This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Link from the post:
Also someone linked this old tweet
The sad thing is making the masses believe that under capitalism, companies strive for competition by making better and distinct products, while in this last century reality most of them are competing for who gets acquired by the bigger corporations and exit with shit loads of money.
Sigh... Why...? Why is it too hard? Why is it that in this day and age, we can't simply have something we pay for and keep with no worries. Once I started owning software, Affinity was my choice. They had a long track record of not selling out, retaining high standards and a fairly priced transaction.
You pay for good software, the company works hard to make the software better, and then sells you a better version that you can upgrade at your own choice. Plain, simple and honest.
Nothing lasts in this day and age.
You used to be something Serif, but now you're in the big leagues along with Adobe, and against them you're nothing.
Undramatic PS: Affinity Designer is damn solid, like it more than big A's Illustrator, shame I'm now afraid of pressing the update button >:(
EDIT:
Speculative decision thoughts
Apparently in 2022 when V2 came out, they made triple of what they expected and that number was something like 10-20 million pounds. Even though it sounds like a lot, it might have not been enough.
After blowing off some steam to think clearly, there is the chance that Affinity might've been sinking and hoping for a payday. They have always been a couple steps behind Adobe and . Whenever Adobe makes a new feature they brag about it from the mountains as they got the R&D cash to power those, while Affinity is churning along just polishing their software. This makes it hard to sell at a glance, also FOSS alternatives are getting stronger. So their new user aquisition probably hasn't been great.
They might have been stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they're not free and competing against free software which is just as good if not better. On the other hand while they require payment, Businesses do not mind paying through the nose so long as its "THE BEST" and using alternative NON BEST software introduces unwanted friction.
That 1 billion might've really been the offer they couldn't have refused.
Hi All, I am thrilled to announce that Affinity is joining the Canva family.
It's just so cringy seeing this weird corpospeak saying "we've been acquired, another corporation paid money to own our assets".
Also, of course you are thrilled, you’re getting a fat check lol.
Literally these messages could be written by an AI, they’re so generic.
“We’re thrilled”: we’ve been paid to be happy and have golden handcuffs on. “Nothing will change”: We’re busy popping champagne bottles and ordering private jets and besides this isn’t our concern any more. The new owner will eventually make some changes I’d imagine. “We’re committed to”: we are making no promises and until we announce changes we will fully back the current policies.
Nooooo, not Affinity! “Felt right” my ass, everyone has a price don’t they. Well at least I paid for it already, so even if they go subscription I’m fine. Unless they lock me out of it somehow. But then they will just die, as only reason people use it instead of adobe is the pricing
Yep. There's no reason to continue development for V2 since they need to pivot to Canva integrations, and there's no financial incentive to make anything new for V2 if they make V3 a part of Canva's subscription
Sounds like a billion dollar deal
God fucking dammit.
Well at least I got the full suite now, and hopefully they won't force subscriptions on existing users.
My first thought was, “here comes the subscription.”
Guaranteed this will happen. Even skylum has been taking Luminar on a steady path toward subscriptions too (Luminar and affinity being the two paths I went when ditching Adobe).
Well at least I got the full suite now, and hopefully they won’t force subscriptions on existing users.
Probably not, that would cause too much bad PR. They'll just make it more and more inconvenient to keep your prepaid suite until most users switch over
Better give inkscape more practice.
lol at the "no plan to change at the moment" crap. that ship has already sailed.
Better give inkscape more practice.
Too bad Inkscape uses GTK. It's fine under Linux and okayish under Windows but under macOS it's just horse shit. There's a reason Krita's popularity exploded. It just works great everywhere (heck, even Android under Samsung DeX).
I’ve used Designer for several years now in combination with inkscape very heavily for work having bashed my head against a wall called Adobe Illustrator for years - all the obvious reasons including terrible svg support. Inkscape should be supported for sure , but Designer has sped up workflow no end with what I use it for. It’s a shame that everything must enshittify.
I was recommended Affinity on here a while back as a one-time-payment alternative to Adobe subscription based photoshop/publisher.
I haven't used Canva in a while, but I remember disliking their interface and pricing schemes. Am I right to think that this change is a bad thing for Affinity users?
We have to say that selling Serif was not on our minds at all, but when Canva contacted us (only a couple of months ago!) there was something about it which just felt right.
hmm :/
Will the ethos of Affinity change now it’s part of a large global company?
The team behind Affinity remains in place and our approach remains the same – and this is something that Canva is very focused for us to maintain too. Yes, we are now a division within a larger company, but we believe this will allow us to serve our community even better in the future and give us even greater freedom and ability to challenge the status quo.
