Adobe Is Killing A Popular Animation And Game Development Program (gamespot.com)
- Reference: 0180725748
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/03/1445206/adobe-is-killing-a-popular-animation-and-game-development-program
- Source link: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/adobe-is-killing-a-popular-animation-and-game-development-program/1100-6537851/
Animate, the successor to the once-popular Flash, is widely used for graphic creation, animation and building games in HTML5. The company has not offered a reason for the shutdown. On BlueSky, artist and animator Julia Glassman wrote that many television productions, games, and animated media still rely on Animate and Flash pipelines and cannot simply pivot to entirely new software.
[1] https://www.gamespot.com/articles/adobe-is-killing-a-popular-animation-and-game-development-program/1100-6537851/
why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
> many television productions, games, and animated media still rely on Animate and Flash pipelines and cannot simply pivot to entirely new software.
"cannot"? Why not? Is this one of Adobe's cloud-only programs? Nope, wikipedia to the rescue:
> Technical support and the ability to download content will be available for end users until March 1, 2027, support for enterprise customers will continue until March 1, 2029. However, despite this discontinuation, [1]the software will still function [wikipedia.org].
So... the software (which is, by the way, Flash ) will continue to work as long as Windows doesn't change too much underneath it, and will receive enterprise support for FOUR YEARS. If you cannot "pivot" away from Flash in FOUR YEARS then you deserve to fail. Most media in current production won't even still be made in four years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_animate
er (Score:2)
Forgot what year it was there for a second. THREE YEARS. Our weapons are fear, surprise, and...
Re: (Score:2)
If this were normal software I would agree with you, but it's not. This is Adobe software. Adobe is infamously known for doing incredibly dumb shit in the name of "support" such as ring fencing installation of software to specific Windows versions without any good compatibility reason.
There's no reason to think Animate won't just fail to install completely arbitrarily on some upcoming Windows release. It has happened in the past as anyone who ever decided to try a Windows beta build and found they couldn't
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure this hypothetical won't ever be a problem, though! After all, Windows 11 is the last version of Windows, ever! Or wait, wasn't that Windows 10?
It's local (Score:3)
As far as I know, it's a local application, so even if they discontinue it, you can still run it. I'm still using VB6 as our main development platform for our daily used application, and MS discontinued it in 2021 (of course any new application is not being developed in VB6 anymore, but the moneymaker still is).
Re: (Score:2)
Adobe has a history of arbitrarily ring-fencing applications to specific windows versions. Its a local application which means that what you have today will function with the build of Windows you have today. That may not be the case next year where you may find shit just fails to install with an error saying it's not compatible with your version of Windows. Adobe has a history of this dumbfuckery.
Homestar runner had just come back (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not really a surprise that adobe is killing it. AI is going to devour the actual market for this stuff which is quick and dirty advertising campaigns. And there is not much money to be made off of hobbyists they're just aren't enough of them.
Of course if any company actually tried to make a viable product that could compete in this space and get some traction I'm sure Adobe would immediately run them out of business or buy them out. Because having control of all markets is something that companies
Wait, I thought they liked money (Score:1)
"What if this is the last straw and while changing software, they also train the whole company on GIMP instead of Photoshop and stop paying us exorbitant fees per month for nothing?" - Nobody at Adobe apparently.
Re: (Score:3)
>> while changing software, they also train the whole company on GIMP instead of Photoshop
> GIMP is not an alternative to Adobe Animate
I read it as a not-only-but-also construction: "while changing [animation] software [from Adobe Animate to something else], they also train the whole company on GIMP instead of Photoshop." In other words, Adobe's former customers would be using not only Synfig Studio to replace Animate but also GIMP to replace Photoshop.
Yeah, but it was only 1.999 billion dollars (Score:2)
Daddy doesn't get a yacht for his yacht's service yacht for less than 2.00 billion.
This isn't news. Never trust Adobe. (Score:1)
Trough out the 2000nds I did professional rich client development with Flash & ActionScript. One of my last gigs was as a senior FE dev building a large non-trivial Flash client for a commercial internet/web game. The project closed down after 2 million Euros were spent because FakeB00k changed the TOS and closed up their platform for Zynga and FarmVille/CityVille. Shortly after the official iOS blocking/prevention of Flash became a widespread fact and Adobe completely dropped the ball on utilizing Flas
Misleading much? (Score:2)
It's a bit misleading to post in the summary that it will be discontinued "March 1" without mentioning that's 2027 - more than a year away, and the product will continue to work, but just stop getting updates on that date. I agree it's tough to rework your whole pipeline, but if your entire business model relies on someone else's product never changing or going away, then you're bad at business.
Re: (Score:2)
> the product will continue to work, but just stop getting updates on that date.
Maybe I misread, but it sounded like Animate would also stop getting activated on replacement PCs on that date.
Animate(d) (Score:1)
Only because they haven't found an additional mechanism to make money from the content creators that are using the software. ALL of their software has numerous built-in un-removable 'additional' cost content or services.
Synfic (Open Source) Might Work for Some Animators (Score:2)
[1]https://www.synfig.org/ [synfig.org]
[1] https://www.synfig.org/
"Again, Charlie Brown. Again, and again, & aga (Score:4, Insightful)
If only there were some precedent for software developers or even specifically Adobe behaving in this way that could have warned the users that this sort of thing might happen.