Re:Show HN: I open sourced a game I just released on Steam, ...
by WorldMaker on Monday May 24, 2021 @05:33PM
(#27269985)
I believe what went away was the ability to get Animate for cheap. Flash was extremely highly pirated and that served as an entryway for young would be web devs/game makers. In the Creative Cloud era, pirating Animate has become a lot harder to do. So fewer people know of what it can do after the easier to pirate eras, and in turn fewer people see it as an on ramp to web animation and/or game development.
Not that pirating is the right solution nor that Adobe doesn't have a right to make money from their software, but that Adobe is missing a possibly huge audience they could attract with more "middle options" than super locked down Creative Cloud accounts such as for kids without access to the family's purse strings, for lower income and education use, for try before you buy needs, etc.
Animate also exports to Adobe's AIR runtime — which isn't just "that weird Adobe thing you had to install on your PC once to run a business presentation", but much more importantly translates to the ability to export a project to a native mobile app for iOS/Android, since these platforms have AIR-runtime implementation as libraries you can link into an app project.
Not sure why everyone seems to have forgotten it existed. It's not like it went unmaintained or anything, the way Fireworks was for a while before its death. Animate is still a great and modern tool, with new features being added all the time. It's become a first-in-class tool for animation studios to produce cartoons with — thus the updated name/branding. People just seem to have lost, in the process of that rebrand, all awareness of the fact that it can still be used to make games/interactive experiences. Which is a shame.