kitekrazy wrote: ↑10 Aug 2019
The issue here is you can't create an RE that is close to quality of the Kontakt engine. There is also another possible trend of developers not wanting to pay for the licensing fee to NI or Props.
Kontakt is the
de facto sample-player build format right now, it's not that it's inherently better in some magical way, it just got lucky when NI put a ton of money and resources into it. We could just have easily been talking about SampleTank or Gigasampler if IK or whoever had they developed their systems better first. Currently I don't think the gulf to Gorilla, a uJam system, not Props, is that wide on a
technical level—albeit there
are some exceptions regarding Gorilla's use
in Reason, which is a Props system, but NDA etc—the limitations are
mostly ones of scale/finance/visibility. NI are a 100m company. Everyone else isn't.
So while I don't really agree on the first point, in a tick list of things each can and can't do and depending upon the particular type of sample content, after all is said I'd have be brave play the Reason defence too much I suspect so I'll call it a draw
If I had to guess (and invariably I do), the failure of the big Kontakt devs to produce successful Reason conversions is less about lack of sample streaming, though of course that hurts, but the products were—to a product—fairly lazily converted by people who it appeared didn't really understand the Reason environment, and using an unfamiliar SDK for the first time to try and produce fairly large products that ended up with terrible looking devices with half-arsed features; that's rarely going to end well in terms of user reactions, which then causes them to disappear. Then the moment Reason supported Kontakt natively there's zero point in even bothering to convert in the first place.
Your
second point above, though, is very interesting. NI licensing is upfront payments
for a limited number of licenses, which both makes it a risky upfront cost BUT
it keeps prices for the major Kontakt libraries high, as devs know they have to get a return on each set of license purchases
before they ever see a fucking cent of revenue for themselves.
With PH/uJam it's different, you get a return from the start. The downside is with instant revenue it became a race to the bottom for some devs who've had literally zero appreciation of long-term economic viability of their businesses by undervaluing their products, forcing other devs to do the same to compete.
To compound the problem, and this applies to both the "normal" C++ RE SDK and the Gorilla side, I don't think developers objected to the substantial % PH take based on what Ernst's original announcement stated (or at least very much implied, we'd have to check the exact wording tbh, it was a long time ago
) they'd do - new devices would
mostly be via third party allowing PH to concentrate on developing the SDK and the Reason environment itself. That's really not what happened. By 2016 it was apparent SDK updates were occasional and threadbare, and most critically PH used the significant revenue income RE provides (due to getting a cut of every sale of every product by every developer) to effectively produce a constant stream of
directly competing devices at the high end (and in the last 12 months doing so even more cheaply by repackaging or licensing 15 year old samplesets in easy-to-produce Gorilla-based products for which they get 80% of the revenue compared to our 50%, who likes
them apples? (fwiw uJam get 20%). RE devs cannot compete with that (even if there's one or two who still think they can). The RE format is now on the cusp of being an IDT-based format for hobbyists only, and what the RE format could have been by now had they put the damn resources into developing that and reworking a few fundamentals like the GUI to improve rendering speeds for example (I mean the big USP in 2012 was the future-proofed support for hiDPI; but this was six years ago and still isn't been utilised. A USP is not a USP if one doesn't bloody use it) rather than supporting and recommending perfectly cromulent third-party products.