Von Native:
Hi everyone,
We’ve been reading your responses and questions based upon the tough news about changes inside of Native Instruments. And we understand the doubts and fears that may have arisen. Our press statement was aimed at business media, so we want to speak to you directly here.
I can’t answer every question, but I hope I can at least give you some more information and reassurance.
Let’s just get this out of the way: Native Instruments is a healthy business. We’re not going anywhere, and neither are the products that you have.
Going forward, our priority is to listen to your requests, and to deliver the key features you want. This doesn’t mean we are going to be able to build every feature our community asks for, but we are listening. Our Product Managers are keeping track of the most requested features. And those of us in management will support them to ensure these features are built. In short, we will be focusing a lot more on software, and in turn making the hardware you have even better.
We also want to be more community-focused. But we are aware that in the past, we’ve promised things that we couldn’t always deliver. Instead of promising things now, we understand we have to build your trust by “doing” rather than “talking”.
An example of this are the arranger features currently in development for Maschine. We appreciate that this has been an important topic for many of you, and this is currently a top priority for us. If you want to see how this is taking shape, then I highly recommend joining our MASCHINE Beta group, where you’ll soon be able to test the first parts yourself and give us feedback. It’s a big task and we want to get it right, so we are building this step by step, and sharing this with you in the beta environment so that we deliver what you need.
Another example of where we are actively working with you, our community, is for Massive X. We are regularly updating the roadmap there and will be rolling out new features on a regular basis. Please join the beta or follow the forum to see more.
Many people were confused by the phrase “One Native” and you've probably seen this term being used in our press release. Firstly, it's not some kind of new product. To hopefully end speculation, this refers to how we work inside of Native. In the past, some of our teams have been working fairly separately and products have sometimes been developed with not enough collaboration and integration aspects in mind. By taking a unified approach inside the company, we believe we can make our products and services work together more smoothly and provide better communication to you, the musicians who are using Native. And it’s not just about connecting our own products, but also the wider world of sounds and music making tools out there. NKS is a great example of this, and we want to do more.
We’ve seen the term “platform strategy” brought up a number of times, with some believing this translates to “subscription”. It doesn’t. Native is already a platform provider. Examples of our existing platforms might be KONTAKT or REAKTOR. These are “authoring platforms” or tools which allow third parties to build instruments and make money from them. And we’re proud there are so many amazing instruments built on those platforms, many of them supporting the NKS standard, which we consider to be part of our platform experience. Naturally, we want to see more. So this is an aspect of our business that we believe we can strengthen, be it in developing existing products, or in larger ideas for the future.
On the subject of subscriptions, we understand some people feel strongly about this. Please let me reassure you that we’re not about to charge you subscriptions for the products you already own. One of Native’s aims is to remove barriers for people who want to make music. And for some people, that barrier might be financial. We’re exploring lots of different ways to address this including (but not limited to) subscriptions. A recent example of how we’re doing this is the introduction of PayPal installment plans in our online shop. But we want to do more.
Of course we can’t share everything that we’re working on. But I hope this gives you some insight into what’s going on at Native.
Best,
Paul
sdk.steinberg.net
cdm.link
www.gearnews.de
support.native-instruments.com
