Why does production software usually cost so much?

Maccy said:
Can get it for £119 through the education store :p
Click to expand...

That's a good discount.

To a recording studio, £500 is a relatively small investment, and would earn that £500 back after a few bookings...

But to a student, £500 is loads, so £119 makes it affordable enough to buy, learn and use. :)
 
It's all down to demand, nothing else.

You can expect the latest AAA Xbox title to sell hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies, but 3D Studio Max or Logic Pro will sell absolutely nowhere near.
 
KNiVES said:
Research & development costs.
Click to expand...

^^^this

It is unlikely that they're openly taking the mickey too much as (unless the software is very very specialised) competition will prevent it.

My company writes software that can be a bit buggy at times, has rather ugly and not particularly well designed GUIs etc.. and yet our clients pay millions for a license.

Tis basically the amount you're likely to sell & the development cost.
 
Emphacy said:
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.
Click to expand...

The very basic max application without any of the plugins or extra's is a couple of quid off £3000 right now. Add in stuff that you might need to produce stuff for say TV quality work and you can easily double that. That's for one stand alone licence and a studio will often need 10+ copies. I know people that have invested hundreds of thousands of pounds on production software.

Even google sketchup pro and a decent rendering plugin like vray will set you back over £800 per licence and that's just about usable for Architecture.
 
It's just market economics: The cost of developing a piece of software capable of competing in the marketplace, versus the size of the marketplace.

For example, high end computational modelling software (CFD, finite element modelling etc) will often set you back in excess of £20k per year, especially if you need more than a couple of parallel licenses. The reason is the high cost of developing and maintaining such complex software, against the relatively small end-user base. Still, if used in the right projects the software can bring in many times its cost.

When we do CFD consultancy that requires using commercial codes, we tend to budget more for software than for salaries. Always depressing, but ultimately necessary.
 
dont forget customer support, its much better with professional software than it is with general consumer software
 
£20k? Pah!

Try $100k for some software, then add on the extras...

To be fair, seem steep, until you consider that using that software may help you find $1B underground...

So yeah, really its a cross between cost to develop and amount companies are willing to pay. For example the above software would never be used by anyone that wasn't considering investing millions (or already had) before and after using that software, unlike photoshop which can be used by everyone, and be used to make small-large profits.
 
~>Dg<~ said:
if you have kids at schools or college and other circumstance you can qualify

:)
Click to expand...

Yeah College students get quite a lot of software packages on the cheap. Through Dreamspark if I remember correctly. Apparently because it is industry standard then the companies like you to use them when you are learning, and then so you know how to use the packages in the workplace, meaning the company you work for will see that you can use say 3DS Max and use that for their production, or for the work you are meant to carry out... That is the theory anyway, but I ended up using my Maya 8.5 from when I was at college to doss about in when I was bored :D
 
Added value is one aspect, if you make a piece of software that results in someone making millions, you want a decent amount of money for it.

Software like 3DS max is free for personal use anyway.
 
We write software that costs at least £40k per week to develop :p I've used other software that cost just over £1m before. It was used for a brief period then thrown away.

Windows Datacenter edition will cost you nearly £3k per processor.. it's Datacenter edition, so you're probably going to have at least 16 processors.

Photoshop is cheap, yo! :>
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom