EClark1894 posted at 3:18AM Sat, 28 December 2019 - #4374760

So's Blender, but let's see, Pixar, Maya, 3DS Max, Sculptris, Houdini, Lightwave. They're all still around. Blender hasn't put them out of business. Not even close.

True, Blender will never put those big companies completely out of business, but it will reduce them to second-rate citizens of the CG world. Blender will also become industry standard. If you follow those blender conferences you will see the movement towards blender quite clearly. Things have come a seriously long way in recent years, and the goodies that arrived in blender 2.8 will only go to increase the trend.

Today, blender more than any other CG program on the planet, can be considered one of the big names, because more people have blender installed than anything Autodesk ever put out there. And not just because it's free, it's because it's every bit as powerful as those other "big names". Each package has it's pluses and minuses, but the nature of blender being Open Source means, by default, that blender is the only big name out there that will truly develop for the benefit of it's users, not company shareholders.

My personal prediction is that Maya, Max etc will eventually all have to face the reality of the Open Source competition they have in the mighty blender, and will have to decide between a Unity3D-type business model, a blender-type business model, or simply go out of business (and I doubt they'd want that).