I agree with Getalife, and I’d offer the following perspective;
if Nuendo had the market share that PT has, or if this was PT, then I’d possibly be miffed about it. But since that’s not the case there’s an argument for doing what is necessary to keep growing the market share. That should actually benefit those of us that have been on Nuendo for years. More users = more work on the platform, and we’re in the position of having more experience on it.
So look at what happened on the PT side of things; the pricing structure about a year ago or so was very much “encouraging” (some would say “forcing”) users to upgrade, but now the new pricing is much more beneficial for new users. But the difference is that the Avid eco-system consisted of a bunch of proprietary hardware in addition to it being the industry standard, so if you were a user in a lower end of the market it really hurt. You were essentially “forced” to upgrade within a year or face much steeper prices after. But that all changed recently, and so some of those who waited are getting better deals.
Now, if you’re looking at investing in one of the two best DAWs out there for post, meaning either Nuendo or PT, both of which are fantastic workstations, your Native PT option is actually $1k per year. If you make a living on it you’ll make that cost back pretty quickly. If you’re in a major market you might make say $50/hr as an independent engineer and that means you need to work 20 hrs per year to make that back. That’s not a lot. But people look at the up-front cost at the lower end of the spectrum so they see $999 and compare that to Nuendo’s $1,700 (without NEK) and think PT is a steal. Over the course of two years they’re even, but on the other hand if they stop renting PT after year one they’re ahead.
Taking the above into account and adding the fact that we’ve been using Nuendo since we bought it on release I agree that it’s totally fine that there’s a price drop now. I prefer a wider user base I think.
What I don’t like, and where I do think that criticism and user “feedback” is warranted, is releasing software that takes a long time before it’s actually working the way it should. If I was Steinberg I would do two things as a “perk” to those who pay the most;
1: Make the Nuendo+NEK license include all Cubase versions. That would be a nice gesture to those who pay the most, as well as put the whole leap-frogging/NEK nonsense in a better context.
2: Add value to Nuendo without raising the price. After all, I understand that while giving something away represents losing potential revenue, it doesn’t add cost, but it adds “goodwill”. So, grab one of the other items sold, like Halion full version or something else, and bundle that with Nuendo (or at least NEK) to add value.