Reason price hike starting October 1st

[jens]

Propellerheads sure does know how to scare away customers don't they?

Propellerheads has been no more for several years now. They don't make the calls.

Just a name change isn't it? or did they get bought out or invested in like NI, Roli, Studio One etc. etc.

They've been bought by venture capital company (Verdane) I believe in 2016 or 17, replaced the CEO and - what it seems like - many senior staff. And obviously made lots of other moves that (part of, at least) community isn't happy about.

I think technically they have not really been bought, but brought in and external investor.

I could imagine them losing/laying off more and more staff which won't get in line.

[antic604]

I think technically they have not really been bought, but brought in and external investor.

Whether they bought the shares off of existing owners or brought additional capital thus diluting said original owners' share is irrelevant - they now have majority ownership & full decisioning power in RS.

Which isn't necessarily bad, but just saying

[imrae]

You'd think they'd at least finish v12 features like VST3 before hiking the price. I'm not inclined to pay £129 for unfinished software.

[kmonkey]

Precisely. Not gonna pay them for new combinator (which is great), new sampler which is variation of 3 existing samplers and nothing necessarily needed, and high res graphic assets.

So I'll stay on R11 for some time. Perhaps there will be some attraction to v13 or something like that. I don't find price hike that serious, I will gladly pay money to developers which are bringing something new to the table.

But R12 is definitely not something new in a sense it's worth it (to me). I almost purchased it, but then I was thinking wait a second. This is not polished thing.

I feel that R12 is most unfinished release they ever did. Even official R12 (non beta) product is still crippled like I am seeing weird glitches in the Mixer view (confirmed by their support) and there are parts of sequencer which looks weird. Also my notebook fan definitely spins more then on R11 (also confirmed). Plus sometimes for no reason, when I shut down Reason 12 it appear as application is shutdown correctly but when opening task manager on windows it somehow stays in the background and CPU usage goes high. I need to kill the process manually. This is not happening with R11.

Anyway my whole feel about R12 is bitter and their newsletters are more and more aggressive as if they are becoming so poor or they want to achieve some specific numbers - whatever everything seems weird.

I've never received so much emails from a DAW company asking me to upgrade - in my life.

[dellboy]

I just had this email from them even though I unsubscribed a few weeks back............

"​​​​​​This is your final call to get Reason 12 for the year 2000 price of $399, before the price increases to $499 on October 1st, 2021."

Did Reason really cost $399 in the year 2000 with out a built in DAW, and no audio, and unable to run VSTs ? That seems like an awful lot of money for a midi sequencer with some built in sounds. But put in perspective all the major DAWs have stayed relative to the year 2000 price even though the spec has greatly increased.

[THE INTRANCER]

I just had this email from them even though I unsubscribed a few weeks back............

"​​​​​​This is your final call to get Reason 12 for the year 2000 price of $399, before the price increases to $499 on October 1st, 2021."

Did Reason really cost $399 in the year 2000 with out a built in DAW, and no audio, and unable to run VSTs ? That seems like an awful lot of money for a midi sequencer with some built in sounds. But put in perspective all the major DAWs have stayed relative to the year 2000 price even though the spec has greatly increased.

Reason 1.0 was released in the UK in early 2001 in a box, it cost £289 inc VAT in May of that year excluding postage and packing.

The instruments were essentially VST's, a subtractive synth, sampler (player), drum machine, rex loop player, and a small set of simple effect devices, matrix sequencer and mixer, patches and samples.

It didn't sound like you got a lot for your money, but it was in that the days of VST instruments and effects were very costly on CPU. A basic Athlon 750 Mhz machine with a 128MB of memory was restricted to just a few VSTs that could be used. With Reason, you could have dozens of Subtractors multiple samplers, drum machines and 20 to 30 tracks playing at the same time. Everything was self-contained in one file and everything was rock solid stable and highly configurable from the back of the rack in a way that there wasn't ever before. Ultimately, you had a Studio Rack without the wires and inconvenience in setting everything up and could share your creations. Online communities such as Reasonstation which had upload song and patch file support in addition to a review section added more value to the program because you could hear and see what everyone was doing with the program.

.............................
Roll on 20 years....

I wasn't aware of just how high the price hike was actually, but wtf... are they having a laugh.... ?
Upgrades back in the day cost around £76 - £93 and now they are wanting £200 ... nevermind getting shafted £30 in the Euro conversion... My last update from Studio One 3 to Studio One 4 cost around £50 lol. A quarter of the price lol.... Now given the state Reason 12 is in and actually provides, I would be pretty unimpressed and would actually start looking to get off the train and getting on a different one. So much still needs to be done before one could even entertain an upgrade of that amount of cash.

