Adobe’s creative software will soon only be available via an online subscription. The company has announced that it is canning perpetual licences of its Creative Suite products in favour of Creative Cloud membership.
Photoshop CS6, After Effects CS6 and their sister products will be the final releases under the Creative Suite brand. When the new versions of the software go on sale in June, they will be branded ‘CC’, for ‘Creative Cloud’.
Conventional licences of the CS6 tools will remain available for the immediate future, but Adobe says that it “do[es] not have any current plans to release future CC tools outside Creative Cloud”.
It’s important to note that the new CC releases will not require a permanent internet connection: the applications still live on your hard disk – they just prompt you to connect to the licence server every 30 days.
Users can choose when to update, so you shouldn’t have to troubleshoot new tools in the middle of a project. When it comes to backwards-compatibility, Adobe says that it “plans to continue to support the ability to export to Creative Suite 6 [from Creative Cloud] applications that have that capability now”. It’s also possible to run a CC edition of a tool alongside an older version of the software, so if all else fails, you retain your original software as a back-up.
However, for many people, the main issue will be pricing. Creative Cloud membership currently begins at $49.99 a month for access to all of Adobe’s creative software, or $19.99 a month for access to a single app.
For more info visit: Adobe