Native Instruments Discontinues KORE Platform

Posted on Jun 21, 2011

Native Instruments has officially announced the discontinuation of the KORE platform and will focus their resources into turning Maschine into an Ableton Live killer the center piece of the Native Instruments ecosystem. This announcement is not much of a surprise to us (See our February 10, 2009 feature “Ghost In The Maschine” —Ed.)

However, many users of KORE are obviously dismayed at the announcement below, which was posted on NI’s Community Forum:

Discontinuation of the Kore product range
In order to utilize its development resources in the best interest of its wider userbase, Native Instruments has decided to discontinue the Kore product range.

As an immediate consequence, Kore 2 and all Kore-based instruments and effects will no longer be offered for sale. The Kore Player will also be no longer available for download.

The Kore 2 software will be supported through further maintenance updates for the time being. Two updates that will optimize the compatibility with current setups are currently in preparation: The first update will integrate the latest engine versions of Absynth 5, FM8, Guitar Rig 4, Massive, Kontakt 4 and Reaktor 5, and is scheduled for the third quarter of this year; a further update will provide 64bit plugin versions for Windows and Mac OS X, and is scheduled for the fourth quarter.

Technical support for Kore will also continue to be available. Future versions of the Komplete bundle and of individual NI instruments might no longer be fully compatible with Kore, and will not include special preset versions for its sound browser.

Development resources will be refocused from Kore to Maschine and its popular instrument hosting features. Maschine will be enhanced with specific preset management and parameter mapping features for Komplete and individual NI instruments in the upcoming free 1.7 update, and will be further expanded in its role as the central NI instruments host in the future.

Owners of the full versions of Kore 1 or Kore 2 (including software-only versions) who are interested in Maschine can purchase a special crossgrade price of $449 / €399 until the end of the year.

Furthermore…

You might have already seen the formal announcement above, outlining the fact that Kore is not a central part of the NI product roadmap anymore, and that it will not be developed beyond its current second generation: http://www.native-instruments.com/fo…ment.php?f=124

On behalf of the Kore team, I would like to reassure you that this decision was not made lightly or on short notice. It is also based on the fact that the technical concept of Kore, with its integrated instrument engines, has always made it require an extraordinary amount of development resources just in order to keep it compatible with the rest of the NI instrument range. This effort was increasingly hard to justify, especially compared to other NI products, their popularity and related feature requests.

As Maschine has developed into a host for NI instruments due to popular demand from its already very sizable userbase, the feature set and purpose of Maschine and Kore would have been bound to overlap more and more in the future. In order not to create redundancy, but rather invest all resources into one single host system and expand it as efficiently as possible, the decision was ultimately made to focus future development resources to Maschine.

Obviously we do not expect Kore fans to be happy about this announcement, but we hope that the upcoming maintenance updates, including the 64bit features, as well as the crossgrade offer to Maschine combined with its expanding instrument hosting features, will accommodate as many Kore users as much as possible.

I also want to reassure everyone that technical support for Kore continues to be available for an unlimited amount of time.

Keir and I will try to answer any questions about the situation with Kore in as much detail as possible in this thread.

Regards, Thomas

Native Instruments is clearly not abandoning their KORE users and even has provided an upgrade path to Maschine at a discounted rate. The company has even gone as far as to continue technical support for the platform. However, these gestures will probably not quell the backlash that NI is now encountering. Users have even gone as far as to contact us about the discontinuation in order to spark a “journalistic beatdown.” Some say that there’s only two certainties in life: death and taxes, but we’ll add “things will change.” And in the technology space, things-change-quickly. NI took a good hard look at the KORE platform and had to make the difficult decision that it was just not in their “future roadmap.” As much as it may hurt users that the German concern discontinued KORE, it hurt the company even more as far as the resources it devoted to the endeavor, fiscally and emotionally, and the lack of return on investment they’ve received to date. It may be easy for someone to walk past a boarded up store with an Out Of Business sign, but for the business owner who devoted a good part of their lives and money to initiative, it leaves scars.