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Adobe Creative suite (photoshop.illustrator etc) started this ownership ambiguity back in the CS4 era, the last version you could buy on DVDs. There are an awfu

Adobe Creative suite (photoshop.illustrator etc) started this ownership ambiguity back in the CS4 era, the last version you could buy on DVDs. There are an awful lot of people running old mac os's to keep using this version. It does phone home and has some suspicious bugs that may be associated with that so some are paranoid enough to keep their dedicated CS4 computer offline. This is high cost software that people rely on for business but since that era our phones and macs update all the time in the background, rendering sw we thought we owned non operational and requiring 'upgrade$'. It's insidious and has created a whole generation who feel 'ownership' is ephemeral and at the whim of the sw creator, while being encouraged to think of products like creative suite as pay as you go, pay to play rental services. We really need to get some user rights laws back in place around the idea that if you buy something you own it permanently because vehicles are rapidly evolving to be rental software cash cows too.

LegitShady 4y ago
I have DVDs of cs5 I think, but you still need their activation service or a crack to use them.
- olivermarks 4y ago
  Yes I think CS5 is a lot harder to keep running due to the Adobe activation 'service'. What I find fascinating is a whole generation of people learnt last century how to use Adobe sw on cracked Photoshop and others, an invaluable trained user base. Adobe have gone right to the other extreme of creating a walled garden with very tight monetization, which must surely result in a rapidly shrinking user base? I've also heard horror stories of Adobe going after publicly listed companies who have multiple licenses for CS but who have people in offices in other countries who have gone shadow IT and are running unlicensed creative suites, with Adobe insisting they can sue the multinational company for license revenue for every single employee the company has worldwide. None of this is healthy, whether a game, creative software or a car....
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    This has at least spurred competition in the space. I find the Affinity products much better priced and providing the functionality i need
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    I ended up buying Affinity Designer/Photo, and Procreate on ipad, to replace a huge amount of what I did with adobe software. It’s not perfect but its close enough, and I’d rather do a one time purchase and just have the license instead of the monthly subscription. I think adobe is pretty happy with the results of their switch to subscriptions, but I personally don’t get enough use out of it to pay monthly. I used CS5 for years and years - I don’t need to have the latest and greatest. Maybe for someone else it is worth it.
    - daniel-cussen 4y ago
      I will never learn an Adobe product, in response.
CyanBird 4y ago
Hijacking this rambling on Adobe, to try and get some visibility for this issue: To substance designer users, Adobe is about to *shut down substance share* with all its shared graphs, materials, textures and tools alongside it, they will not port any of these graphs onto the new monetized platform they made, and newly added tools on that platform will be locked off for learning as they are stored on the innacessible sbar format rather than the open format of sbs They will shut down substance share on September, so if you want to keep local copies of tools stored there, it is now or never to back it all up For reference to non-substance users, all of the info above was corroborated after a lot of discussion with adobe's lead product management, they will do it anyway, no matter what, there's nearly a decade worth of collective knowledge in that repo, and yes, they will nuke it anyway because it can't be easily monetized
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  If this is something worth saving maybe you could go to reddit r/datahoarders and get someone to back it up?
kllrnohj 4y ago
In the case of Adobe's suite I don't mind because it's priced accordingly and quite clear from the outset to be a rental model. It's a bummer there's no just purchase option, but it's not ambiguous either. The Ubisoft situation here is different. This wasn't ever positioned as a subscription, it's not sold or priced as one, so it's I think tantamount to theft by Ubisoft. They're stealing from everyone who bought the game.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  It used to be retail. For the particular product I use a lot (Audition, audio editing SW), they moved to a rental model without adding any new features in the last 5-6 years. In fact, there are older versions of the software that I keep around because they have features that Adobe took out after they acquired the product from Syntrillium software.
  - olivermarks 4y ago
    CS4 & CS5 had a complete adobe acrobat and distiller included. That sw today is gutted as a rental product, with various module 'features' you can pay extra for that are effectively identical to the original complete package. I don't think the product has evolved significantly, but the monetization monitoring and charging system certainly has
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Retail Adobe was really expensive, easily $1k+, and people would blanche at the cost of upgrading to newer versions, so at least the subscription would help spread that cost out. Games have never been priced that expensively and so are less compelling even if they are subscription.
- weaksauce 4y ago
  there are some options for people like using affinity which you own outright for ~50 bucks or davinci studio which is like 2 or 3 hundred. both very powerful in their own domains... photoshop and premier. there is no alternative for older games. They really should opensource the code for the server to save it for posterity sake.
kyriakos 4y ago
It also created a new problem. Software being released unpolished without adequate testing in semi beta state because customers will receive updates shortly after that may or may not fix the issues. This is particularly an issue with games (see cyberpunk 2077 story as an example).
- eastbound 4y ago
  I was about to say that it greatly reduced the cost of building the software, at very little inconvenience for end-users, since entire blocks of features don’t need to be built when you can launch quick and observe what customers use the product for. But in the case of games, it’s like a movie, you can’t go Agile with a movie and release the first two scenes and see what stories customers would like you to develop.
  - kyriakos 4y ago
    You are making a valid point. I wouldn't mind if for example Adobe included a new experimental denoising algorithm in lightroom and later release an update to fix it but with a video game it's a different story. Games are an experience, and if that experience is riddled with bugs I will never go back to replay those parts when a fix is released.
  - cma 4y ago
    Minecraft early access is a good counter argument, but it wasn't a narrative game.
quitit 4y ago
I feel your sentiment, but Adobe is probably not the best example to use since it is clearly sold as a subscription and the annual subscription service solves a lot of historical issues* while being nearly 27x cheaper than buying the CS master-suite outright. Also Adobe never made moves to kill the apps which you did buy outright (they even still offer some cut back versions of their apps this way). A better example is Stadia - where you buy the game, can only play it in Stadia and since Google seem likely to pull the plug on it; those games will quite likely become unplayable forever. I can only partly sympathise with Ubisoft's argument that online services can't go on in perpetuity. Since there are a lot of really reasonable counterpoints: 1. Ubisoft aren't discontinuing online service for remastered editions 2. Is it really unrealistic to keep running such a service, at least until it is no longer played by large numbers of people? Also similar to your line of thinking, it's a shame that Ubisoft can't be compelled to release the server software when they discontinue online play. 3. They are literally still selling a title which will no longer be playable in less than 2 months. 4. DLC for these games wasn't free, and it'll be gone. People aren't being unreasonable here, they're right to be upset. * Adobe: Creatives/agencies were almost always on different versions of the software, or simply didn't have all of the apps. Something that hamstrung the industry and made it very difficult to switch agencies. Secondly each app began to reproduce functionality of their sister applications because it wasn't realistic to possess the master suite (e.g. 3D, vectors and video in Photoshop.) Now with the suite available to everyone, the apps are becoming more focussed for their purpose, and developers can spend more time enhancing that core purpose, rather than having to code shoddy me-too functionality.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Photoshop Elements (and I assume Premiere) is still available as a perpetual license. Some MacOS update finally broke my old version but I get Photoshop along with my Lightroom subscription anyway so I've never bought a new version.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

