Device Access
Lastly (for now), we have found a way for you to access certain Java
and Objective-C APIs from Lua! On the Android side, we already have the
foundation there thanks to Enterprise, and we’re looking at how we can
accelerate bringing those Enterprise innovations down to Pro developers.
In parallel, we also have a proof-of-concept on the iOS side, so I’ll
have more news once we’re past the research phase.
I am mostly interested in this… Hopefully this will be soon…
Just wanted to chip in, in agreement with natelipscomb:
Thanks David for being so accessible. I was afraid of a void after Carlos left, but you and Brent and Rob are very present on the forum - which to me is worth “a couple of dollars” a year in itself.
Besides that, my very personal opinion is that your new pricing is ridiculously good news for a lot of indie developers - it’s basically insane that your starter version is free but still a tool that can potentially earn someone a living. Unfortunately the pro version at 600 dollars is too much in my opinion, if I compare it to the other software packages I buy and update for our 20-strong design studio, and especially since for a lot of us it seems that only IAP is the big lacking feature in starter. Then again, you’re not forcing anyone to buy something they don’t want, so it’s very much a first world problem. Keep it up!
p.s. Do bear in mind that your pro price is practically the same as the price for the whole Adobe Creative Suite subscription, so for the same price as “pro”, meaning not even the Enterprise version Adobe gives you:
Photoshop
Illustrator
Indesign
Dreamweaver
Flash
Flex
After Effects
Premiere
Edge
and lots more …
Something to ponder…
I’d also like to know more about that _ Device Access _ point.
If that’s going to give pro devs the ability to extend corona with some obj c native code, well at least it could be a partial solution to all of us asking to be able to make native plugins with a Pro license.
Any insight on how it will work?
Well, I’m rather new subscriber. Bought iOS version, and currently have been promoted to Pro version wich is nice.
But I do agree that the price is rather too expensive. As thomas6 pointed out, check out just what you can get from adobe at that price.
I plan on releasing my first game written in Corona by the end of the year. After that I really can’t promise I’m gonna contiune using Corona and buying a new licence. For 600$ I would expect to get plugins and especially offline builds. 1000$ for that is simply too much for Indie developer.
And yes I do know I won’t have to pay 600$ in the next 2 years. But still, I have to consider what will happend after those two years pass by. Then I will have to pay 600$ and still I will not have offline builds, and probably won’t be able to write plugins. There is a huge gap between Pro and Starter licences. Too huge if u ask me.
Just my 2 cents 
I literally upgraded to Pro the day before this announcement. Doh! Oh well… I get 2 extra months and 2 years of renewal at $350, but still… I’m barely selling enough a month to cover this and my iOS developer fee. Still think Corona SDK is a great deal. In fact, giving a presentation on it this month in my local iOS users group.
So if all you want is in-app do you have to upgrade from starter to Pro or will there be ala carte pricing? Just curious. Too late for me. But that would have been the route I went if I hadn’t already upgraded. My timing is impeccable.
I don’t really understand the continuing comparison to Unity. I think both have their right to exist, since they don’t really focus the same target group, but of cause there is a intersection. And for me, the free option sounds great, as long you are a small company or in the beginnings. As far as I can see the benefits from the pro version are only indispensable if you go serious.
But as usually, the devil is in the details. If you have a major bug in the public release, it can be a pain in the ass to wait up to two months. So its up to corona, to take also care on the free customers. But I think they will.
On the other hand, I hope bugs reported by pro users will be adressed faster in the future, cause the long duration were really annoying in part.
So IMO the changes are a step in the right direction if good transacted.
I for one was very disappointed that not 5 days ago I spent $199 for a product which is now free…sure they upgraded me to ‘pro’, but I don’t need any of that…This reminds me of when I stood in line to buy the original iPhone for $600 and not 2 weeks later they dropped the price $200. Way to annoy folks…
The free starter deal is amazing, maybe giving too much away - why go pro? Especially as free doesn’t even have branding (spash screen)
Many existing apps could have been done with starter (its only really missiing IAP),
and having just paid for Indie (now Pro) last week I’m left a little peeved that I’d be just as well off not paying…
One good thing is the merging of platforms, so everybody can target all iOs/android by default.
I see many people dropping down to free unless pro gets more features added.
With IAP, Gluon Plugins (so much cool stuff coming with that!), Graphics 2.0 (5k onscreen objects at 60fps, 2.5d image manipulation), Daily Builds (new/latest features/newest devices/OS support) and a price lock for 2 years, old indie/pro users haven’t got it too bad.
Although these features are not for everyone of course, many will be happy with the pro plan, many will be satisfied with the free plan. Near impossible to make everyone happy
hi @DavidRangel :
I have a question regarding plugin support for pro user.
It seems the plugin created by 3 party but not pro user, right now, I do not see any detail info of plug in.
When could we got it ? and how many 3 party will provide plugin for us .
Because the different between free version and pro version only IAP function
(this only support google play and iOS , no Amazon and nook)
If only these different and without detail of plugins, I think this will not make old pro user happy :huh:
Hello folks, just been catching up with all of this exciting news and I have a few points I’d like to make.
Firstly, we are now using Unity Pro (trial for now) for another project because we need 3D; basically it’s an augmented reality project so it’s the obvious choice. We are professional developers and whilst we’d love to spend 100% of our time making our own indie games we simply can’t afford to do that yet. This Unity project is targeting commercial clients and they expect NOT to see a Unity splash screen every time their app opens as they want to see their own logo. Therefore we need to use Unity Pro and looking at the pricing now it looks like a single license is $1500 for pro + $1500 for iOS + $1500 for Android = $4,500. Unity is an amazing tool and the price is justified. We’ll just need to include it in the costing for the clients!
