Blackmagic Forum

*crickets*???? or announcement of 8.5?

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IBC in September is usually when Fusion developments are announced.

BDP has a booth at Siggraph, and Fusion probably makes more sense there than any other BDP product.

yeah just got the mail.. waaah waaah.. no new Fusion. Resolve 14 though. Nuke 11 and AE 2017 updates at NAB were announced.. probably a good place for some Fusion info since it appears to be the right forum.

Any chance BDM follow the new pricing scheme (read:price drop ) they introduced with Resolve 14 and announce the same for Fusion Studio? A Resolve/Fusion Studio bundle for, say, $500 would be very nice...

Mario Kalogjera wrote:Any chance BDM follow the new pricing scheme (read:price drop ) they introduced with Resolve 14 and announce the same for Fusion Studio? A Resolve/Fusion Studio bundle for, say, $500 would be very nice...

Wild speculation ahead...

Grant didn't just announce a price cut, he announced a licensing model change. Resolve (plus Fairlight SOLO + 3DAW) for $299 retail doesn't make any sense at all. I wouldn't be surprised if Resolve 15 required an upgrade license or subscription or something of the sort. Almost every competitor does this already. If the licensing model does change, then it would make a lot of sense to reduce the upfront costs on new licenses and it would make sense that Fusion would be a part of that model.

Hypothetically...
Someone who bought Fusion 6.x with subscription for $2500 gets Fusion 7 and 8 and 9 for free. Someone who bought Fusion 7.x for $995 gets 8 and 9 for free.
Someone who bought Fusion 8 for $995 gets 9 for free.
Someone who buys Fusion 8.5 for $295 gets 9 for free.
Someone who buys Fusion 9 for $295 is still getting a great deal.
FusionX costs $200 per year.
Under this scheme, most users probably feel like they got a good deal. Maybe there's a 12 month grace period on FusionX for anyone who has a legacy 7-9 dongle to sweeten the deal.

I can't see how the business would work otherwise. Fusion isn't driving hardware sales the way Resolve/Fairlight does. There's no Fusion panel (but there could be, Generation too!). You don't need a DeckLink to get fullscreen output. You don't use Fusion to do live switching/grading/effects for multicam events (but maybe someday!).

Selfishly, I welcome a $299 Fusion Studio license, not because I want to save money on Fusion, but because I want more Studio users as customers of my plugins.

I just hope they keep showing Fusion some love and it doesn't get left by the wayside. Its a good product that is really close to being a great product but it will die with out some serious updated features. Integrated 3D tracker and performance optimisation, error logging, usability improvements and bug fixes are a must, things like VR tools, better warping/paint tools would make it a real contender.

Chad Capeland wrote: Resolve (plus Fairlight SOLO + 3DAW) for $299 retail doesn't make any sense at all. I wouldn't be surprised if Resolve 15 required an upgrade license or subscription or something of the sort. Almost every competitor does this already.

I think Blackmagic's main drive is market domination. The price drop of Resolve is a direct jab at Adobe, and they make it very clear in their marketing materials. It only makes sense that Fusion Studio will also get a price drop soon, as well as other functions to make it highly desirable for AfterEffects and Nuke users.

In some ways, the new Resolve also begins to pit itself against Pro Tools for audio, so nothing is off the table.

I see Fusion transitioning into more tight integration within Resolve, and hopefully addressing some of its shortcomings like the current lack of a 3D camera tracker.

Black Magic's trick is that its revenue comes from selling giant volumes of hardware products, like 30,000 converters at a time to huge customers. So its essentially subsidizing a software development team that's larger than the teams dedicated to Nucoda, BaseLight, and Mistika combined.

It's a huge advantage for BMD that has pretty much all of the high end post tool developers rethinking their strategies.

Rakesh Malik wrote:Black Magic's trick is that its revenue comes from selling giant volumes of hardware products, like 30,000 converters at a time to huge customers.

Exactly. Very similar to Apple. Eventually even Microsoft had to change their strategy and subsidize their software-only model with hardware.

Nice thing about hardware --> can't be pirated!

Kays Alatrakchi wrote:

Rakesh Malik wrote:Black Magic's trick is that its revenue comes from selling giant volumes of hardware products, like 30,000 converters at a time to huge customers.

Exactly. Very similar to Apple. Eventually even Microsoft had to change their strategy and subsidize their software-only model with hardware.

Nice thing about hardware --> can't be pirated!

But that only works if the software creates demand for hardware. Resolve does that. Fusion does not.

Chad Capeland wrote:But that only works if the software creates demand for hardware. Resolve does that. Fusion does not.

