avasopht wrote: ↑12 Mar 2021
I've been using it for nearly 19 years now. That means that in my backup harddrive I have 19 years worth of material that can only be opened in reason standalone.
There is absolutely no conceivable way Reason Studios would be stupid enough to think they could push users like me onto RRP by doing what you've suggested.
They'd lose them for good.
I explained in one of my earlier posts - no, they would not!
Assuming you're a perpetual license holder - which is the case for 100% of people having "years worth of material" - you're not gonna leave because:
a) you can still open your old projects in last Reason DAW version you have license for;
b) you'll keep upgrading the RRP, at least occasionally, to retain access to REs you've invested in while the underlying OS and hardware make previous versions non-functioning; what's $150 every 2-4 years if you've sunk $2-3k in REs that you can't sell?;
c) you'll perhaps buy an odd instrument, FX or Player because why the hell not? you're paying anyway! and let's face it - they're pretty good a lot of the time, too!
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Sure, some people will simply stop using anything Reason just to spite them, but that's not gonna be the majority.
Also remember it's not Props at the steering wheel anymore, so they don't have any emotional ties with the "old" users. As a VC, what they care for is a business model that has a chance of generating steady and hopefully growing revenue stream going forward. That's gonna be covered by Reason+ subs & RE sales, not by cranky Reason DAW users who demand track folders, user-definable keyboard shortcuts and track freezing. Guess what - with RRP they've outsourced all of that to other devs
They're probably also considering alternative revenue streams, hinted at by their CTO at Juce conference in 2019, e.g. running RE devices on hardware and in the web. Notice, hardware units don't need sequencer or mixer, and all the demos of web-based stuff from them was always just the rack, too.
Ok, I've "argued myself into oblivion" by now
It's very likely, as @EnochLight says, that Reason was
always mainly about the rack and it's just me who really liked the whole package and is sad to see it go... I'm not one of those people who'll sound-design in Bitwig, arrange in Live, mix in Studio One and master in ProTools. I'm more of the one-DAW-per-project person and I fear it won't be possible with Reason anymore. And no other DAW felt a complete, perfectly integrated environment like Reason does.