LegitShady 4y ago

I have DVDs of cs5 I think, but you still need their activation service or a crack to use them.

olivermarks 4y ago
Yes I think CS5 is a lot harder to keep running due to the Adobe activation 'service'. What I find fascinating is a whole generation of people learnt last century how to use Adobe sw on cracked Photoshop and others, an invaluable trained user base. Adobe have gone right to the other extreme of creating a walled garden with very tight monetization, which must surely result in a rapidly shrinking user base? I've also heard horror stories of Adobe going after publicly listed companies who have multiple licenses for CS but who have people in offices in other countries who have gone shadow IT and are running unlicensed creative suites, with Adobe insisting they can sue the multinational company for license revenue for every single employee the company has worldwide. None of this is healthy, whether a game, creative software or a car....
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  This has at least spurred competition in the space. I find the Affinity products much better priced and providing the functionality i need
- LegitShady 4y ago
  I ended up buying Affinity Designer/Photo, and Procreate on ipad, to replace a huge amount of what I did with adobe software. It’s not perfect but its close enough, and I’d rather do a one time purchase and just have the license instead of the monthly subscription. I think adobe is pretty happy with the results of their switch to subscriptions, but I personally don’t get enough use out of it to pay monthly. I used CS5 for years and years - I don’t need to have the latest and greatest. Maybe for someone else it is worth it.
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    I will never learn an Adobe product, in response.

