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Adobe Is Killing A Popular Animation And Game Development Program (gamespot.com) 52

Posted by msmash from the end-of-road dept.
Adobe has emailed users of Adobe Animate to let them know the popular animation and game development program will be discontinued on March 1, an abrupt decision that has angered animators and game developers who say the tool remains an industry standard in television and game production.

Animate, the successor to the once-popular Flash, is widely used for graphic creation, animation and building games in HTML5. The company has not offered a reason for the shutdown. On BlueSky, artist and animator Julia Glassman wrote that many television productions, games, and animated media still rely on Animate and Flash pipelines and cannot simply pivot to entirely new software.
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Adobe Is Killing A Popular Animation And Game Development Program More

Adobe Is Killing A Popular Animation And Game Development Program

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  • "Again, Charlie Brown. Again, and again, & aga (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @11:11AM (#65966502)
    If only there were some precedent for software developers or even specifically Adobe behaving in this way that could have warned the users that this sort of thing might happen.
    • The problem is I don't think there were a lot of good alternatives. If you want an easy to use animation tool that's affordable flash and it's replacement Adobe animate seem to be about the only game in town. There are other solutions but they're harder to use and have fewer features.

      And nobody is going to build an alternative because in addition to the risks of adobe going after them for patent infringement the fact of the matter is that if you build up a viable competitor there's a high probability Ad

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Kisai ( 213879 )

        It's been walked back already.
        https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/kb/maintenance-mode.html

        >We are not discontinuing or removing access to Adobe Animate. Animate will continue to be available for both current and new customers, and we will ensure you continue to have access to your content. There is no longer a deadline or date by which Animate will no longer be available. These are changes from what we shared in our original email.

        >Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode for all customers. This applies to in

        • Predict that multiple large software companies will end of life with no migration path elderly software products just to cut costs.

          The old way was to sell off the dying product to a third party, wait a year or two, then the third-party will greatly increase the licensing costs to drive customers away.

          I've seen it where a company sold a product to a third-party, who was incorporated outside of the USA, that waited until license renewals, signed 1 year deals with customers and and then after the 1 year was up

  • why not? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @11:12AM (#65966506) Homepage Journal

    many television productions, games, and animated media still rely on Animate and Flash pipelines and cannot simply pivot to entirely new software.

    "cannot"? Why not? Is this one of Adobe's cloud-only programs? Nope, wikipedia to the rescue:

    Technical support and the ability to download content will be available for end users until March 1, 2027, support for enterprise customers will continue until March 1, 2029. However, despite this discontinuation, the software will still function [wikipedia.org].

    So... the software (which is, by the way, Flash) will continue to work as long as Windows doesn't change too much underneath it, and will receive enterprise support for FOUR YEARS. If you cannot "pivot" away from Flash in FOUR YEARS then you deserve to fail. Most media in current production won't even still be made in four years.

    • er (Score:2, Troll)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      Forgot what year it was there for a second. THREE YEARS. Our weapons are fear, surprise, and...

    • Re:why not? (Score:4, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @12:13PM (#65966630)

      If this were normal software I would agree with you, but it's not. This is Adobe software. Adobe is infamously known for doing incredibly dumb shit in the name of "support" such as ring fencing installation of software to specific Windows versions without any good compatibility reason.

      There's no reason to think Animate won't just fail to install completely arbitrarily on some upcoming Windows release. It has happened in the past as anyone who ever decided to try a Windows beta build and found they couldn't install part of the creative suite for no reason can attest to.

      • I'm sure this hypothetical won't ever be a problem, though! After all, Windows 11 is the last version of Windows, ever! Or wait, wasn't that Windows 10?

      • "There's no reason to think Animate won't just fail to install completely arbitrarily on some upcoming Windows release."

        So they may have to keep old windows around if they want to use this old program. Or they could switch to something from a less terrible company. They have some years of support before they have to do that. Adobe might even change their mind by then.