Which is why I think that a Resolve/Fusion fusion (pardon the pun) is unavoidable.

Chad Capeland wrote:But that only works if the software creates demand for hardware. Resolve does that. Fusion does not.

What's the next big potential Fusion revenue source then Chad? Cloud rendering with SAAS (software as a service) provided on demand render nodes then?

Cheers,
Andrew

Kays Alatrakchi wrote:

Chad Capeland wrote:But that only works if the software creates demand for hardware. Resolve does that. Fusion does not.

Which is why I think that a Resolve/Fusion fusion (pardon the pun) is unavoidable.

As a bundle? Not sure that makes sense, as that would just reduce Fusion related revenue.

Andrew Hazelden wrote:

Chad Capeland wrote:But that only works if the software creates demand for hardware. Resolve does that. Fusion does not.

What's the next big potential Fusion revenue source then Chad? Cloud rendering with SAAS (software as a service) provided on demand render nodes then?

Cheers,
Andrew

Well, there is an opportunity for that. Thinkbox is now owned by Amazon and has a very good service that allows BDP to see revenue from EC2 applications. Charge $0.10 per hour per instance or whatever. Would it be significant revenue? Probably not. But it would be an excellent service for users and would open Fusion up to new markets. Right now Nuke has the on-demand image processing market cornered, and the only reason why is they made the licensing work.

I've long wondered what would happen if you could make a FPGA device for Fusion that does image processing, not just I/O. GPU's have largely filled the role, but BDP has a lot of expertise in FPGAs and could sell a card that speeds up certain operations. Think Red Rocket type device. But would it be worth it? They seem to be content to promote multi-GPU machines for Resolve stations, so I doubt they think it would be viable to promote their own FPGAs over commodity GPUs. But BDP doesn't see any revenue when a Resolve user buys 4 P6000's for their workstation.

BDP could operate an asset store. Sell footage, macros, plugins, scripts, tutorials, etc.. This has potential to be significant revenue.

They could introduce premium products, like The Foundry does. Dimension, Connection, and Generation were once like that. Sell a niche add-on for $500 or whatever.

Chad Capeland wrote:I've long wondered what would happen if you could make a FPGA device for Fusion that does image processing, not just I/O. GPU's have largely filled the role, but BDP has a lot of expertise in FPGAs and could sell a card that speeds up certain operations. Think Red Rocket type device. But would it be worth it? They seem to be content to promote multi-GPU machines for Resolve stations, so I doubt they think it would be viable to promote their own FPGAs over commodity GPUs. But BDP doesn't see any revenue when a Resolve user buys 4 P6000's for their workstation.

I think something like an adaptation of the existing NVIDIA Quadro VCA appliance concept aimed at Fusion compositors would be pretty cool.

It would give the possibility of a redo of the SGI Onyx 2 + INFERNO like super-suite for hybrid 2D and 3D comping with amazing compute power. Not likely to happen, but it would certainly be neat to see.

I certainly like the idea of a Red Rocket type device. Maybe it could be a dedicated PCI-E card of Ultimate, or something similar to Imaginasion's PowerVR Wizard GR6500..

An accelerator card with the ability to have ray traced rendering directly in Fusion and real time keying, color correction, loader caching etc... would certainly be worth a premium.

Ryan Bloomer wrote:I certainly like the idea of a Red Rocket type device. Maybe it could be a dedicated PCI-E card of Ultimate, or something similar to Imaginasion's PowerVR Wizard GR6500..

An accelerator card with the ability to have ray traced rendering directly in Fusion and real time keying, color correction, loader caching etc... would certainly be worth a premium.

I just don't know if BDP could sell at a profit a device that would be more cost effective for users than a GPU. Like Fusion can already do realtime color correction on 16K footage on a $150 GPU.

Before BMD thinks about developing hardware to go with Fusion, I think Fusion needs a serious boost in feature set. It's powerful, yes, but ultimately apps like Nuke and even AE are more dominating. There has to be a compelling case for Fusion to be even considered by studios, other than they have a free version or a $999 version. Also, I have a feeling people don't want to buy another card just to boost Fusion when every other software out there is relying more and more on the GPU. Slap a couple Nvidia cards in a workstation and you've potentially boosted speed across all of your design/production apps.

Also, I don't think the answer is to bundle Fusion with Resolve and call it a day. Many artists who need compositing software don't require editing software and vise versa. Resolve is continuing to be more feature-rich and having people reconsidering supporting Premiere, Avid or iMovie Pro. So far, I can't see too many people reconsidering their backing of Nuke or After Effects, in total. That doesn't mean people haven't moved to Fusion but by and large it hasn't happened.

