This has heightened my concerns, not allayed them. They have said perpetual licenses will always be an option but 1) I don’t trust corporate promises and 2) they could easily just price that out of reach to push people onto a subscription model. A six-month trial is a not a “try us” timeline, it is “make us indispensable” timeline. That’s a big up front loss of revenue for them which I only see them making back if they go for a higher-pressure pricing model.
The whole point of single purchase, that people here ask for all the time, is that you pay once and get a product.
Nothing that is happening changes that contract. If they go against their perpetual license promise, your existing one will still be valid "perpetually."
That's the whole trade: monthly or annual subscriptions give you the flexibility to react to changes to the product. One time payments don't get changes so no need to react.
There is more to this argument. Adobe made themselves an industry standard with a perpetual license - pay once, own forever. Once they transitioned to a subscription model with a strict cancellation policy, it became the only option.
Saying that designers could have just continued using Photoshop CS on a 2006 MacBook doesn't reflect the reality of hardware updates and the changes in the industry-wide design trends.
The concern is here is clearly not the revocation of licenses.
The cost of not just learning but becoming a professional user of a specific set of tools is very high. Then later as time goes by being forced to either abandon these tools or to accept a different pricing model is - to many people - unfair and unethical.
To play along, activation is still a potential issue. Affinity v1 suite had offline activation so one can always activate on any new system/install, while v2 (for its non-volume license at least), which since brought along an optional subscription model, switched to online activation.
Looking at Adobe multiple versions have phased out online activation support over the years, with a not uncommon complaint being trouble installing and using purchases subsequently. As with anything tied to server checks one has to trust it will either continue working or workarounds be provided.
IIRC Clip Studio Paint switched their activation method in the last few years as well.
I know some people who bought the last time they had a 50% off sale recently.
$100 or so for the full suite. Great for the few times a year you need to use a tool. Even though I'm more on the tech side, I spent enough time in photoshop/etc around web development at one point that it's handy to have.
This would cost more in a month or two on a subscription.
I don't anticipate the current version licensing being revoked.
Future versions might add a subscription, but my feeling is if the TAM for them is all of Adobe's subscription clients, there's probably a lot more customers they can absorb.
