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From what understand they will. It's just not called MSA. Its a yearly update for your perpetual licence that will be a combination of all the subscription features released during the year. They are offering both perpetual licences and subscriptions.

Makes sense to go down this route. We will see in a few weeks time I guess.

I just want to throw out a different perspective on this. Here in New Zealand we have to purchase C4D through our local reseller. We don't have an online website. It is all done manually by a real person sitting in an office. With this in mind think about how their businesses run. By having the MSA (or the new billed yearly subscription) that means the reseller only has to process a single transaction once per year. This means me emailing them, they contact MAXON to lock in the rate based on the current exchange rate, the reseller then emails me an invoice, I agree and make the payment, the following day they receive the cash in their account and confirm it via another email, a wire transfer is initiated to send the funds through to MAXON, this is received and the licence is then sent to the reseller, who then forwards me all the details. Now this only happens once year. The reseller takes some % of that transaction. Lets say 10%. So of the new subcription the reseller gets $72 from that $720 amount. This is enough to pay the costs of the person doing the work in NZ. Likewise MAXONS costs are covered on their end by having a person managing things from their side. Now imagine this happens every month. At $60 that means the reseller only gets $6. And they have to do the same amount of work every month for every subscriber. Then on the MAXON side they also reduce their income. So the way around that would be to increase the price to $100 per month (as a purely monthly subscription). This adds $40 to this to cover the cost on both sides. Perhaps now the reseller gets $30 per transaction and MAXON takes $10 to handle it on their end. So this would make sense and could be one of the reasons why they offer that purely monthly price as they have done along side the billed annually version. Those in Germany, US and UK all have online stores I believe, so this could be automated. I am not sure but maybe those stores are all independently operated as well according to each countries specific tax laws. But keeping the entire operation consistent for now does make sense for this first transition. MAXON is not the same size as Adobe or Autodesk. They can't have a single online presence for selling software and handling International sales for these monthly subscriptions. Plus its actually nice that they use local resellers since that provides business to these countries. Now MAXON may be building something to handle this in future, I don't really know, but going by their Jobs page (https://www.MAXON.net/en/header-meta-navigation/about-MAXON/jobs/) they always seem to looking for people in ecommerce type rolls. Or potentially Nemetsheck could build a worldwide system and incorporated MAXON sales in there. Again I am just speculating, I don't know anything about it. But I would feel for the resellers if this was the case. Anyway, that's just another perspective on how some of this may be working from a business case in countries like mine.

I didn’t know that. I always thought the MSA just started from whenever you bought it. For me that was May.

Thanks for clarifying. Yes I agree with you on this. I don’t mind the yearly lock-in but having to pay upfront will still be difficult to do for a lot of people. I hope they reconsider this and allow to pay the yearly amount in monthly payments. Also an indie tier would be good to have as well.

How? There are two prices on this page both shown in their monthly amounts so that you can compare the difference. https://www.MAXON.net/en/buy/ Is it perhaps that they are asking you to be billed annually? Would you rather it said billed monthly but you have to lock in for 12 months? Just wondering what it is about the wording that has people so fired about about it. I see exactly the same thing everywhere for almost every other subscription based software. Even my car insurance is billed annually but quoted as monthly to indicate the savings I make. So does my gym. Is it that it seems you need to pay the lump sum annually in one go? Rather than being split up over 12 payments? Or is it the price?

Yes very true. But that number is what most companies use for what they call the Indie license.

I don't see C4D dying at all. But I do see it changing. Hobbyist users will migrate to blender. But those interested in making a career out of motion graphics and 3D will stick with C4D since that is what Studios are using. And any business that uses C4D now will not be changing at all, if anything they will now have the ability to take on more jobs. Subscriptions will allow them ramp productions up and down much more easily by buying a pile of licences for a few months VS having to shell out for full versions which they won't need later. When these studios do ramp up all those artists that know C4D will be called onto these projects. Also there are lots of studios stuck on older versions of C4D. And its hard to justify spending $3500 to upgrade to the latest. So now that subscriptions are here its much easier to tell your boss (as one other poster here said recently that its $2 a day)... "Hey, boss, its only the price of a cup of coffee per day and we get the very latest version." I don't see any larger plugin developers leaving at all. But smaller hobbyist ones may drop away if they are not able to generate an income that offsets the cost of the software. IE Sell one plugin every month at $60 euros. If that happens then it would be enough for them to stay in the game and keep learning and developing.

Just wanted to say that yes I agree with you in regards to Indie licences. It would be great if MAXON announced an indie licence for hobbyist users under 100k.

