[qppo]

I know of a few shops that took VC money. The big problem isn't the market size so much as how slow the market moves. The product lifetime of a plugin is around a decade. And users hate subscriptions. And it's really hard to determine the value you add to your customers. And no one wants to pay you.

It's basically a terrible place to be a developer in it for the money. Really fun work otherwise. The cool gigs are the ones where you build custom plugins for someone's crazy idea.

In consumer applications, plugins are used all the time for prototyping before you go to hardware. MATLAB is way too slow for anything useful.

[nil-sec]

The success of splice would disagree with your notion that “users hate subscriptions”. Given the horrendous price point of many of these plugins it seems to be perfect for a subscription based model. To me it always seemed there is more of a pushback from the industry producing vsts than from the consumers.

[qppo]

Splice's numbers aren't public so I can't comment on their success. Avid's are, and they had a terrible quarter - and they're the poster child (alongside Adobe) for subscription licensing in creative software. But I'd be interested to see what the breakdown in revenue is for plugin licenses versus preset/sample packs (bit of a blade & razor model there).

The price points really aren't horrendous if you consider how expensive the engineering is, how little demand there is, and how long you need to maintain a product. You aren't being ripped off by spending a couple hundred bucks on a plugin. I think we'll end up at a place where everything is a subscription, but I can tell you from experience that it creates friction for the users.

[nil-sec]

Agreed. The business model seems to be to give access to the rent to own deals via the sample subscription fee. Don’t think they make any money of their plugin deals. I’m also not arguing it’s too expensive or a rip off. But it’s still a large amount of money for software, in the private space at least. The rent to own thing seems like a smart tool to get rid of the barrier of entry.

[mrstumpy]

Slate Digital is subscription and seems to be doing well. I think the SSL native plugins are pretty popular and also subscription.