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Basically Autodesk have released a version of Maya aimed at indie ( read, poor ) game developers. Priced at 800$, or 50$ a month, 125% a quarter on a rental basis, this version has some serious limits.

First, it can only render sprites, making pre-rendered cut-scenes or even composited stills impossible.

Second, there is a 25K polygon cap on FBX export, making it nearly useless for level design and high detail work.

Third, no plugins or Mel.

For many developers, especially ones working on sprite based or low(er) polygon realtime mobile titles, those limitations wont be a big deal and the savings from the full version ( about 2800$ cheaper ) are huge.

For others... hey, ever tried Blender?

I have a few beefs with this.

First, I remember when Maya and Softimage were trending down in price, to the point you could get Softimage Foundation ( which is LESS gimped than this! ) for 499$ and Maya had a version for around 1000$. Then Autodesk purchased them and raised prices across the board. So in some ways, this is salt in the wounds for people with longer memories.

Second, as others have said, Blender is nearing feature parity and is better in some regards. It is certainly more stable! With the final integration of previously 3rd party features ( BMesh, Cycles, Freestyle, etc... ) and a focus on polishing, Blender 2.6 is waaayyyyyyyyyy better than 2.5. It is certainly improving at a faster rate than Max or Maya, both of which are going backwards in some regards.

Third, they gimped the wrong things. 25K polygons makes it useless as a level design tool, sprite only makes it useless for cinematics or complex stills while no plugins makes it off limits to many engines, such as Project Anarchy. ( Granted, PA has an FBX importer in the works ).

All told, this will appeal to a very limited community.

HOWEVER, the source of this information ( Tom's Hardware ) is now showing a 404, so it's possible the information is wrong or has changed. More likely though, they jumped the gun on a press embargo, which explains the lack of other sources.

I got the opportunity to interview Autodesk for a bit more information. Interview is below the official press release.

Interestingly, Maya LT is its own product ( based on 2014 ) with its own development path ahead. They are aiming at a creating a tool for sprite sheet generation and model creation, and quite obviously are targeting Unity, so they chose Maya as the base, as its their only cross platform app. Plugins are in fact removed, but 3rd party plugins related to game development may be whitelisted to work with Maya LT.