*Note: Clarification, this isn't aimed at any specific customer service rep, this is all about Autodesk.
I look at this and just snicker to myself at a company shooting itself in the foot by putting it's customers through hot coals over misplaced CEO-class greed in a market that marketing has no clue about.
Not being able to open MLT files in Maya Indie is a big no-no, especially considering you're marketing it to about the same group of folks, who are OBVIOUSLY going to come over from LT to indie to get more features.
You're already bleeding customer base at this point before this situation is even discussed.
But, in-stead, you want folks to DO THE SAME THING (just more difficult in process), by exporting to FBX - the same format that can be read by many other (competitors!) software - to open in the same destination program you prevented them (with much less work) from opening it in a few moments ago (but with more to go wrong, too).
So, knowing this attitude towards customers, why SHOULD someone get started in Maya indie and not just throw in the towel and go to Blender 2.8+ (free) or Houdini (free for non-commercial), or Cinema4d (commercial), when they know full well how they were inconvenienced?
To recap:
You're upsetting your customers, and making them lose time (which is money), to drag out the same process your making them do anyway, just with more steps AND less features / more bugs, so you can be sure you're getting your money's worth out of the customer per license by chasing them away with unfriendly practice while making them export their ENTIRE project to a format the competitor's applications can all read/import?
I would think a bit of loss on the license department (not all studios cheat!) would be a better trade-off than annoying a lot of customers into choosing a competitors (potentially free) software.
I know full well about this. I am in this position too, and the last thing I'm going to do if I must export 1300+ Maya LT format models, is put them right back in another piece of Autodesk software (and risk this AGAIN later on down the road) when there's free software out there to do the same things, especially considering I can't afford the yearly all-at-once cost of Indie being disabled/on a fixed income and all.
If you want to do this without chasing customers away, have a piece of software that we can download that we can log in to, that will migrate everything over, and leave the old stuff as backup.
There's a reason studios won't hire me, it's because I know Maya and not BLENDER. They mostly require Blender. I am fixing this situation. Do I like using Maya better to possibly freelance? Yes. Can I afford Maya Indie all-at-once yearly costs? Nope. That just sends me right on to choose someone else's software that is more affordable - the thing Indie was supposed to do in the first place.
Other software's UV'ing solutions are also variably somewhat to WAY more convenient than anything in Maya LT, something I spend the majority of my time doing (and not enjoying). Watched many youtube and similar site tutorials, not always an easy way out here.
I know it's tempting to delete this, but that wouldn't be an honest, customer-friendly thing to do, would it?
Honestly, we used to fire people from our family business that treated customers like this, on the spot. The customer should get what the customer wants, because if they don't, someone else surely will scoop them up and do just that, or at the very least you won't have that customer and/or you won't have the positive word-of mouth advertising you desire.
The customer will always find a way. Every other (well, almost) company would gladly coddle a customer with proprietary migration software to make a one-way trip into it's next-level-up software as easy as possible, to make sure they KEEP that customer.
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