        • You say that as if corporations or companies are a bunch of nerds at home rather than at the whim of contracts with suppliers, vendors with volume licensed windows, and above all regulators who will ask them how they are managing their cyber security risks (you do not want to be the one that tells them you are running outdated unpatched or unsupported software on purpose).

          What you do in your home is not at all related to how companies are required to operate.

          • What you do in your home is not at all related to how companies are required to operate.

            What I do in my home is not become dependent on Adobe software. I guess I'm smarter than "companies".

            You sure do like to make excuses for idiots and simp for corporations which make shit products.

            • What you confuse with simping (which I did no where in this thread, in fact I not once condoned the use of Adobe products) is only me saying in words what the world around me is like.

              I can only explain things to you, I can't understand them for you. I guess you are really smart. Like a teenager who thinks they know everything.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      If you cannot "pivot" away from Flash in FOUR YEARS then you deserve to fail.

      No one deserves to fail because they guessed wrong and built some critical bit of their infrastructure on what would turn out to be an abandoned product. Neither does anyone deserve to fail because they can't manage to transition away inside of some arbitrary timeline you set based on zero information. Four years is really not that long, particularly for a critical migration.

      Do you seriously think that just because the original developers used Flash that the software must necessarily be simple enough that

      • "No one deserves to fail because they guessed wrong and built some critical bit of their infrastructure on what would turn out to be an abandoned product."

        First, yes they do. If they bet the farm on commercial software they don't control they already fucked up.

        Second, it's fucking Adobe.

        Third, it's fucking flash. Adobe already half abandoned it. Not expecting them to do it some more is spectacularly stupid. As in, way beyond deserves to fail and well into begging to fail.

        Fourth, they have three years. If th

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kisai ( 213879 )

          So you're telling me that my 4K animation project I started 5 years ago, I need to abandon because Adobe decided to break the product?

          I will tell you what is going to happen as the fallout of this. Everyone using Flash is either going to dig out CS6, or are going to use cracked/pirated of the last version that receives updates.

          Toonboom is not competition here. Toonboom is only an animation project. It does not replace flash. It's licensing system is also worse than Adobe's.
          Unity is not competition here. Uni

          • I will tell you what is going to happen as the fallout of this. Everyone using Flash is either going to dig out CS6, or are going to use cracked/pirated of the last version that receives updates.

            Cool, they should do that.

            The reason people keep using Flash, is because that's the product they've been using since the 1990's. They do not want to switch products.

            Adobe has been shitty for a long time. They made a decision and it is now bearing fruit. Shrug.

  • It sounds like those who rely on it are willing to pay for it as a critical part of their process, Adobe could just raise the price to make it worth their time. Or they could spin it off into another division dedicated to supporting these artists and make it independent from the company.

  • It's local (Score:3)

    by SuperDre ( 982372 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @11:14AM (#65966514) Homepage
    As far as I know, it's a local application, so even if they discontinue it, you can still run it. I'm still using VB6 as our main development platform for our daily used application, and MS discontinued it in 2021 (of course any new application is not being developed in VB6 anymore, but the moneymaker still is).

    • Adobe has a history of arbitrarily ring-fencing applications to specific windows versions. Its a local application which means that what you have today will function with the build of Windows you have today. That may not be the case next year where you may find shit just fails to install with an error saying it's not compatible with your version of Windows. Adobe has a history of this dumbfuckery.

      • Eh. As a long time windows developer, the version fencing is rarely arbitrary and it's likely they're doing stuff that would crash or simply be unsupported in older versions (without very expensive refactoring and rolling thier own, or minimally finding workable 3rd party API. ) Eventually, trying to maintain different code paths for different API subsets(Windows versions) becomes a total nightmare.

        • False. Adobe's is completely arbitrary. Or at least their rationale is "we didn't bother testing it, so just excluded it even though the underlying system is the same." Seriously ask anyone who has ever run an Insider build of Windows. It's not a case of maintaining code paths, in most cases there's zero difference that is relevant for the software.

