laxu
Rock Star
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When the QC launched my expectation would be that NeuralDSP would quickly add marketplace functions to their cloud service so 1st and 3rd party vendors can sell their captures and presets in one convenient place, with NeuralDSP skimming a 10-30% cut off the top like most app/game stores do nowadays. Why that hasn't happened, I don't know because it seems like a very obvious thing to do with the way the cloud was setup.I get his theory on what "other companies" might do in terms of reverting to paid DLC, but being that there are really only two "other companies" (Sit this one out, Tonemaster Pro) at the QC pricepoint - Line 6 and Fractal - this probably won't come to pass in any significant way.
For Fractal, Cliff is driven by a passion for perfection and he loves to share his new creations/tweaks and fixes to the community at large. I just don't see him paywalling all of the new amps and FX he'll develop in the future. That being said, he does monetize stuff like future Dynacabs and IR cab packs. But he also includes so, so many in the factory firmware, they're just fun add-ons....not must-haves.
For Line 6, they have spent the entire lifespan of the Helix washing the paid DLC taste out of users' mouths after an abundance of it toward the end of the Pod XT era. In fact, they've used other product lines to essentially work out the kinks of content that they've turned around and given to HX for free (e.g. Catalyst amps, Metallurgy plugins).
I never say never, but I think NDSP will stay alone in prioritizing DLC. To be fair to them, as @Jynx noted in his screenshot.....they say they'll get back on the QC content train "after" 3.00.
But then again, they say lots of things and move goalposts all of the time, so.....
The "free" updates on our favorite modelers aren't truly free but the development cost is baked into the selling price of the unit itself. For a small company like Fractal, it can work out just fine as long as the units keep selling. For a large company like Boss or Yamaha/Line6, you are likely to need a whole different sales volume. Of course, Boss barely updates anything and is quite vertically integrated by using Roland's DSP chips etc so they have been able to push the price of their gear lower in the first place.
I don't mind the DLC approach if the unit already has a lot of capability. I can just choose to not buy anything, or I can pick the things I like and not pay for things I don't care about. Since DLCs like say IR or capture packs generally aren't very expensive, I think of them in terms of "what are you spending on other stuff like lunch, snacks, going to the movies etc" and then it doesn't seem unreasonable for something you can potentially use for years.
The fear for NeuralDSP is that they will gate all the "cool" stuff behind plugin sales. A good example of this would be the Soldano SLO plugin, that sounded massively better than the SLO model in the QC. I don't know how well the updated QC SLO compares to the plugin, but maybe someone will test Soldano SLO X vs QC model vs captures.
