Just found this out:
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ouch for all the people that invested in it.
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The most important date: February 1, 2021 End of access to ArtCAM 2018 for customers with active subscriptions. So really you have until then.
I’d love to say that this is a surprise, but it isn’t, in retrospect. A-D has been acquiring new products and other companies since their inception (they didn’t start in CAD, but that became their focus as they dropped the original philosophy of distributing and supporting other developers software), and have been dropping products, both their own and those acquired, regularly. There are a few others I would not be surprised to see deprecated and end-of-lifed in the next few years, especially as they push deeper into the subscription model and roll more features into the cloud-based products like Fusion.
Yeah, I seriously considered getting Autodesk Designer, 'cause I was desperate for an updated vector editor, but fortunately resisted out of concern over how Autodesk treats their customers. Fortunately we now has Serif’s Affinity Designer.
Still have a perpetual license for Autodesk Sketchbook 2011, but couldn’t bring myself to buy into their last perpetual license (at least they had the decency to announce it).
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You know, I guess I think of my software tools like something in my toolbox, literally. When I buy new hardware, I get the software I know I’ll need – that runs locally. Except for security updates, I don’t typically update–I freeze everything as is and know that what I have, I will continue to have and be able to use until my hardware fails.
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Lest this turn into an A-D bashing thread, I do use a number of their products, and have for years, but long ago realized that most software vendor subscribed to the planned obsolescence model, due to the need to maintain an income stream. As purchasers have become more savvy (we don’t need to buy an upgrade every year-- any improvements we care about will be overshadowed by new flaws and incompatibilities) and market more saturated, the subscription model with the benefits (to the vendor) of cloud storage and cloud services is the tool to maintain that income stream.
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Affinity Design is amazing!
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not sure why it shouldn’t be an Autodesk bashing thread, they deserve every electron of it…
I have been a used/user since AutoCAD ver 2.52, Max when it was 3D Studio, all kinds of add ons, etc, etc, etc… WITHOUT EXCEPTION, they all had missing features, bugs, etc which were never really addressed, you simply had to work around them… WITHOUT EXCEPTION, they had extortion-level pricing for their products, during a career when it was nearly impossible to get bosses to go with any other alternatives…
WITHOUT EXCEPTION, they have followed the Micro$oft, Google model of ‘product development’, where they buy out competitors and then snuff out the product… been doing that since day one… useless ‘upgrades’ that have ‘new’ features 99% of us will never use, simply to get you to kick in another couple thousand EVEN THOUGH AutoCAD Lite from 1980 would STILL do what you needed to do, IF they ‘allowed’ you to use it without changing the file format to screw you over…
NOW I’m screwed over on my ArtCam subscription, JUST when I was getting used to it ? ? ? thanks autodesk, you always make my life easier…
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