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Affinity Studio now free

(www.affinity.studio)
1199 points dagmx | 4 comments | 30 Oct 25 15:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.723s | source
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mns ◴[30 Oct 25 17:21 UTC] No.45762506[source]▶
Devastated about this. Good for them for making money on the sale to Canva, but still, this is a sad day. Studio is now freemium, in the future probably more and more features (outside of AI) will be added in the subscription, and you will end up with an app full of disabled features and pop-ups encouraging you to subscribe and unlock the new and shiny thing.

There is absolutely nothing in the world that anyone can say to convince me that this is not the end for Affinity. Every single product that went through this ended up being an ad data gathering subscription pushing unusable app for anything useful.

I have both a V1 and V2 license. V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates. This marks the death of one of the last popular pay once and use forever apps (in the sense that a V3 with new features will never exist).

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pmkary ◴[30 Oct 25 18:08 UTC] No.45763112[source]▶
I was so in love with the idea of "purchase and own for life" I thought every now and then I will buy the license and have a piece of mind. What started after SaaS is now at its closing days to have fully ruined software and from now on there will be hell like we have never seen before. Free Software is dead, Indie software as we used to is dead, and great businesses like Serif are down the road of being dead. I'm so sad.
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bigyabai ◴[30 Oct 25 20:11 UTC] No.45764769[source]▶
This seems fatalist. Free software isn't dead, and indie software hasn't died because the notion of "purchase and own for life" isn't a sustainable business model.

In the 1980s, buying a new computer often meant buying compatible copies of software you already owned. It was a treadmill of support that did keep computing alive, but also prevented ordinary people from investing into the hobby as fully as they liked. Many of the boutique developers from the 80s would go out of business in the 1990s, when home computing proliferated to the point that they couldn't profit. Both FOSS and commercial software development persisted, despite the predictions of unfathomable hellscapes by the advocates of Franklin Computer et. al.

In my opinion, what changed was customer sentiment. 15 years ago, in the halcyon early days of the iPhone, paying $5/month for a SaaS or $10 for a novelty app was exciting. There was a (naive) belief that spending "the cost of a cup of coffee" would contribute to the betterment of society once Apple and Mastercard had taken their cut. But it never panned out. Brand loyalty is as foolish in software as it is in hardware.

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1. tavavex ◴[30 Oct 25 21:03 UTC] No.45765321[source]▶
> indie software hasn't died because the notion of "purchase and own for life" isn't a sustainable business model

The worst thing is that it can totally be a sustainable business model. Many software giants of today grew to their size by offering "buy to own" products through the 90s and 2000s. Lots of software can still be bought through that model, especially games, and it seems to be going pretty well for the developers.

No, it's not that this model isn't good. It's that it's not enough. For nearly any large business today, the thought of not endlessly maximizing the profit for the immediate next quarter is appalling. The world-leading analysts have done their research, and the results are in: just like you said, brand loyalty doesn't actually matter for anything, and neither does brand perception or consistency. What makes the most money is using any means imaginable to hook people into a recurring payment, so that's what everyone will do once they get big enough. Nothing else actually matters in terms of money.

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2. Gigachad ◴[30 Oct 25 21:41 UTC] No.45765707[source]▶
If the competition is making more money on subscriptions, they can hire more people to improve the product, ultimately beating the non subscription options.
3. SenHeng ◴[31 Oct 25 04:06 UTC] No.45768321[source]▶
And lots of game companies keep going bust or get bought out by the bigger ones.

Even now, over a decade after its release, FFXIV subscriptions are what’s keeping the mighty Square Enix alive.

https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/25q4slides...

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4. tavavex ◴[31 Oct 25 05:23 UTC] No.45768685[source]▶
> And lots of game companies keep going bust or get bought out by the bigger ones.

I'm not sure I'm seeing the same. The gaming industry is going strong, and increasing consolidation isn't really a sign that the companies being acquired are in financial trouble, it's more about the strength and dominance of the biggest companies. And even those biggest players are continuing to release non-subscription-based titles. I'm not saying there aren't struggling gaming companies, but to me it seems that the majority are doing well for themselves, certainly there's nothing so monumental in the industry as to make me think "they're all losing money because they're not all moving to subscription services".

Square Enix also isn't really representative of the average gaming company. FFXIV seems to be their primary product in general, especially in the American and European markets. The products they cite in other sub-segments of digital entertainment are far more niche and many don't seem to be as well-received critically. They also focus a lot more on Japan than other gaming companies, for obvious reasons, which makes direct comparisons even harder. FFXIV is definitely their main cash cow due to the situation that company is in, but there's not nearly enough to map it to some sweeping industry-wide conclusion.