In mid-September 2022, Adobe officially announced the acquisition of the highly popular Figma graphic editor, which is wildly popular among web designers and interface developers for mobile and desktop platforms. The deal was worth $20 billion, so users already predicted that the large owner company would soon begin to transform Figma’s business model to capitalize on the acquired audience. And today, January 10, Adobe confirmed this information – an entry about the platform for the sale of paid assets and plugins appeared on the official Figma blog.
Already in February of this year, Figma will introduce support for paid files, plugins, widgets and other content from the graphics editor community. True, it will not be Adobe itself that will sell the content, but content creators who meet the requirements of the platform. And at the moment, of course, it is not entirely clear how exactly these content authors will be selected, what percentage of the sale Adobe will take for itself, and whether content authors will be able to set their own price or whether the service will independently evaluate the cost of content in each of the categories. But this is not the worst news, which could potentially completely change the attitude of the audience towards the Community section, which previously allowed access to a ton of useful materials.
The main problem is that Figma will no longer allow plugin and widget developers, as well as various asset authors, to include links to third-party payment systems. For example, before the user could connect a plugin to remove the background from an image by paying for a paid subscription on the official website of this extension. Now it will be possible to pay for content exclusively through the Figma payment platform – in the same way, for example, Apple is forcing developers to pay a percentage of sales in the App Store. This is a big blow to developers who have been creating really useful plugins for years and could make good money from it.
However, the situation is quite expected – when a company like Adobe buys a project so important for the world of web design for $ 20 billion, then it is foolish to expect that it will not be monetized in order to recoup the money spent. Another thing is that the company could find monetization mechanisms that are more attractive to the audience than the forced sale of content in the community.
Source: Trash Box
Charles Grill is a tech-savvy writer with over 3 years of experience in the field. He writes on a variety of technology-related topics and has a strong focus on the latest advancements in the industry. He is connected with several online news websites and is currently contributing to a technology-focused platform.
