John Gibson

Cool, I appreciate that, but I will need a month or two and a few serious jobs to test Affinity with. I find that often I foolishly just register for a new product only to get distracted and find my free trial time has elapsed before I realised, so these days I am resigned to a purchase even for testing purposes, unless the product is price prohibitive. Cheers!

Both Designer and Photo are available to try for free:
https://affin.co/designertrial
https://affin.co/phototrial
Please note that the ten-day trial clock runs continuously from the first time you launch the app.

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EDIT: Seems I cross-posted, you were writing at the same time.. will read that now....
Gaming??   
Engine developers have it already pretty hard to develop with completeness a single game engine (and having worked quite at game dev studios, using one of those is often a very weak/limited solution compared to in-house made engines for custom projects, coded by really estelar programmers) . I mean is clearly a type of product you would not include in a large suite.  Blender (is not only 3D composition, it does practically everything in 3D, and even texturing/shading/animating/rendering/video editing, etc, etc. with Grease Pencil, even 2D animating, even while they already had a industry level toon shading rendering with Freestyle) will, almost for sure, never partner with anything commercial, unless the other party ready to go on fully with the strict GNU GPL licensing, and I don't see many (there are instances) commercial closed source companies happy to go that path....
Look, I see sense in what MS has been doing for so many decades -and dominating the world with it- with its Microsoft Office pack, and totally great what open source has there to offer, specially Libre Office. A bunch of softwares kind of targeting a correlated set of tasks. Not stuff going across every possible different industry one can randomly think of. (even while AD/AP and PS/AI can actually be used in a ton of different industries (from medical, to astronomy, fashion, etc... but that's another matter) . I mean, not sure if what you are defining is a suite or the Apple Mac store front at its whole. Just as if all there was from the same company....
Well, in a somewhat serious note, I think that whole list is attacking way too many fronts. One thing is to be too niche, or making just one app for one single platform (ie, Winzip, which BTW, extremely successful and they did only make that, but reigned in Wndows like a Caesar in compressed archives. It goes now by version 23, lol, started all with the zip archiving system back in 1989, MSDOS times, I saw its birth ( anyone around remembers arj files? lol...), the first Windows (way before win 95, and before even Win 3.1) and it has been always strong. Or, as another way more recent example, 3D Coat. Or Zbrush. A full industry standard, now. THE KING. It only has been after many years that they expanded to a pair of other tools, but doing more or less the same stuff than the main one, or parts of it) I sincerely don't see this need of developing every freaking type of application you can run in a machine, and and stamp on it the badge of a 'suite'...
What Serif is doing, instead, totally sensible. Is the pack needed for DTP,  2D graphic design, and anything raster and vector.  Also, the number of target users is massive: photographers, designers, etc... I once -long ago, I recon- checked the volume in business (in big numbers) moved in 2D compared with 3D, and I was shocked. Despite me considering, having long experience in both, that 3D was in the end, looking at it as a whole, more technically complex, and wider to fully master all micro fields there, it totally blow my mind to check and realize the HUGE difference in money moved, size of market of 2D compared to 3D. So.. targeting that market and photography as the main thing, and even only that, makes the heck of a ton of sense.  Meaning, with a vector, a raster editing tools, and now the publishing one, they're good to go for a while... And those are deep matters enough that will take, well, at least half of what took Adobe to achieve in those their current level.
Am not saying the full list is crazy. I see some good points there, as are related, complement well the current suite. Like :
(well, your point 4 makes me think you need a bit more information on the full functionality of Affinity apps. Or just use them more.)
8 Document editing and execution (eg. Acrobat)  If you mean sth like the old Adobe Distiller, yep, I'd agree would be a nice addition. Tho, not sure if that's overlapping quite with AD/AP/Apub current and planned functionality. Seems more compact to me if the needed features PDF related keep being added to those, specially as they have this huge advantage over Adobe and other suites with the common format.
9 Okay, I'd agree, but no need to make it only cloud based. A lot of current target users are not fond of cloud-only handling, particularly. But yeah, and there's a lot of requests for a Bridge like app, an assets browser. As far as I understood, is planned to be done at some point by Serif, might be quite in the future. So, another one in the green list.
I particularly see non convenient to attack the WYSIWYG front. I've worked more than a decade doing  web code, and being a graphic web designer as well, and in this, it's all going coding centered, not the opposite. There's a reason why Muse was closed by Adobe, and why Dreamweaver is not pushed very much, neither Flash (Animate). Also, there are new workflows in the UI/UX land, and as now have a ton more tasks than we old web designers ever had, it has a ton to do with team shared work, continuous integration, team work, working with online tools like webflow, with a huge push with InVision, Sketch , Figma and, perhaps (weaker in the line, imo) Adobe XD. To put those down, and mostly make a buck, extremely, extremely hard. As also, it is all going not the design desktop app way, neither the full page design, but coding chunks and integrating those mostly generated server side, and coordinated by those UI/UX online, team work tools, very hard to defeat.
 

