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Waves Discontinues Perpetual Licenses (UPDATE: They have gone Subscription Only)


Martin H.

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I got burned way back at v3.  I was hoping this would not happen again. I would like to be positive so, I am glad I have the waves plugins I have. They are perpetual license. You can’t get these any more. I only hope they don’t sabotage the plug-ins I have paid for perpetual licenses.  Only time will tell.  I still think is is a great set of plugins even though the company has some unscrupulous ideas about selling plugins.  This ploy is not for pros!!!  This is about the home hobbyist. No Pro is looking for a bunch of AI plug-in chains that don’t fit any particular situation that they are working on. You can only get close with ai chains. It just doesn’t work that way.  Most pros already have their go to start  up settings for chains. There are probably 500:1 amateur recordist to pros, or more. If you were selling plugins which group would you target?

google->
USA 21,631 Pro studios

I could not find home studio information so these are just my guess. 

google->27.98 million musicians in the USA in 2014.

 

 

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You can create pretty much ANYTHING with the cakewalk stock plugins and some very good free plugins. What is actually worth buying  apart from  Instruments like synth etc? Maybe Mastering like Ozone, correction like Melodyne and maybe some type of filter like FabFilter (fancy multiband and comp) even though you can do that in cakewalk stock like most of the FX. 

Waves Scheps Omni Channel was £30 now you got to pay £15 or £25 a month is bloody robbery.  Solid Sate Logic do the same £15 a month and i can see more following but they will suffer the wrath of the customers and plugin warehouses like plugin boutique that sold their products fore years making them popular. 

 

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I feel like they want to go out of bizness and don't know how to say fuk it we're done , gonna spend my money .... ala Dirk  ...kinda so they create their own death lol kinda EU ahahha

I was speaking with a rep today , asked him my case because iwas still on windows 8.1  and was about to wup to get plugin resize ...

He answered you can now sub and always be on date and have new plugin ..... i said i don't want to be update i wanna v 13 mlinimum and as for new plugin i went mercury because i wanted to be set and done .... and i added giving what's happening  in the world .. ... subs are the last thing people needs / wants .... ...

Never mind , i'm still amazed that Englosaxon think the whole world has the same mindset ....i talked about that to steven slate when i stsrated it ...and explainedhim that french are not like US guyz , we buy stuff ...we don't rent  .... it's societal ...

Anyway waves for me is a tool box (S1 imager here, de esser there , api eq on production stage here ect .... ) but now with uad Going native , some red rock stuff (best native api around imho with uad) i will not cry .

 

I should have boycoteed waves when some friends did so because of appratheid and illegal occupation , ya know what we 're doing nowdays with every russians , but at that time i said "i judge people dids , not their gov crap" ... but anyway , not the end of the world , i'll put this in my stock pile of "regrets investement" and i have plenty lol ..... they served me well , and i cna't imagine OSX guyz omg , next years it's other with nex os lol at least i can use my plugin until windows 12 lol 

Edited by Zo
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use

55 minutes ago, Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann said:

How to reverse the un-love of WUP in 2 steps:

  1. Eliminate WUP in the way that is most assured to piss people off
  2. Go back and allow WUP again

 

Was thinking about that , but nah ....  (all) bizness became crap , they all want revenu with zero risks .....

Lesson learned  .... hardware still rules .....  i'm gonna back up all my software , keep those with hardware auth (ilok , keys ect) that don't need internet (baecuse we're at their mercy)  and gonna minimise set up as much as possible .... 

It reminded me Plugin alliance move , their were like fuk we do it , after several weeks ok deals are back ..... lol  

NOW in this cases i swear waves is losing customers , but for life , like people ain't gonna come back ....

Thgey way they treat top bundles owner and pro's is just something we will not forget ....period !!

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I'm not saying it was intentionally done, I'm just amazed at how it's evolving, with that "petition to bring WUP back"

And my perspective of human nature is that, if Waves doesn't take too long to reverse course, people will curse and moan but will also forget after one or two new shiny plugins come out and Waves comes out with a few "cut down demo versions" freebies and sales to celebrate that everything is going back to normal

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39 minutes ago, Zo said:

Hardware still rules ..... 

Oui!  

After the Waves fiasco hit home yesterday, I boot up my Eventide Eclipse and started playing around with some of the amazing reverbs.  

Software is convenient though.

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16 minutes ago, husker said:

Oui!  

After the Waves fiasco hit home yesterday, I boot up my Eventide Eclipse and started playing around with some of the amazing reverbs.  

Software is convenient though.

Exact , just bougth myself a minilogue XD module , it's so beautyfull to have knobs and "perform" sounds .... but integration is reminind me why i went all ITB ...; that said it forces you to commit and fvalidate / finish stuff ....

