> There products are probably better than ever.

I would say only Kontakt and Guitar Rig are in good shape.

Reaktor is abandonware at this point. Massive X is still lacking basic features. Absynth 6 is basically a new GUI over the old engine from 2009. Etc.

Honestly, internally everyone has seen this coming. The company has gone to shit ever since private equity has been involved.

Surprise, surprise, if you replace most of the c level executives with people that have no clue of the unique space that Native Instruments and its brands operate in, things start to go downhill.

There are still a bunch of very skilled and passionate people working there, but NI really needs to shed all of the weight and refocus on what it has been built on.

audixdude got flagged for some reason

I'm sure piracy has an impact, but they are already targeting hobby musicians with all the soundpacks that can run on Kontakt Player or Reaktor Player and lite versions of Traktor.

I think it's more due to things like - the brilliant founders are no longer there...folks like Stephan Schmitt used Reaktor (node-based audio DSP environment) to prototype so many products over the years, hard to find a bigger product evangelist than founder/COO/CTO types who eat their own dogfood.

When they released Massive X it was way too early, clearly a cash grab and IDK if they ever added back basic UI features like "navigate menus with arrow keys" that worked in all previous versions. Then there are clearly decades of technical debt that still need to be addressed - I stopped using Reaktor and Kontakt several years ago because the tiny anti-aliased fonts still used in various key places are literally too painful to look at.

NI has a strong ARR of $80-100M. The issue is most likely the debt to buy Izotope etc after the acquisition by Francisco Partners.

Almost nothing i assume. NI really lost the plot several years ago when the original founders left the company. Crappy after-sales support, lack of product vision and corresponding crappy execution, and a ton of technical debt all over their product-range. Plus competitors made better/right moves, came alongside, and then moved faster and better, leaving NI in the dust. It's sad to see a company that once was leading in several categories now in this state.