A monopoly is an evil for small business.

21 hours ago, Litho said:

I understand that the majority of people here function purely from a hobby aspect. I do as well as far as game design goes. I am however a professional artist. I pay for Adobe suite for personal use (and occasional freelancing) despite having a copy provided to me for my 9-5 job.

From hobbyists point of view this means that Substance is literally gone - majority of people running for game jams, or making a hobby project at home will NOT pay license fee monthly. This is mainly due to the fact that you spend time occasionally and irregularly on that project - there can be months where you don't touch it at all, and there can be days where you work at the project "without sleeping". Adobe is literally stating that they don't care about these customers (at least in majority of their other products).

From economical point of view (as I'm a business owner), I don't like the fact that I'm going to be unable to purchase perpetual license at all. This may of course differ per what company services you offer, what products you make, etc. I simply dislike not having an option to buy perpetual license. This is especially harmful for smaller companies, additional rent costs may hurt you a lot (especially when you're a smaller company with less clients/products).

For most software that went this way I've moved to competition (which Substance doesn't have as of now).

From my personal point of view, Adobe tends to make their software worse with every release. Their own software is inconsistent and UI constantly changes - which I personally consider very bad. Although this is personal point of view - and others may have different one.

A few years back adobe bought out mixamo, a 3D asset auto-rigging and animation service.

Despite my initial concerns that it was going to end up behind the paywall known as Adobe Creative Cloud, i found these fears to be pretty much false, as it still remains free and just as functional today.

If they play their cards right and do the same to substance, e.g. don't change the payment model, it could work.

It seems to me that adobe are slowly buying up many gamedev tools and eventually might have enough small tools to package together into an engine, or make a play to buy out or license something premade e.g. cryengine.

They know getting into gamedev by jumping in both feet first is a dangerous business and a huge financial risk to their existing customer base and business, so they're carefully absorbing what they want a small piece at a time, divide and conquer, until eventually we'll all be part of the adobe hive ?

What are your thoughts on this?

21 hours ago, Septopus said:

I dunno what that means...  Maybe you've been downloading your Adobe products from warez sites?  Not recommended.

No, take a look to the huge ammount of cricical security updates, every time a huge list, for many times.

If a company makes such garbage, why are they not banned from existence ?

1 hour ago, Sound Master said:

If a company makes such garbage, why are they not banned from existence ?

In times a GPU driver is a half GB of size, web browsers are more complex than an older OS, displaying some images and scrolling text takes more memory than a Cray supercomputer have had back the days, consoles reserve one core to run social stuff in the background... is it even possible 'non garbage' software can still exist at all?

3 hours ago, Brain said:

It seems to me that adobe are slowly buying up many gamedev tools and eventually might have enough small tools to package together into an engine, or make a play to buy out or license something premade e.g. cryengine.

Hmmm... this remembers me, when i worked with Adobe design tools for a very long time, i always wished they would fuse some of their programs into a single one. Many had similar functionality, e.g. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, all allowed to draw bezier shapes. But each different, and you always missed something from the other programs.

But this never happened. I've never seen them merging stuff together. So if you think they want to rival Unity / UE4 on the long run i do not think they could do this well. More likely they keep focused on content creation. Is Substance their first 'serious' approach towards 3D at all? You may be right and they may not force, but just lure gamedevs to their cloud model, so creative cloud OR stand alone? Would be better for anyone at first i guess.

2 hours ago, Sound Master said:

No, take a look to the huge ammount of cricical security updates, every time a huge list, for many times.

If a company makes such garbage, why are they not banned from existence ?

The world isn't 2 dimensional my friend, you can't just "write good code" publish it and never touch it again.  When you are one of the most widely known names in computer graphics and digital imaging, how many attempts to hack their code do you think they get?  I would suspect as much or more than any major operating system, with a code-base size that likely rivals an OS...  How many critical security updates does Windows or Linux generate? 

Your opinions are very strong and it seems like they are mostly unfounded, I don't understand why you think their products are garbage anyhow..  Have you ever used Photoshop?  Like actually used it?..  Not garbage, not garbage at all.

5 minutes ago, JoeJ said:

Is Substance their first 'serious' approach towards 3D at all?

They have Dimension for 3D scene rendering and Animate for 3D Animation(html5,webgl,AIR), so they could easily fit Substance into their existing CC offering without changing anything much at all.

You measure in good things i measure in bad things.

Dont wanto be rude, where i,m from : no news is good news.

53 minutes ago, Sound Master said:

If a company makes such garbage, why are they not banned from existence ?

You can't ban a company, if we could - then we'd be living in totalitarian regime. You can get rid of them though - by making software that is going to be their competition. This isn't a simple task, but it is doable.

5 minutes ago, JoeJ said:

is it even possible 'non garbage' software can still exist at all?

The complexity of software does grow - but that doesn't necessarily means that all software is a garbage.

You need to support your software though. I'm not sure in how complex projects @Sound Master was involved so far, but everything is going to have issues, bugs, etc. Just FYI even in as simple project as this: https://zgragselus.itch.io/logicatory 

Is having multiple bugs. And this is a Ludum Dare jam game project (which often means software garbage per definition), created within 72 hours on pre-existing game engine ... the actual game source code is bad - and you can find it here - https://github.com/Zgragselus/Ludum-Dare-41---Logicatory).

In this project you can find at least a dozen of issues that could be fixed with investing additional time into supporting this software (which goes against the point of game jam).

I'm not linking this to do a shameless self-promotion or to show you how bad art & code I can create when working on caffeine without sleep - but mainly to illustrate that even simple software WILL HAVE BUGS & ISSUES. With growing complexity, the amount of problems increases.

The only way how to have non-garbage software is to actually invest time and resources to support it. I don't personally consider Adobe software a garbage, they just go the way I don't like.

25 minutes ago, JoeJ said:

is it even possible 'non garbage' software can still exist at all? 

True, this is also a big point next to the safety issues.

8 minutes ago, Septopus said:

They have Dimension for 3D scene rendering and Animate for 3D Animation

While i have not used any of those, i remember Photoshops and After Effects awesome 3D features  ... not really useful for somebody experienced with Autodesk stuff for example. So with Substance it is quite a shift towards 3D professionals, which is interesting. It is not their existing user base of 2D artists, designers, web, movie makers. So an alternative distribution additionally to CC makes a lot sense here. Likely they would need a more complete package to justify a proper CC bundle for gamedev. Quixel or something, haha :)