Start with the free version, pay $99 when you want to go commercial, and then they get royalties for sales over $5000. Not a bad deal when you consider it used to be completely beyond the budget of anyone here.
For me, I'm learning to use it because it's just good to have experience with the tools so many big fellas use. In the end, though, I don't see a reason to go past A7, which doesn't ask for any royalties.
Stuff like this worries me a little (from the forum):
You can't write your own shaders from scratch. You build shaders using the material editor. It is a pretty powerful though and I read on the UDN somewhere that they have added a new HLSL custom node in the material editor. You are still stuck with sending the output of that node to one of the material channels.
Although I guess if that's their interface for materials, perhaps you can do just as much with the "HLSL custom node" as you could writing custom shaders from scratch. I certainly hope so, anyway. Another thing I took for granted with A7 is the limitless and straight-forward shader programming.
Jibb
