Corona vs Unity (Pricing)

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Hello folks,

Let me first start by sharing my experience with this wonderful SDK so far. We started working on our new product and out of all the game engines out there, we chose Corona for its simplicity and performance. After working with this SDK for a few months and developing a commercial mobile game, I really liked the workflow and ease of use (Lua is awesome). However, there are some aspects of Corona SDK that bothered us and caused some delays in our CI/CD pipeline due to the build server being offline every now and then only for short while though. Other than that, its been a really pleasant experience overall working in Corona, and I must thank the whole team of Corona for their amazing work.

Anyway, I was also considering using Corona for my personal game projects, but when I found about the prices for some of the premium plugins that I need for my game, it kind of broke the deal for me.

I know that there are so many plugins built by Corona Labs that are available for free to everyone, which is great. But the two plugins that I need for my game are Custom Splash ($99/year) screen and Google Admob ($199/year).

Now, with just those two plugins, the cost for using Corona would be  $300 per year  for me, which in my opinion is very high, especially when I compare it with  Unity Plus  which is also at the same price  $300/year  (which includes custom splash screen and admob plugin is free, officially built by Google).

No matter how much I like working in Corona, but I can’t justify the fact that if I have to pay $300/year, why not getting Unity Plus, which has zillions of assets in the marketplace and unprecedented number of supported platforms and other features, as well as tools to work on both 3D/2D games. Practically, I can use Unity for free with admob plugin without having to pay a dime if I can live with Unity’s splash screen. I believe a business model like  You make money, we make money.

Just wanted to post it here to get some thoughts from other developers and the Corona team. 

Regards

#2

When I looked at Unity recently I came to the exact opposite conclusion that you did. You have placed some restrictions on your assessments that tilt you in favor of Unity.

Why are you restricted to Admob only? Appodeal and many add providers are available for Corona for free. I use to pay for Admob but I switched to Appodeal. About 4/5 of my ad revenue still comes from Admob directly since Appodeal only is a passthrough to Admob. It uses your account and your placements. You are just starting out: if at some point “You make money”, you can always switch to the paid Admob and “Corona makes money”.

But there is another workaround if you are determined to use Admob and not willing to pay. You can build natively in xCode and Android Studio and use the Admob latest SDK. You would have to write a small wrapper for it, but there are plenty of projects on Github that would give you a start. And the experience would be very similar to Unity, because unless you are using their cloud build Unity, local build is very similar to Corona native builds. 

Now the splash screen is only $99 dollars. I don’t mind the Corona splash screen or the Unity splash screen and I even have a Gamesparks splash screen in my game. Nobody has ever complained about any of them (and I get plenty of complaints about other random things). And some games that I play like Magic have 5 logos when you start them up. But if you do mind the splash screen you can remove it for $99 dollars vs $300. Corona is cheaper.

Corona has no restriction on revenue:

I make 101K in revenue or funding. So at that point, it is $0 Corona and $300 Unity.

I make 101K in revenue or funding and I don’t like the splash screen then: it is $99 Corona and $300 Unity.

I make 201K in revenue or funding: it is $0 Corona and $1500 Unity.

I make 201K in revenue or funding and I don’t like the Corona splash screen then: it is $99 Corona and $1500 Unity.

More importantly, when I reach those milestones, I don’t have to scramble around trying to get the correct license.

#3

I looked at Unity before finding Corona last year, and for a moment I was interested in learning it. But this was a deal breaker:

“If your company currently makes more than $100k in annual gross revenues or has raised funds in excess of $100k, you are not permitted to use Unity Personal, for prototyping or otherwise, as defined in our EULA Agreement. You may use Unity Plus for up to $200k in annual gross revenues, or Unity Pro with an unlimited revenue or fundraising capacity.”

Games development is a new venture for us and it’s going to be a long time before games are a noteworthy revenue stream, but as a whole, my company is over this threshold and we’d have to pay $35 monthly right from the start. Bearing in mind it takes time to learn a new framework, time to build something worth publishing, and time to properly market a published product before it picks up traction and starts to bring in a reasoable sum of revenue, $35 p/m is a hefty cost. Corona though, is free.

I did also look at Admob originally too. We’re a web company really so experienced with Adwords and Adsense, and I’ve used Admob previously in Phonegap built apps, so this seemed the obvious choice. But having since researched the different options further I came to the conclusion Admob wasn’t the best approach. Partly because of the plugin fee, but mostly because most of the developer blogs I found pointed towards Applovin as having better CPM’s and, importantly for me, being a nice company to work for. I like to support companies with high morals so if the staff are happy, I feel encouraged to give the company my time.

