Darknoodles

Hello! What if the Affinity products were relying more on the community ? I've been testing a lot of softwares and games, and what i can observe is that the one that are still up even though low prices or even being free, is the community that's behind. I originally come from the 3D world, working with Blender, Unreal, Unity, Godot Engine and a few others, all being free. First Point - Blender has always been free and open source (well except at the very start, but lets not make history here), and had a sluggish UI, weird counter industry standard shortcuts etc. Today, we can see how it evolved. They have a really dedicated community, developpers from all around the world, and most importantly (IMO) the scripting capabilities for people that don't want to touch the source code but have to adapt the software to there needs. And i think Affinity products is lacking that point. This would eventually allow users to temporarily solve some lacking features until they are officially implemented by the dev team. Second Point - Unreal and Unity were not free in the early years, and have now became free until you earn a certain amount of money, past which you'll have to give a percentage of your profits. This might not fit Affinity philosophy or business mind or whatever it's called, and that leads me to that other point. Third Point - Relying on contents instead of the software itself. By this, i mean establishing an official asset store where Serrif would take a percent of the sale. That's what Epic and Unity does, and i think they have been alive long enough to prove that combining this with the previous point generates enough founds to keep things going. Fourth Point - Why not going open source or adding a donation system (or both) ? That's quite sensitive i know, but look at Inkscape, they have a ton of features, even a modifier system like in 3D softwares (and damn, i miss this so much in 2D softs). On the other side, the UI is terrible (let's be honest). I wish AD would get the features from Inkscape, and Inkscape to get the UI and smoothness of AD. Another things is that a lot of opensource softwares can get people involved in it, either by donating there time or giving money. Plus, Epic Games tends to encorage open source by donating some money (Blender had been given 1.4 million if i remember well, Godot Engine got 50K... look at the Epic Mega Grant nominees). I also think that Affinity products got really interesting things, like the persona system, but they could have more. This is something that was innovating from other softwares, but it seems that the innovation stops here, sadly. I wish your softwares kept going with "out of the box" ideas. Right now to me, lots of 2D softwares look similar, with the same design philosophy and lacking or 20 years old workflow. I could make a 30 pages comparison of features that are in 3D softwares and could have there place in 2D but that's not the point. I hope you will find some interesting things in there. Cheers