Be aware of gamespace... I'm currently somehow "forced" to use it.

It is not expensive, compared to max. But it's expensive enough (299$)so that you have to know, what you are doing, if your going to buy it.

IMHO, gamespace is buggy. It has some nice modelling features, but it took me at least a month to understand how careful you have to be with it (I'm not doing this fulltime). Doing the wrong things can crash your work, since the undo is buggy.

When I used Blender, there was none of that harsh crashes I had with gameSpace. So in comparision to the (quite frustrating) time needed to get around with gameSpace you could also put this time in learning Blender :-)