There is this video that I found and responded to in the early hours of today before I found out how much an upgrade was going to be. [Long post]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L9GW_M56j0

[machinesworking]

Did Reason really cost $399 in the year 2000 with out a built in DAW, and no audio, and unable to run VSTs ? That seems like an awful lot of money for a midi sequencer with some built in sounds. But put in perspective all the major DAWs have stayed relative to the year 2000 price even though the spec has greatly increased.

I still have my receipt for Reason 1.0. It was $299, but that wasn't the full price, I recall they had an introductory sale. I'm not one to defend price increases, but at the time, most DAWs were from $500 to $800. Prices dropped super slightly over the years since the introduction of $199 for Logic and Reapers $70-250 price point.

Basically $400-600 is the normal range for a DAW barring Logic and Reaper, and has been for 20 years.

[summer2000]

I'm sticking with my Reason 11 Suite version until the Props delivery an upgrade worthy of my hard earned money. Reason 12 in its current buggy state did not impress me enough to buy in at $129. Definitely no deal when the upgrade price increases to $199.

[jens]

Yeah, one would think as many of us aren't wiling to pay 129 for the upgrade from 11 to 12 they might consider to offer it to us for 99, but no - they increase the upgrade price to 199 instead... like that is going to do the trick to persuade us....
You just couldn't make this shit up.

[emasters]

What a shame, really. I used Reason for many years. But the slow pace of updates, lacking features (compared to other DAWs) and Prop's attitude towards its customers, pushed me to use alternatives. I do like the concept with the Rack. And certainly the product has expanded considerably over the years. But in terms of features, it just doesn't compare. Hard to believe the big "feature" in v12 is hi-res graphics. So now they are upping the price, which will no doubt cause new customers to storm the gates to get their copy. Good luck Props... seems like a challenging sell to me.

[gentleclockdivider]

They've been bought by venture capital company (Verdane) I believe in 2016 or 17, replaced the CEO and - what it seems like - many senior staff. And obviously made lots of other moves that (part of, at least) community isn't happy about.

I get that, I like that Ableton, Image Line, Bitwig and MOTU are all independent outfits. Makes me less worried than I get with Roli, NI, being bought by investors, or Steinberg, Pro Tools, Logic, Akai, Cakewalk etc. being small potatoes to their larger corporate conglomerates.

I always used Reason rewired though, so to me it's a super ROMpler.

Image line independent , think again ...
Then you probably haven't heard of the billion euro private investment shareholder group called 'waterland' ( it's dutch btw )
That happened 2 years ago ,and '' Waterland' is efin huuuge

[machinesworking]

They've been bought by venture capital company (Verdane) I believe in 2016 or 17, replaced the CEO and - what it seems like - many senior staff. And obviously made lots of other moves that (part of, at least) community isn't happy about.

I get that, I like that Ableton, Image Line, Bitwig and MOTU are all independent outfits. Makes me less worried than I get with Roli, NI, being bought by investors, or Steinberg, Pro Tools, Logic, Akai, Cakewalk etc. being small potatoes to their larger corporate conglomerates.

I always used Reason rewired though, so to me it's a super ROMpler.

Image line independent , think again ...
Then you probably haven't heard of the billion euro private investment shareholder group called 'waterland' ( it's dutch btw )
That happened 2 years ago ,and '' Waterland' is efin huuuge

Thanks, didn't know that. That leaves Ableton, Cockos, Bitwig and MOTU as the players without ties to conglomerates or private investors that more or less make them beholden to shareholders...

[Resonant- Serpent]

What a ripoff. Two week window to make a decision is lame, and makes not want to spend a penny with them in the future.

[Psuper]

Props historically offers too little, too late, and gets away with it only because of new users seeing the same small but voraciously loud pity-party of fannies praising every small bone-throw while excusing shortfalls at every turn.

Not unexpected. New users only come once, and easily recognize the same verbose fannies in the couple forums available to talk about Reason. Now props are left with the majority of existing customers who see little to no value with their latest release, and haven't been fooled for years.

[SLiC]

has anyone ever paid full retail price for anything! Reason has big sales often, I am pretty sure I got 40% off and even more discount from JJR when I bought R11 this year (as an upgrade from the free intro)....it was about 150 bucks with R12 free, so this is quite the hike, I should have bought more licences, could probably have sold them for a profit!!