I cannot even express the huge dissapointment because of this news.
First of all, two competing products under the same umbrella... I won't even start to comment as I'm too angry now, but Softimage keeps coming into my mind. So is the disaster with the updates on Maya/3ds max. Why would an inverstor/anyone pay money on two development teams for two competing products? Monopoly(or lack of competition) is the worst thing that can happen to the advancement of any products. Look at Intel, they've been doing 2% increase in performance with OUTRAGEOUS prices for years until AMD finally came with a serious competing product.
I'm curious if(when?) the phrase" You can buy our sister product for those features" will be heard soon :D
After working 7 years + with Vray, I was really glad moving to Corona in 2015 ( I should've done it sooner!). I actually had projects which I couldn't have finished on Vray. I decided to support Corona (because let's be honest, I could've gone the underground/free way) because I really liked the team, the atmosphere on the forums and it is a product very well made and Ondra and the rest really deserved all the help they needed. And the pricing was really fair!! I seriously cannot say the same stuff about V-ray pricing. Now I really feel like..the Starks bending the knee to the Lannisters.
I always liked small teams with great vision that can create something really good, in any industry. I like how Koenigsegg is teasing Ferrari and Lamborghini, even though they are much younger and smaller company. Competition is pushing things forward, bringing new ideas and pushing boundaries. V-ray couldn't do a damn decent Interative preview for AGES until Corona came in, which is one the main reasons that got me into switching. Years and years being stuck with V-ray with no revolutionary new ideas or huge improvement..Makes me sick only when I think on the splotches and all that shit IR and LC gave. And BF was impossible to use unless you owned your own powerplant and half of Intel's CPU-s. Then Corona came along and I was stunned I could use it on my old crapy i7920, IN REALTIME PREVIEW RENDERING! Now all this tech goes to the arrogance of V-ray and their stupid prices which didn't do anything revolutionary about it until Corona was a serious contender. I remember some posts, here or on Facebook, can't remember where, after Corona released the denoiser, someone said "I'm pretty sure what Vlado is starting to code tonight" Or somewhere long those lines.
It's a s*it day... As soon as I find an alternative I will have to leave Corona. I'm pretty sure pricing will rise in the future, and even if it won't happen, I simply cannot give my money to Chaos Group.
With Corona, it was the first time when I was actually trying to get involved with suggestions to improve the product and find bugs, even in my spare time, because, and I can't really explain this properly rationally, I wanted to help the Corona team as much as I could, mainly to be able to bitchslap V-ray a little bit for all the years being stuck with it with no huge improvement. This reminds me of a quote of my technical lead artist from my former company. Our main client was Philips, and sometimes it can be a very difficult client, and this guy told me "well, those are the comments. We are Philips' bitch, so they can bitchslap us when they want"
Ow well I guess it's all about the money in the end, and no pride and drive to be the king render engine.
Sooo what's Fstorm doing these days? still legal issues or something?
Also that thing written on the blog, history of bigger companies buying smaller ones, tells me to reserve my right to be extremely skeptical about it.
"Ondrej, Jaroslav and I feel like parents, and Corona is our baby" Well, you've just sold your baby...