Adobe acquires Allegorithmic makers of Substance Painter & Designer
polycounter lvl 14
Can't say I am a fan of these news: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/23/adobe-acquires-allegorithmic-makers-of-the-substance-texture-tools/
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Just went to the Allegorithmic forums to confirm and there are 11 pages of doom and gloom, outrage, disappointment, and the eulogies have already begun.....
Just look what Adobe did to Mixamo. Corporations kill creativity by definition.
This is a sad day for artists.
I had no idea Adobe had a bad rep among artist. And I've always been wishing photoshop and painter could merge.
Is there no silver lining at all? Is Adobe that awful?
It may not be for a few years, but Substance tools, as we know them, will suffer greatly. Yes, you'll hear the usual cheerful and optimistic replies from devs whose company has just sold out to a corporation: 'oh, everything will stay the same. We're one big happy family now.....'
Bullshit. I've seen it countless times over the years. So many great programs and plugins murdered ruthlessly or left to die on the vine by corporations.
Also, there's the pricing plan to consider. They'll keep squeezing. It's how share-driven, profit margin companies work. They suck the blood dry. Adobe are a notoriously bad company in terms of customer relations. Giant corporations always are. But, I don't really give a shit abut the pricing in comparison to the creativity and innovation that will surely suffer.
Something they're known for is buying companies/software, and either integrating killing them; for better or worse. Really all we can do is speculate on the future and loot the convenience stores for good measure.
Allegorithmic was consistently innovating their tools with really useful new features and bug fixes every few months, not even need to mention the good interaction with their customers, like youtube, support, good prices, and actually listening to what ppl wanted.
And Adobe, oohh Adobe, took them 10 years to fix bugs that people were complaning all the time with basics tool like brushes in photoshop, and new and usefull features happens every year or so and when it happens is very few things, pretty much the same type of complaining that max and maya users have with autodesk for years.
But hey, look at the bright side, if you want to use the ''second'' best tool for texture painting you need, err, an adobe licence.
My mind just keeps going back to a looong outrage thread on the Mixamo forums a year or so ago when Adobe killed off the UE4 integration overnight, with ZERO warning. The thread was full of indie devs whose entire projects were built around a Mixamo pipeline. Projects were either being rebuilt or scrapped entirely, while others missed deadlines and in the worst cases bankrupted the dev or studio.
All the while a smug, satisfied 'PR woman' from Adobe, who clearly had no f**cking idea what a pipeline even was, repeated her same bullshit corporate platitudes with ZERO empathy, heart, emotion, or inkling of just what was at stake for some of these unfortunate bastards who might just have wasted 2 years of their lives and spent every penny they had. Corporations in a nutshell.
Well, I just got an email (sure everybody did) from allegorithmic and the main premise was in belaboring the point that this merge won't stifle innovation but will in fact expand, etc. Haha. Ok, so now I really know exactly what to expect. Like when somebody prefaces "Now, no offense, but..."
I'm not saying I'm right, but chances are that I am. Never underestimate the nature of a corporation to destroy creativity.
I wasn't that much upset since when Adesk bought Softimage and then killed it!
As for the email, stuff like that is always said on an acquisition in order to maintain customers. Even if they actually believe it themselves at Allegorithmic, it's irrelevant. Because Adobe are now the ones in charge, and obviously they would never let on to the company they're trying to acquire that they have any nefarious plans for them.
There are countless, countless examples out there of small companies cheering about their acquisition while their new parent company was standing behind them cocking a rifle.
It may not be all bad. There's actually room for significant improvements in the way Allegorithmic implement features and importantly TEST their software.
Painter is a high risk update in a production pipeline and honestly as the person responsible for keeping our substance pipeline working across multiple projects it terrifies me every time we decide to make the jump.
On the other hand adobe could do what they did to photoshop and fuck it up to the point where it becomes a liability and a small French company pops their head up and steals all the customers
Pieces of Substance will be put into Photoshop and DimensionsCC; that's all I can say.
I think you guys misunderstood me. I was saying that even if I didn't believe musashidan (I do, he isn't saying anything crazy or unbelievable and I know he's been around in the industry for a minute) the emails sent out from allegorithmic do a great job of immediately reinforcing what he was saying.
Like, the first thing they are telling everybody is, "hey, don't worry about innovation and great support, blah blah blah." which just goes to show this is exactly what they expect everybody is going to be worried about.
poopipe said:
On the other hand adobe could do what they did to photoshop and fuck it up to the point where it becomes a liability [snip]
Damn hope not! would be just too awful to even contemplate...
Edit: I don't want to appear to hijack this thread, we're just getting mentioned frequently and I've been correcting responses as I see them pop up.
https://polycount.com/discussion/208172/adobe-substance