This is some not great news. I’ve been using NI (as well as izotope & plugin alliance) stuff for a very long time, and have hardware from them too. I imagine there are a lot of small sound design studios selling kontakt instruments who are a bit scared for the future now.
I really hope they’re able to find a good solution for creators with the administrators.
Edit:
MusicRadar article: https://www.musicradar.com/music-tech/native-instruments-has-been-placed-in-preliminary-insolvency
Firstly, I 100% completely agree that it would be good to have everyone move to an open alternative, but it simply doesn’t practically exist yet. SFZ is as you describe, just a sound font, Kontakt is effectively a DAW in itself with how complex the instruments can get.
I could be wrong but I’ve read a number of times that a big part of its dominance is the development experience of kontakt keeping sound designers using it.
The dev tooling, licensing infrastructure and high standard of built-in effects and building blocks, etc are apparently more or less peerless even across other proprietary solutions. Professional sound designers ultimately want to build and sell their instruments, so any friction there is going to make them look elsewhere
That may be the case, but it seems to come down to the same chicken & the egg problem that most proprietary vs. free software has had to overcome. Proprietary software usually can offer a smoother UX because there isn’t enough development of the FLOSS alternative, which is caused by a lack of users (and thus the potential pool of developers and financial donors) to motivate that UX becoming more polished.
For most, the lock-in of proprietary software was tolerable because it was at worst an inconvenience at times, or only incurred a semi-reasonable cost. But we’re seeing that as investors demand enshittification, staying in those comfortable lock-ins will inevitably result in further pain down the road as the user is squeezed further and further with more invasive DRM restrictions, more features being locked behind paywalls, and intolerable subscriptions with ever increasing monthly dues.
At some point people will need to choose between continuing the use of lock-in software for continued comfort in the short term, or biting the bullet and developing/using the less comfortable FLOSS option to encourage it to become comfortable by dog-fooding it. We can see when that finally happens, it is able to out compete the lock-in options to the benefit of us all (Blender, Godot, and Krita are good examples).
But that’s just my 2 cents.