Prices set to increase ?

[AdvancedFollower]

This has always been true for software - in theory. But here’s the secret - 10 customers who have only bought it because it is cheap is likely to be 20x the tech support headaches - and support costs time and money.

Do you have any statistics for that? Someone who only bought it because it's cheap and not because they truly needed it might be more likely to just move on if they can't get it to work properly. Also there's no reason why people who can only afford to spend $30 on a plugin would be worse at using computers than someone who's able to spend $300...Also if the company has written proper documentation and has stable installation programs that don't keep messing stuff up, getting a plugin up and running is pretty trivial. Also companies might not necessarily scale up their tech support linearly with the number of buyers, opting instead for longer response times and more generic responses ("RTFM").

If these kinds of sales weren't profitable, companies would stop doing them. There's a reason why more and more companies are jumping on the "90% Discount" bandwagon, and it's not out of goodwill.

[GaryG]

And as CHK said, PC components are outrageously high, at least GPU's as far as I can see. That's all thanks to cryptomining.

As an aside, I've been told by someone who understand these things (...) that something big is happening in June; one of the big cryptos is changing the way it's validated or something (don't ask me...) and it'll effectively kill off home mining (and pointless mining for bitcoin nowadays unless you have some kind of warehouse setup).

He reckons this will lead to people dumping 3060s etc on ebay for peanuts with new prices probably tumbling too. He's convinced enough to be holding off upgrading his gaming rig till July...

Maybe hyperbole, wouldn't know.

[noiseboyuk]

Do you have any statistics for that? Someone who only bought it because it's cheap and not because they truly needed it might be more likely to just move on if they can't get it to work properly. Also there's no reason why people who can only afford to spend $30 on a plugin would be worse at using computers than someone who's able to spend $300...Also if the company has written proper documentation and has stable installation programs that don't keep messing stuff up, getting a plugin up and running is pretty trivial. Also companies might not necessarily scale up their tech support linearly with the number of buyers, opting instead for longer response times and more generic responses ("RTFM").

If these kinds of sales weren't profitable, companies would stop doing them. There's a reason why more and more companies are jumping on the "90% Discount" bandwagon, and it's not out of goodwill.

I've heard it first hand from a fairly big high-end developer. I think we were talking about Spectrasonics pricing, and they said that they understood why they priced as they do, and 90% of it was support issues - they said they get very few issues from professionals, almost everything from the hobbyist crowd (paraphrasing).

As I said, other companies take a different view. But just as Waves do well, so do Spectrasonics. I'd be very surprised if they ever slashed prices, equally surprised if they ever got into financial difficulties. I think its the hobbyist sector that will stop spending on music kit more than the pros.

[BenfordLaw]

All this talk about 'support' is laughable - if you run a software company, you are in control of your software, right? i.e. YOU have to fix bugs in it, and make it work. Yes, some people will have problems, I bet it's a tiny percentage, and you can easily - easily - just give them a refund if you think it's going to cost you more in support time to help them, than you made selling the software to them in the first place.
We get this comment EVERY single time somebody either suggests reducing the price of a VST or VSTs, or talks about sales.

[BenfordLaw]

Besides VPS avenger what other developers have announced price increase?

LOL if VPS Avenger is going up in price 'because of inflation'. You couldn't make it up. What a surprise!

[BenfordLaw]

And as CHK said, PC components are outrageously high, at least GPU's as far as I can see. That's all thanks to cryptomining.

Worrying times.

I have an i7 4790k which I bought for £80 off Ebay. I also have 40TB of hard drives and a £80 secondhand GPU, and my PC runs fine. The price of GPUs is pretty irrelevant to VST developers, isn't it? I was using my i7's built in GPU for five years (on my old PC, I had an i7 4790s in a tiny HP desktop for about ten years before buying my HP i7 4790 tower), and you can happily play games like Painkiller at 1920 x 1080 on it - on the CPU's GPU!

PCs are dirt cheap because there are so many of them out there. Hard drives are pretty much dirt cheap nowadays too.

[BenfordLaw]

...In the early days of plugins you had to make similar choices because they were priced close to hardware. Now they're so cheap that you don't have to make many choices anymore but you end up with so much more than you need that at some point it's harder to justify even a good deal.

So because they're so cheap, people just reach their own personal saturation level more quickly and then you can't sell them any more. Along the way, you didn't earn very much, so the only thing that you can do it to try and keep hyping your shit up as the second coming.

And we wonder why subscriptions are so appealing to companies.

"then you can't sell them any more". WTF?

