It’s not just Maxon. RayDream. Infini-D. Bryce. Combustion. XSI. Modo. Freehand. Everything Adobe offers.
And on all the above at least for the most part, the buyer was a software company that was already familiar with the professional market (I’ll exclude MetaCreations, as they never appeared to be anything more than a room full of venture capitalists.)
Canva is just another Wix, or VistaPrint. Selling a service to people who generally know very little about best practices, nor care about quality control. They want a template with suggestions, and an easy interface that just drags one bad decision on top of another layer.
How does this affect my life? Not at all, as I use InDesign. The only time I’ve really run into the world of Affinity was a year ago, when I had to eval a freelancer that someone wanted me to work with. They told me they used Affinity, and that was basically the end of the conversation for me… nonetheless, i regret the Canva news on behalf of those of you who do use it, as this will not turn out well.
I use PaintShop Pro (X8 2016). I don’t know how it compares to Affinity but it does photo editing and post pro for my simple needs. Thinking of upgrading to the current version. It’s affordable, current users get a discount on upgrades, not subscription.
Sigh that is a true Enshittification at play here.
The Affinity Universal license was barely useful for my purposes and many skilled users over there as well as I made it a sport to find as many workarounds as possible.
I won´t heedlessly jump into yet another soon to be enshittificated product and am determined to put all resources in a solution which better aids my needs and that might be a new longterm project on which I am working on.
Yeah I know. But eg all those autodesk buyouts had a goal that doesnt fit here. They narrowed down the market. So if Adobe had bought Serif I’d also have come to the conclusions that its the apps slow death. But for incorporated firms / stock corporation buyouts are an integral part. Beside that buyouts are also a typical process in the life of a market as a whole. And Canva is diversifying their portfolio with it. To make it short, at the end there might be a ton of different reasons to buy serif and to rival Adobe with the buyout is one of them.
But no need to agree with me. So I have to go now. Cu thorn.
Oftentimes, if you are running your own independent company and some bigger fish offers enough money to place your life on easy mode for the rest of your days (retire and live large) in exchange for your company, then it is hard to say no.
A lot of people, even the self-proclaimed virtuous who claim to not care about money, will suddenly express changes of behavior when a lot of it comes their way.
Not to mention, there’s no guarantee that the current commitments can be upheld, meaning, bugfixes for V1&2, as well as the longevity of the V2 update cycle. I think V3 will mark integration within the Canva ‘ecosystem’, which is the first step towards subscription only (“hey, we have cloud based infrastructure with recurring costs to maintain now, so, welcome to subscription”).
GAWD this pisses me off. I guess I should have seen it coming though. I jumped on the Affinity wagon very early on and I’ve always been very pleased and impressed with what they offered. So much so that I replaced Photoshop and all my Adobe products completely and I’ve never hesitated to tell everyone how Affinity was staying the course and not falling prey to the whole “buyout and change our model” like literally everyone else. Of course, in the back of my mind I knew it wouldn’t last forever, but still… this is a lot like learning that your significant other has been cheating on you and it’s only a matter of time before the relationship ends.
Canva is a dirty word over here - business people that SHOULD be using Adobe instead use Canva and try to pass on their jpegs to me as workable art that I actually have to rebuild as vector. Same goes for people wanting to make a logo for their business - they send me their Canva work and I just want to vomit at the way they just choose the same basic skinny font and the script wordmark with random flowers and a circle border. Even a big business once sent me something they did in Canva and I had to redo the art because it wasn’t outlined or in shapes.
Affinity got my money twice before at the job I was at as I researched whether we could swap for Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop - the problem being that the bug I reported in Photo never got addressed and the text handling never reached the level of Adobe in the Designer version I was using then so we had to pass. Still a great program, but I wouldn’t say it’s good enough for a subscription - I’m still paying $60 a month for Adobe to keep up with the two clients that require it for prepress.
Inkscape and Gimp and Scribus are likely what I would lean on, they have a fond place in my heart since I’m familiar with them. I’m still an Adobe user since that’s where my wheel house is - but Blender is my main go to in starting ideas and in creating illustrations.
Absolutely true. I do design and prepress for a commercial printer and the amount of time I spend fixing the shit output by canva is, well, let’s just say it’s a lot.
Canva is the bane of the print trade.
I own the Affinity apps but only for occasional home use (it’s all Adobe at work). That said, I am quite horrified by this.
Possible that Photoline will have to fall yet before GIMP gets its ‘Godot’ moment and sees a massive increase in funding and in manpower, but then again Serif was also a private company with little to no shareholder pressure (so the ball may have come into their court anyway and it is now their job to not fumble away the opportunity).
Renzatic
(Professor Emeritus Billy H. Wafflesmith XIV Esq.)
56
All I can say is that I’m hoping for the best, but expecting the worst.
Watch the video and pay attention to his body language. He looks like he’s performing a eulogy. I mean, he looks sad and he knows that his newly-signed NDA is the only thing holding him back from complete honesty.
All of that will change next week when the new Ferrari gets delivered I’m sure.
I said it on Mastodon already … This happened too often already and at some point there are no places left to go. Ultimately if there are only subscription services left people can just as well go back to the original. It’s the trend in commercial software and it’s not going to stop until it fails massively.
Blender and Godot show that there can be contenders. Unreal Shows that at least being open and accessible is a better strategy, though they are undoubtedly in a different position which can also change any time Tim Sweeney leaves the company and with him the big supporter of open or available source files.
So ultimately the better question is - what can we do to get some free and reliable Open Source alternatives going that are actually up for the task?
100% same story here. I really believed it will work the way it started and kinda hoped that what happened now never did. Let’s hope that history does not repeat itself this one time in software aquisitions.
@Ace_Dragon Please gods, don’t startle me like that!
I’ve been using PhotoLine since the a year before Adobe went subscription (CS5-6), because the writing was on the wall.
Very happy using it, and even though I have Affinity 1 and 2 licenses, those never got much work to do but for the odd end conversion or specific feature.
I always considered and still consider PhotoLine to be a better product than Affinity. Affinity falls flat on its face in regard to core workflow - to myself at least.
And PhotoLine integrates so very nice with other apps. I set up live round-tripping to both Krita and Inkscape.
For example: when I need some genAI removal or additions, I send the layer from PhotoLine to Krita. I use the free genAI plugin in Krita, adjust things, and then save. PhotoLine picks up on the change, and updates the master file.
Same with Inkscape: PhotoLine has pretty solid core of vector editing tools (including mesh gradients and true vector pattern fills), but of course Inkscape has its own merits. So I send a layer group of vector objects to Inkscape, edit those, save, and it updates the layer stack in PhotoLine.
And this connection remains live: any edit in Krita or Inkscape updates the master file in PhotoLine. Very handy.
Very happy with PhotoLine. And it even works off a USB stick as a portable version.
But I agree with you that it seems PhotoLine is one of the last perpetual commercial image editors out there right now (one that can keep up with Photoshop in terms of general image editing, that is).
