You know I respect you, and I totally understand your well-reasoned post. I am also a pragmatic person, BUT I’ve reached a point in life where there are some philosophical lines I have drawn in the sand. That’s a loaded conversation right there, one I would love to have around a fire pit someplace on a beautiful beach with a star-filled night sky and good drinks, and no mosquitoes bugging us.
Not to go too much more into it, as I think you understand my main points anyway, I believe subscription models for software like this are symptomatic of larger issues in society. I am tempted to launch into my full philosophy mode here and go on and on about this, but I’ll try to spare folks of too many more of my long posts.
We’ve seen so many mergers, bankruptcies, insolvencies, and so forth, in this market, that it’s a little miracle that Steinberg has been so stable amid this roller coaster.
Timo said:
Which is an incredible statement to make because to be ABLE to do that is a remarkable feat in this difficult market. I think Steinberg deserves a huge amount of respect… to “try to keep pricing stable” is amazing in this market, not to mention inflation!
And many of us (including myself) have often complained about “this or that” missing feature, or too many bugs, or not enough communication, etc… BUT it seems Steinberg has been doing a delicate balancing act for long time, probably pushed to the edge of what they can realistically do – like it or not – with the current business model.
Now it appears they’re quite good at this balancing act, since they obviously are still in business, unlike some of their competitors who are struggling financially to say the least. (Er-hem, Native Instruments being the latest big one in the news.)
But this also underscores the enormous pressures Steinberg is under and, well… reality is reality, things MIGHT change with regard to a subscription model. And thank you again to Timo for being honest about it.
I don’t want to cross any bridges yet, or overstate anything, or assume that any decisions have already been made, BUT business is business. Timo’s honesty and transparency here is very much appreciated, and I hope he keeps it up.
Clearly, there are people here – smart, talented, professional people – who are totally open to subscriptions, and/or they may not like them, but they’ll still accept them due to some net positive factors, or because they’ve already bought into the platform.
I am not going to join the subscription guys on this. Nope. This is my line for software licenses. But if the market forces compel Steinberg to do it, then so be it, that’s how life goes. I will respectfully part ways as I mentioned earlier.
This whole current subscription model trend in the DAW market has, in part, emerged and evolved out the SaaS (“Software as a Service”) model, which has become the dominant form of software development and deployment overall.
The wider trend includes planned obsolescence and massive telemetry models that turn our behaviors into marketing profiles, as we all know by now. The related philosophies and business models have invaded every aspect of society, right into privacy laws and freedom of speech. It’s a radical departure from prior models, and some of the consequences are quite obvious in society. I won’t get into those here. We all have our opinions about it.
Now it’s not all doom and gloom of course. There are benefits to the model. Everyone here is probably well-versed in the relevant issues, pros and cons, and ultimately, we’ve all had this discussion before to one degree or another. So I won’t repeat the different arguments. Many people – probably the majority of people – have also already acclimated to it.
But I’m not joining this philosophical bandwagon. I’ve drawn the line, and in my life I’ve increasingly drawn the line each year on different things, and it has actually made my life a little better in unexpected, sometimes joyful ways. And there is a minority of strange folks like me that have drawn the line in different markets and areas of interest, and some of these folks are pretty cool and doing just fine in their minority markets.
For example, some of us like to use things called “pens” to write strange shapes in sequence on paper that resemble words or sentences or notes or even musical notation. Some of us like actual “books” printed on actual paper and stored in strange things called bookshelves. Some of us like vinyl “records” with weird mechanical grooves in them that reproduce music through cool things called record players. Yes, you can still buy them!
Some of us like to pay for good quality musical instruments or studio gear and keep using it all for decades without having to update software or pay licensing fees or worse of all, subscription fees! What a strange idea! Who is the radical now? Some of us like to pay for software licenses and want to use them indefinitely as long as their computers keep working, without subscription fees. And yes, some people like to pay for computer hardware and keep on using it as long as it works, without some OS company arbitrarily deciding it’s now obsolete and condemning it to the recycle bin. And so forth, and on and on and on….
I promised myself I would not write another long post, and HERE I AM DOING IT AGAIN. 
I’ll quit here.
I respect your point of view, and this thread discussion has been great. Kudos to the Nuendo community. I doubt this conversation would be so elevated in other forums.
Let’s see what Steinberg decides to do. I respect Timo and the whole team at Steinberg. It’s a lot to balance all these forces and demands. I really believe they care about what they do (although some here might think otherwise), and I believe they care about their customers too. It sounds like IF they go subscription it will be because they genuinely believe they really don’t have another way forward to provide what the majority of their customers seem to want. I just hope they keep the communication going and don’t just drop a bomb on us.
Until then, I’m still excited for Nuendo 15.
Cheers to all!
Heck yeah! 
.
. It seems that in the cases of Cubase, Nuendo, Groove Agent and others that the yearly feature sets are incomplete, and that actual improvements to current workflows (which we have dependencies on) must share development resources with “features that will sell this years’ version iteration.” Sure, Cubase 15 had some feature introductions, but was it really a full version iteration? I personally don’t think so. Yes, it changed the way did some things, but I can’t identify what I can now do "better.”
