Adobe announced in October 2021, that they would be jumping on the NFT train. They showed that a new feature that allows you to export your work into an NFT to sell. This seems to be the next step when it comes too all tech giants across the industry: Social Media with Facebook, Gaming with Ubisoft, and now Art with Adobe. As with most businesses, its just another profit hunt, its there only reasoning- and we know that its their only reasoning, however, they have come out with a statement, “The goal is to prevent the minting of art by those who didn’t create it”. This is all just typical PR, covering up. They believe it is the future. Now the only good side to this, is the fact that Adobe is only adding more accessibility when it comes to their products. However, having Adobe be in full support of NFTs has caused a huge uproar amongst artists, o0r at least those who don’t support NFTs. Although this was expected of Adobe to hop on, it still seemed to catch creators by surprise and cause them to start pirating the software or finding other software in boycott. This is a huge problem in the industry. More and more companies are hopping on the NFT train just to make a few extra easy bucks on top of their billon dollar corporation, and there are many consequence both in the environment and in their customers. I believe that there is enough of a overall disgust for NFTs right now that I cant comprehend why more and more companies are still joining.
Author: Jaydon
This is Jaydon Bazin-Smith. Jaydon is a student at Glendale Community College and is in the Digital Media Arts program to be a Graphic Designer. His hobbies include gaming, recording lets play style gaming videos, and recording for journalist style gaming podcasts. His goals in this class are to help improve his writing skills in general as well as to be able to write scripts for his videos and podcasts. Ultimately his goal in all of his studying is to be a lead graphic designer for logos and marketing for an indie game studio or even a triple A game studio.
The NFT chatter never stops! Why am I not surprised that everyones software conglomerate, Adobe, is getting their greedy little hands on a piece of the pie. I can tell you have some strong opinions on the nature of Adobe’s business practices, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. As someone with a passion for photography and videography, I have spent countless dollars and many hours laboring over the creative cloud. I have found myself chained to a company who refuses to let me buy their products. Hiding behind customer support and software updates, it’s difficult to not hold some resentment towards the company when they are dipping their toes in just another way to make money.
As anyone who uses creative cloud softwares knows, there will always be a catch to adding the program to your arsenal. Whether it be an add-on fee or an outright upgrade to base subscription packages, I can guarantee Adobe will be finding a way to make money from this new NFT export method.
While most of what I’m saying is doom and gloom along with being relatively negative, I do think that professional artists who need a resourceful way to release NFT’s will find Adobe’s platform to be reliable, just not cheap.
Hi Jaydon! I liked your article because I, too, am sick of NFTs. There is so much to say about what is wrong with the idea of owning an image address on a blockchain, but as an artist I prefer to focus on the difficulties NFTs pose to artists. One thing I am noticing in the art industry is that NFT production requires a ton of work for very little pay. Artists are already getting paid less than is appropriate, I feel like there is no benefit here other than continued employment. Furthermore, if an artist wishes to sell an NFT piece, it is definitively more work than just selling a piece or selling a commission. There are just more steps, more work, more knowledge, and more unintended consequences.
I think that your point about companies hopping on the train for money is spot on. At its baseline, NFT doesn’t really seem like something that can cause these giant profits, but the culture around cryptocurrencies has managed to really inflate their value. I don’t really feel like I can fault the companies for hopping on because, well, why wouldn’t they? It’s already an established thing on the blockchain, and it’s already established to be profitable. It costs them very little to get involved, but also allows them a lot of profits.
I think the NFT craze is mostly a case of ignorance; people don’t know what blockchains are or how they work, but it sounds cool and they like “owning” things. Kind of like beanie babies.