          For example: Adobe blocked installation of Creative Suite on Windows 10 1903 on the day that Microsoft designated it as EOL. The same version that was perfectly

    • VB6 has aged like wine. Vista forced safe threading, allowing your app to safely thread even in the IDE, even when unhandled errors occur (allowing live debugging)! Good shit. That shit used to always crash because you simply could not safe thread manually (even if your code was 100 percent solid as an executable.)
  • It's not really a surprise that adobe is killing it. AI is going to devour the actual market for this stuff which is quick and dirty advertising campaigns. And there is not much money to be made off of hobbyists they're just aren't enough of them.

    Of course if any company actually tried to make a viable product that could compete in this space and get some traction I'm sure Adobe would immediately run them out of business or buy them out. Because having control of all markets is something that companies
  • "What if this is the last straw and while changing software, they also train the whole company on GIMP instead of Photoshop and stop paying us exorbitant fees per month for nothing?" - Nobody at Adobe apparently.

    • Daddy doesn't get a yacht for his yacht's service yacht for less than 2.00 billion.

    • I have tried using this shit. The product bugs, updates that often broke things and it being somehow plus the software was so bad it just made you more angry at Adobe in whole new ways.

      It's like my memories of Flash were wrong because this made me think it really sucked... you expect newer software to NOT to be so bad it not only makes you hate it but it also kills positive memories of past versions as well!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by unrtst ( 777550 )

        I haven't tried it, but I was using flash in 96-98 while in art school and it was pretty great. I have very fond memories of it. The interface was surprisingly simple for what it was doing, and the programming language integration was pretty great, especially for back then. I've often thought that an open source version of the older and simpler Macromedia Flash (was it 3.0?) would do very well. It could even use the old flash format with options to export to HTML5.

        The whole thing went to shit pretty quickly

        • I tried Flash at version 4-5.
          I kind of liked Macromedia Director and did that professionally for a little while. I preferred it even as flash migrated into replacing it... Flash was poor in comparison.

          For animated vector work Flash's purpose WAS to do vector animation!
          It earned it's way to the top of that but then it started to replace Director as the web-reboot of Director which is extreme feature creep.
          Then Adobe went into wanting a new platform to replace the JVM applets, eventually replace the OS and pu

    • Gimp is closer to Photoshop since the last major version, but it's still very very far away in every category and the only way it's superior is you don't have to deal with Adobe. That's not nothing but it's also not enough.

      In particular I was hoping that the interface would improve when they introduced non-destructive editing, but no. It's still grossly harder to do things which have been simple in Photoshop since early days.

  • Trough out the 2000nds I did professional rich client development with Flash & ActionScript. One of my last gigs was as a senior FE dev building a large non-trivial Flash client for a commercial internet/web game. The project closed down after 2 million Euros were spent because FakeB00k changed the TOS and closed up their platform for Zynga and FarmVille/CityVille. Shortly after the official iOS blocking/prevention of Flash became a widespread fact and Adobe completely dropped the ball on utilizing Flas

  • Misleading much? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by flibbidyfloo ( 451053 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @11:51AM (#65966590)
    It's a bit misleading to post in the summary that it will be discontinued "March 1" without mentioning that's 2027 - more than a year away, and the product will continue to work, but just stop getting updates on that date. I agree it's tough to rework your whole pipeline, but if your entire business model relies on someone else's product never changing or going away, then you're bad at business.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      the product will continue to work, but just stop getting updates on that date.

      Maybe I misread, but it sounded like Animate would also stop getting activated on replacement PCs on that date.

  • Only because they haven't found an additional mechanism to make money from the content creators that are using the software. ALL of their software has numerous built-in un-removable 'additional' cost content or services.

  • Anybody burned by this insanely short announcement delay will try to stay away from Adobe now. Long-term assured tool availability is critical for professional work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Ah, I see it is March 2027. Still way too short. Apparently, Adobe has stopped understanding its customers.

  • it's not discontinued, but in "maintenance" mode, meaning no new features and bug & security fixes for some time until it becomes too old to be supported by newer OSs.

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