CyanBird 4y ago

Hijacking this rambling on Adobe, to try and get some visibility for this issue: To substance designer users, Adobe is about to *shut down substance share* with all its shared graphs, materials, textures and tools alongside it, they will not port any of these graphs onto the new monetized platform they made, and newly added tools on that platform will be locked off for learning as they are stored on the innacessible sbar format rather than the open format of sbs They will shut down substance share on September, so if you want to keep local copies of tools stored there, it is now or never to back it all up For reference to non-substance users, all of the info above was corroborated after a lot of discussion with adobe's lead product management, they will do it anyway, no matter what, there's nearly a decade worth of collective knowledge in that repo, and yes, they will nuke it anyway because it can't be easily monetized

stjohnswarts 4y ago
If this is something worth saving maybe you could go to reddit r/datahoarders and get someone to back it up?

kllrnohj 4y ago

In the case of Adobe's suite I don't mind because it's priced accordingly and quite clear from the outset to be a rental model. It's a bummer there's no just purchase option, but it's not ambiguous either. The Ubisoft situation here is different. This wasn't ever positioned as a subscription, it's not sold or priced as one, so it's I think tantamount to theft by Ubisoft. They're stealing from everyone who bought the game.

anigbrowl 4y ago
It used to be retail. For the particular product I use a lot (Audition, audio editing SW), they moved to a rental model without adding any new features in the last 5-6 years. In fact, there are older versions of the software that I keep around because they have features that Adobe took out after they acquired the product from Syntrillium software.
- olivermarks 4y ago
  CS4 & CS5 had a complete adobe acrobat and distiller included. That sw today is gutted as a rental product, with various module 'features' you can pay extra for that are effectively identical to the original complete package. I don't think the product has evolved significantly, but the monetization monitoring and charging system certainly has
bobthepanda 4y ago
Retail Adobe was really expensive, easily $1k+, and people would blanche at the cost of upgrading to newer versions, so at least the subscription would help spread that cost out. Games have never been priced that expensively and so are less compelling even if they are subscription.
weaksauce 4y ago
there are some options for people like using affinity which you own outright for ~50 bucks or davinci studio which is like 2 or 3 hundred. both very powerful in their own domains... photoshop and premier. there is no alternative for older games. They really should opensource the code for the server to save it for posterity sake.

kyriakos 4y ago

It also created a new problem. Software being released unpolished without adequate testing in semi beta state because customers will receive updates shortly after that may or may not fix the issues. This is particularly an issue with games (see cyberpunk 2077 story as an example).

eastbound 4y ago
I was about to say that it greatly reduced the cost of building the software, at very little inconvenience for end-users, since entire blocks of features don’t need to be built when you can launch quick and observe what customers use the product for. But in the case of games, it’s like a movie, you can’t go Agile with a movie and release the first two scenes and see what stories customers would like you to develop.
- kyriakos 4y ago
  You are making a valid point. I wouldn't mind if for example Adobe included a new experimental denoising algorithm in lightroom and later release an update to fix it but with a video game it's a different story. Games are an experience, and if that experience is riddled with bugs I will never go back to replay those parts when a fix is released.
- cma 4y ago
  Minecraft early access is a good counter argument, but it wasn't a narrative game.

quitit 4y ago

I feel your sentiment, but Adobe is probably not the best example to use since it is clearly sold as a subscription and the annual subscription service solves a lot of historical issues* while being nearly 27x cheaper than buying the CS master-suite outright. Also Adobe never made moves to kill the apps which you did buy outright (they even still offer some cut back versions of their apps this way). A better example is Stadia - where you buy the game, can only play it in Stadia and since Google seem likely to pull the plug on it; those games will quite likely become unplayable forever. I can only partly sympathise with Ubisoft's argument that online services can't go on in perpetuity. Since there are a lot of really reasonable counterpoints: 1. Ubisoft aren't discontinuing online service for remastered editions 2. Is it really unrealistic to keep running such a service, at least until it is no longer played by large numbers of people? Also similar to your line of thinking, it's a shame that Ubisoft can't be compelled to release the server software when they discontinue online play. 3. They are literally still selling a title which will no longer be playable in less than 2 months. 4. DLC for these games wasn't free, and it'll be gone. People aren't being unreasonable here, they're right to be upset. * Adobe: Creatives/agencies were almost always on different versions of the software, or simply didn't have all of the apps. Something that hamstrung the industry and made it very difficult to switch agencies. Secondly each app began to reproduce functionality of their sister applications because it wasn't realistic to possess the master suite (e.g. 3D, vectors and video in Photoshop.) Now with the suite available to everyone, the apps are becoming more focussed for their purpose, and developers can spend more time enhancing that core purpose, rather than having to code shoddy me-too functionality.

ghaff 4y ago
Photoshop Elements (and I assume Premiere) is still available as a perpetual license. Some MacOS update finally broke my old version but I get Photoshop along with my Lightroom subscription anyway so I've never bought a new version.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]