Image Line Acquires UVI

[Double Tap]

But at the core of it, DRM is a technical solution to a social reality

FTFY

Thanks for sort-of putting words in my mouth, heh...

Now answer this: if what you wrote there is true, why is it so?


And what can we do to create a social reality where everyone can afford to pay for software, and is civilized enough to choose to do so out of their free will - instead of being forced into it via technological means?

Philosophy? At this time on a Monday?

[Double Tap]

Perhaps it’s too soon to tell, but I’m wondering, have you actually seen a significant jump in sales as a result of changing to a C/R system that would validate your decision?

I asked, and he answered, a few pages back:

Did you see a change in sales after the new system?

Yes. Every time we tighten anti-piracy at any level. We see a boost in sales.

Particularly when we release new versions that are not cracked, and can't be shared.

Data drives everything on this topic.

Perhaps I should not be surprised, but people often fail to take the perspective of a business trying to sell software, which by its nature is vulnerable to piracy.

It's bad actors who ruin it for everyone else. If people were honest, you would still have access to the old FLRegkey.Reg system. This has always been an arms-race between software companies and and criminals or at least badly behaving teens. Account-sharing is the new Piracy, as I said.

The amount of organized crime surrounding software piracy is staggering. All those torrent servers are not being run for free and by people of good will.

Criminals will pay crackers so they can get something to sell/attract people with.

Recent example - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/s ... -creators/

Examples of impersonated software that contain malicious YTStealer installers include OBS Studio, Adobe Premiere Pro, FL Studio, Ableton Live, Antares Auto-Tune Pro, and Filmora.


You can see this in operation, here is todays haul from that malware...



These are all fake phishing links.

[jamcat]

I cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone in their right mind would argue against lifetime upgrades, but this is KVR, as you can tell there's a lot of eh, divergent opinions here.

Well, I’m primarily questioning it as a good long-term business model. But Scott says it works for them, so…

Now, from a user perspective, on one hand, sure, as a PreSonus customer, I’d love to get free Studio One upgrades for life. But on the other hand, I’m not so sure that Studio One would get all of the cool new features packed into each version upgrade if they weren’t getting any upgrade revenues for it.

[JMC]

.. and poorly conceived lifetime update policy

We have been hearing for over 25 years that our business model is not sustainable but this may give you some insight of what's living/breeding and what potential is out there :

• FL Studio is installed over 30.000 times/day with peaks up to 70.000 times/day on new releases
• The 40 top YouTube channels featuring FL Studio cater an average of 400.000 views/day, over 1.2 billion views in total. And there are 1000s of little channels in dozens of languages about FL Studio that in total at least match that number.
• Our own Facebook channel has 850.000 subs
• Our own YouTube channel has 600.000 subs
• The #FLStudio tag has 3 billion views on Tiktok.
• FL Studio is responsible for a bunch of #1 hits all over the world and featured almost every week in the socials of extremely popular artists, sending thousands of enthousiasts in our direction.
• millions of new/potential customers (most of which never saw a mixer desk up close) enter the bottom of the market evey year so we don't need to milk the few people that believed in us and paid for the software.

... this legacy that took over two decades to build ... and we will do our extreme best to last at least another two decades.

Jean-Marie Cannie (co-founder & co-owner of Image-Line)

[sjm]

Perhaps it’s too soon to tell, but I’m wondering, have you actually seen a significant jump in sales as a result of changing to a C/R system that would validate your decision?

Not the answer to the question you're asking, but I'm definitely contemplating moving to Reaper if I find that 20.8.4 (the last version without C/R) is no longer fit for my purposes. If only Reaper's PR wasn't such a UX nightmare, it'd be a lot easier to take the plunge. I know I'm not the only one at least wondering whether this isn't the sign that it's time to jump ship.

Its not a pressing concern right now - FL 21 offers nothing I care about, being more of a cosmetic gimmick release and not addressing any fundamental issues. So I really don't think I'm missing out by not upgrading. But there will be a time when it will become a more pressing concern as technology moves on. Part of me hopes IL will have either changed the DRM by then or at least put measures in place to safeguard our investment should they go poof/get bought (i.e. an updated EULA and a software escrow solution). But the staff is still at the stage of telling us "everything is fine, you don't know what you're talking about". Past track records suggest that it will take 5-20 years until the penny drops and they understand the concerns and get their heads out of their own arses. Even with gol gone, there's still a lot of willful blindness and condescension.

Of course, IL already got our money, so maybe we don't matter in the grand scheme of things, but we are the users who are making the tutorials, helping new users learn the software online and encouraging them to buy rather than pirate.

[dayjob]

well this turned into worst thread of the year... so far.