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Answer 1 : AUD55 for 1 piece or bundle 3 at AUD150 per year should be good and competitive.
Answer 2: Have an option to sell the bundle like for - graphics, web, video/ animation/ gaming or individually, instead of forcing us to have everything.
 
 
 
 

I have used Adobe tools 5 to 6 days a week daily for the past 26 years, with the exception when Freehand is still in business, and when later InDesign came along. What good is a software if it needs user to do many workarounds and switched off many resources? Maybe you are working with small files. We worked with huge pre-press files, large event panel files, and the latest Illustrator is just not production ready.
Bounding box disappeared by itself (mac) Changing text box A attributes will affect text box B. Text box A have no effect, need to quit (mac) Select an object and the properties panel do not reflect the selection (mac) The program reset preference as and when it likes (mac) AI ext is associated to XD and cannot be changed (Win) measurements are not accurate (e.g., enter 210 mm, the properties may become 209.99 mm - long term) White became yellow on screen kerning set will revert to 0 after deselect Out of memory (mac) Most these may be non-existent if you are working with tiny file sizes, I do not know! Support will only tell you we have a new update 23.0.1, please update and thread is closed.
Sorry for whining, out of topic.

There's one recent one here . I've not listened to all of it yet (over 1 hour) but I'm fairly sure it does not mention subscription for corp/education. I will see if anyone can find the one I'm thinking of.
Written one here
 

The purpose of that introduce yourself thread is to make customers (mainly newbies) to feel comfortable enough to introduce themselves without judgement.
To be honest John, I chose to split this off because I wanted it to have more visibility, rather than less, (that is a long thread that most participants here will ignore notifications of after a bit) and give this discussion air to breathe. Nobody petitioned anyone that I saw, and I think none of this belongs in an introduce yourself thread.

LMAOROTF, There you go again with your glib, paternal Baby Boomer notions of how I should think and what I should do with my time, without addressing even a single counterpoint I made to your previous post.
You were so embarrassed by me handing your hat to you in regards to your (Winnie The) Pooh argument, that you were thankfully relieved when the moderator split this post away from the Introduce Yourself thread, lest you suffer the indignity of the new entrants to the Serif forums reading your antediluvian post. And yet you return here, to offer me your Sir and your 2 cents of paltry riposte, which is more to be pitied than despised.
How about some serious counterpoints Jim. I remember so many know-it-alls in 1985, who uttered words about Microsoft and Apple, in a manner similar to your previous post here about Serif, so excuse me for holding you to account with forthright arguments and rationale, however much you dislike them.
And as far as your American cringe comments go, get off your high horse! You're obviously not a Californian when you say things like that now are you, lmao! I'm guessing you live in a fly-over state somewhere, or perhaps in the British back-blocks of Boston Massachusetts?!? 
And remember, freedom of speech at its essence includes the right of reply, which you should fundamentally understand as the American you purport to be, so try not to be too hurt by my latest reply to you, why not instead stick to the substance of the points at hand?
As the substance of my posts here demonstrate, I prefer rationale debate, rather than irrational baiting, but there has to be a bit of sport in this for the both of us Jim  