I also discovered that Corona uses these integrations for monetisation themselves, which is why the framework is free. With plugins like Applovin, they’ve worked with the service provider to create the plugin and take a cut of the revenue you earn through it, which is absolutely fine with me. Corona have to turn a profit just like the rest of us, and if they can do that by taking a bit of what we earn from our apps instead of charging us for something before we’ve chance to earn from it ourselves, like Unity does, then that’s fantastic. Presumably this is why then, the Admob plugin costs so much. I expect Corona reached out to Google, couldn’t get a deal settled, and resorted to having to just charge for the plugin. It’s a shame for sure, but again there are apparently better ad services anyway, like Applovin.

The splash screen however I’m still sitting on the wall for. On the one hand again this is a free framework and the splash helps to give it some free marketing in return, which I’m fine with. But on the other hand it’s admittedly a fairly ugly looking splash (sorry team!) and I’d quite like to be able to just grab that license and do away with it myself. This comes back to my problem with Unity though - I can’t warrant spending anything on something that so far isn’t a worthwhile revenue stream for us. If we start to see a reasonable monthly earning from games or Corona plugin/template submissions then some of that will no doubt go towards things like the splash removal plugin, but until that point we’re very much just testing the water, and that’s something that needs keeping free.

My point is probably this: last year I found Corona, and initially came to similar conclusions as you - those plugins seemed a necessity and almost caused me to skip over it the same way I did Unity, but in the end I’m very, very glad that I didn’t and now that I’ve given the framework some time, liaised a fair bit with the support team, become more active in this community, and learned how the monetisation plugins are used to fund Corona itself, I’ll be more than happy to pay $99 a year for it when the times comes.

Besides, Unity as far as I’ve been able to tell is a drag and drop thing, and I don’t think I’d be happy working that way. I’m old-skool and I just don’t see dragging a cube down, right clicking it, and attaching some pre-programmed mechanics to it as programming. Show me a shiny looking 3D game built in Unity and I’ll look at it and wonder how much effort actually went in to creating it. Show me a less shiny 2D game built in Corona and I’ll be more impressed, because I know it was actually built with code.

#4

I also want to point out something that Richard mentioned that I didn’t even think of. I believe unity is by seat. The moment you have one more than one developer those cost are per developer. It clearly states in the EULA that if you have to pay for one license of Unity Pro or Plus then you are not allowed to use the free version for anything. All your licenses have to be of the same type.

#5

To be honest, although i do not necessarily agree with the current ad plugins pricing, it is still a kind of “we make money you make money” concept.

Without a large enough user base, ads should be left out of the game. Not worth the hassle or nuisance for peanuts. Once your game lift off, then it might be worth to consider adding ads. By then ads should cover the yearly cost and leave you the hopefully ever increasing surplus revenue.

We have to remember that Corona needs to get paid one way or another for all the work they do, probably even more than we do.

Personally i hate ads so i dont use them, but the current model makes sense to me.

#6

I have some personal experience when it comes to counting your revenues before you’ve even launched (or started) your first commercial game. My advice is: don’t.

Paying to remove the splash screen in either Corona or Unity is just something extra. There isn’t anything bad, devaluing or negative about having the game engine’s logo pop up on the screen when the app starts.

As for the ads, I both agree and disagree with @anaqim. When your active user base isn’t high enough, you’ll just be making cents or a couple of euros/dollars a day. However, if you do plan on including ads, you should plan on how they will be implemented straight away. If your game has a virtual currency store, for instance, and there is a button to get free VC by watching an ad, that should be implemented straight away, but again, unless you have enough active users, you won’t earn anything.

It is as others have said, if your app is popular enough, the cost of the plugins will be covered by the ad revenue. Making your decision between Corona and Unity based on which costs less is not the route that you want to take. Compare both engines and see if there is something that forces the decision for you, e.g. making a 3D game. If there are no such issues, then go with whatever you feel works better for you and your project.

#7

@richard11 - I wouldn’t call Unity ‘drag and drop’. Sure, you can get libraries like Playmaker for that, but out of the box you’ve still got to code everything yourself.

#8

There are other intangibles as well. Unity is around a 4-5 gigabyte install. Corona is like a 0.15 gigabyte install. Unity really needs a quad-core processor and a pretty beefy graphics card. Corona’s hardware requirements are much kinder. We have worked very hard to create easy-to-use, logical APIs that are very well documented. You can do a lot with minimal code. 

Rob

#9

comparing unity with corona is a bit like comparing candy crush saga with the witcher 3

both great market leaders yet not really comparable segments.

#10

I’ve never tried to use it - as above the pricing model was a deal breaker for me - but the tutorials I looked over at the time gave the impression it works more like a 3D modeller where the action of creating models causes the engine to build classes in the background, and you can WYSIWYG edit those classes by clicking objects and selecting menu actions. I could have totally gotten the wrong end of the stick, but if I’m remotely right then it’s just not the engine for me. I learned in QB back in the MS Dos days so I’m procedural by nature. I don’t even feel comfortable working in OOP, let alone WYSIWYG kits.

