Alchemedia
Decomposer
Exactly! They may have irreparably damaged their brand loyalty in one fell swoop unless they can come up with some brilliant damage control ASAP. In retrospect the U-He promo seems like a last-ditch money grab ala iZotope. Perhaps a sell-out to Francisco Partners is next.Thinking a bit more about this I'm starting to get a very different picture.
At first I was thinking that they really fucked up their release strategy and communication. They should have communicated in advance they were planning to release paid Bitwig add-ons, right? People could have decided in advance if they wanted to buy/renew under those terms or not.
But then, I remembered there was the U-He promo recently. Of course Bitwig aren't idiots. They knew their user base wouldn't like this. Probably a big percentage of people wouldn't have bought/renewed even with the U-He thing. So instead, they consciously decided to release the paid add-ons after the promo.
I don't know. I typically attribute stuff like this to ignorance instead malice, but now I'm not so sure. The timing is too perfect.
I do think Bitwig probably didn't imagine the backlash would be so strong.