This brings me back to Corona which has no Corona splash screen for ANY version. Meaning even free users can use it for commercial work! Amazing. I’m sure that news alone will help build a bigger and stronger Corona community.
I’m also now thinking that our own game Finger Hoola could actually now be built with that free version as it uses no IAPs. Having said that, we could never have built and released it when we did without having access to the daily builds, due to well know problems such as storyboard and in our case an audio lib bug. So whilst we’re quite happy and very excited to see the new features coming to the pro level I’d personally like to see a bigger commitment to addressing problems with the public release and please make them monthly. Users should choose to upgrade to pro because they need more features not because they need it to work.
So if we have a fully paid Unity Pro license will we continue to use Corona for most of our projects? Absolutely. We simply can’t do anything else as quickly and efficiently as we can do it in Corona. In fact a good friend of mine has been doing a lot of swearing lately because he’s having a hard time getting Unity to run well beyond a certain number of 2D UI objects. No platform is perfect!
@funkyvisions, @sean84 - sorry about the bad timing guys, but it is inevitable that some people will be just on the bad side of an announcement like this. There are also people that are in the opposite situation of course.
@codingcake - there are a number of things still being defined around plugins. However, our goal is to have as many plugins available as possible. Fair warning: it is impossible to have tons of plugins day 1. It will take some time to build up a good inventory of plugins but we will get there.
@natelipscomb - thank you very much for the great thoughts and feedback. I agree with you on several points:
our communication on features can be better
we need to be more regular on public releases
We are getting better at this and will continue to improve it. We realize this is really important to fully regain the confidence of the community. But anything we have said we are building in the last few months will get delivered. There is no question about that.
I just wanted everyone to know that I will always include a Corona splash screen in my future games. Corona has been so amazing and the community and staff have been so helpful that I, for one, don’t mind advertising for them. Thank you so much to everyone
C
For the developer I think having corona for free is a great idea. Free is free right, whats to complain right? I’m amongst those that unsubstantial numbers of indie developers dropping back from pro to starter as to be honest I’m happy with the graphics engine and am able to work around most things. Its not as if indies cant access IAP or analytics. For analytics theres gameanalytics.com (who have a corona specific library :-)) and for IAPs there are many that have JSON interface which can be used from starter (eg virool). Plus the forums are great for solving problems. So I don’t think there is any real downside for the developer. Loss of latest builds - its was a IWBNI anyway - no great loss.
For Corona, I would imagine that the calculations work out too. Thought I don’t get it, and Its not my problem anyway. Its probably cheaper to have a simpler subscription model in terms of hassle.
So onward I go, and hope that when I do eventually release an app it makes enough money to justify going pro.
I have to say that personally I don’t mind the price increase and structure change. I was lucky enough to have purchased a subscription just prior to the announcement, but even if I hadn’t the Starter one would have been fantastic for me. Corona is a great product and to me Lua is one of it’s main advantages. The learning curve is short and a lot of the work is done for you. What you are really paying for is convenience. Remember people, Xcode and Eclipse are completely free to use. If you are unhappy about Corona’s price structure feel free to use one of those IDE’s .
I think really the main discussion and area of concern for most is IAP. While this is becoming one of the more popular monetization methods it certainly isn’t the only one. Regardless of whether or not it is the best choice for your app is irrelevant. But like others have mentioned you first need to tackle the battle of getting many downloads before making any money. If you are unsure about buying Pro in order to utilize IAP, I would suggest doing some basic math beforehand to justify the cost. For instance, I think a fair conversion rate for most apps with IAP is around 2-3% on average. So, to make it easy, let’s say you plan on averaging $1 per IAP sale. In order to justify the cost of Pro you’re looking at roughly 20,000-30,000 downloads to happen per year. If your current app isn’t getting anywhere near that then it won’t be worth it. If you have a new app and are unsure you will reach those numbers, then release it completely for free. See what happens. If you can’t reach those numbers with a completely free app then you won’t with a restricted app with IAP.
Alright!
Now I get it, your intention was warn of impending changes and price changes that will follow the tech changes.
Then I take my words back, it is not a cash grab!
But there are clearly some miscommunication issues, as can be noticed by the amount of people complaining of several things.
But I am looking forward to it, I only wish Pro supported offline builds, one of the reasons we bought Marmalade was that some of our apps have lots of versions (one of them is in 5 different android stores that don’t want link to competitor stores, and it has lite and full version, thus only on Android it is already 10 builds) and the lack of automatic builds is introducing lots of human errors and making the process very slow.
This alone would justify much better the Pro price increase and the removal of Indie license.
Maurício Gomes
I see alot of people actually upset that its free now but all i got to say is THANK YOU GOD!!! lol - i have been hoping that by some miraculous work Corona would be made as a free version and now I got it!
Now I have a reason to push forward in my learning of Corona SDK and LUA! Thank you again for making a free version that has the capabilities to publish! :wub:
@Corona Staff - Can you please clarify one thing for me. I am a current Indie dev (iOS only) that got upgraded to the new Pro. Do I also get the 2 years @ $349ea?
JonPM - yes, you do. At this point all subscribers are Pro subscribers. And all Pro subscribers on April 30 can renew for up to 2 years at $349.
Great, thank you. One last question (out of curiosity), how does Corona know the generated revenues of its developers?