So there is a finite number of people on Earth, (i.e. people don't age, children don't become adults and get jobs and therefore disposable income, nobody suddenly decides one day that they are interested in making music on a computer) and nobody is having babies any more, and the human population is completely static?

Of course not. Tens of millions of children become adults and start working every year, and of those people, many of them can now afford to buy VSTs and DAWs, so they do. That's not even including adults who have an interest in music and decide this year to buy a DAW and VSTs, which obviously happens all the time, otherwise there wouldn't BE any DAWs or VSTs.
I've got loads and loads of VSTs, anything that normally costs over £50 I only bought when it was on sale, and I still can't resist new bargains that come around. That's why there's all this talk of 'GAS' on this forum, loads of us are buying stuff even though we haven't finished learning the stuff we've already got.

[ghettosynth]

...

[LeVzi]

And as CHK said, PC components are outrageously high, at least GPU's as far as I can see. That's all thanks to cryptomining.

As an aside, I've been told by someone who understand these things (...) that something big is happening in June; one of the big cryptos is changing the way it's validated or something (don't ask me...) and it'll effectively kill off home mining (and pointless mining for bitcoin nowadays unless you have some kind of warehouse setup).

He reckons this will lead to people dumping 3060s etc on ebay for peanuts with new prices probably tumbling too. He's convinced enough to be holding off upgrading his gaming rig till July...

Maybe hyperbole, wouldn't know.

That would be a result.

[LeVzi]

And as CHK said, PC components are outrageously high, at least GPU's as far as I can see. That's all thanks to cryptomining.

Worrying times.

I have an i7 4790k which I bought for £80 off Ebay. I also have 40TB of hard drives and a £80 secondhand GPU, and my PC runs fine. The price of GPUs is pretty irrelevant to VST developers, isn't it? I was using my i7's built in GPU for five years (on my old PC, I had an i7 4790s in a tiny HP desktop for about ten years before buying my HP i7 4790 tower), and you can happily play games like Painkiller at 1920 x 1080 on it - on the CPU's GPU!

PCs are dirt cheap because there are so many of them out there. Hard drives are pretty much dirt cheap nowadays too.

GPU's are essential imo for using the modern DAW's like Cubase, as it takes the strain off the CPU, not that there is a great deal but onboard graphics is never much good.

[Kerbie]

And as CHK said, PC components are outrageously high, at least GPU's as far as I can see. That's all thanks to cryptomining.

Worrying times.

I have an i7 4790k which I bought for £80 off Ebay. I also have 40TB of hard drives and a £80 secondhand GPU, and my PC runs fine. The price of GPUs is pretty irrelevant to VST developers, isn't it? I was using my i7's built in GPU for five years (on my old PC, I had an i7 4790s in a tiny HP desktop for about ten years before buying my HP i7 4790 tower), and you can happily play games like Painkiller at 1920 x 1080 on it - on the CPU's GPU!

PCs are dirt cheap because there are so many of them out there. Hard drives are pretty much dirt cheap nowadays too.

GPU's are essential imo for using the modern DAW's like Cubase, as it takes the strain off the CPU, not that there is a great deal but onboard graphics is never much good.

There's also some development towards using GPU's as DSP's for VST's. Supposed to be a public beta for an effects suite released next month.

[FapFilter]

haven't made any benchmarks, but imo onboard graphics - while awful for demanding games, or CGI render acceleration,should be plenty good for DAW use.
yes, they might become an inferior option IF GPU processing for audio work finally became a thing. Maybe it will at one point, but this has been promised for more than 10 years now i think but for whatever reasons never took off.

[Kerbie]

haven't made any benchmarks, but imo onboard graphics - while awful for demanding games, or CGI render acceleration,should be plenty good for DAW use.
yes, they might become an inferior option IF GPU processing for audio work finally became a thing. Maybe it will at one point, but this has been promised for more than 10 years now i think but for whatever reasons never took off.

There's a convolution reverb plugin you can download right now for Nvidia from GPU Audio. They're the ones who announced the public beta that's supposed to release next month. Also, in 2020 Nvidia released Broadcast, for live noise reduction. The technology is here and it's being worked on. I think we will see some interesting developments in the next year.

[Uncle E]

Also, in 2020 Nvidia released Broadcast, for live noise reduction.

Very cool that it’s real-time. There’s not much point in having a GPU-powered convolution reverb (doesn’t need to be real-time, doesn’t use much CPU) but it would be great to see GPU-powered instruments.

[LeVzi]

Why add more CPU cycles using onboard graphics, when if you chuck a card in there, the CPU is freed up just for realtime audio processing.

I never looked up if onboard GFX adds to DPC latency or not tbh, id be interested to find out.