Wan Is the Old Model People Run Themselves

Some verdicts on Wan come with a successor named. Someone who ordered a hard drive to keep their Wan 2.2 models and LoRAs rather than delete them wrote that "thanks to Minimax, the WAN days are over". The grief comes with a culprit named, and the culprit is a rival, not the passing of time. Between 7 and 13 September the retirement notices named Wan 2.2; between 14 and 20 September they also name Wan 2.1.

Where Wan's quality is argued, the argument is about a ceiling on what it can do. Someone says Wan is "not even close to as good a seedance", and that for results that do not look like AI, Seedance and Kling are "the only viable ones right now". That judgment is about realism, not about the model's age. Another person says Wan is "pretty limited in quality" but that its community models "pretty much maxed out what wan can do". On that view the base model sets the limit and the community's work is how far it goes.

Someone running Minimax H3 in ComfyUI writes that they "have experience with Wan 2.2", started on Minimax a week ago, and are "blown away by its abilities to understand concepts and language so much easier". Their stated problem is adherence to one piece of the input text, which leaves each of their commercial shorts almost usable but not quite. So the person trying Minimax still measures the new model against the one they ran, and by their account the new one does not yet finish the job.

The model called old is also part of what people build with. Someone explaining why a run is slow says SCAIL-2 "is still based on Wan 2.1", so the max frame limit applies and videos have to be generated in chunks and stitched together after. On that person's account, a limit written into a base model reaches the tool built on it. Someone else runs Wan 2.2 and LTX locally in ComfyUI and wants a simple web page so friends who aren't technical can generate videos in one click. For them, Wan is part of a setup worth handing to other people.

Where Wan is defended, the defense is specific. Someone says Wan 2.1 "with good Lora is still miles ahead in NSFW than Ltx and H3". The claim is about one kind of content and names its rivals, so it is a comparison and not a general endorsement. Someone else says it is no surprise that "models for the low Model have no movement" because "that's what the high models are for", and that "they are ment to be used together with WAN 2.2". The advice treats Wan 2.2 as a working part of someone's setup, with pieces that have to be fitted together.

The newest Wan sits in a different category from the versions people run. Someone explained that "Wan 2.2 was open weight but every version since is closed". That sets open weights against closed ones, and puts Wan 2.2 on the open side, where a person can keep the files themselves. Someone else reported that "WAN 3.0 became censored" on a Sunday and that the regular version "seems to be no more fun". Wan 3.0 is described by the terms it comes on, as closed and as censored.

Some of this week's talk about Wan 3.0 is about where to get it. Someone looking for a face-swap tool says Higgsfield's "wan 3.0 or win3.0 is pretty good", but that Higgsfield "is a scam" and they are still waiting on a refund. For this person the complaint is about the seller, not the model. Someone comparing local models with a hosted service says Krea 2 has a "spicy variant" and "they added wan 3.0 for video", both "unfiltered". Wan 3.0 turns up in these posts as a feature inside another company's service.

What the split between open and closed versions puts in question is who decides when a version of Wan is finished with: the people who run Wan 2.2 on their own machines, or the companies that offer the newest version.