this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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3DPrinting

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago (2 children)

DRM filament spools has already been a thing, XYZprinting tried it but luckily it didn't catch on and they went bankrupt a few years ago.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Restrictive tech never works when you apply it from the start. You need to capture the market first before you can start to apply that. And that is the road Bamboo labs looks to be heading down. It is the classic playbook:

  1. have some true disruptive innovation in some product that people will actually want to use your products for ✅
  2. mass market your product and get loads of people singing parse about how innovate it is ✅
  3. slowly start to lock down your product, typically behind the guise of safety and security ✅
  4. start to squeeze your customers for as much money as you can with DRM or subscriptions You wont succeed if you skip straight to step 4. But Bamboo have been slowly working their way up to it. It might take a few more years but I can see them eventually wanting DRM filament.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

Totally correct.

XYZprinting didn't fail because of the DRM per se. They failed because they had an expensive priter with average quality, average learning curve, average reliability, and on top of that, they had stupid, expensive DRM cartridges that would frequently tangle and that you couldn't untangle without breaking the cartridge. And they didn't even have a decent selection of filaments and colors.

They were a below average product to begin with, and being the first company to slap DRM on the filament was just the nail in the coffin.

If it had been one of the big players of the time (Ender, Prusa, ...) who slowly snuck in DRM, it would have been much more likely to succeed.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago