[Fixed in 4.4] Weird bug: latest "Spectral Suite" update not included in upgrade plan

[musikarldererste]

The biggest concern for me at this very moment is...

What do I really get for the €170 yearly renewal?

If you see it the other way you get everything which is already out by the date you activate it and on top of that you get some updates for free in the next 12 month. That is how I look at the update plan.
If I buy Cubase X I get exactly that, nothing more.

That's a silly way of looking at it because when you buy Bitwig you are paying $399. Is every update after that initial $399 free? I don't think so. You get a years worth of updates only. You already have access to all the update of the previous year. If you renew its with the expectation that you are paying for future updates. What you wrote here only makes sense if you skipped a year or two, but if you've been paying since you bought the initial package every yearly activation is paying for future updates you are not paying for the previous years update, you already paid for those.

You don't need to pay for the years after your initial buy. That is my point. Buy Bitwig for 400€ enjoy one year of updates. After that, wait until something is introduced what you want and buy the upgrade plan. People are using it like a subscription and it is falsely advertised as one but you never loose the ability to start the last version which was covered by your upgrade plan.
I always brought the upgrade plan on sale and waited until a version came out which I wanted to use. My mindset was always I buy a certain version of Bitwig which was available.
Now we have to wait and see how the core/addon parts of Bitwig will get updates.

its great now you can pay twice
because the new addons needs an actual version

so be thankfull now you can spend more money
dont think pay PAY PAY PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY

[krazzmann]

Ultimately, I believe Bitwig will do the right thing, and they just made a stupid mistake here. Poor communication, not honoring existing agreements and expectations.

"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" - Hanlon's razor

They aren't bad, just didn't think this one through well at all.

I still have hope for that. I think the people working at Bitwig are good people, and they will soon do a course correction to resolve this.

paywig will do nothing
i hate those fanboys
so many videos on youtube and still ignored
f**k paywig i will drive to berlin and piss on their windows

Many posts back you wrote that you are happy

[srcodling]

so spectra is "extra special " ?

what about "the grid " ?
what about convulation reverb ?
what about chorus+ , flanger+, phaser+
what about delay +

all of that was core features
so your move make no sense

This EXACTLY. I wouldn't have minded if they explained that their business model had to change for such-and-such reason, and told us what it was now going to look like going forward. But to pull this stunt and imply that Spectra is a different or more special upgrade than these other things that have been previously included (I still cannot figure out how they are different), and then to act like it's just a continuation of what they've always been doing and that it makes 100% sense - THAT is what has me hot & bothered and thinking of going back to Ableton (if I can figure out an easy way to mimic the amazing modulating system in Bitwig which is my #1 reason for having switched).

[0degree]

You don't need to pay for the years after your initial buy. That is my point. Buy Bitwig for 400€ enjoy one year of updates. After that, wait until something is introduced what you want and buy the upgrade plan. People are using it like a subscription and it is falsely advertised as one but you never loose the ability to start the last version which was covered by your upgrade plan.
I always brought the upgrade plan on sale and waited until a version came out which I wanted to use. My mindset was always I buy a certain version of Bitwig which was available.
Now we have to wait and see how the core/addon parts of Bitwig will get updates.

But isn't the current situation the end result of the "game" Bitwig encouraged to play?
They were always saying "you don't have to update" so I don't and wait until something interesting to me arrives. Now there could one more "incentive" to upgrade if the newest "add-ons" require the most up to date Bitwig version

The whole upgrade plan is IMO stupid and I think they would be better off with normal releases as their competition.
My guess is they don't sell enough updates and/or don't have enough new users but IMO it's because of the upgrade plan mechanics.
They did everything wrong with this release including (obviously unintentional) bug telling users they can't have the new "add-on"

On the "bright" side given the radio silence I think they were prepared for the shit storm and planned it beforehand. I also think they will be ok - they pulled the upgrade plan stunt on 2.0 release and people sucked it up so after some time they will also accept the new "add-ons". Internet newer forgets but also forgives quickly

[Phil B]

Ultimately, I believe Bitwig will do the right thing, and they just made a stupid mistake here. Poor communication, not honoring existing agreements and expectations.

"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" - Hanlon's razor

They aren't bad, just didn't think this one through well at all.

I still have hope for that. I think the people working at Bitwig are good people, and they will soon do a course correction to resolve this.

I like this post and hope you are correct but being sceptical I wonder if they are waiting to see if they sell enough 'add ons' at $79 to make the trouble worthwhile as if they were going to do/say anything it should have been by now.

In an ideal world they would just refund any purchases (if people had an active plan), but if they have already taken a lot of money (I can't see this personally) it may be hard for them to do!

I'm hopeful too, but given I just got a response to my original email that was a cut and paste of their canned, conclusory response that the add-ons will not affect the quality, content or regularity of future updates, my hope is dissipating

[Buckster]

Sounds like I had the same email response - I was very disappointed. If an amazing update arrives within the next month then maybe my fears will be unfounded but we shall see

[Phil B]

That is my point. Buy Bitwig for 400€ enjoy one year of updates. After that, wait until something is introduced what you want and buy the upgrade plan.

That's exactly the point ... what seems like a decent chunk of their revenue was coming from customers (me, for example) who viewed buying these plans as a means to support the company in good faith (not banking on some specific new feature to come in the next year - I don't where you guys get that from). If all of those people (me, for example) now wait an extra year or two because they are now looking at it like you, that could severely impact their annualized revenues.

My mindset was always I buy a certain version of Bitwig which was available.

So, prove it ... next time you buy an update, request Bitwig to reduce your effective period from 1 year to 1 day without lowering your price.

