Believe it or not that initial wave of consolidation brought prices down. A license of SGI Power Animator cost over $30k in the 90s. softImage was not far behind. 3ds Max basically took the fight out of them, at which point Autodesk started going on a buying spree.
Was just talking with a coworker about how with the rise of server-side rendering we’re finally technologically back to Web 1.0