BMD needs to show it's committed to the software and entice more users to *pay* for Fusion which will help with continued development through a revenue stream.

Jeff, I'm sure everyone wants Fusion to have rainbows and pixie dust, but the issue is one of a business model. Resolve isn't profitable at $300 retail for a perpetual transferable license that includes lifetime free updates. We can't expect Fusion to do better.

....it would be better, they dont change the price for resolve. 1000$ for that great software, was not much! But instead lowering the price, they should use the income to hire more Fusion-developers, to make Fusion great again!

Stefan Kirste wrote:....it would be better, they dont change the price for resolve. 1000$ for that great software, was not much! But instead lowering the price, they should use the income to hire more Fusion-developers, to make Fusion great again!

Yeah, that's why I speculated that the model would change. I don't think they're going to see sales for Resolve increase by 333% because of a price cut. It's just speculation on my part, maybe they have data that says that Resolve Studio users are 10x more likely to buy UltraStudio units or consoles or something and that will offset the lost revenue? But that's where it doesn't make sense for Fusion. Fusion Studio users aren't more likely to buy hardware, I assume.

Chad Capeland wrote:Jeff, I'm sure everyone wants Fusion to have rainbows and pixie dust, but the issue is one of a business model. Resolve isn't profitable at $300 retail for a perpetual transferable license that includes lifetime free updates. We can't expect Fusion to do better.

I am not 100% sure that Blackmagic is only focused on profit for products like Resolve and Fusion, but who knows for sure? It might also be they run such an efficient and tight ship compared to most others, that at $300, Resolve is still profitable.

I suspect that Blackmagic's reasoning behind Resolve and Fusion is to solidify their market leadership and add prestige to their brand while punching everyone else in the eye. Profit is not always the only motivator for business. For instance, big studios love their handful of artsy movies which lose money but win Oscars.

There is no doubt in my mind that Fusion is being furiously updated at the moment by a tight group of programmers who are focussed on pushing Nuke out of the way. I think there are challenges to Fusion that are probably not easy to overcome, but if we've learned anything about Blackmagic is that they do listen to their users and move fast.

More "resources" are not always the best approach. Look at Adobe or AVID, they have insane resources and yet seem to be so sluggish in their releases. Blackmagic seems to have learned the lesson that lean and mean can accomplish better results faster.

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.

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.

Resolve is essentially subsidized by hardware sales, since big customers will on occasion buy 30,000 BMD mini-converters at a time...

Chad Capeland wrote: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.

I know you don't mean it this way, but what you're basically saying there is that you think Blackmagic is run but a bunch of incompetent idiots who have absolutely no business sense whatsoever and are making pricing decisions based on what mood they woke up in.

Methinks that they know exactly what they're doing, and understand the complexity of running a multi-million (AU) dollar international corporation way better than you or I. I think they're on such steady financial footing that if they ever decided to go public, I'd be lining up to buy some of their shares!

Kays Alatrakchi wrote:I know you don't mean it this way, but what you're basically saying there is that you think Blackmagic is run but a bunch of incompetent idiots who have absolutely no business sense whatsoever and are making pricing decisions based on what mood they woke up in.

By that logic, no one should be making any feature requests, right?

I don't know anything about BDP's business, but it's entirely possible that Grant just LIKES software and chooses to use hardware sales to subsidize a software division that loses money. Or it's possible that Resolve and Fusion are moving to a subscription model. Or it's possible that the goal is market share in preparation for a sale. We just don't know. But I'm fairly certain that if Fusion Studio was cut to $299 it wouldn't be generating profit, just based on the scenario I mentioned.

Chad Capeland wrote:By that logic, no one should be making any feature requests, right?

Not sure how you arrived at that conclusion, but whatevs.

Kays Alatrakchi wrote:

Chad Capeland wrote:By that logic, no one should be making any feature requests, right?

Not sure how you arrived at that conclusion, but whatevs.

What's the difference between saying "Fusion should be a profitable product" and "Fusion should be more competitive with Nuke and After Effects"? Some may argue that it's not important that Fusion be profitable. Others may argue that Fusion should focus on becoming a better forensic security footage analysis tool. I don't think in either case someone is saying that the folks at BDP are incompetent idiots.

Chad Capeland wrote:What's the difference between saying "Fusion should be a profitable product" and "Fusion should be more competitive with Nuke and After Effects"? Some may argue that it's not important that Fusion be profitable. Others may argue that Fusion should focus on becoming a better forensic security footage analysis tool. I don't think in either case someone is saying that the folks at BDP are incompetent idiots.

Does it make sense for an end user to provide feedback and request useful new features from a piece of software; particularly if they're justified by real-world scenario examples?

