I wanna share a thought I'm incubating for very long: is #enshittification just a matter of greed or it's something most software companies, especially in the #B2C space, needs to do to survive?

Back in 2018-2019 I found out the awesome Affinity suite for graphic design who offered a fast, compatible, good looking alternative to Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign for a very low price and no subscriptions. While I'm not very skilled in graphic design and Gimp and Inkscape are more than enough to cover my need I still bought the license to their software out of the admiration for their work and I did that again when V2 came out despite not really needing to update. For a while I even considered to apply to work with them since I believe in fast and polished software and they seem among the best in doing that but never tried since I lacked that much experience with modern C++.

Some years later they were acquired by #Canva, obviously the #CEO promised to keep improving #Affinity and never put a subscription on it but it seems that they're taking steps towards it. They made the application "free as in free beer" (good... I guess...) but it now requires a Canva account to work and now it regularly contacts Canva servers to check activation status (despite it costs 0). Then they integrated #AI features on it but these are paywalled, they started to paywall some features from the older version too (not many features but still...), its rumored they'll introduce "collaboration" features (of course paywalled) and I can't wait to see what's going to happen once #Canva becomes a public company 🙄 I totally expect Canva to turn them into "Adobe but slightly less evil/expensive". It's like seeing a parasite consuming from the inside a company and a software package I used to love and sooner or later only an empty shell will remain.

Now its easy to blame Canva, human greed or le evil capitalism for this but I wonder if Affinity higher ups had alternatives that allowed them to keep their lights open without being assimilated ehm... acquired by big corp.
There's only a fixed amount of features which makes sense to include in a graphic design software and a fixed amounts of bugs to fix before software becomes rock solid therefore sooner or later you run off of reasons to convince your customers to open their wallet and buy the new version of your software, the old just works well enough. This on a software which is already a niche selling only to the relatively few professionals who trust them and take the plunge leaving Adobe behind and to software enthusiasts like me. Therefore you have only a fixed amount of versions and a fixed amount of sales before the market becomes saturated to death and at that point what would you do? Fall standing up for your principle (at the cost of your employers losing their jobs) or get acquired winning a nice paycheck for yourself and buying some times for your employers too? Its not an easy choice.