EnochLight wrote: ↑28 Jan 2021
I didn't buy. It wasn't out of malice. I just found what I needed inside Reason.
ShelLuser wrote: ↑28 Jan 2021
The thing you're missing is that Reason Studios control the RE market. If they think an RE developer is entering or threatening their revenue then they reserve the right to kick them out. Oh wait, I worded that wrong
If they think that an RE developer is
violating their code of conduct then they reserve the right to kick them out. Don't forget that they're selling a service, but just because you bought into it doesn't give you any guaranteed rights to your spot.
How is that (a fair) competition?
There is none! Because in the end Reason Studios always wins.
I never said the competition was fair, BTW. Obviously RS has an edge. My entire point is: a Reason+ subscription service
option does not change things for third party devs just because it comes with a bunch of RE's (assuming they eventually do add the ability for R+ subs to purchase third party RE's, as I understand - according to the FAQ pointed out to me will be soon).
And there is it!
The crucial line that entirely undermines your stated opinion and supports the facts I presented:
" I didn't buy. It wasn't out of malice.
I just found what I needed inside Reason."
Exactly!!
By giving people everything they think they need in Reason, there's no real incentive to investigate alternatives, often better alternatives. And when you're spending £20
every month just to be able to load a songfile, you're going to make damn sure you make full use of what you've been given in Reason first before you ever look at the Shop, especially when they're also going to be continually bombarded with more free "high quality" 'ID8 in a Combinator' patches on a weekly basis. Absolutely, a minority of well-off power-users will look in the Shop, and a few purchases will be made, some of them outside of sales, I'm not suggesting zero shop revenues here. But your—sorry for the perjoative—average joe, it'll be at best look but don't touch.
I don't take it personally, honestly! I don't mind if you buy or don't my products, that's not the point, though of course I'd haved liked you to have every one! But that right there is the free market: you chose mine or another third party dev. But third party devs as a
group,
we can't compete with RS when they wilfully undermine us and offer mostly inferior products, but usually good enough, or really, yes, more specifically it's
good-looking enough that people don't feel the need to buy anything else. They mostly use good visual design to mask surprisingly questionable or half-arsed feature-sets.
ReasonStudios want, nay,
desperately want more third party devices in the shop. Because that 30% is free literally (give or take a few cents of infrastructure costs), free money. So long as at least one person buys it they earn money on in it, of course they want as much in the shop as possible, with as high a % take as possible. Gorilla Editor was a big win for them because it opened the doors for masses of extra content produced extraordinary cheaply by new entrants (and yes, I've produced FX stuff in Gorilla too, but never the basic modules simply reskinned). As a result, it also tends to very samey. Regardless, quality doesn't matter to them, but quantity does, hence why they're happy with obvious copyright infringemnt like Softphonics, so they earn both on our stuff and their stuff. That's why it's unfair competition, we're trying to compete with RS. It's totally different to me competing with let's say, Turn2On. His chorus device is the Gorilla Chorus Module with a couple of filters stuck after it. People can freely chose based on cost or what they perceive as better sound. I think they'd be insane to buy that, but I can't be upset, it's cheaper than mine because mine is far higher quality so I think I should charge an appropriate price for that, and that's fair competition against another dev: he's on the same field I am, sometimes I score, sometimes he does. But for every goal I get two points on the board, but he only gets one. C'est la vie. Meanwhile RS earn half a point on both.
But neither he nor I get a cent of Quartet, which RS
also produced in Gorilla Editor,
for pretty much no significant development cost just to quickly bump up the Reason 11 feature list and quite intentionally to piss me off because they specifically used the term "BBD", even though it's not a BBD. A BBD chorus is a chorus produced by using a BBD. Gorilla's IDL chorus module is not suddenly a BBD chorus because they've stacked four of them (which wouldn't really work well as they wouldn't be synced correctly). Or maybe they didn't even do that and it's literally just the basic 4-voice chorus module in Gorilla Editor with a couple of filters stuck after it. (Filters that, incidentally, are ... well, "buggy" would be harsh, but I had an exchange of views with uJam questioning their behaviour and I still think it's iffy
) So let's be clear: Quartet's use of the label "BBD" is intentionally misleading, to suggest it's the same style and quality of chorus as Chenille. It is not.
So by offering that and pretending it's a "special type of chorus" (MHG's exact words on Test Pilot forum), he was willfully undermining our real and hard work. It's disheartening. He could have reached out to us and said, "we want to add a really good new chorus to Reason, could we license your Chenille codebase?" I'd have made a bit more money, Pitchblende would have received more money, and every Reason user would instant access to what is still the best true chorus available for Reason.
Instead, what people actually got was the
exact same chorus they'd have got if they bought any other chorus released in the previous two years, just with a couple of filters in slightly different order.
So, now both me and Turn2On lose out on a potential sale to every user who might have wanted an alternative chorus. They see "BBD" on the Quartet label, then see "BBD" on mine and they'll think "oh, well, I already have a BBD chorus" even though they don't. So RS are cutting off their nose to spite me by being dishonest about the product, yet by doing that they now also lose half a point on a potentially lost Chenille sale. This is the level of stupidity we're dealing with at RS these days.
It's one thing to compete against other devs in an open playing field but PH/RS have actively worked to undermine us. Scuzzy and I were working on a BBD Flanger. Then they released Reason 11. And you know, our testers all agreed it sounded so much better than the PoS crap they knocked out, and ours offered some really unique functionality in the Reason space. Now, I'm less sure Sweeper was using Gorilla phaser/flanger module as I didn't try it myself, but it seems likely given Quartet definitely is (if it isn't, then they've literally copied it right down to the value ranges). Even if Sweeper is hand-coded, it'll be copied straight out of the pages of Pirkle.