Maschine 3.0 General Discussion

No.

Pro Tools and Cubase got to where they are by being early onto the market, investing heavily in feature development early on (getting ahead of the curve) and then building out secure market segments that are less fickle and could hold a product up through economic downturns because they became the basis for peoples' businesses.

Maschine is almost certainly less of that than Cubase or Pro Tools these days.

This gives companies like Avid and Steinberg the "priviledge" of not having to participate in a race to the bottom simply to exist.

Finale is a great example of this. Because Finale became niched off to a market segment that is very conservative and doesn't see many values in feature upgrades, the product could not sustain development. This put it in a position where they could not actually afford to develop the features needed to make the product competitive.

This also happened to products like Sonar, Acid, Reason, and others. While they still exist, they are now so behind the curve that many people don't find reason to choose them over others.

Arturia produces good products, but they participate in the same "race to the bottom" strategy that many other plug-in developers entertain. They release as MSRP and then they have countless promotional periods throughout the year where the price drops substantially to get people in at extremely low costs. And since those people will not pay higher costs, they are now forced to keep having these promotions just to get them to upgrade. However, Arturia makes money from content, as well, so perhaps they have figured this to be worth the tradeoff.

This also applies to NI, but Arturia's content tends to be predominantly Synth Expansions, which are cheaper than NI Play Series or [Maschine] Expansion drops. This changes the market dynamics.

As I've stated, software becomes high margin after the development costs are raked in, so this is easy to do with software products. This cannot be done with hardware products, where material, production and shipping costs set a baseline that cannot be surpassed without the product becoming a loss for each sale. Also factor in returns, the the fact that every return has to be refurbished and sold at a lower price (eating into margins).

FL Studio got popular by being easy to pirate. That's a majority of its early growth. Image-Line was very passive on enforcement because they were banking on the user base growing and converting to paid users (which most have). This is a strategy that many shareware developers have been employing since the 1980s. It does work.

FL Studio is popular in Hip Hop, but I doubt FL Studio has the level of dominance in that market segment that Pro Tools has in Studio and Postproduction or Cubase has with Composers or Film Scoring professionals. Many Hip Hop producers also use Ableton Live, Bitwig, Cubase, Studio One, Reason and other DAWs. FL's grip on the Hip Hop production market is much looser than Live's grip on the EDM production market, currently.

Onto NI's "Pricing Strategy," literally nothing you wrote makes sense.

1. Maschine+ was hilariously overpriced when it was released. Everyone knew it. Most reviewers outright stated it. The product launched half a year after the MPC One with a weaksauce CPU and worse connectivity… but for almost twice the price.
   1. It also launched when Laptops were slimming down… Right when we were getting 7nm Ryzen Laptops that could deliver 5x the performance of a Maschine+ with ease while running off of 60W USB-C PD in Silent Mode with a Maschine MK3 attached to it… and the Maschine+ isn't really amazingly better for portability compared to that setup.
      1. That's not even mentioning the Apple M1 machines that came later that year.
2. Maschine+ was hilariously overpriced on release. A price drop was inevitable. They would barely move any units at $1,299-1,399. Sorry, but no. Maschine+'s pricing helped sell tons of MPC One units.
3. High Price is fine if a product deserves it. No one is asking NI to drop the price of the S-Series Keyboards. Those Keyboards in in line with competitors on the market - like the Arturia KeyLab, Novation SL-series, etc.
   1. The issue with the Maschine+ is that the pricing is way out of line. It was effectively an MPC One with MPC Live II pricing. That was the problem.
   2. If a product deserves the price, it will justify that price through sales. Clearly, the M+ was not selling, otherwise they would have kept the high price. Why give away your margins when you don't have to?
4. Lol, what? Perhaps NI needs to simply realize when a product is past its due date and sunste it, instead of keeping it on hte market indefinitely as practical abandonware. Again, NI can easily create a Maschine Drum Machine plug-in as well as beef up the samplers in Komplete Kontrol. They don't need to waste resources generated by the Maschine development team to patch up a product that has lost mindshare and is unlikely to deliver any gains to justify it due to the market having turned to alternatives - and people generally don't come back after they've left.

If you think people are going to stop using the Drum Samplers in Live, Bitwig, Cubase, Logic and other DAWs to use Battery, then I dunno what to tell you. This simply won't happen.

Battery has been nothing but a reservoir for NI Expansion Content for the better part of the last decade…

The update is $29. The fact that there are people complaining about that is crazy.

I've been phasing NI out over the past year and now very little I produce uses their products. As I've stated before, Bitwig Studio is basically Maschine 3.0 for me, due to how well the controllers work there. Beyond that, I use Cubase and simply don't use (on all but one machine, I don't even install) NI's products.