VST 2 will gradually be discontinued
Posted: 19 Jan 2022
I presume that Steinberg could also withdraw the VST2 licence from third parties like RS and all the other DAW companies if they wanted to but simply dropping VST2 support in the Steinberg products might be enough to persuade VST vendors to switch to VST3.
They can't withdraw it:
Steinberg VST 2 Plug-Ins SDK Licensing Agreement (Version ”2.4 - January 2006”) wrote: ...
§ 9 TERM OF THE AGREEMENT
1. The Agreement shall run for an unlimited period.
...
Yeah, they can't withdraw it, but they've not granted the license to any new developer since October 2018. This includes anyone starting to make a DAW. So everything from new companies have to be VST3 only. They're doing everything they can to get people to move on.
Yes I know that, I'm only talking about other DAWs. Why would they voluntarily drop compatibility with maybe discontinued VST2 plugins that some users still want to use?
It's no big deal really, you can use an adapter to run vst3's as vst2 and vst2's as vst3.Billy+ wrote: ↑19 Jan 2022I'm not a developer so don't really understand the implications of this?
I assume that any DAW that currently allows vst2.4 devices to be hosted would continue to do so and won't have to remove support for vst2.4 devices and all should continue working as normal?
It would be very disappointing for R12 to break any vst2.4 device before they fully implemented the standard?
I've got quite a few vst2.4 devices that don't offer vst3 versions...
The whole point of the latest Steinberg move is to pressure companies into making a VST3 version of their VST2 products. Most of them will do so. Of course, some VST2s will be out of development and some companies may opt to retire a VST rather than invest in updating it.
If you use Steinberg apps, their releases will stop supporting VST2 plug-ins soon-ish. If you don't use Steinberg apps, this is mostly a distant early warning that the market for them will become less robust. Even if you are sure you have bought all the VST2 plug-ins you will ever buy, their developers will be decreasingly interested in keeping them up to date for new operating systems, etc., and they will eventually break. In fact, the VST2 SDK as a whole will eventually break, and there will come a time when Steinberg has lost interest in fixing it.
Because the DAWs are controlled by Steinberg, and they're trying to force developers to make VST3 versions of their plugins. As for discontinued, they likely don't care.