As a still new developer, the encoding fee was very much a big deal.
But even without that
- the licenses are expensive and they're not giving me any data on what that buys me
- paying forward is a big no for me financially, and I frankly don't see why I should put up with it, seems unnecessary, the could just do it like most other companies, which is they just get their share as you sell stuff. Also I'm also not keen about having to check if I need to re-stock on licenses.
- I didn't upgrade to Kontakt 7 because I read so many bad things about it and dislike where they're going with it, so obviously I don't develop for it
- HISE seems like an ever more tempting alternative as a business model and as a development environment
Regarding the license prices, in practice they are even more expensive since you'll probably constantly have a bunch of unused ones and never want to get to 0 licenses.
Which is especially an issue for small developers.
Let's say your 39$ library sells its hundredths copy but you don't expect to sell much more. Are you paying 351$ to hopefully get more than 18 more copies to get that money back (on 19$ sale) or removing it from the store?
And they're in practice even more expensive since the license for a 39$ library is 9% of the full price, so if you sell a copy at 50% off they ultimately get 18% of that, right?
I thought about it a couple of times, but no matter how I look at it, it all seems like such a terribly bad idea to me. Before Pulse it might have somewhat made sense, but not now.