Does it make sense for an end user to give business and financial advice without having the slightest inkling of what a company's plans and strategies are?


(One of the answers is yes, the other one is no...can you guess which one?)

Kays Alatrakchi wrote:Does it make sense for an end user to provide feedback and request useful new features from a piece of software; particularly if they're justified by real-world scenario examples?

Does it make sense for an end user to give business and financial advice without having the slightest inkling of what a company's plans and strategies are?

I wasn't giving advice to BDP. I was giving advice to end users. I was making speculation about the viability of BDP to provide support for a product without having economic incentive to provide support and how that may affect future products.

It would be no different from me advising users not to buy a Mac Pro. I'm not saying I know anything about the inner workings of Apple Computer or saying that I have better business sense than they do; I don't. But there's no difference between me suggesting that Apple may want to alter it's business to gain sales and me suggesting that Apple may want to alter it's product offerings to gain sales.

To answer your questions, I think both are equally valid feedback to give. Certain feedback for product or business may make no sense and may be uninformed, but we still see examples of both on this forum.

Don't want to be a case of "told you so" but Fusion's future is in being a tab inside Resolve just like Fairlight. It's beyond obvious that is the route they chose to go. Look at the effects inside new Resolve, those are pretty much standard 2D Fusion tools.

Resolve is going head to head with Premeire/After Effects combo but in a single package like HitFilm.

Huge downside of this approach is hell of a clutter in interface, even in Edit tab some options are represented as icons in tools pallet and some are in drop down menu even though they are very similar and could be grouped. It's a mess.

Couple of downsides for that, though...

1. Fusion doesn't have good tools. It has good backend.
2. Resolve has good tools, it doesn't have a good backend.
3. BDP would lose all the revenue from Fusion and Generation.
4. The UI for Resolve is a mess as-is. There's only so long you can make the menus and only so many hotkeys available.
5. The Fusion team has spent nearly 2 years making a new UI. That would be completely wasted.
6. Lots of customers would abandon Fusion. You could offset that with gains for Resolve, but it won't be the same customers that are looking for a visual effects solution.
7. Resolve lacks scripting, an SDK, support for most of the datatypes used in Fusion, and has a completely different model for network rendering.

If you want Resolve OR Fusion to move forward, taking the worst parts of each application and mixing them together for a year isn't the best approach. Especially if it's going to either cost more or be less profitable in the end.

I hope they don't put Fusion inside Resolve. I think the current workflow with Fusion connect is the way forward and despite a lack of initial interest from myself have found Fusion Connect really valuable in my workflow (I often Grade mid-low budget Features and do the VFX).

If BM are serious about Fusion they will keep it separate, Studios are the ones likely to pay for Fusion and they will have 50+ comp'ers working on the big films, they need a dedicated tool with a dedicated engine.

There are many reasons i can think off that make the implementation of Fusion into Resolve almost impossible the way things are.

A striped down version of Fusion is possible but i think that a full functioning Fusion tab inside Resolve would make everything unnecessary over-complicated. I don't believe that standalone Fusion is going away anytime soon.

It looks like Chad is sometimes reading BMD as a software-only company and that's why he can't make sense of its business strategy. There is a bigger BMD picture here to see and standard business models don't seem to apply with them.

Judging from myself, the attraction that BMD and its products have on me has increased tenfold the last year. I just bought a Resolve Studio license, some minor hardware for my cameras, i am ready to buy a Fusion studio license if a similar price reduction is introduced and willing to ditch my RED cameras for BlackMagic ones in the near future. I see similar impressions from other colleagues recently. So, considering where i was standing just one year ago on all these matters, i believe that the success of BMD is immense and unprecedented.

Miltos Pilalitos wrote:It looks like Chad is sometimes reading BMD as a software-only company and that's why he can't make sense of its business strategy. There is a bigger BMD picture here to see and standard business models don't seem to apply with them.

Right, I'm just acknowledging that at the current time, BDP is gaining market share. If they hit 100% saturation for Fusion (or Resolve, for that matter), they lose their entire revenue stream from software sales. It's like Ford selling a car that never breaks down. This is so cool that everyone buys Fords, everyone loves how awesome their Fords are. Ford puts every other car manufacturer out of business, then realizes they can't sell any more cars because they get no repeat business. Grant announced a new licensing model, and I wonder if that's their solution to this problem. After all, it's not like anyone is going to jump ship to another software because of it, because every other software (that isn't open source) is doing the same thing.