Yes I did the same with Adobe when I needed it. I got a discount by agreeing to lock into 1 year and my monthly amount worked out at $70 per month vs $120 if I paid monthly. So does it really matter? Are you intending on only using Cinema 4D for just 1 month? Do you only want to pay for every second month? If your intending on using it for a full year then get the discount and pay the 61.47 euros a month. If not then you can pay purely on an ad-hoc monthly basis and pay $104.54 euros per month. Its up to you and when you need a licence. I just don't see what all the uproar is with regards to the argument about the monthly not being monthly. If you don't need it for a few months they go pure monthly. All depends on what you want to use C4D for. Better than shelling out over $3500 bucks when your not even sure if you will use it for a couple of weeks.

Yes but that is why Maya is $297 USD a month and C4D is about $67 USD a month. You can't expect software to stay stagnant and never update its SDK. Plugin developers will need to adapt and support multiple versions. Which is exactly what Octane does. There is a different plugin for every release of C4D, since new features were added each release that needed to be supported. People will just have to get used to having to update plugins every release. Even I have to do this myself, since every version since R17 had some slight changes that required me to do a new build of the plugin for every release since (sdk changes, Visual Studio/XCode changes, new versions of OSX or Windows etc.... all require rebuilds and adaptations of code). Python based plugins will largely remain unaffected.

I haven't talked to my local distributor yet about this. But if that's true then, and assuming that is USD, for me that's an additional $500 NZD a year for perpetual. I have already paid my MSA for this year so doesn't matter too much for me for now. But next year I would have to sell a few more plugins to keep in the game. I like to keep perpetual around so I can do builds and updates for older versions, so can't go just with subscription.

If you earn over 100k, need a Pro licence then its definitely 99 USD a month. https://www.substance3d.com/buy/pro I still don't know if companies like this consider the revenue what you earn from their software or just what you personally earn per year or not though. The company name Allegorithmic doesn't exist anymore. Which is why I just said substance :)

I have a plan for adding quadriflow as a native C++ plugin for OSX and Windows. Will come later this year. That will give you a similar workflow. I will make it work with the sculpting tools to give a fast workflow. https://github.com/hjwdzh/QuadriFlow In the mean time you can try using Ryans plugin...

From what I have read you can still buy an update for your perpetual licence. So this is effectively the same as the MSA. So if you have C4D Studio already, you get the next perpetual update every year. Prime, Broadcast and Visualize customers will have to pay more now though since they get Studio essentially. But other than that it seems pretty similar to me.

Just curious why people keep comparing MAXON to Adobe? That is correct, MAXON is not Adobe. Why not compare C4D with Maya, Max, Modo etc... IE compare MAXON to Autodesk, or The Foundry. Just had a look now and Maya is $297 NZD here per month, C4D will be ~$100 NZD I think (60 euros). Both Autodesk and MAXON are offering perpetual licences. Modo subscription is $599 USD a year (or $931 NZD) or about $77 NZD a month. And they also offer a perpetual. Even Substances is $99 USD a month for a subscription. Thats more than C4D just for texturing! And it's not even part of Adobe CC. They all have a monthly fee which can be paid annually with a discount. Or you can pay the pure monthly amount which is slightly more. And from my past experience Maya broke every plugin every release as well. C4D was a rare gem where they were able to keep the plugins compatible for so long. This was done through extensive effort on their part, but meant they couldn't change much under the hood. Now they are updating all the internal code, and the SDKs to give plugin developers more features and power, so things change.

