OTOY Forums

Well moving to the sub model for more than online-only services is pretty disappointing.
A recurring auto-update license should be no more than an option never mandatory for version upgrades.
Also earlier in the thread it was said that letting the aub expire would bounce the product back to an inferior outdated version instead of at least
keeping the last version that was accessible during the subscription period.
This is a total show stopper !
If you really want to force push the annoying Adobe model then at least you must give full ensurance that dropping the sub service will NEVER
invalidate anything other than online services and future updates.
Users MUST always be able to further use the last version before expiration even with online services disabled.

Otherwise this is a shoddy lock in scheme. Anyone still buying into that sort for a business is kinda setting himself up for the well
known M$-lock-in price and future contract modalities roulette with the customer probably betting his business on it.

Sorry but this new model does not cut it.
Would super have bought another upgrade with proper licensing conditions or even a sub if it was a fair deal instead of cheap lock-in scheme.

I'll stick with v4 or maybe move to a competing product unless you fix your licensing strategy before I loose interest altogether.

Inverse404 wrote:Well moving to the sub model for more than online-only services is pretty disappointing.
A recurring auto-update license should be no more than an option never mandatory for version upgrades.

...

Otherwise this is a shoddy lock in scheme. Anyone still buying into that sort for a business is kinda setting himself up for the well
known M$-lock-in price and future contract modalities roulette with the customer probably betting his business on it.

Sorry but this new model does not cut it.
Would super have bought another upgrade with proper licensing conditions or even a sub if it was a fair deal instead of cheap lock-in scheme.

I'll stick with v4 or maybe move to a competing product unless you fix your licensing strategy before I loose interest altogether.

Well said. This is pretty worrying stuff. Might want to fast-track that rent-to-own model you mentioned, Otoy.

A thought: Adobe's model justifies itself by "look at all the value you get with all the different apps", when most people only use a handful. Similar to your "all access" -- most people do not need to use all of the plugins, so such a value justification doesn't work. At least not for many users.

my personal opinion is that Otoy should review ALL of its sales / rental policy.
it is the most confusing system I have ever seen, it seems to be at the market, at the three card stand, where the dealer is definitely the winner whatever you do.
Do you choose this card? that one? no, this!
et voila.....
You lost.
Also this time.
why on earth should anyone buy a software that, from the beginning, openly show itself as outdated and free of future developments, for which ones, coincidentally, look, here is a new product.
wanna buy it?
Will it persist?
Who know?
Trust me.

We'll be revamping the shop page and replacing V4 with the release of 2019.1 stable (RC1 is coming next, so we are getting close). There wasn't enough time to do this with 2018.1.

With the release of Octane 2019.1, we will simplify and add value to the existing monthly/annual Octane Studio and Enterprise tiers, and also officially offer a perpetual Octane 2019.x option/upgrade/side-grade (with some limits, like no AA).

For how long will OctaneRender® Enterprise All-Access Annual Extension upgrades be at the discounted price?

Am being scared off investing until the dust has settled and we all know what's going on as it seems you're still finalising the pricing structures - what is a 'sidegrade'?

Hi,

sorry but the upgrade is not so clear for me...
At the moment I have:

3 standalone V4 licenses for 2 Computer and 1 Slave
2 C4D plugin V4 licenses

Now If I want to upgrade to 2018 and future 2019 version I need to upgrade to OctaneRender® Enterprise All-Access Annual Extension right?
But only for the 2 licenses of computer? Slave and plugin are included?


