I’ve used Keyshot since it was Hypershot beta. I have been on maintenance that entire time and steadfastly supported the software and recommended it. But here’s the thing, the one thing we have issues with Keyshot is with licensing. I keep our license unactivated as I have Keyshot installed on a couple of machines and when we need it we activate it. The when finished, deactivate it. We’ve done this for years. It works OK.
But today it didn’t. Today we fired up Keyshot and the reactivate button didn’t do anything. On any machine. So I contacted Luxion support directly via the ticket system, and the reseller. We had a deadline today and had no way to render. So it was mission critical.
After several hours, a couple of calls we gave up. We installed 2023 (we were using 11 as it is mid project and we never upgrade mid project (after a disaster a few years back)). Activation worked. We deactivated and tried 11 again. No go. So we had to continue with 2023 (and as a vanilla install update all materials etc). We missed the deadline.
Here’s the thing that really annoys me.
I get that issues happen. I do. But it is how a company responds to issues that defines the business. Go back 5 years and Luxion were the best in the game for customer response. A license issue? I would get a response within 30mins. These days, well I submitted the ticket mid morning and as of now over 12 hrs later, not even an email. Nothing. Not a single suggestion. Not good enough.
We have the occasional issue using Keyshot but the business killers always relate to licensing. Sort it out. Either have a better licensing platform or have a team who can deal with mission critical issues immediately.
We resolved the issue ourselves by upgrading to 2023 (aka Keyshot 12). This was something we didn’t want to do mid project but deadlines forced our hand.
We had a response from our reseller to say “case closed, I see you sorted it”. Then at midnight (yes modnight) I had an email from the reseller with a v11 license attached.
Not a peep out of Luxion themselves until 2 days later, with another v11 license key.
What really irritated me about this was not the delay it was the text that accompanied the email:
*The manual reactivation process for your current license isn’t immediate and requires a support engineer to issue a new license file whenever you need to reactivate. Our new subscription product offers an enhanced experience where you won’t have to reactivate your license every time you switch computers. You no longer need license file support and instead can easily log in and log out on up to three machines, eliminating potential downtime. *
If you find yourself frequently switching your KeyShot license between the office, home, and your laptop, a subscription license may be a better fit for you. I’ve copied your customer success manager on this email, who can discuss trade-in options for your current license. We have very beneficial trade-in pricing available to help long-time KeyShot users move to subscription, to ensure you have the best experience possible.
So Luxion, what you are suggesting as a way around your inadequate licensing procedures is for a very long standing customer who pays for maintenance already, to switch over to you subscription model, which costs us a lot more, and means if we stop paying we lose access to the software.
This is not the Luxion I supported from day one when you had the bust up with Bunkspeed.
I notice that @will.gibbons latest email today raises the issue of features and value for subscription services and that we need to get Luxion to refocus on supporting the “little guys” who only use Keyshot for rendering and animation - you know the very toolset that caused us to go to it in the first place. Customers like us see very little of value in recent releases. We still battle with issues relating to rendering - fireflies anyone? Inconsistent file handling? Plug ins that don’t work half the time?
I can deal with all that but what I cannot deal with is having to lose a half day dealing with licinsing issues that simply should not happen. If your new subscription license platfom is so great, roll it out to everyone! Then your engineers can focus on support and feature development rather than issuing license keys!