I too respect your position, as you have at least tried to deal with the substance of my rationale, where others have seem to get caught up in childish, emotional responses without for one second contending with my reasoning, whether it be my premises, arguments or conclusions, usually because they don't have a valid counterpoint, just hurt feelings because their filter bubble has been popped by an insurgent thought. I congratulate you for not being that way, for being made of sterner stuff, good job.
We can agree to disagree re the points, but I hope that I am right and Serif rises to the challenge to contend for market-leadership, which goes to the substance of your first paragraph, which is why am I doing this, why not still use Adobe?
Well in answer to that question, I still do. And I pay almost AUD$80 per month for it. But I wish that I didn't have to. I wish there were an alternative hence my positions put on this forum. Why? Well because I was outraged when Adobe bought Freehand and then discontinued it, even though it was far superior (and still is) to Illustrator. I was and still are outraged that Adobe persists with properitory standards like flash rather than embrace open source, industry wide, peer reviewed and democratic standards like HTML 5 for example, much like Steve Jobs hated Adobe for this too. This means of course lots of time wasted when you use a product like Freehand or more recently Edge Animate only to find your files are made redundant over time, the time you invested in workflow and product knowledge development goes out the window, and you get more or less put back to square one from time to time, DESPITE the majority of Adobe users expressing their strong views not to abandon well loved products. At the time re Freehand, I didn't know a single designer who thought Illustrator was superior to Freehand, many of who wrote to Adobe to plead with them, who instead were completely ignored and we are still paying the price for that decision in terms of extra complexity, more obtuse workflows and the like. Then there is the outrageous monthly subscription fee which is price gouging monopolist pricing policy that almost everyone condemns. As you know, I have no problems with subscriptions as a pricing model, but I do have a problem with anti-competitive, monopolistic, opportunistic pricing in which ever form of pricing regime it is applied with, be that a subscription or a single price purchase, or any other. Another example is that scumbag Martin Shkreli who raised the price of a 60 year old medicine that he acquired the ownership rights to by 5000% and is now in jail for insider trading - let him rot there! 
I could go on as there are a number of other reasons I despise Adobe, but as you say, for practical reasons, namely network effect reasons (everyone else uses it, my employees, clients, suppliers, etc), I have no other choice. Perhaps Mike is and others are right when they say words to the effect of "its too late now", a bit like the QWERTY keyboard, where there are other keyboards that have been scientifically proven to be more effective, yet the network effect of the QWERTY keyboard sees being entrenched as a standard, until of course we have direct mind link to a new product which I'll call "Think Words Into Your Computer" and the QWERTY keyboard will be toast! I don't think the creative software industry and Adobe's current leadership of it are nearly as entrenched as the QWERTY keyboard. Steve Jobs showed with the iPhone and iOS that when you provide a paradigm shift in user experience and ease of use, you can disrupt even the most entrenched markets. And that will be what the "Think Words Into Your Computer" Company will do to put the QWERTY keyboard out to pasture when they finally come along. Serif has a far lesser task to eclipse Adobe, as Adobe is like a huge ship, slow to move, committed to a course, with product vulnerabilities like the Titanic and a lot of people like me baying for a REAL/TRUE alternative.
When I say "put your money where your mouth is", I mean tell me how much you would be willing to pay a year for Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher beyond its current perpetual price of AUD$165 (assuming Publisher is also about AUD$55 when its stable) and how much would you pay per year for an Affinity version of Adobe CC with 20 software products?
I respect the fact you have invested and trialled lots of other software. I take you at your work you are an experienced designer/software user with real experiences. I too have to work with substandard software and open source products (like Wordpress for example) because everyone else does, or because a client does and so on, so I understand these dilemmas which you raise.