They don't say anything about pricing / plans. If I'm going to be forced into a subscription anyways, then I might as well use adobe's stuff
Just bought Designer a week ago. Wouldn't have touched it had it been a subscription. I love it so far but it will be my last purchase of any Affinity software if they move to a subscription.
Id contact them if i were you, asking for clarification and possibly a refund.
I've sent them an email, not too hopeful I'll get any information out of them about their pricing model going forward though.
Edit: They replied but they just gave a copy and pasted statement from the press release that Designer V2 users will own in perpetuity, nothing regarding future plans.
I too wrote to them. This is their reply
Nothing changes. We will continue to sell the apps as a single payment and you’ll continue to get regular free updates. If anything, this will enable us to introduce bigger updates, faster.
Affinity refused to make Linux ports. That alone killed them for me.
full port would have been great but i would have been already very happy if they at least tried to make it run somewhat ok via wine.
I haven't used Canva in a while, but I remember disliking their interface and pricing schemes. Am I right to think that this change is a bad thing for Affinity users?
I can tell you my first reaction sure as hell wasn't "sweet, now I can hook my photo editor into some online bullshit".
They don't say anything about pricing / plans. If I'm going to be forced into a subscription anyways, then I might as well use adobe's stuff
They have an FAQ that says they're keeping the same model and plan to continue to develop v2. How long that lasts, though?
No plans “at this time”. So next week I’m guessing lmao
Pretty much how I feel. I was OK with the transition to v2 because I thought the upgrade path was reasonable, but I feel like at some point I'm going to get screwed now.
Though without updates the current version should be fine for me for the foreseeable future,
I wonder if they recognize that "not a subscription" is a huge part of Affinity's market position though.
If you're going to force a subscription, why wouldn't I just use photoshop?
Welp - that’s the end of recommending affinity 😔
What a shit fuck
Yeah, very worried. Why would they purchase something unless they thought it would be profitable? I don't want profitable software, I want fairly priced software.
Do you want to lose customers forever? This is how you lose customers forever.
This is about the dumbest business decision either side could have made here. The Affinity tools’ only competitive advantage was not having the Adobe pricing model. Canva’s pricing model is basically dogshit Adobe lite.
Let’s be real, everyone has a number that they’d be willing to sell out for. But this one hurts. Affinity make great software.
Loyalty to anything but yourself is pointless.
:(
I bought the V2 suite of their apps at release to support the company because I'm tired of perpetual subscription software. I'm not expecting lifetime updates or support, I just want whatever I paid for to work reasonably without hassles.
Remembering the situation when Macromedia was bought bei Adobe – now I have the same vibes again. Five years later nothing was left except Flash – that horrible piece of software – and Dreamweaver – I liked that one. The best transition back then was from Freehand to Illustrator and (consequently from Quark) to InDesign.
And then in 2015 to Affinity. So ... 5 years with Corel, 12 years with Adobe/Macromedia, now 8 years with Affinity, so far ... let's see what they do and what we decide afterwards.
My first websites after hand coding were fine in Fireworks :'( I miss Macromedia stuff
Looked at Canva’s offerings for about 30 seconds and they all sound like trash.
I really liked Serif, it felt like they intended to do it right and largely did. I probably couldn’t walk away from a billion bucks, so I’ll try to to be too judgmental :-)
Well damn that sucks. I actually paid for affinity apps. I hope they don't go the way of subscription, because I may as well don my sailing hat at that point.
“Family”
Out of the loop for this one. Is Affinity a software for graphics editing, which was regarded as an alternative to Adobe, but it now acquired by a big corp?
Pretty much
They had a set of programs that rivalled Adobe Photoshop and similar software, good enough to be used by the industry. They differentiated themselves by having everything available with a one-time purchase instead of Adobe's monthly subscriptions.
They got acquired by a big corp that's known for annoying subscriptions, so people are worried that the software won't be developed in the same way anymore
I bought Designer last year as a one off. But there's no point in mastering it anymore. That's just going to suck you more into their ecosystem, then a subscription, then raising price, and then whatever they want.
for me gimp, inkscape and scribus are more than enough
For me, a graphic designer, gimp is quite possibly the worst software Ive ever used. I wish someone would fork Krita to have more image editing related features.
Inkscape, however, is fantastic.
sure, i wouldn't even dream of doing any real graphics work daily on gimp. i just hope that the developement picks up speed and more contributors after gimp 3.0 releases hopefully in may.
Im more interested in Graphite personally https://graphite.rs/
Graphite has interesting ideas but I'm no fan of the web first focus.
Plus every time I've tried, their raster editing has absolutely horrible performance.
I quite literally just bought this yesterday! Of course it happens now.