[Frankie.T]

.. and poorly conceived lifetime update policy

We have been hearing for over 25 years that our business model is not sustainable but this may give you some insight of what's living/breeding and what potential is out there :

• FL Studio is installed over 30.000 times/day with peaks up to 70.000 times/day on new releases
• The 40 top YouTube channels featuring FL Studio cater an average of 400.000 views/day, over 1.2 billion views in total. And there are 1000s of little channels in dozens of languages about FL Studio that in total at least match that number.
• Our own Facebook channel has 850.000 subs
• Our own YouTube channel has 600.000 subs
• The #FLStudio tag has 3 billion views on Tiktok.
• FL Studio is responsible for a bunch of #1 hits all over the world and featured almost every week in the socials of extremely popular artists, sending thousands of enthousiasts in our direction.
• millions of new/potential customers (most of which never saw a mixer desk up close) enter the bottom market evey year so we don't need to milk the few people that believed in us and paid for the software.

... this legacy that took over two decades to build ... and we will do our extreme best to last at least another two decades.

Jean-Marie Cannie (co-founder & co-owner of Image-Line)

That's the reason i do not understand the c/r for activate your product. Some people value a lot the freedom to own something bought. Would be nice to have that system back, that it's a point of failure (as i wrote in previous replies) only for legit users, not for piracy

Thanks for your time

[JMC]

Image-Line has done it before. They acquired VST plugins like Deckadance and DirectWave from ArGuru Software and others and then made them FL proprietary.

I personally created Deckadance with Argu and the rest of our team when he was employed at Image-Line. He died in a car crash 20 minutes after a Deckadance meeting. His work was taken to the next level by Luis (adding Grossbeat, one-knob automations, ...).

The Deckadance sales sadly enough never reached more than 0.5% of our turnover while they required 99.5% of the marketing to get them noticed in the market. On top of that the (then) new generation of Pioneer CDJs were quickly taking back their place in the market so we sold Deckadance to Stanton/Gibson.

[rubez]

Good news imo.

Get rid of iLok I will finally try Falcon.

[Vortifex]

What I really want from Image Line is a refresh of Harmor and Poizone's interfaces. Harmor has an interface that only a mother could love, and they both need resizing options, especially Poizone which is absolutely tiny.

[JMC]

That's the reason i do not understand the c/r for activate your product. Some people value a lot the freedom to own something bought.

You can believe me when I say we'd rather have no copy protection at all but as long as people can't seem to handle the freedom we have little other choice.

This said we're communicating on a 20(?)-year old forum that requires C/R to communicate and most of our emails/social media/pictures and videos are stored by what some consider the most evil companies on the planet.

It usually takes about 6 weeks to 6 months for a new release to be cracked so in the worst case where Image-Line collapses and we don't compile a free version before it does ... you'd have to wait 6 weeks to 6 months in order to use the last version.

[tony10000]

So you’re saying that the plugins from Cakewalk no longer work?

Correct...the ones I have are 32-bit and were never even upgraded. And others were only designed to run in the original Sonar.

Which ones are those?

Plugins like Z3TA+ and Dimension Pro were 64-bit and in the case of Z3TA+, at least, VST3.

I think the freeware rgc plugins maybe were only 32-bit. But they never were going to be 64-bit.

And some of the Cakewalk plugins were even available for Mac.

The original Z3TA. And the other ones were proprietary. Not available, upgradeable, or downloadable.

So this doesn’t make sense. You apparently owned an old version of Cakewalk that didn’t include Z3TA+ 2. You not owning a 64-bit version has nothing to do with Cakewalk ending support of the plugins. If you would have purchased a newer version, you would still be using it today.

I may have eventually upgraded to the 64-bit version if it was available. But it is not...and that option is no longer available. And all of the upgrade $$$ I spent on that platform is down the drain. Not to mention all of the users who bought Sonar Platinum so they could "Always have the most current version with your SONAR membership."

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail ... r-platinum

[tony10000]

Because if i have to rely on external systems/will to use something i bought i don't own the product (anymore), i just payed the king permission to work his lands, but the kings for whatever reason can revoke my land, as he can die or a bad prince can kill him and take his lands back

You don't "own" the product. You "own" a license to use the product subject to the license agreement that can be modified by the IP owner at any time.

[tony10000]

Interesting conversation!

Thing is, the old argument that "piracy users will never buy" is flawed: A vast percentage buys if the already pirated copy is taken away from them. FLS is probably the software with the most beneficial factors to do so that can think of, and unlike Photoshop they can pull it off without going subscription.

Apparently IL is super healthy as a company. Their C/R servers won't go out of service anytime soon. If that is how future free updates are financed by, then it seems not the worst of options (think of subscription as the alternative).

Just my 2c

- U

I certainly agree with you, Urs! And I am sure that the private equity firm investment probably had something to do with Scott's decision. It is not a good look if tens of thousands of potential paying customers are using your software for free. That is leaving a lot of $$$ on the table.

[husker37]

well this turned into worst thread of the year... so far.

My fault.