And as I mentioned before, this COULD work if they move hardware. Resolve has the ability to sell cameras, control surfaces, I/O cards, switchers, displays, etc.. I'm just wondering what Fusion could do to have the same impact. Unless BDP starts selling a VR camera or a starts pushing hardware for Generation, I don't know how else that would look like. Would you want a control surface for Fusion? It's not unheard of, I just don't know how modern compositors would take to it.

I also acknowledged that Grant might just LIKE having software around. It's not a publicly traded company that has to show certain numbers from each division to keep the board of directors happy. Maybe losing money in the interest of doing cool, fun stuff is perfectly fine.

And I'm not even saying they ARE losing money, maybe Fusion Studio sales are doing great. But eventually it will saturate the market and sales will slow. That's what I'm speculating about.

Chad Capeland wrote: But eventually it will saturate the market and sales will slow. That's what I'm speculating about.

But that assumes a static market which is not necessarily the case. For instance, I own Resolve Studio, but I have not yet been incentivized to consider buying Fusion Studio, am I part of, or outside the market? If Fusion Studio is lowered to $300, then it suddenly becomes a no brainer for me to purchase. Does that mean that the market for Fusion Studio just increased by one?

I suspect the market saturation for any given software is constantly in flux and not a fixed number. My guess is that there are plenty of Aftereffects users like myself who are not particularly interested in a $1000 price for FS, but would become customers at a $300 (or even $500) price tag.

I also suspect that there are plenty of people who don't even know that Fusion exists at all, but who could be potential customers.

Let's say BDP gets 10,000,000,000 orders for Fusion Studio tomorrow. They'd have no revenue from Fusion after that. The market is fixed in size when you consider a dongle to be a heirloom.

I suspect BM's current model for Fusion and Resolve is to increase its user base then switch to a more traditinal model of either subscription (which if personally find annoying) or paid upgrades. As Chad has pointed out it has its benefits during a growth phase but would appear to be ultimately unsustainable.

I really hope they don't go public, I think this would be the beginning of the end for them and a lot of the innovative things they are doing would not make it past the bean counters and share holders.

I am really hoping that BM show Fusion some love with the next release, its so close to being a real contender and has a great community behind it.

Chad Capeland wrote:Let's say BDP gets 10,000,000,000 orders for Fusion Studio tomorrow. They'd have no revenue from Fusion after that. The market is fixed in size when you consider a dongle to be a heirloom.

Actually, if they received 10 billion orders at $1,000, that would be about $10 trillion. I am fairly confident that they would be able to run the company providing upgrades for the product forever on the interest from the interest from the interest (which even at 1% would be about $10 million).

Not that it really matters as we have no inside knowledge of their plan, but they have not come close to saturating the market, so that is not really a problem. That means that as long as they sold enough copies a year to cover the cost of the developers and support, they would be fine. At the point that is no longer the case, or at the point those making decisions at Blackmagic Design decide they need more revenue, they could sell an upgrade to anyone who had not purchased a license in more than 2 (or 3, 4, 5, 6 etc) years. Just because they have made most upgrades free, does not mean that all have to be.

However, all this is just speculation as none of us who are not Blackmagic finance or corporate people have any idea of their costs, revenue or strategy.

I hope they continue to improve the product and make it a serious competitor to both After Effects and Nuke (as well as any other possible products). In the same way as I hope that Apple improves Motion in the same way.

Having more viable competitors is a good thing.

It's also interesting to note that the current $299 price of Resolve Studio is being advertised as "half the price of subscription services." This tells us much. Grant has been outspoken in his dislike of subscription software. I expect BMD will avoid a subscription business model for the forseeable future.

That pitch also tells us that BMD sees Adobe and Autodesk subscribers as the untapped market for Resolve.

Lee Gauthier wrote:It's also interesting to note that the current $299 price of Resolve Studio is being advertised as "half the price of subscription services." This tells us much. Grant has been outspoken in his dislike of subscription software. I expect BMD will avoid a subscription business model for the forseeable future.

That pitch also tells us that BMD sees Adobe and Autodesk subscribers as the untapped market for Resolve.

True. But the middle ground between free upgrades and subscriptions is permanent licenses with upgrade fees. We may not see a change from free upgrades for a long time, and for that we should be happy, but the new licensing option would make it possible.

Chad Capeland wrote:But the middle ground between free upgrades and subscriptions is permanent licenses with upgrade fees. We may not see a change from free upgrades for a long time, and for that we should be happy, but the new licensing option would make it possible.

Nothing in their current model prevents them from deciding that Fusion 10 (or 11, 12, or some other future version) will be a paid upgrade. Even if the license said all future versions of Fusion, they could simply call the new version something else (e.g. Fusion Xtreme) and still charge for upgrades when they feel it is warranted.