Hey everyone, welcome to another deep dive on the Veel Scenepacks blog.
Since 80% of you guys live in After Effects every single day, today we're talking about the elephant in the room — Adobe. The company behind Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, and the entire Creative Cloud empire.
We're going full documentary mode here. No sugarcoating, no "what should you do" advice at the end. Just the raw reality of how Adobe became this massive, hated-but-dominant force in creative software.
The Monopoly That Actually Delivered (For a While)
Adobe didn't become a giant by accident. For decades they built tools that creatives actually wanted to use. After Effects basically invented modern motion graphics workflows. Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator — these aren't just apps, they became industry standards.
The shift to Creative Cloud (subscription-only) in the early 2010s was the turning point. No more buying perpetual licenses. You pay monthly forever or you lose access to your tools (and sometimes even your files).
It worked financially. Adobe turned a one-time purchase business into a predictable, recurring revenue machine. Subscription revenue exploded. But this is also where the cracks started showing.
The Subscription Trap & Anti-Consumer Practices
Over the years, Adobe perfected the art of making it painful to leave.
- Hidden early termination fees that could cost hundreds of dollars.
- A cancellation process so complicated it required navigating multiple screens and talking to several representatives — the DOJ literally called it an "obstacle course".
- In 2024, the US government sued Adobe over these practices. In 2026 they settled for $150 million — a tiny fraction of their revenue.
Users started calling it "the Adobe tax." You pay premium prices, but updates sometimes feel half-baked, performance gets worse on older hardware, and you have no real ownership.
Despite all this, most professional editors and motion designers stayed. Why? Because the alternatives weren't good enough yet. After Effects had (and still has) the biggest plugin ecosystem, the most tutorials, and the deepest integration with the rest of the Adobe suite. It became a classic lock-in situation.
The CEO Era Ends: Shantanu Narayen's Exit
In March 2026, Shantanu Narayen — who had been CEO since 2007 (literally the year some of you were born) — announced he was stepping down once a successor is found. He's staying on as Chairman.
This came at a rough time. Adobe's stock had taken a beating. The announcement itself caused shares to drop over 7% in after-hours trading. The pressure was clear: deliver on AI, fight off competitors, and stabilize the ship.
The AI Era & Firefly Controversies
Adobe went all-in on AI with Firefly. They marketed it heavily as the "ethical" alternative — trained only on licensed data, not scraped from the internet like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion.
But it wasn't that clean.
- There was backlash from Adobe Stock contributors who felt their work was used without proper consent.
- There were reports of Firefly being trained on some AI-generated images — including from other models.
- Legal worries popped up for enterprise users about potential copyright issues.
Meanwhile, competitors moved faster with generative tools. Canva became insanely popular for quick work. Free or cheaper AI tools started eating into lower-end tasks that used to require Photoshop or Premiere.
The Figma Deal Disaster
In 2022, Adobe tried to buy Figma for $20 billion to strengthen its position in collaborative design. After massive regulatory pushback — especially from Europe and the UK — the deal fell through in late 2023. Adobe paid a $1 billion breakup fee.
It was a huge strategic miss. Figma continued growing independently, and Adobe lost a major opportunity to modernize its design tools.
AV1 Support? Still Waiting in 2026
This one hits hard for scenepack makers and video editors.
AV1 launched publicly around 2018. It's a royalty-free codec that offers better compression than HEVC in many cases. YouTube, Netflix, and many others have adopted it.
Yet in 2026 — eight years later — Adobe still has no native AV1 encoding/decoding support in Premiere Pro, Media Encoder, or After Effects. Editors still rely on plugins like Influx or have to transcode files manually.
For a company that positions itself as the leader in video tools, this is shocking. While they push AI features aggressively, basic modern codec support lags years behind.
Market Share Pressure & Rising Competitors
Adobe is still huge, but cracks are showing:
- DaVinci Resolve has been eating into Premiere Pro's territory, especially with its free version and powerful Fusion page for motion graphics.
- Canva has taken a massive chunk of quick design and simple video work.
- CapCut and local AI apps are pulling younger creators away from the Adobe ecosystem entirely.
- Stock performance in 2025–2026 has been rough, with significant drops from previous highs.
The company is making good revenue still — over $23 billion in recent years — but growth is slowing and the market is punishing them for it.
The Giant Elephant in the Room
Adobe built an incredible set of tools that became the creative industry standard. Their products are genuinely powerful — that's why so many of you still open After Effects every single day.
But the business practices — aggressive subscriptions, cancellation hell, slow innovation in key areas like modern codecs, and heavy-handed AI moves — have created massive resentment.
They turned creative software from something you buy and own into something you rent forever. And they made it very expensive and painful to stop renting.
That's the core tension: great products wrapped in a business model that feels exploitative to many users.
This is the current state of Adobe in mid-2026. A company at the top of the mountain, but the ground is shaking underneath — new competitors, AI disruption, regulatory heat, leadership change, and a very vocal user base that's tired of the status quo.
What a time to be a creator.
What do you think?
- Are you still on Creative Cloud or have you switched to something else?
- Do you think DaVinci Resolve is actually a real replacement for Premiere + After Effects?
- Should Adobe have bought Figma at that price?
Drop your takes in the comments. And if you're not in the Discord yet — join here. We talk about this stuff all the time.