EnochLight wrote: ↑05 Sep 2021
EnochLight wrote: ↑03 Sep 2019
Hahah - this should be fun. Whoever thinks Props/Reason Studios will be bought by another company by 2021, , please earmark this thread and refer to it on
September 3, 2021. I'm willing to wager you were wrong, and
I look forward to dining on the blood of the fallen.
In all seriousness, here's my prediction:
1. Add VST 3 support in Reason DAW proper
2. Add the ability to handle 4K/high dpi graphics/scaling (in both Reason DAW proper, and Reason Plugin)
3. Add a new Combinator Mark 2 for Reason DAW proper with new features that also translate into use in Reason Plugin
4. Continue to trickle new features into the main sequencer that bring it closer to parity with other DAW
I don't see them porting all legacy devices to RE. I just don't. Here we are 6 years after RE's were introduced, and
not one has been ported to our knowledge. They even chose to update the RV7000 with sampling built-in to Reason instead of porting it to RE.
Well, it's been 2 years, and Propellerhead are now Reason Studios - but no company sale though. The only thing that changed is their CEO and the company name. Have the VC's
"cashed in that investment" yet? That said, looks like:
1. No bueno!
2. DONE!
3. DONE!
4. Waiting...
I guess 2 out of 4 aint' bad, nay?
We want you,
We need you,
But there ain't no way
We're gonna full HD you
Now don't be sad
Cos one out of four ain't bad!
[RIP Jim! ]
So yes... 2's a
bit of stretch. RS themselves are on record as saying it's not done!
Of course, these predictions were just a game, a bit of fun. Although your vampiristic tendencies and love of necro-threads at last explain why you never show up in photographs....
(And even #3... Combi 2 is good in many respects, kudos to RS for the stuff that they have done there: I do appreciate they've added things I honestly thought they'd would not have done, like "align and distribute" of control positions. On the downside do note they've not improved the ability to program it by, y'know, adding copy and fuckin' paste of Combi control mappings to identical devices, like some of us asked for at least 12 years ago.
They did add dead space to the sides of the rack though, </s>like everyone wanted! </s>)
The reference to the investment however—and joking aside—you do make a fair point.
Interestingly, boingy wrote above in his prediction:
"1. Continue to prepare the company for sale, aiming to complete that sale by mid-2021. That's how venture capitalists work. Cut costs, boost short-term profits, sell the company for a big fat profit, move on."
Again, I know this was just for fun, and you're only teasing the "PH sell out" guys, that's cool, <l> it is not unamusing </l>
.
But his prediction got me thinking, when I took note of this part: "
boost short-term profit".
You're right, and yet in a way, so are "VC sell-out" guys. The RS profit wasn't boosted. So it is likely there's been no value in selling at this point. It's probably even I have a post somewhere saying the VC's will be in it for no more than 5 years. That's naive. We don't know what the long-term plan was in 2017. And not all VCs are short-term, short-sellers. Sometimes they do play the long game, especially given of course they have access to more business information than the likes of us, and whatever the long-term PH roadmap. At the time I think some of us, me inc., were focused on the addition of VST support right at that time. Now, I don't think that assumption was wrong, per se, that was as much for the benefit of adding value to Reason to sweeten investment deals as it was adding value to users, but it was silly to think there wouldn't be more to it in the grander scheme. No company invests with the intention to lose money. The job of the VC is, ultimately, to make money for the VC.
And so indeed 2020 is actually the first year-on-year increase of turnover for quite a long time. After four years of Y-o-Y falling revenue and losses, it seems they might have turned a clear profit overall last year.
