Once the apple of Microsoft's eye, Paint 3D will be fully killed off in favour of its elder sibling Paint
Few people wanted it when it was first launched, fewer people used it over the years, and now very few people will miss it.
![A promotional image for Microsoft's Paint 3D application](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/KhxJSdQdRWSzQSNnQ3iDrd-320-80.jpg)
From the beginning of November this year, Paint 3D will be no more, as Microsoft plans to remove it from the eponymous Store and stop updating it altogether. Once heralded as a modernised version of Paint we all deserved, the rapid decline in interest and use meant that it was only a matter of time before the inevitable would happen.
It might seem a little hard to believe but Microsoft's Paint app has been part and parcel of every version of Windows, making it almost four decades old. However, in 2017 with the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft thought we could all do with a better version and gave us Paint 3D, with the main feature set being its support for 3D models and rendering.
But as Windows Central reports, despite having some genuinely good features, time is being called on the seven-year-old app and after November 4 2024, you won't be able to download it from Microsoft Store, nor will it ever receive any future updates.
To be honest, the news shouldn't come as any surprise, especially given that Microsoft itself has been rather keen on Paint of late, updating it with a background removal tool and a generative AI system last year, to name just a few of the recent changes.
Like many of my colleagues in the PC Gamer hardware team, I have a genuine fondness for Paint and routinely use it to do basic annotations, image format changes, resizing, and so on. For more complex work, I typically use GIMP (occasionally Photoshop) and when I worked in the field of engineering, anything 3D-related would involve firing up AutoCAD, Inventor, or Fusion 360.
What I've never needed was something that was only a piecemeal version of all of these tools and given Paint 3D's swift consignment to software history, I strongly suspect I'm not the only one.
Windows 10 might still be the world's most popular Microsoft operating system but that hasn't saved the likes of Cortana and the Tips tool being quietly booted into netherspace. At least Paint 3D can join them with a sense of being quite useful and I wouldn't be surprised if there are some folks out there who will be sad to see it go.
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Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in 1981, with the love affair starting on a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and a book on ZX Basic. He ended up becoming a physics and IT teacher, but by the late 1990s decided it was time to cut his teeth writing for a long defunct UK tech site. He went on to do the same at Madonion, helping to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its gaming and hardware section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com and over 100 long articles on anything and everything. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open world grindy RPGs, but who isn't these days?