I apologize in advance for the bad grammar. Typing this right before I go to work.
30 years ago I had a dream of creating a digital comic book. I was in business school and it was my goal to gain the ability to run the financials and be the writer for the comic book, as I was terrible at art but a good writer. I put together (in college) a team of like-minded individuals who also had artistic talent and we were going to form a company. Unfortunately part of being young is being stupid, and I let that dream go. And, once I entered the working world I almost completely forgot about. Now digital media is all over the place. A little over 10 years ago, I tried to make the dream a reality. I just needed a single artist and I went to a friend from high school. At this point we’d both been working for 20 years and we both realized working for someone else wasn’t going to make us rich, and it wasn’t even lending us a lot of financial stability. Pensions are largely a thing of the past, now it’s all about the 401K. So we formed a little LLC, I bought him a digital pad to do the art on, and I did the story. It never went anywhere because work had burned him out. He no longer had the fire necessary to do the art. And after a year of trying I gave up trying to get out of him. But I wouldn’t let it go. I tried to do a short animation. I put together a team, forked out about $20K and we muddled through to create an animated short. This was years ago and I had ZERO experience doing this. It was a mess - as it should’ve been. I entered it into a competition to win a grant and it came nowhere close. But it was the most satisfying failure I’ve ever had because we made SOMETHING (finally). That path simply wasn’t financially viable. I JUST paid off the last of that $20K debt (only to have medical issues which caused me to go back into debt). Then I found Reallusion and I learned I could create characters all on my own. So here I am in my late 40’s. I’ve been working a little less than 30 years and I’m 20 years away from retirement (could be more). I still love writing, I love creating characters, and I love creating worlds for my characters. But I don’t have a ton of time. I look at the comic Autodidact did and I marvel because THIS shows what one person can do with time, skill, and effort. I don’t have a lot of time OR skill, but I can put forth effort. So I came up with a way to do an audiobook that does audiovisual storytelling. I’m still working out exactly how I want it to present, mainly because the AI TTS programs don’t properly annunciate all of the time. And the engines are still perfecting how to convey the emotions I want, but it gets better every month. Reallusion allows me to consistently create characters the way I want them to look, and then I can put them in IClone and pose them properly. AI can do backgrounds and VFX. I’m still working out the kinks, but it’s a one man operation (and I do have two artists that I hire out to do custom costumes, weapons, jewelry and I’m trying to get a person to do hair).
I said ALL of that to point out I love Reallusion, but I’m an INCREDIBLY small niche. I understand Reallusion is (or has been) moving away from hobbyists like me and are trying to sell to companies (as they should be). But whatever marketing strategy they’re using, it didn’t go well for them in 2024. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/6882.TWO/key-statistics/
People who want to do image creation and don’t care about consistency can just use AI tools now, many of them for free. Or they can just make videos (which - to ME - look bad because they’re so terribly inconsistent) and have AI do voiceovers. That’s going to pull more potential customers away from Reallusion, and a whole lot of other companies as well. And, as has been pointed out, their motion software is already inferior to UE and Cascadeur. So they’re not a market leader. They can’t absorb the same kinds of losses UE can because they’re a much smaller company. I do love what they did with CC5, but like all things Reallusion, it was expensive. Not everyone was willing to pay that. Reallusion, as a company, isn’t in a great position. The BEST thing they’ve done is add a plugin that utilizes AI in their software. From what I’ve used and seen on the thread, that hasn’t been supremely successful, but it’s a step in the right direction. And THEN we get to the mess that has become Windows 11. People ARE moving away from it. In droves. Yes, if you choose to work with Reallusion products, you are choosing to use Windows. Facts. But people are actively looking to move away from Windows. It was already a trend and now it’s become far more than that. That further shrinks Reallusion’s already diminishing customer base.
I look at Reallusion in this landscape and I wonder how or even if they can survive? I WANT them to. I’m rooting for them to make it because what’s left of my dream (which is now just a hobby) utilizes their product, but more and more it’s looking like it will get left behind. I honestly don’t know if they have the money to make a Linux variant. I hadn’t looked at their 2024 financial highlights until now. I don’t know what they’re going to do, but what I do know is people are adopting Linux and because of that they won’t even entertain Reallusion as a product.
It truly irks me to say this, because I actively root against Microsoft, but based on Reallusion’s company size and lack of profitability (and with AI taking over), their best bet is that Microsoft cleans up Windows 11. And that, in my opinion, is a very bad bet. The outlook for Reallusion looks grim, but I would love to hear from anyone who can contradict me.