Re my facts being "more in the land of opinions", well of course you are welcome to your view, but we have to start somewhere. I mean we could go back to philosophical first principles of idealism vs. realism to argue this whole reality is just a figment of my (or your) imagination and nothing is real. 2+2 does not equal 4 because its just in my imagination (or yours) that it does. So where are we to start and stop when rationalising? Is climate change real? Is all mainstream media "Fake News"? Do we really wan't to abandon relative rationalism to the point the we retreat to the Dark Ages and a world of leaders like Donald Trump?
Given this relative choice of rationalism, I choice Kant's Categorical Imperative, as a pretty good starting point, as an enlightened starting point, like most scientists do, though I am sure they are better at it than I.
Most business theories and models suffer this relativity issue, like economics which at best a pseudo science, and yet these tools evolve and are still better than guessing when it comes to complex human - business, money, resources, social - problems. The Evolution and Revolution of How Companies Grow is one such model. And yet, its been pretty darn accurate so far. 
You are quite correct in saying that there are many single product or small range product companies that succeed, excell and do very well for their customers, staff and shareholders, which is a given, as there are Market Leaders (only 1 typically in any mature market), Secondaries (companies who could lead but probably won't), Contenders (upstarts that could be Secondaries and are an outside chance to lead) and Also Ran's (the typically SME's you refer to). If serif wishes to stay that way, well time will tell and these comments of mine will be moot.
The context of my comments in this thread is about a pricing strategy, a capitalisation strategy and a market leadership strategy for Serif to contend with Adobe to become a market leader, knowing as we all now do, that there is a very fluid dynamic in the creative industries market, which Serif could take advantage of if they adopt a leadership strategy to do so. For example, quantum computing is around the corner perhaps 10-20 years away, so for anyone to say the ANY software markets are now mature and therefore these matters are settled (ie. no-one can beat Adobe) is akin to the same tripe I heard about Microsoft in 1985 when Apple sacked Steve Jobs.
People who say these types of things (and I'm not saying this is you) typically lack imagination, historical understanding and market leadership understanding and avoid rationale debate for something more like akin to diatribe. So rather than admit they are out of their depth, and that these matters are beyond their imagination, they wish to limit everyone else to their low level altitude thinking. Well, I'm sorry, the world doesn't work that way. Steve Jobs didn't give up on market leadership aspirations and neither should Serif.
As far as my motivation for making these posts, well I simply hope to challenge the Serif owners and C-Suite, assuming Serif is robust and non-insular enough to self refer contrary opinions about their products to those who count, to make a difference, as Serif has come closer than any other vendor that I've seen to actually having the technical and product development wherewithal to give Adobe a run for their money, provided they can get their leadership strategy in order. I also hope to challenge the Serif community by asking them, in the first instance, the question I asked you, as potential market research for Serif (out of my own interest, I have no affiliation with Serif in any way), which is:
QUESTION 1: How much you would be willing to pay a year (updates, service & support) for Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher beyond its current perpetual price of AUD$165 (assuming Publisher is also about AUD$55 when its stable) and how much would you pay per year for an Affinity version of Adobe CC with 20 software products?
And I'll add:
QUESTION 2: Would you like Serif to create a suite of superb products as a one-stop shop for your creative authoring needs?
QUESTION 3: Would you be prepared to pay $250, $500, $1,000 or more as part of a crowd-funding, capital-raising venture for Serif in return for one time (perpetual) license and/or part-ownership of all of their soon to be developed products? How much would you pay and what would you want in return?
QUESTION 4: Would you buy Serif shares if they floated on the stock exchange?
QUESTION 5: What would you add to the current Serif products in terms of features? What other software products would you like Serif to create if they had unlimited resources?
I have a few other questions but I'll stop there for the moment. Let's see if the Serif community or at least those bother to read this post, can answer those questions for Serif's benefit, or whether they are too busy eating the Serif fruit to care about the Serif tree and a potential Serif orchard?
As far as English being your second language, you're doing a pretty good job as far as I can tell, so good luck to you!