Plugins developers now need to seriously consider offering subscription plans for their plugins. I was wondering how everyone feels about this and what kind of price point makes sense. Any new C4D users after September are going to be subscription based. We have to be realistic about the fact that anyone new is not going to drop 3567 Euros on a new application when getting started. So plugin developers are now faced with the issue of how to price their products. Is it still worth full $$$$ for a non-expiring perpetual licence of a plugin when your C4D licence is subscription based. Since as a subscriber you will most likely keep updating C4D every time there is a new build throughout the year. Which may mean you need to update your plugins as well along with it. The benefit of purchasing a perpetual licence for a plugin seems only to be worth it if your software stays locked to a specific version also. Such as when your in the middle of a production and don't want to upgrade anything in case it breaks. So my question to everyone here is would you subscribe for plugins on a monthly basis? Some developers do this already. But for most it is effectively a yearly price and one years support. I think a lot of developers will be asking themselves this question going forward. Since how can you sell to a new user, support their continuous C4D updates and not go broke in the process. Also it can take considerable effort to update the plugins to support each new C4D update. How much is a monthly subscription worth for a plugin? Difficult to decide. Since if it is a plugin that does just one thing, a user would rent it for one month, do their thing and cancel the subscription. So in this case those types of plugins may be higher priced, or on a yearly basis. But if it's a plugin that offers crucial features to your running scene then you need to keep updated all the time, so perhaps paying monthly and keeping up to date is not so bad. But what is that worth? $$$ divided by 12 months? Tricky choices to make. I think in the end most developers will most likely go for the outright larger payment (effectively 1 years worth) and provide support and updates for that year. This is what I currently do. But interested to know everyones thoughts on this. One last point to note is that we may see the end of free updates for C4D plugins going forward, especially C++ based ones. This would be in favour of a small yearly support fee. Every release now takes considerable effort to support and is no longer a trivial new licence key. Python based plugins may not have this issue as often, but not everything can be done in python, especially if you want optimised performance. Be nice to the developers people. They are here to help you and at the same time try to feed their families and pay the mortgage just like everyone else. So if they change their pricing or the way they do things, be nice. I would like to see the plugin development community thrive and grow right here on C4D Cafe. I don't want to see any of the current devs abandon their projects.

I have the same issue. I think it might be downloading some huge images every time perhaps? That big top image always seems to be the last thing to appear. Doesn’t seem like anything is caching at all. Really bad performance on my iPhoneX.

Results of the poll are now in. You can see them at the top of this post. Still pretty much a 50/50 split between those who will stick with R20 and those who will go to R21 perpetual or subscription. 754 is not a large number of voters, but still more than I have ever gotten from any other poll I have run. Thanks to all that voted!

I didn't address your actual question here... yes this is entirely possible. If the community wants to get behind the developers to create something bigger then it can definitely be done. I would be happy to take lead on the projects, get a few developers together and create plugins. We could run this through Patreon, which I have been looking at for myself as a way of funding development. It really isn't that difficult. On the cafe we have ~30k users? Imagine if every user donated $50. That would be 1.5 million. The Cafe could even take 10% (150k) of that to fund someone full time for Cafe work and pay for all your servers. That then leaves 1.35 million which could fund 5 or 6 people for just over 2 years (for the finished product, there will obviously be alphas and betas along the way). That would be a team of possibly 3 developers, documentation writer, tutorial creator and UX designer/artist. Then you still have all the business & accounting side of it as well. It just needs a project that people want and advertising to get people behind it. It's totally possible. Cost of a dinner out for some plugins? This is what I will doing on my own Patreon site. So if users get behind it and if the cafe allows discussions about development then yes, 100% something could be done. If people want painting, uvs, fluids, computational geometry, or anything else, then just feel free to let me know. For my fluids plugin that could be made into a serious tool with as little as 10,000 people donating $10 each. That's one years worth of development time right there. Or via Patreon with 1000 patrons paying $10 per month etc... it just comes down to the numbers, faith in the developers and the patience and support from the artists.

It was 100% the case a couple of years ago. Which is why I moved my conversations to twitter. I thought perhaps since you were selling your plugin via the cafe that you might have come to an agreement. Or perhaps things have changed now. Will wait and see what the official response is from the guys. No hard feelings or anything, I fully understood the reasons behind the ban. If it’s changed then great, if not then that’s ok too. :-)

That would depend on the terms and conditions of using C4D Cafe. Up till now the Cafe has frowned upon developers who talk about their products, to the point that posts even got deleted due to perceived free advertisement of their work. But if that policy changes then C4D Cafe could become a great place for developers to come, share ideas, share work on their plugins and get feedback from artists on their work. I think the C4D Cafe would be a much better place for it than the official MAXON plugincafe, since that is largely a support forum now and has lost its feeling of fun and community. Be warned though, if you do allow us to start writing about what we do here then you might start to get a flood of topics and threads.

Oh that's a shame. I thought everyone would be able to at least see the results but it appears not. As of now there are 689 votes and its pretty much 50/50 for those people staying with R20 vs those moving onto R21. Will update you again in 2 days when the poll is finished. Lots of great C4D artists on twitter. Worth joining just to follow what they are up to.

I am running a highly scientific poll over on twitter if anyone here would like to vote on it. I am using it to get a feel for what existing customers are likely to do in regards to staying with R20 or moving to R21 and beyond. Be great to get all your input on this. Thanks.

Just thought I would mention that you can still edit the UVs of the base mesh while it is being sculpted. The changes will be propagated through to the higher subdivision levels.