Larian Studios Forums General Chat Have to vent...

So, I'm taking a programming course, and some time ago I came across this book, called "3D Game Animation for Dummies".

Recently, I thought "hey, I'd love to give that a go", so I started reading the book.

After a few chapters the book gets into the practical application, and they tell you to download a program called Maya Personal Learning Edition. Every exercise in the whole book is based on working with Maya Personal Learning Edition.

Well, so I start the process indicated to install Maya Personal Learning Edition... And I find out that Autodesk, the company that is responsible for Maya, chose to discontinue the Personal Learning Edition, preventing anyone, even people that actually paid money to learn to work with this free program, from being able to use it... so I basically threw away my money on that book.

I spend hours on the Autodesk site trying to find a way to e-mail them. None. Only for piracy matters, and even that only by giving them a ton of personal information that I do not share on the internet.

So I go to the Dummies site, to send them an e-mail. Same thing happens.

Why do they do this?


Does this make me want to spend €3000+ on Maya Unlimited? No.
Does this make me want to pirate Maya without feeling even a little bit guilty? Yes.
Oh, piracy is illegal? So is bashing your head open, but piracy is less aggressive.

Fuck you, big companies. You're what's wrong with the world.

I understand you.

And that's why I don't trust a few companies anymore.

Have you tried to get your money back ? I think you should, then, imho.

They do it because they are greedy, short sighted and stupid, honestly. They look at it as cutting costs now, forgetting that by doing so they may be alienating their customer base and harming future sales.

Treating customers like crap results in permanently lost customers and a lifetime of lost sales opportunities. It's not smart.

So yeah - I hear ya, dude.

In my philosophy this is due to the thinking model : Things are treated as mere wares, nothing else.

Musik - no art, but simple ware you can buy and sell as you like (as a company), same with the copyrights also.

Music isn't treated in respect to the art in it anymore, but just as Yet Another Tool For Generating Profits.

And since the thought directs how you act, this is the result.

Same with games, anymore. For companies, the "game" aspect has become totally irrelevant; instead, it's the "ware" aspect dominating everything else.

It's a bit like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product using as a measure on how "satisfied" peoplke in general are, but this concept totally fails to include everything that's non-material ...

And so are treated games and arts : As pure material. No spiritual parts, please.

Stupidity is rampant.

When did we allow swearing on the forums? 0.0

It isn't up to what a professional Autodesk application can do for ya, but http://www.blender.org/ with the world wild web, it should be fairly easy to learn this piece of open source 3D software.

that is awesome. Thanks man!