Just when I thought I was having a nice vacation from tending the Autodesk Graveyard (see also Autodesk products are falling like parrots), another bunch of former best-thing-ever products have bitten the dust.
This time, it’s Autodesk’s Gameware middleware products that have been read the Last Rites. Scaleform, Beast, HumanIK and Navigation can no longer be purchased or maintained. If you used these products, support will cease as soon as your existing maintenance agreement expires. More details on cgchannel.com.
That leaves Stingray as the only surviving middleware product (for now). That’s probably only still alive because Autodesk wants the halo effect associated with currently-fashionable-again Virtual Reality. But how long that remains enough for survival is anybody’s guess.
My brief experience with Stingray at an Autodesk event left me with the impression that it’s a fair way short of being a finished product. I have been much more impressed with Autodesk’s competition in this area. Autodesk’s currently in Product Grim Reaper mode, which is understandable given Autodesk’s ridiculously large product portfolio. However, that does mean that potential Stingray users should be very wary of investing time and resources in a bleeding-edge product that might not be around for long.
Anybody care to have a guess at which Autodesk product(s) will be killed off next?
Image of war graves by Arne Hückelheim.
No disrespect intended to those who paid the ultimate sacrifice. Lest we forget.
It will affect more products. AutoDesk has to many products on stock and they change the content of the suites every year. Many customer are insecure what happen in the future with their products and the data that are created with them.
They have to focus on their main products.
“Hey, let’s use Bitsquid (aka Stingray) as our VR\game platform instead of Unreal” said no one, ever in the history of the universe.
Epic is working on actual interop plugins for Max (the Max project manager who “left” in 2013 is in charge of non game development of Unreal) and the next release of Twinmotion is Unreal based. It won’t be long before Stingray is pulled from the store, mothballed and put into maintenance mode. No wait, that should be “included as a subscription benefit.”
Griffin, I need you to tell me some lottery numbers. You nailed it.