Link from the post:
Also someone linked this old tweet
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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.
^This. End stage capitalism at its finest.
end?
i think the technofeudalism and enshitification of everything can still continue.
Oh, def. The fun has just begun.
Not the end, the end stage.
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
I won’t switch over. The whole point is avoiding thr subscription model.
I think if there’s anything big corporations have learned over the past few years, it’s that PR doesn’t matter all that much.
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.
That’s certainly a more hopeful response. Fingers crossed they keep to their word with V3 too.
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?
Maybe they want to compete with the price per subscription: let’s say they want to charge 5 € per month for Photo, Design and Publisher each, against 26 € for Photoshop (alone).
Maybe.
Wouldn’t make a difference to me though. If you go to a subscription, I’m leaving, and with a lot of bad blood.
The FAQ is very deliberately worded in that nothing changes now, but offers no reassurance for the future. V2 will stay the same, but V3, or whatever they decide to call it at that point, could very well be subscription based.
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.
Canva had a great UI just a few years ago, but they’ve simplified it a lot to the point that it’s just hard to use now.
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).
Yeah, same with GIMP. I would love to use it on my Mac since I already use it and am comfortable with it on Linux, but it’s noticeably slow for some reason and you shouldn’t even try using it with the touchpad. The windows especially in multi-window mode don’t behave as you’d expect, the keybinds don’t either, it’s very meh all around. I was wondering whether I should get Affinity but I guess with this it’s a no.
The difference to GIMP is that Inkscape is written in C++, so a port to Qt would be more feasible than a Gimp port to Qt.
Krita on Mac works fine, btw. Get it on Steam if you want an auto updater.
What makes it bad on mac? On windows I find both krita and inkscape mediocre UI’s but idk how much of that is the toolkit, and how much just small open source teams not having time for ui/ux
What makes it bad on mac?
It’s like using an old Java GUI application on a modern OS.
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.
The only thing that inkscape could be better at is image tracing. Other than that its my favorite vector software.
“At the moment” being the key part of that phrase. All the changes still have to be worked out lol.
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.
I don’t want profitable software
What? You want all the software companies you depend on to go bankrupt?
I want fairly priced software
Canva is free for basic features and reasonably priced if you want features that cost them money such as 24/7 phone support, access to their stock artwork library, storing up to a terabyte of documents on their servers, etc.
I get the hesitation - we don’t know what they’re going to do with the affinity suite, but I wouldn’t immediately assume it will be ruined.
Given the context I don’t think they meant profitable as “The software makes a profit” but that the acquisition would be profitable given the costs to acquire it. The acquiring company likely has no attachment to the software itself and only sees a bunch of cows (customers) for milking.
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
Yeh. And Adobe were trying to compete with ImageReady. What a cluster that workflow was. Fireworks was great.
“Family”
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 :-)