 

@Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann WUP never been a bad thing , people got emotional to much , in fact , it was why i bougth mercury , was about to upgrade few dayz ago and while having a major update on all my pliugin (resize , new menu ect ..) i would have at the same time like 20 new plugin s .... (hence why i waited also) 

Wup sucks for small puchases , but imho for mercury they should keep it .... as most of pro studios have mercury and will wup anyway each time osx will have a new version ...

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3 hours ago, Lionel said:

They'd have to be complete idiots not to bring back perpetual licenses and WUP

Oh I think they've got a lot of experience in making dumb choices, so if there's an idiotic choice to be made.. these guys have the skills to do it 🤣

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I'm with Peter on B2B being a way different market than hobbyists.

One important thing about a business paying a monthly subscription fee is that the business can look at hard numbers and judge the value they are getting as a percentage of revenue. It's an equation, and a monthly subscription fee just goes along with other fixed monthly expenses like janitorial and rent. It even makes it easier to budget for. The money is for something that is used every day as a tool to make more money. Because the function of a business is to make money. If paying every month to use Pro Tools or Photoshop makes the business enough money, it's worth it, no question.

With hobbyists, on the other hand, the hobby of producing music with a computer may be something we only engage in a few days a week, or even less often. It may be only a small part of our overall music hobby. Someone might mostly play live, but once in a while put together a single or album or demo on their computer. And the function of a hobby is....to have fun. There is no equation. Subscribing to anything for fun brings with it a monthly assessment: did I get $15 worth of entertainment from my Netflix/HBO/Showtime/Computer Music/Sound On Sound subscription? Is there something else I could do with my $15 that would bring me more fun?

BTW, I don't remember who it was that chalked the trend toward software license by subscription up to kids these days with their Netflix subscriptions, etc., but subscriptions are not some newfangled thing. HBO turned 50 last year. Cable TV by subscription is older than that. Consumer computer software is a relatively newer thing, so it's been relatively more recent that companies have started considering subscription models for licensing. The model has been around a lot longer in the business computing world. I think 50 years ago, IBM (and their competitors) made you rent the whole computer along with the software that ran on it. It's an old idea that's being applied to a newer market.

Adobe and Avid get away with it to the extent that they do because so much of their customer base is the pro market, and in the case of Adobe, they have at least one unquestionable killer industry standard app in their suite, and the other titles, if they don't own the market the way that Photoshop does, they are at least good quality. Avid, on the other hand, think they have that, and enough of their users believe it that it may work for them. I have no idea how Pro Tools is doing in the marketplace these days; it sure seems to be less and less visible to me. I'm going by forum and magazine and YouTube attention. I suspect Pro Tools has very slow growth in the hobbyist market, which is of course way bigger than the pro market. And people in the hobbyist market turn into the pro market. I doubt that someone who has years invested in learning Cubase or FL Studio or Logic or REAPER is going to dump their favorite program in favor of Pro Tools once they start making money.

Also, never, ever believe that the people making the decisions at any size of company are inherently on the ball in any way. The landscape is littered with the shells of once great companies destroyed by the decisions of upper management. In my experience, if management at a company seem bright enough to dress themselves in the morning and not injure themselves while brushing their teeth, then they're above average.

In order to make this huge commitment, to go subscription-only, someone at Waves must believe they have enough leverage in the marketplace to pull it off, that enough people will think that having certain of their products is that essential. In my thinking, I don't see that they do. There are just too many good alternatives. Waves used to be considered a top-tier brand, but I don't know how true that is any more. In terms of respect, I think that there are multiple companies whose plug-ins are more highly regarded. Brainworx/PA, iZotope,  FabFilter, IK Multimedia. If I had to choose a company to subscribe to their product line, it would NOT be Waves, any of the others I mentioned would be above Waves on my list.

A question: has anyone checked out the terms to know if the subscription is the same Waves single seater? Wouldn't that be wonderful, if for your $25 a month you're limited to one computer? Go Waves. I've never bought a single one of their products except one round of WUP to get a couple updated. The only ones that interested me were TrueVerb, which was my go-to before OrilRiver came out, MetaFilter, which I've never actually used in a project due to single seat license, and Element 2, which made its way onto exactly one song. I was giving it a chance because I felt some sort of obligation to check out the shiny object.

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29 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

Also, never, ever believe that the people making the decisions at any size of company are inherently on the ball in any way. The landscape is littered with the shells of once great companies destroyed by the decisions of upper management. In my experience, if management at a company seem bright enough to dress themselves in the morning and not injure themselves while brushing their teeth, then they're above average.

This is quite possibly the most cynical thing I've read today.. also the most accurate thing for the day too! Haha.. Your overall post was all on the money, but I definitely had a laugh reading this part in particular 🤣

There's a lot of old dinosaurs mentality where they still think they're king and haven't reassessed the current market and competition which is definitely a recipe for running the companies into the ground.

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