One of the next mechanics we’ll be building for our own games is a chat system, so I’m wondering if there’s any call for this being made as a plugin?
There’s already a chat plugin in the marketplace by Develephant ( https://marketplace.coronalabs.com/corona-plugins/coronium-chatterbox ) which admittedly I’ve not looked into properly, but it looks like this requires self-hosting the server side. Contrary, what I’m thinking is that we (QWeb) would host and manage the server side and sell monthly subscriptions to just tap into this for your own games, basically.
I.e. rather than a one-off plugin cost, you’d subscribe for an access token, integrate a free plugin, and the fee would then be based on usage.
Is this of interest to anybody? If so:
-
Would you prefer that the plugin was a complete chat system that you just require() in and maybe pass parameters to define where on the screen this gets rendered and some primary colours to use?
-
Or would you prefer that this is more of an API - you use the plugin to get/post messages and figure out the rendering of them yourself?
-
For GDPR, messages would be transferred over https and stored pseudonymised/obfuscated. We’d prefer that storage is temporary, meaning that an integrated chat area would only be able to display per-session messages, because this is both better for GDPR and reduces storage costs and therefore the fee we’d need to charge, but would this be a deal breaker? Would you need more permanent storage and historical chat logs?
-
There are undoubtedly some legal implications we’d need to look into here. For example I expect we’d need some kind of a report mechanic that goes to you as the game operator and probably QWeb as the chat operator to protect against cyber bullying and paedophilia, and you’d need to accept the responsibility of dealing with these reports appropriately. Again, would this be a deal breaker?
-
Other than the basic sending and receiving of messages, what sort of features would be needed to win you over? Both in terms of the Corona plugin and the web based dashboard. What reports? Would you want to see actual chat logs (GDPR may restrict that)? Something else?
-
What sort of cost would you consider to be reasonable? We’ve not begun to figure out operating costs ourselves but this would inevitably need to be based on the number of messages you pass through your account, otherwise if a game takes off and ends up with millions of players and we’re only charging say, $5 a month, the resource and bandwidth usage costs incurred to us would be crippling.
Thanks.