I started with R6. At that time Cinema was still a small fish in the pond but MAXON was good at catching up and implementing the most important features, sometimes better sometimes worse.
For some years now I don’t feel Cinema is catching up with the competition. MAXON also seems to be aware of this and they justify the always rather subtle innovations with the fact that a new core is programmed, which then forms the basis for groundbreaking innovations.
Unfortunately, the groundbreaking innovations seem to be a long time coming.
And also the performance improvements, which one could have expected after renewing the core, are rather isolated solutions. Who is helped by a multi-instance if the real problem is a slow object manager?
Instead, a lot of energy is put into diverse material systems and renderers that are of no use to anyone. Prorender was a mistake right from the start. It would have made much more sense to implement cycles.
Long-time users are now rewarded with the ability to decide. Either they let the software they’ve spent a lot of money on get outdated, and enter a rental system that leaves them without access to their own files as soon as they leave. Or they do without Cineversity access and are at a disadvantage when it comes to updates.
In addition, an online obligation is introduced, which in connection with the reduction of downloadable old versions actually forbids the term perpetual license.
MAXON of course had to introduce a rental option from a business point of view, to reduce the entry threshold. There is no way around this after the unfortunate success of Adobe, . But, of course, they could have been more sensitive to their old customers. If the recently upgraded MSA had simply continued to run and a free Redshift license had been added, nobody would have complained.
However, MAXON is now a subsidiary of Nemechek. And I’m afraid that’s where the problem lies. Profits that must have been made in the last 15 years were probably more likely to be skimmed off than to go into development, otherwise we would have noticed a faster development than 10 years ago.
Of course, the employees and even the managing director of MAXON have little to do with that.
No matter what MAXON’s intentions were. Those who have never owned Cinema can cheer.
Those who have supported this company for many years pay the price.
