...so, according to a certain magazine report, Alias Wavefront have cut a deal to package Maya PLE with all copies of Unreal Tournament 2003...for those who don't know, that is a game likely to be the biggest game pretty much in history.
So...OK, Maya has been available free to learn for a long time, as are other packages, but it is only available to those who are aware of it, and interested enough in the industry to find out.
My point is that now, millions of 15 year-old school kids, their Mums' and pet monkeies are all gonna be having a blast with Maya thinking they can have a go at creating some of the stuff they like in games. So, the consequences are that before you know it, the 80% of 3D work, which is essentially monkey-work, will be done, no doubt, by young drop-outs who did not put the effort into the higher education, like most of us had to.
As a result, jobs for the majority of young inexperienced animators are much harder to acquire, and all of our wages are slashed in half, due to an influx of so-called 3D artists. An extreme idea, yes it is indeed. But, the fact is, that even if only 1 % of the millions of Unreal players and other gamers use the package enough, than its enough to displace a lot of animators and drive down wages, slowly but shorly. I know that when I was in school, most of my friends would have killed to be able to make simple game-type things and would no-doubt have learned a package like Maya, well enough, with a couple of years of practice. And so, on leaving school,...well, do I need to explain the rest!!!
So how is driving down wages and strangling the industry help Alias Wavefront? Beats me! I wonder what exactly the marketing manager at Alias was thinking when he thought this one up. Maybe its just the cut-throat mentality of these software companies trying to do eachother out of the market all the time. There was a roumer for a while that Alias were in talks over selling to Apple...huh!! Maybe that was a cover....maybe they are actually owned by Microsoft!
What are peoples opinions on this? I am very interested to see if people think that advertising directly to the biggest liesure market in the world (gamers) is a wise idea for such a specialist and volatile industry that is still barely out of infancy.