And yet turnover and profit in 2020 is still not as high as 2016, arguably the peak of the RE-era. The increased revenue in 2020 is unlikely to be from substantially from RE sales because there were no new REs of any real signficant value, or gained any traction last year. One thing I do agree with MHG on is when he noted [paraphrased] "only new stuff sells". We can therefore deduce one thing beyond reasonable doubt: the introduction of RRP and R+ has been beneficial to the bottom line in the short term. Anecdotal evidence suggests a good number of people bought RRP, while never using Reason itself. And for those people, RE probably means little, if anything. Everything in RRP is just what they expect RRP to be: a plugin that comes with a lot of devices. It's feasible most of them don't know or care there are plugins for their Plugin.
There may well be more Reason users today than ever before, but be aware that's very much not the same as there being more Reason buyers, or more RE purchasers than ever before. Especially not with any obvious link to the RE shop on the front page of their website. And even if people do find it, note how badly the shop is now laid out, there's virtually nothing on display other than a huge banner for the latest RS product.
While I'm baffled by the apparent success of R+, I do now realise my error in thinking: there's an age component in play. It might be true that software subs are simply the normal for Gen Z in the same way that programming the VHS timer was normal for Xers in the 80s, yet pre-Boomer parents couldn't even put the tape in***. The clever thing about subs from a revenue and marketing perspective is that it "
Lowers the barrier to entry", as we've been repeatedly told by the copy-pasta from the Reason Studio forum-rules political handbook. Yes, that's true, it does lower the barrier to entry. (And yes, they have a forum-rules handbook: when multiple people use the same phrase, you know it's intentional they've been told to use that phrase to stick to a precise and consistent messaging line)
Of course, such marketing-talk intentionally belies the fact that over multiple years it
increases the ongoing running cost. And that's the key bit. They need to keep those subscribers. And at that point ARPU becomes largely irrelevant. They can simply concern themselves with a fixed MRPU. (Minimum, or Monthly Revenue, rather than Average. Anything
above MRPU is just gravy). As I noted before in another thread somewhere, the problem with a monthly subscription for the premise they claim they're using it for is that risks becoming the entire expenditure that person can afford in the entire product environment, its walled garden. For RS, that's entirely acceptable: they get a guaranteed subs income, the MRPU. For RE devs, subs users—who remember are typically subbing
because of the "lower barrier to entry",
so would be expected by such a description to typically have a limited disposable income!—have already used a not insignicant portion of their expenditure allowance just to use Reason. It's very telling the language RS used to convice people of their success in the RE format is "more Reason users than ever" and explicitly not "more RE users, more buyers and more RE subscribers than ever". It's quite possible to have more Reason users and fewer RE buyers.
So 2020 was a relatively good year for RS compared to 2017-19. And yet, 2020 was a weird-arse fucking year. With people locked down at home for the best part of eight months, paid influencers hawking it like the bitcoin-scamming anti-vaxxers they all are, still making less than 2016 doesn't feel that impressive, even if it is a real improvement on 2019. Still, one must concede it is a risky read too much into it in terms of it being either a successful year that shows real growth for the platform, or as evidence that really it's stagnating and should be doing better than it is. It's both and neither. It might be just, you know, a novelty bump.
Even though the R12 HD is woefully incomplete, I'm going to predict 2021 revenue results will be higher than 2020, because even if some early subbers do fall off, you'd expect there to be natural attrition but also that fall-off gets constantly replaced by fresh young conscripts. I would imagine a vast majority of licensed owners, and particularly every-other-release type upgraders, e.g. the R10 holdouts, will now upgrade to 12, just to get what HD they can. 10-to-11 wasn't a worthwhile upgrade. 10-to-12 is pretty decent value, especially if one got an off-site deal like at JRR.
I might bookmark this thread. I won't earmark it, cos I don't want you suckling the blood off my fresh lobe piercings again....
_________________________
*** When you hit 40 you realise that Douglas Adams was spot-on in this great quote of his:
"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
12.7.4 | MacBook Pro (16”, 2021), OS Sonoma, M1 Max, 4TB SSD, 64GB RAM | quality instruments & gear
1 will come this year too so I'll give you that one as well, 3 out of 4, bravo!
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