Thanks
S

Hi Stefano,
you need to purchase 2x All Access bundles, and you will end up with 2x Combo for Master, and 2x Standalone for the slaves.
In total, you will have:
4x Standalone
2x C4D plugin

ciao Beppe

bepeg4d wrote:Hi Stefano,
you need to purchase 2x All Access bundles, and you will end up with 2x Combo for Master, and 2x Standalone for the slaves.
In total, you will have:
4x Standalone
2x C4D plugin

ciao Beppe

Thank you very much Beppe!

hi @goldorak,

i have tried to make sense of it all, but short of reading all of the forum posts its kind of impossible to make heads or tails of all of this.
fwiw i bought into the two year enterprise sub. i was kind of forced to since i had a deadline and the last version actually broke octane for me so in order to finish the project i had to upgrade.
troubleshooting was not the luxury i could afford at that moment.

i have some questions. actually alot but let me try and put some into words.

you wrote:

We did V3.08, V4 and V5 in 12 months, and V6 with RTX is halfway done and early next year. So if you want those kind of updates every year multiply 3 x 75 and you have more cost than $179 year which is what it is on the shop page today. Also, V4 was free and still is, so amortize the upgrades from that perspective.

i have literaly no idea what this is about. what v5 and 6? isn´t the nomenclature 2018, 2019 etc? even so its june and i have not seen anything of 2019.1. what are you referring to here? if v6 is indeed 2019.1 then the "early next year" has been missed by quite a margin.


you wrote:

Perpetual licenses for 2019 will have limits: they won’t extend to services or bundles like extra All Access DCC plugins, cloud, headless and slave nodes, livedb2, RNDR Network, and will not be actively updated long term after initial release to fix future breaking driver and GPU hardware changes.

but what of v4 users in that case? gpu drivers will surely break things so what would be the solution here? in a year of two, with hardware and driver changes, having "v4 perpetually" will be moot.


example: otoy posted videos showcasing 2018.1 features which nudged me towards the sub (besides the project urgency and the broken v4 version i had)
i installed it expecting to play around with vectron and spectron. vectron was and is a mess. i can load a mandelbrot fractal whopdeefriggindoo. spectron, well i can put in a spotlight with a fog cone, but cannot see any changes with volume rendering compared to earlier versions.
i have no idea what i am doing in both of these cases but the documentation is still v4 which is absolutely disgraceful.

the august 2018 video advertised:
meshes being able to be vectorised into vectron objects.
vectron procedural primitives
boolean operations
osl graphs as nodes
vectron examples
polarized lighting.

nearly a year later, i cant seem to find any of these features present (unelss its all under the hood, doubtful). could you please point me to them as, like i said, there is not documentation to actually find and use these features. if they are not present, then all of this falls simply under false advertising category and you should be providing either complementary time or refunds. i will put a more official complaint, this is basically a rant.

i need to be blunt: being your user for a few years now, it is very clear to me that otoy as a company is thoroughly unfit to have a steady flow of stable versions and features in any sort of managable timeframe. infact every company from microsoft to autodesk to adobe is struggling with this, and the results are simply buggy software. since the whole subscription system is based on time, this leaves us, the users at an incredible disadvantage. with a regular scheme the constant wait is simply annoying, with a subscription system its a whole different ball game.

i have been there, waiting for the announced features for months upon months.
SaaS is surely attractive for much of the software companies but in the hurry to rake in the money and lock in the costumers, the "service" part is paid little attention to.
i actually gave you the benefit of the doubt and got onto the wagon and now feel more and more scammed out of my money. i know you guys are working hard but like i said the track record has been and remains abysmal.
as joss wrote it few pages back, octane always felt like half alpha half beta, never a stable software i have serious doubts that anything will change.

what remains is the fact that octane provides the most gorgeous looking images out there and it saddens me that you have taken this route. i, once again, have to look into alternatives.
best render quality, best support. (beppe is the king!) horrible management apparently.
i dont mean to be vitriolic or offensive, just trying to give a user perspective. hope you take it that way. on the whole i have nothing but the greatest respect for what you are putting together, but it does not seem that you feel the same way about your users.

crackfox

all true.

For many years, users have been active beta testers of all Otoy products. (long testing of RC versions + error correction of already stable versions)

and a new subscription system without a permanent license is stupidity and ridicule over users.