利用者:Ton/Autodesk report

Autodesk 2010 annual report

trying to interpret the numbers.

Autodesk is a publicly traded US company. When trying to get a better picture of the 3D software market, I stumbled upon their elaborate and well written public reports. I already knew that their 3D 'animation' segment was small, but here we see it's only making up 5% of their revenues. if you don't like long texts, jump below to the conclusions!

Revenue overview:

[1] There's 180M income for entertainment division. This division has two parts, one "Advanced Systems" (vfx products, color graders) and one called "Animation". The latter includes Maya, Max, Xsi, Motionbuilder and Mudbox.

The report doesn't show the size of the divisions, but from the info they give about the revenue changes for the divisions: [2] you can derive that "Animation" is roughly twice the size of "Advanced Systems". Revenues for "Animation" then is 110M. .
In the aforementioned link Autodesk also states that 31% comes from "maintenance" (subscriptions) and rest from sold "seats". Extrapolating this on the 110M revenue:

69% of 110M = 77M full licenses revenues
31% of 110M = 33M subscriptions revenues

Licenses sold

Official list prices for Max or Maya or XSi are about 5000, annual subscriptions 1000 USD. But there's Mudbox too, discounts, student versions and big reseller percentages. So let's lower the average per-product income considerably:

77M full licenses / 2000 average = 38k users
33M subscriptions / 300 average = 101k users

Now let's focus on Maya. It is unknown how Maya totals compare to the others, but 3DMax is considered to be many factors bigger (5-8 times).

If 10% of licenses sold is for Maya -> that's only 3800 new licenses and 10k subscribers.

The report also states that the amount of Autodesk "users" is 2.2M: [3]
Of which 1.7M are "enrolled in the maintenance program": [4]
(That number includes 600k educational licenses).

My above estimations (140k users for "Animation" products) would mean this makes up for 7% of the total user count. With "Animation" making 5% of total company revenues, that could be not far from reality.

However, their animation programs are in the cheaper category, so It might be 10% though (200k paying users for Animation products). That probably doesn't increase the amount of Maya/Max/Xsi users much, because it's in the higher price category.

77M full licenses / 1200 average = 64k users
33M subscriptions / 250 average = 132k users

Per department costs:

[5]
If 27% of 110M revenues goes to research and development, 30M was spent on the Animation division. Ten percent for Maya, makes 3M for making this program (total costs, including outsourcing).

Common business practice is that 40% of costs is personnel; that's 1.2M. That's a team of merely 15-20 people.

Salaries of the Autodesk board:

[6]
The CEO gets 5 times more money than all Maya developers together :)

Interesting notes on competition:

[7]

Doubts are being expressed about the viability of this market. "We believe that our future results depend largely on offering new products, by development or acquisition ...".

Conclusions:

• There's roughly 14k active Maya licenses world-wide
• For all the money - including reseller margin - you spend on Autodesk "Animation" programs, only 10% goes to development and research.
• If just 50 Maya users would give up their maintenance license, they can sponsor a full-time developer to make Blender awesome!

Disclaimer: there's still too much guess-work here, especially by applying general percentages on specific cases. The figures however closely match information I have from other sources.

Ton Roosendaal, Feb 2011