A few days ago, the Dollar General of plugins (Waves) decided to stop selling individual plugins and move to a model of forever subscriptions, where you tie the fortunes of your recording career to your financial investment in Waves. To add insult to injury, if you have purchased their plugins in the past, you couldn’t ever update them unless you subscribed. Forever.
Before I forget, I apologize to dogs everywhere. I like dogs.
Full disclosure: I currently own and use three plugins by Waves: DeEsser, Electric Grand 80, and an aural exciter of some type. None of them are indispensable, and I’ll be going through my tracks and bouncing them before an OS update breaks my plugins. Some of the Waves plugins are very good, and some are very meh. I had one of the SSL channel strips and I stopped using it because it wasn’t as good as the stock plugins in Logic.
I used to use Vocal Rider… but it kept crashing my Logic project. Which never happened with other mixing plugins. So I no longer use it.
So today, after getting buried by negative comments that somehow they didn’t see coming, they decided to backtrack and bring back the ability to get plugins as perpetual licenses, which I assume means that you’ll soon be able to buy individual plugins once again. Personally I think the threat of lawsuits also may have had something to do with this.
Will this appease people? I guess it should… but if I may use an analogy: Say you’re dating this girl, and one night after dinner for no reason, she slaps your face and leaves. The next morning she calls you and says “I’m really sorry I did that, you didn’t deserve it, please forgive me.” Do you move on? Or do you forgive her? Probably depends on how strongly you feel about her. I don’t feel very strongly about Waves plugins. I’ll just use other plugins from now on.