Just like the QC was supposed to.... what’s the positive of “killing” another piece of gear?? Would the tonex even exist without the kemper? Would some modellers exist if line 6 hadn’t made the pod?
I thought playing music was about having fun..... i wonder if people like this won’t play with other people if they aren’t using gear they like....
Just like the Line6 POD was "killed" by better products (such as the first gen Axe-Fx...), there will eventually be something that makes another product less worth buying. Whether it's a new generation product from the same manufacturer or from someone else. It's not a negative for us end users as the old champion gets cheaper to buy or you can get the new thing that does the old champ's thing even better.
The Kemper has been around for about 10 years and the company hasn't seen it prudent to do much about drastically improving it. Even the Kemper Stage is something that IMO should have happened years earlier. Now the Quad Cortex offers more in a smaller box, with better UI for a similar price to the Kemper Stage. If the ToneX can do even more accurate profiling, then that reduces the value of the QC captures feature as well as the Kemper profiles.
IK has been smart by offloading the capture process on your much more powerful computer hardware and could then make a cheaper, less powerful pedal that can just run the generated models and cab sims. If it's sized similar to a Strymon or UAFX pedal it's going to be one heck of a contender that could make Strymon Iridium, UAFX amp pedals, Kemper and QC all less enticing for those who already have pedalboards and would just like to replace their amp/cab with a virtual thing.
To me Fractal does not need to play the capture game because they already have authentically behaving models that also replicate the behavior of the controls whereas captures/profiles tend to sound authentic at the settings profiled and then any adjustments will deviate from that (but tend to sound perfectly fine of course). All adding a capturing feature would do is shut up the people always asking for more amp models despite having 300 to play with.
I recently bought some Strymon pedals (Compadre and Zelzah) and because my pedalboard is in another castle, I was testing those by plugging them into my Axe-Fx 3 on fw 21.01. I was really impressed by how different amp models reacted to using the pedals into the Axe-Fx 3 input. Using a high headroom amp like a Mesa Lonestar behaved very differently from using a low headroom amp like a Princeton Reverb.
Fractal is not only their amp modeling but also the world class effects and so far IK has not been able to match those. To me Fractal is in a similar category to top tier pedals from Eventide, Strymon, Source Audio or UA or various rack units. By comparison e.g the IK X-series pedals are "just ok".