Waves...smh

[Digivolt]

Waves apologizing is like an apology for cheating. Once a cheater...always a cheater...they can never be trusted again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4

[trackbout]

I actually think the whole mess was a net positive. It's drawn a bright red line for every audio dev on earth. The perpetual license option is sacred ground.

[Greenstorm33]

How hilarious would it be if they backtracked because they made less on subs than they were making on perpetual sales on an average day? I can just imagine the resulting sales department meeting. Maybe unlikely but I highly doubt they'd have reversed course unless they saw the writing on the wall wrt the financial fallout from their decision.

[abc1mce2]

What do you think, revert back to WUP for a transitional time or just silently ride it out?

Hard to say - but I think regardless of how they react they delivered a blow to themselves that will be very hard (if possible at all) to recover from. Regardless of what they'll say or do they can't fix what they have just broken for good.
And I bet the truth of that will slowly but surely start to sink in for them. Most probably they are in panic-mode already and lots of the Waves staff is fearing for their jobs.

Your forgetting the old users who would regularly buy the WUP (like myself) to stay up to date. That's $240 a year they'll never get from me again. That's not everybody, but it has to be a significant number of people and studios who have more than one seat to WUP.

How is that relevant to this post of mine you just quoted?

Sorry. Replied to the wrong post.

[jens]

I see - np.

[0degree]

Ok, so now since they are backtracking it's time for something to dry the tears - how about some exclusive 29$ sale?

[AdvancedFollower]

lots of the Waves staff is fearing for their jobs.

Hopefully there will be some new indie developer startups soon. There must be a lot of talent at Waves held back by the bureaucracy, being forced to mindlessly maintain their huge library of legacy plugins, go to pointless meetings and constantly hand in TPS reports.

[ghettosynth]

I actually think the whole mess was a net positive. It's drawn a bright red line for every audio dev on earth. The perpetual license option is sacred ground.

I agree, if Waves can't pull it off others should think twice. Not going to lie though, the sub and acquisition craze has tempered my interest in buying software.

[Scotty]

People want a choice. A subscription might make sense and it might not. I’ll buy Clairty and Harmony soon assuming the prices remain competitive. Taking a step back and resetting is a lesson learned. Their latest plugins are good and there are keepers in their legacy collection as well. I’ve got a MacBook Pro recently and I’ll pay the wup to get m1 capacity on them . That is justifiable given the cpu architecture changes. The drama hopefully is over.

[billcarroll]

If you make plugins and want new customers, you kind of need to support current operating systems and hardware. This is just part of doing business as a software developer. I'm not sure it's right to charge current customers who have already purchased software for that maintenance.

Waves just doesn't deliver anything of substance for the WUP fee. You get the same plugin you already purchased many years ago, and in a few cases a GUI update.

FabFilter does things in a way that makes a lot of sense to me as a customer. No subscription or WUP to fund maintenance. Maintenance updates are free. FabFilter also continues to innovate and develop new versions of their plugins that are worth an upgrade price, and then people (definitely me) are more than happy to pay for an upgrade.

[martiu]

what is WUP?

[Aloysius]

To whomever said ... in another thread. You know who you are.

[billcarroll]

what is WUP?

You can't tell me you've never paid for a wuppin

[kidslow]

And this Google spreadsheet I have seen floating in the interwebs is ludicrous cope mostly. No way are some of those alternatives there viable.

I agree with that. Like all things, it quickly devolved into just another vehicle for people to promote their favourite niche plugins and developers, no matter how inappropriate they may be for the actual task in question.

When I looked at it the other night after part had been locked, I saw just the opposite of niche plugins or developers listed. I saw a lot of mainstream developers and what appeared to be perhaps an astroturf attempt by their marketing departments to stuff the list. I found it to be unusable. Perhaps that was just what I chose to see, but where we are in agreement is that the listings were not apparently viable nor appropriate replacements in many (most?) cases.

[kidslow]

You apparently misread what I wrote, which was barometer moment, as in the industry will use this moment to take a reading on whether subscriptions can be crammed down on their customers or not. Watershed, which does not appear in the thread prior to your using it, means something else entirely.

I made a post and quoted and referenced nobody. That’s right, I’m the OP of the word watershed. That’s me, full of original ideas. I see nothing pivotal or groundbreaking and that’s what I wrote.

Yep you sure called it in advance. Nothing pivotal nor groundbreaking took place this week. I think the industry got their barometer reading on subscriptions.