Waves moves to subscription only

C-Suite products have actually been around for years from a company called Cedar. The C-Suite is just a marketing name created for UAD. And those UAD versions are really old that have been available from Cedar for years.

Not that they don't work well, but in many people's minds other options like iZotope Rx have surpassed them, or at least compete strongly with them. But Cedar was always in the TV/Film postproduction world, not in general music industry. 

UAD's have value precisely because you can use them low latency during tracking. Take that Apollo system away and you may as well look at other noise reducing options. 

Need to reduce color, high pass to prevent pumping on bass, and add a lil bit of the warmth slider to compensate for the brightness ime

I wonder if waves somehow hurt itself by constantly creating new plugins instead of adding features on their old ones. It's amazing that some of their plugins haven't changed in 20+ years.

Rather than update and add new features (like fabfilter pro-q > q2 > q3), waves realized it was more profitable to get people to buy the latest new plugin. This would also allow WUP to be charged on four plugins with minimal features instead of one packed with features. Alternatively, more plugins meant the chance to market bundles with "50+ plugins!" People buy them, use three plugins and pay wup for the entire bundle.

Then the market became saturated and extremely competitive. Waves cannot come up with enough ideas for users to buy.

Now Waves has 220+ plugins to constantly maintain with OS and UI tweaks (like re-sizing) and their userbase probably spends almost all their time on the top 20.

Plus with apple silicon finally happening, it doesn't look like people would have had a need to WUP for a while after the change.

Waves grew their company horizontally with more and more products. Eventually that model was going to hit a limit and that moment may have been reached.

FabFilter grows vertically with a small number of products but each gets better and better - "growing upwards". It may mean FF never became enormous like waves but that model is sustainable.

Fwiw, Acustica Audio has been growing horizontally and I think they're eventually f'd. They've admitted "free upgrades" means new products are much more profitable than upgrading old ones so new products are what they develop.

They've modelled all the hardware out there and now are coming up with new combinations to get buyers (waves did this too). Now Acoustica has a massive line of products and UIs which are a pain to upgrade. Eventually they will run out of ideas to get buyers for new products. They're going to have to end "free upgrades" at which point there will be a customer meltdown.

I've found this time and time again - "ooh, I think I need to buy another plug-in to perform this function. No, hang on, there's a JS one bundled with Reaper that does exactly what I need"

The original guys behind Waves, I have no doubt, made themselves multi millionaires out of their company.

Like Avid they were there at the start, they were selling mega buck TDM plug-ins going back decades when competition was very light on the ground.

This almost looks like a “pension top up”

Put the whole catalog up on a server, charge 25 bucks a month access - add a billy wiz kid AI to stay on trend a few new plug-ins by CLA every now and then.

I wonder with these companies when they’ve already made such relatively large sums of money what motivates them to keep going.

This radical move by Waves certainly looks like they don’t care anymore about staying competitive.

It’s like here’s Mercury for the cost of a curry and beer each month - take it or leave it.

Hard to understand any other way.

I think I might subscribe and revisit some plugs I used to love using, and there’s a whole heap I’ve never tried but always wanted to.

Having had my fingers burnt by Emagic, Apple, TC and to some extent UAD there’s was no way I was going to drop the capital on buying Mercury.

25 bucks a month (thankfully) isn’t an issue for me.

If I’m not getting any great value, I’ll cancel my sub.
(I’ve done that with lots of other things)

“Dear Waves community,

Over the past few days, many of you have expressed concerns about our decision to discontinue perpetual plugin licenses and our move to an exclusive plugin subscription model. I would like to start by apologizing for the frustration we have caused many of you, our loyal customers. We understand that our move was sudden and disruptive, and did not sufficiently take into consideration your needs, wishes, and preferences. We are genuinely sorry for the distress it has caused.

After respectfully listening to your concerns, I want to share with you that we are bringing back the perpetual plugin license model, side-by-side with the new subscriptions. You will again be able to get plugins as perpetual licenses, just as before.

In addition, those of you who already own perpetual licenses will once again be able to update your plugins and receive a second license via the Waves Update Plan—again, just as before. This option, too, will be available alongside and independently of the subscription program.

We are currently putting all our efforts into making perpetual licenses available to you again, as quickly as possible. In the meantime, you can keep-up-date on this webpage, where we will post real-time updates as they are available.

I would like you to know that we are committed to you, our users. We listened to your feedback, and we will continue to listen to you. Waves is a company filled with users and creators, just like you, and we are all as passionate about the products as you are. With this in mind, we will strive to find the way to make things right by you, and hopefully regain your trust.

Thank you for your feedback and continued support—I wish you all the best,

Meir Shashoua
CTO and Co-Founder
Waves Audio”

Well that whole idea didn't hold water.
Will Waves finally break, from their Titanic mistake?
Now that they went overboard?
Chris

I think they legitimately underestimated how bad the response would be, and/or they felt like they *had* to change to the subscription model with no warning because of something financial that we don't know about.

I can't imagine that they would have burned a couple decades of goodwill over a PR stunt.

Guessing they burned a few major bridges no matter what and people won't be going back anyways. That was a shit roll out. They could have gone about that in so many different and better ways. They will have lost a lot of customers from this.

I got the email too. Interesting to say the least. I think the amount of universal negative feedback they got really made them think twice. Subscription only, after having perpetual licenses was corporate suicide.
We will see how this all unfolds. I still wish they would update the code on some popular plugins. The gui update was good, but they still need to update the code.

Bridge burned here. Glad they are reversing their minds, but unfortunately, they made it all too clear that their priority is greed. Too many other great options out there.

Funny, I still haven't gotten the email...