Coming from a world where our traditional tools have come with a price tag at purchase but no charge for publishing final projects, I’m curious to know if there are any plans to broaden the scope of the current TD licensing model. Let me give you the context…
We do a very broad range of work, from multi-machine, projection mapped, interactive installations, through to simple touch-screen exhibits in museums. For the former, the TD licensing model makes total sense, but for the latter, it really doesn’t work. For example, we recently completed a small museum with 17 exhibits in it. From my limited understanding of TD we probably could have used it to create at least 14 of these exhibits. However, some of the smaller ones had budgets of just $1,000-$2,000. Spending $500 on a TD Commercial license for every one of these just doesn’t make commercial sense. Currently we use Flash and .NET for this kind of work, so we can create final executable files at no additional cost.
I realise the likely response to this post will be ‘Well don’t use Touch for that kind of work’, but I’m looking to invest time for my whole team to learn 1 dominant platform as a long-term successor to Flash.
Any comments/suggestions would be gratefully received.
good question, i’m also interested in getting some insight from Derivative about this issue. for instance, right now i have a interactive art installation running my comercial license of TD, and i’m not able to keep using it to develop until the exhibition ends, in January. Would love to have some flexibility on the final result, maybe a special pack of licenses only for Touch Player?
Yeah, that’s exactly the sort of thing I was thinking, or perhaps the option of a percentage cost reduction based on volume. I know vvvv uses the second model, reducing license costs like this:
22% off for the 4th to 9th License
33% off for the 10th to 19th License
44% off for the 20th to 99th License
55% off for the 100th and more Licenses
Does anyone from Derivative have any comments on this?
Also, we’re currently looking at a project that might require up to 15 networked machines, each outputting to full HD projectors. Would this require a full commercial license per machine?
Yes, the only way to get costs down is to get the amount of machines down, I.e. use machines with multiple quadro gpus. I’m currently driving 8 displays from a single machine, others are driving 10 … In theory you can do up to 16 outputs per system
Well this puts a bit of a damper on my aspirations
Guess I was assuming that once I bought the commercial version I could make projects for clients that they could launch on their computers in the performance mode while I still use TD on my own machine to create other projects. Or is that what the Pro version is for?
No, it’s quite a shock to the system isn’t it? It seems that TD is purely designed for performance usage and for installations.
It’s a shame because I think there’s a big opportunity here for a tool like TD to step into the shoes of Authorware/Director/Flash or whatever your interactive tool of choice is. HTML 5 just doesn’t cut it for some of the more high end applications.
I wish someone from Derivative would at least comment on this and suggest if there are any plans for future expansion to the licensing options.