[martinjuenke]

paywig will do nothing
i hate those fanboys
so many videos on youtube and still ignored
f**k paywig i will drive to berlin and piss on their windows

that's hilarious! make sure you post a youtube video!!!

Please use a macro objective on your video cam to make sure that we see something

[Held]

I mean, if you add discord, reddit, and kvr, there's probably less than one hundred people complaining, and I doubt many more wrote to support.

So it probably doesn't seem like a big deal to Bitwig and they are rolling in that sweet add-on money. The real impact will only be felt once people stop renewing their upgrade plans, and stop recommending Bitwig to others. There's no way of knowing if the additional revenue will make up for that, but Bitwig seems to think it will, so they'll just wait this out.

It's a lose-lose for customers who love Bitwig anyway. Either this move bankrupts Bitwig and there are no more updates, or it doesn't and there will be considerably more expensive updates.

Personally, I'll invest my Bitwig money in FL Studio for now since that's what most of my favorite artists are using and being main stream can be fun too.

[ollie.rollover]

Haha! Evil.

[billcarroll]

Ultimately, I believe Bitwig will do the right thing, and they just made a stupid mistake here. Poor communication, not honoring existing agreements and expectations.

"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" - Hanlon's razor

They aren't bad, just didn't think this one through well at all.

I still have hope for that. I think the people working at Bitwig are good people, and they will soon do a course correction to resolve this.

paywig will do nothing
i hate those fanboys
so many videos on youtube and still ignored
f**k paywig i will drive to berlin and piss on their windows

Much better things to do in Berlin. Such a wonderful city.

[pierb]

Honestly the whole idea Bitwig did this because they're having financial difficulties is ridiculous.

If that was the case, they should have just increased their prices, like all companies in the world do. Of course some people would have been pissed, but at least they wouldn't have felt like someone pulled the rug from under their feet. Customers would have remained in control of their decisions instead of feeling like they didn't get what they paid for.

Also, if these add-ons were an attempt to diversify their income streams, why invest dev efforts in a somewhat niche feature instead of working on something with mass appeal like... I don't know... MSEGs that have been asked for years? Any of the top feature requests in Bitwish? Improvements in the piano roll?

On top of all that, it's not very clear how these add-ons are not Bitwig features. They are installed with BWS itself as part of an update like all other BWS features, are part of the BWS source code, and cannot be used outside of BWS. I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like it would be very hard to argue otherwise in front of a judge. Even more hard with customers who just bought/renewed BWS and are hungry for new features.

[SamDi]

I am pretty sure Bitwig has some serious economical problems. I mean, having around 30 employees as fix costs and generating between 100-200k profit is just to near at the black zero and a small little incident would push Bitwig into red numbers. What I wonder about is, when they employ 30 people, there should be at least 75% developers in such a small company. For that amount, the SW outcome is just too less. Either they failed in optimizing employee structure and have bloated administration or they have a suboptimal development process. But they should rather work on their efficiency and increase customer base by listen more to their customer feature requests and offering more value, instead of pissing on the small up-until-yesterday-loyal customer base.

I think the software outcome is really impressive. Which DAW gives you more updates in the same time frame?
It is funny that people argue about efficiency when 4 devs created Bitwig from zero to version 1. And that is not something I believe they did, they themselves spoke about that in a radio interview in Germany back in the days. 75% developer makes no sense at all in a business like that.
They made round about 1 million last year, take 50% off (tax etc.) and then divide it by 20. They were 20 people in 2019 some of them not even full time. That's 25k€ for everybody if you would split it equally. Just an easy calculation. Everybody speaking of greed ->
Just check bundesanzeiger.de

Take a step back and look what they have already achieved! For my part I am really happy with Bitwig and I will continue to support them, like I did in the past.
And please stop this hate culture, it is not healthy at all and will change nothing into something better.

Yes, when 4 devs created the initial DAW once, they surely were efficient. But now they are around 30 according to their self-presentation. And for a 30 people-company, the outcome is too low IMO. I see it at some points similar as you: they are not greedy, they just dont get managed their finances. Not sure how much turnover they make, but if it would be just 1 million, this wouldn't feed the people. Avergae wage in DE is ~50k, but without employers additional royalties and costs and we are not talking about average, but emplyoess with mostly academic backgrounds.

I am not primarily interested in what they offer per timeframe, but per money. So which DAW offers more for the money? We can easily list Logic, Reaper, Ableton, FL studio here. The price/value ratio for new features is much much higher..

Of course you can argue that I have this in my hand by just buying an upgrade plan, e.g. each 2 years. But then it's nevertheless annyoing, that I have timeslots, where I don't have the latest and the greatest and furthermore it's annoying to buy an upgrade plan with the knowledge in mind, that you will not get all of the fancy stuff in the future, but going to be charged extra, if you want it.

[martinjuenke]

I mean, if you add discord, reddit, and kvr, there's probably less than one hundred people complaining, and I doubt many more wrote to support.

So it probably doesn't seem like a big deal to Bitwig and they are rolling in that sweet add-on money.

Small addendum: Sale offers for Bitwig Studio on the renowned places are still marginal.
Conclusio: The disappointed fans bark loud, but do not bite.
Well done, Bitwig

[SamDi]

Ultimately, I believe Bitwig will do the right thing, and they just made a stupid mistake here. Poor communication, not honoring existing agreements and expectations.

"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" - Hanlon's razor

They aren't bad, just didn't think this one through well at all.

I still have hope for that. I think the people working at Bitwig are good people, and they will soon do a course correction to resolve this.

paywig will do nothing
i hate those fanboys
so many videos on youtube and still ignored
f**k paywig i will drive to berlin and piss on their windows

The same as somebody pissed in your head, as it seems!

Registered here since 2 days and sending >80 posts full with aggressive non-sense!