You'll find most types of production, design and quality creative software costs far more than is reasonable, like for instance professional 3D modeling, video and music software, even web and programming stuff can cost quite a lot, obviously its about the quality of the tools but why can't they instead sell more copies for less, this would give more people access to quality software and improve their creative potential so we would all benefit as a result?
Why does production software usually cost so much?
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Soldato
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By copy of Logic Pro for £500
Make number 1 record....
Profit?
Make number 1 record....
Profit?
Trust me, the return you get from buying this kind of software is far greater than what you'd pay for it.
For instance, 3D Studio Max costs around £600 yet movie production companies, designers, architects etc all make a fortune off it. £600 compared to a few million ££ return in a film such as WALL-E doesn't put people off spending £600 on the tools to do the Job.
Same goes for Adobe CS4 and all the stuff you can do with that.
Usually people who pirate things have no intention of buying the software anyways.
For instance, 3D Studio Max costs around £600 yet movie production companies, designers, architects etc all make a fortune off it. £600 compared to a few million ££ return in a film such as WALL-E doesn't put people off spending £600 on the tools to do the Job.
Same goes for Adobe CS4 and all the stuff you can do with that.
Usually people who pirate things have no intention of buying the software anyways.
Pretty much. But some of the software is pretty complex. Maya for example costs $3,500, but takes so long to master.
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Because people are prepared to pay for it.
You don't do your pricing based on what is fair, you do it based on what people will pay ..
You don't do your pricing based on what is fair, you do it based on what people will pay ..
Man of Honour
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Or are just turning an image into 400 x 75 pixels with a size less than 20k
Soldato
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Indeed. This is something people seem to gloss over.
Production of software, even simple stuff, can take absolutely ages and cost a huge amount of money. Image, video and modelling software is hugely complex and has to be written for a wide array of systems so takes a long time and a lot of money to produce. It is only fair that they charge the prices that they do.
Add to that the insignificant cost of it to high value production teams as has been mentioned with the likes of film studios and it suddenly isn't expensive at all. It is only expensive to an individual.
Man of Honour
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It's also worth remembering that a fair amount of professional quality software has free/cheap alternatives - sometimes ad supported or with slightly reduced functionality. It might not be quite as slick or as fully featured but if with say GIMP you can do 80% of what you can do with Photoshop then it seems a fair trade off that you get it for free. If you're going to publish with it though and presumably attempt to make some money from it then the hundreds that Photoshop will cost you is not quite so unreasonable.
because people use it to make millions in profit so it's worth it.
it's a very valuable product, plus the support costs a fortune.
adobe have said they don't really care about piracy like that too much as they make their money from people who use it for a business and need a legit copy.