Plug-Ins: ur doin it rong...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
A notable press release came out a couple days ago from Prosoniq. They say they’re discontinuing Windows development because of piracy. Seriously. Bernard essentially says that because of their simple serial copy protection, their products are so frequently pirated on the Windows platform that it has become financially untenable to continue dev for that platform. If you were looking for the World’s Greatest Example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, you could print that press release out and hold it up as a shining beacon of logical failure.
Now, I would be exhibiting a pretty healthy dose of temerity if I were to chastise the creator of the very first non-Steinberg commercial plug-in. But I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that if you can’t manage to sell shit, it is hardly ever the customer’s fault. Having a nearly impenetrable purchasing process, an incredibly poorly managed website, and a product line that has no consistency in platform availability and updates probably has way more to do with a lack of Windows sales, if you’d like my opinion on the matter. And who wouldn’t?
Speaking strictly for ourselves, it’s kind of difficult to tell as we give each customer both platforms, and thus don’t have specific platform purchase info. But if I go by installers downloaded, our Mac users (or I should say “our Mac customers”) outnumber our Windows customers by around 2:1. Of course there is more piracy on the Windows side of things – that goes without saying – but my recent go-round with Fucktwat Douchbag proves that Windows users are by no means alone in their tendency to want Free Shit™. In my experience, the per-capita stupidity on OS X is lower, but only just. It’s that Mac users, by virtue of being able to afford the Mac Fanboi Tax, are also able to afford actually purchasing software. Apple’s planned obsolescence also helps tamp down piracy by making it a generational thing. I could easily use the original 1.0.0 release of Orange Vocoder on my current Vista PC, but that original Mac release is about 5 deep on the Fail Meter and completely unusable on a current Intel Mac, in any way, shape or form.
(I suppose it’s a good time to mention that 10 years is a long time in this business. Orange Vocoder as a product is still more or less the same, and that would account for stagnant sales more than any other factor, I believe.)
Anyhow, I honestly doubt Prosoniq is going to go out of business any time soon, as they get to suckle at the Yamaha Money Teat with frequency. But it’s certainly an odd thing to just delete a platform and blame the consumer base rather than your own selves. It’s easy to make and sell Windows plug-ins. Really, it is.
10 comments
Until your post, I don't think I had heard of Prosoniq, much less been able to name a single plugin they made. Sounds like someone needs to invest in some marketing, duh.
In 1999, they were the _only_ plug-in company, so you would have heard of them then.
-CR
I was a bit WTF? when I read the Prosoniq announcement too.
It's funny, they only supported Windows in the first place because they had to, now that they don't have to (and obviously never wanted to) it's all the pirates fault. Whatever.
Just say, "we don't sell on Windows, we never really did, and we don't have it in us to care," and be done with it. All this clichéd finger pointing is pretty lame.
Strange. Didn't it strike them as conspicuous that virtually every player in the plug-in-making game does both Windows and Mac? They must be waiting for the rest of us to arrive at the same dismal conclusion.
I was wondering briefly whether they're also trying to cut their development costs by dropping a platform, but that doesn't particularly hold up under analysis. Our usual development process is to do the Windows VST first (simply because I prefer developing under Windows, but that's in large part because I have three LCDs on my PC), port to Mac VST, and then do the AU version. It takes far longer for us to do the AU versions of our plug-ins than it takes to do the Mac VST port. Moreover, the total time it takes to cover the two Mac versions is a tiny fraction of the overall development time for any product. (One of Chris's unofficial job duties is to remind me of this truism when I start bitching and moaning about the AU version.)
So yeah, I don't follow their logic either. I've always thought that Audio Damage is in part an experiment, an attempt to demonstrate that you can make a viable business selling plug-ins without using user-hostile copy-protection schemes. The experiment has been entirely successful. Sure, our stuff gets pirated, no doubt. (Someone contacted me via my personal website a month or so ago, saying that he lived in the area and was interested in "making friends in the biz" and went on about how he's been signed and is about to release his first CD and loves our stuff. It didn't take me long to figure out that this love doesn't extend far enough to actually pay for our products. He loves using them for free for his own commercial gain, it seems.) But there are enough honest people out there (thank you, everyone!) to keep us in business using a simple, unobtrusive serial-number registration scheme--and that makes me very happy.
So while I'm very sorry to hear that Prosoniq is having trouble selling stuff, I'm afraid that I don't understand the decision they've made.
--Adam
I have one free windows plugin they did back...well..a LONG time ago called the North Pole. Its a great fun and free plugin. Thats about all I ever wanted from them. And it still works all these years later.
It didn't used to be free. ;-)
But that is, as far as I'm aware, the first commercial VST plug-in not made by Steinberg. There is some question as to the veracity of that claim, but it is one of the very earliest.
-CR
There are two different worlds when it comes to music production -- the one in which people make a living either creating or recording music, and the one in which people do it as an avocation, or a hobby, or whatever.
Mac has always dominated the professional recording market, and Windows the Amateur/Wannabe market. So the fact that there's more piracy on the Windows side comes down to the fact that once someone spends a grand or two on a computer, if they aren't generating income with their music software, they have a hard time paying for it. Or they have a hard time wanting to pay for it.
I'm sure it's harder now than it used to be to run a professional studio and make money, but judging from reading Tape Op, a surprising number of people are doing it. And they might not be getting rich, but they're making a living and have a budget for software and hardware, and $300 for a plugin is a no-brainer if it helps make their job easier or drives business to their door.
$300 for a college student who holds lightswitch raves in a dorm lounge is a fuckload of money that he'd rather spend on beer and weed.
And what is it with recording studios? I thought they were dead! But I live in Iowa City, which ranks 251st in population among US metro areas, and there are 4 studios in or near Iowa City that are booked close to full time. Is that a local condition or is the whole country riddled with small recording studios?
Are you sure Northpole wasn't always free? I thought it was...Just checked the wayback, a page from 1998 seems to agree with me.
And chaircrusher, perhaps some astute observations, but this has nothing to do with piracy. Prosoniq has always been primarily a Mac shop. In fact, their two premiere products, Timefactory and SonicWorx, never were ported to Windows. And they haven't released anything new on Windows in a very long time, save for the v3 update of Orange Vocoder 4 years ago.
Possible. Couldn't say for certain; I'm willing to be wrong.
-CR
Is iLok really so hard to implement? Or Syncrosoft (if they ever get their act together again)?
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