major release upgrade did not fall within that 12 months period, so those of us that did not use the tech support at all feel ripped off. Partly our fault for not realizing what the maintenance agreement was mainly for (support, not upgrade)
Probably the biggest incident of this happening before was Adobe CC, and while they took TONS of flak for doing it, with people threatening everything under the sun, they still did it and they have done well after 4 years of doing it. I feel that their apps have done well, improved enough to make it worth it, and have avoided the whole conundrum of how to decide when to release updates/bugfixes/feature upgrades since they don't have to be tied with a release or an upgrade payment. I do sincerly hope that this sort of thought process allows Luxion to make releases more often, with smaller options and fixes on a more regular basis. There are still so many littel quibbly things that are annoying to deal with, I hope that they can grow the software team to help start checking some of these off.
https://www.willgibbons.com/keyshot-11/?vgo_ee=z71DGR7M2A6IpO7iVsDORc%2BmlmfwsuiZXDT0jIiElG8%3DThat all being said, I agree with Will Gibbons overall view of KS 11, very narrow niche feature set, that while might be laying the foundations for future features, it would be nice if they would focus more on the base. BEtter, faster renders, more robust GPU support, better material behaviors, dealing with the stuff that is CONSTANTLY in the forums being complained about- fireflies, inconsistent render times, keyboard shortcuts not being implemented 100%, interface bugs that are super annoying (talking to you, scene tree grouping and duplicated files being dropped to the bottom of the object list, and most of all, the Make Pattern tool ONLY WORKS ON GROUPS AT THE ROOT LEVEL inconsistantly)
Anyway, we have to continue to use Keyshot, as we now have 5 years of projects in the system. Can only hope they will respond to some of the issues we mention here. Totally understand people ditching KS for other solutions, but it seems that a lot of other renderers are following the subscription model as well. From a business perspective, its the only way to garuntee a certain level of income across the year to support the development.
