It's not being met well in the professional circles I'm part of (VFX & games).
Out of curiosity, do any of them use the Autodesk subscription services? Vigil had switched to it and was quite happy, though it seems Adobe's setup is a bit different.
I couldn't say for certain, but I believe the answer is "yes, but not many." I think Autodesk is treading a little more carefully, and doing so in a manner that's a little more palatable. Their subscription services are largely a rebranded support contract, but oh, yeah... with some "cloud" thrown in. The subscription model was almost certainly not originally designed with the entertainment field in mind, given how small a piece of the pie Maya and 3DS are on the corporate balance sheets. The most interesting aspect of it (IMO, from the perspective of VFX) is using the cloud to scale up render power. Some small vfx studios and environment artists are using the services for minor work (scan/photo to model, eg), but they don't (AFAIK) have a huge success story in the industry that they can use for marketing. The biggest issue with "cloud", at least in VFX, is that it's "cloud". The major film studios are increasingly demanding, as part of their contract with VFX studios, that any machine their IP is accessible on, have its internet access curtailed. Naturally, cloud services (even if it's just for the license checks) aren't feasible in that sort of situation.
From an email by an AD employee (who no doubt doesn't have authority to speak for the company, so take this as their opinion):
As for Adobe and the creative cloud I can tell you we were surprised by the move even though we have several friends that work there that kept it quiet which is very rare. I read it about here.
The creative cloud move has increased their user base by 40% since it started and most of those are casual users who did not see the value in shelling out $$$$ for software they used occasionally or pirates who saw this as a better option than hunting down for serial generators. So anything that technology and capability to more people to me is a good thing. Time will tell if removing the permanent license offering will hurt them as there is no plan to remove that option at Autodesk even with some of the cloud stuff we are working on. I personally like having the permanent option available. There are also internet rules per country and cloud only in China or the Middle East that goes back to North American servers is not going to work too well.
I suspect by "increased their user base", he meant "increased their
paying user base."
Inside THQ, there was a lot of tools and code sharing where it made sense, and newer projects would tend to just start on the latest 3DS Max or similar software.
That's pretty common, I think. That's how it worked at the studios I was at, as well. Moving an existing show to a new version of a software was pretty much verboten, unless there was a clear and demonstrable need for it, and even then, we only allowed the new software for as few shots or sequences as necessary, to minimize risk to the rest of the project. However, given how frequently (or in-frequently) new software releases came out (as opposed to engineering-release/bug-fix versions), and the rate new projects started up, the regular support contracts and upgrade cycles were sufficient. Instant access to teh latest? Not such a big deal, unless teh latest had a new feature necessary for the show (fluid sims, for example). But even then, at the major studios, you're generally part of the beta test program, and get the betas ahead of release, anyway.
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