Dear Slate Digital VCC Customer,
I hope you have had success with the Virtual Console Collection beta plugin. Although it’s not perfect and has its quirks (as a beta usually does), many users have claimed that it has made a positive improvement in their mixes. On behalf of Fabrice and the rest of the crew, thanks so much for your help in the beta process.
I’m writing today to inform you about the future plans of the VCC Beta plugin. The initial intent was to release a near final version called beta3 in the past week. But then something happened which threw a curve ball in our plans.
And that something is piracy.
A lot of people assume that piracy doesn’t really affect pro audio companies. Almost every single software company in the industry has been pirated, and we still keep on releasing new plugins. So we must be doing good business then, right? Well, no. Even the largest software companies have had to lay off staff members.
We are far from large. There are a little more then a dozen hard working guys on our team. Our business is centered around releasing just a few plugins per year, and putting as much quality and innovation into them as possible. Therefore, in order to stay afloat, we rely heavily on the sales of each plugin. Once the VCC is released, it will be only one of three products that bring us revenue.
So when one of our products was pirated, it didn’t just hurt us.
It killed us. If we didn’t make a plan to stop it, than we simply wouldn’t be able to keep developing future plugins.
Coding an audio plugin is an extremely complex task that takes a talented team of engineers and many, many, man hours. However, the demographic of customers who purchase audio plugins is not nearly as large as, for example, the demographic who buy accounting software or graphic design software. Therefore, when the sales drop due to piracy, there is absolutely no way to pay for the R&D or marketing.
The current protection that we use on plugins like the upcoming final VCC is no longer strong enough to prevent piracy. We had to come up with a solution, or we had to pack up shop. And it was obvious which path we wanted to go. So, I came up with a plan.. As you read it below, I hope you can put yourself in our shoes and try to understand that we have attempted to create the most ethical plan that will best please a majority of you, the customers, while protecting our plugin from piracy.
We will end support of the current ilok dongle for the VCC, and release all remaining VCC updates on the newer ilok dongle which has much stronger protection against piracy. The new iloks are selling for $49, but I promised you that for $199 you’d end up getting the full version of VCC when it was done. So that means we’ll be sending all of you an ilok on our dollar, including the shipping cost.
You’ll easily be able to transfer all older ilok licenses onto the new ilok with ease, and it’ll actually hold a lot more then your original ilok. Your current plugins that run on the old ilok will work perfectly on the new ilok without hassle.. we tried it.
Now, the problem is with guys on PPC. The newer ilok will not work with PPC Macs. So we think the fair thing to do is to offer you a 50% refund ($99), or you can take the free ilok and assume that you’ll be updating to an Intel Mac sometime in the near future. The choice is yours. We know this is a bummer, and I wish there was some other way, but there just isn’t.
We’re working out all the logistics to get you these iloks along with the new update of the VCC (which has many bug fixes including the much in-demand Brit N fix) very soon.
Again, I thank you for supporting our efforts to make some cool audio tools that help you make better music, and I hope you find this solution to be one that is fair for everyone.
Best,
Steven Slate
Fuck H20, AIR en al hun lame gebruikers, Deze gasten zorgen er voor dat ISV's met innovatieve producten op een gegeven moment de handoek in de ring moeten gooien.
