The eternal broken printer driver

Adobe has always been targetted at profressionals price wise. Making it SaaS made pirating harder and the high monthly price (and annoying dark patterns) excluded and alienated the general public which upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life. The problem there is mostly the lack of good competition in spaces like Lightroom but that's starting to change. The everyone-pirates-photoshop so don't bother trying to compete idea is now over.

I looked up adobe credits. Aren’t they just used to buy licensed assets like pictures and videos. But not for the core app?

I 'member Adobe's Creative Suite costing hundreds of dollars. Photoshop alone clocked in at 699$, the full CS6 was 2599$ [1]. Either you were a professional and paid dearly every odd year or you were a student and used a cracked/keygen'd CS6.

Today? The full CC license is 70$ a month for individuals (30$ for students) and 100$ a month for businesses. Despite inflation, assuming a two year upgrade cycle you still get the same price for the full Adobe package when comparing CS vs CC.

One may complain a lot about Adobe (RIP Flash, and anything Gen AI can go to hell for all I care), but "enshittification" is one thing that can't reasonably be thrown at them.

As for Adobe Credits, AFAIK that's credits for fonts and assets - and again, I vastly prefer dealing with one storefront (Adobe) than having to buy and license individual font files or stock photos.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/23/2968192/adobe-cs6-pricing...

From a financial point of view I think Adobe’s enshittification is working pretty well.