Kays Alatrakchi wrote:
It might also be they run such an efficient and tight ship compared to most others, that at $300, Resolve is still profitable.
There's such a thing as saturation, though. Are they selling 333% more seats? That's what it would take to maintain the same revenue, maybe even higher since some costs are fixed, like shipping, packaging, etc.. And assuming they do sell a lot more seats, once those sales are made, there's no more revenue, only support costs. BDP has never sold an upgrade for Resolve or Fusion, right?
But even so, I find it hard to believe it's profitable. Again, speculation... Lets say BDP nets $150 per sale. Look at this support forum, they have 32K users including bots. Let's assume 3/4 of those are either using the free versions of Resolve or are using another forum (like they only care about broadcast switchers). That means that BDP has ~8K customers for Resolve over ~5 years (which assumes they had zero customers in 2012, which we know is false and thus inflates the numbers). That's 1600 sales per year. With the price cut, maybe sales triple? Remember, those ~8K users won't be buying again, so they're not in the market. So assume 4800 sales per year. That's $720,000 in revenue from Resolve. Not bad, but how many staff do they have dedicated to Resolve, and how much does it cost to support them? Let's say it costs $200,000 per developer per year. That means there could only be 3-4 developers for Resolve for it to be profitable. I'm pretty sure they have more.
As I said before, maybe they don't care because they know that Resolve moves DeckLinks or whatever, and those get upgraded often enough to make the whole thing profitable via a software/hardware business synergy. But if that's what it takes, that doesn't bode well for Fusion and especially for Generation.
Kays Alatrakchi wrote:
Lastly, about the Resolve/Fusion fusion, what I mean is that I'd like to see the two applications become one eventually; in the same way that many of us are merging into becoming multi-skilled professionals who prefer to stay in the same app for all of our tasks if possible.
I can't see that happening. Resolve breaks BADLY when you do anything complicated in it, at least in the Color panel. Fusion and Resolve also have wildly different means of handling images. The only way I see it happening is Resolve scrapping the Color panel and replacing it wholesale with Fusion, but that's going to cause a huge disruption for existing Resolve users, so I don't see how it could possibly be worth it.
Rather, I think Resolve should just add scripting (I can't believe it's 2017 and this is still a thing) and let Fusion and Resolve run next to each other and communicate metadata and a shared memory pool for images. Also, Fusion should have a 100% pixel perfect superset of every tool in Resolve so that any Resolve Color tab operation can be duplicated in Fusion. You should have the ability to select a node tree in Resolve and copy/paste it to Fusion and get identical (to at least half float precision) results.