#11

Unity is NOT a drag & drop only engine and you also can work very much code oriented if you want to, it’s just not the primary facade they’re selling and you have to do a bit more work … I’d expect all the really big projects do this as I’m quite sure, it would be a nightmare to create games like Wasteland 2 if you’d want to get everything done in a mostly drag & drop fashion and also because sometimes you get that horrible situation where some internal linking just gets corrupted.

No sane developer will (IMO) base a huge game on these kinds of functionality of Unity, it’s only something to impress newbies or handle smaller projects or maybe a group of devs that’s mostly artist/designer based. But “real” developers know, in the end you have to do real work and they can do so. I’d bet there are many high profile games using Unity primarily as an abstracted multiplatform renderer and texture manager but handle almost everything else manually.

Still it’s a monster of an engine, I just recently installed the most current version because of a contract job request and it’s more liked 15GB instead of 5 :slight_smile:

Right now I’m in discussion of replacing the coder of a project (he vanished without a note) as a contract job and they’re using Unity so far. Even though I did some Unity contract work in the past I’ll try to move over the project to Corona as I much more prefer the lightweight style and the, from the ground up, code based workflow of the engine - well and I also love coding in Lua :slight_smile:

With regards to money - IMO both engines are kind of free. If we’re talking about a few $100 a year, we’re not talking about any serious money for anyone who’s intend is to monetize the games made with the engine. Simple as that - think of any other business you can do with sooo little investment as developing games these days?

I actually used to work for a subsidary company of an 3d engine dev in ~2002/3 and back then you had to pay at least six figures per project to use those engines - today you get absurdly much better technology for less than what most pay per month for their cellphones. In my mind, it’s ridiculous to base any decision on todays prices at all, if you do so, you’re not even a serious hobbyist, you just don’t know what you need/do.

#12

I suppose there’s one thing worse than people knowing about your engine but misunderstanding completely how it works, and that’s people not knowing about it at all…

#13

What is needed here is an admob rev share plugin that is free.  this is a win win for dev and Corona.

@Rob why is this not a thing?

#14

I’ll ask, but I highly suspect there are technical limitations that we’ve not figured out how to overcome.

Rob

#15

As you know I’m having Vungle issues and am looking at admob.  I could pay the $199 but then Corona would lose $ thousands a year on potential rev-share.

I want Corona to benefit from my success and would only consider a rev-share model.  I want you guys around to support me next year and the year after!

#16

Ive presumed its due to not being able to reliably check admob revenue. Corona isnt Google.

Corona would likely need to be the middle man for this to work, which opens up a large can of issues which im not sure corona nor the developer are ready to tackle/accept.

#17

Also, google already take 30% so adding a corona cut to that is probably not gonna be very popular with developers.

A price per year isnt such a bad solution, but it could use a solution with different tiers. Maybe a starter free tier even, followed by 20 and 200 usd.

Coronas problem is of course how to reliably find out about revenue…

Success can also be measured in other metrics, maybe seen using app annie, but im no expert here

#18

When I looked at Unity recently I came to the exact opposite conclusion that you did. You have placed some restrictions on your assessments that tilt you in favor of Unity.

Why are you restricted to Admob only? Appodeal and many add providers are available for Corona for free. I use to pay for Admob but I switched to Appodeal. About 4/5 of my ad revenue still comes from Admob directly since Appodeal only is a passthrough to Admob. It uses your account and your placements. You are just starting out: if at some point “You make money”, you can always switch to the paid Admob and “Corona makes money”.

But there is another workaround if you are determined to use Admob and not willing to pay. You can build natively in xCode and Android Studio and use the Admob latest SDK. You would have to write a small wrapper for it, but there are plenty of projects on Github that would give you a start. And the experience would be very similar to Unity, because unless you are using their cloud build Unity, local build is very similar to Corona native builds. 

Now the splash screen is only $99 dollars. I don’t mind the Corona splash screen or the Unity splash screen and I even have a Gamesparks splash screen in my game. Nobody has ever complained about any of them (and I get plenty of complaints about other random things). And some games that I play like Magic have 5 logos when you start them up. But if you do mind the splash screen you can remove it for $99 dollars vs $300. Corona is cheaper.

Corona has no restriction on revenue:

I make 101K in revenue or funding. So at that point, it is $0 Corona and $300 Unity.

I make 101K in revenue or funding and I don’t like the splash screen then: it is $99 Corona and $300 Unity.

I make 201K in revenue or funding: it is $0 Corona and $1500 Unity.

I make 201K in revenue or funding and I don’t like the Corona splash screen then: it is $99 Corona and $1500 Unity.

More importantly, when I reach those milestones, I don’t have to scramble around trying to get the correct license.

#19

I looked at Unity before finding Corona last year, and for a moment I was interested in learning it. But this was a deal breaker:

“If your company currently makes more than $100k in annual gross revenues or has raised funds in excess of $100k, you are not permitted to use Unity Personal, for prototyping or otherwise, as defined in our EULA Agreement. You may use Unity Plus for up to $200k in annual gross revenues, or Unity Pro with an unlimited revenue or fundraising capacity.”

Games development is a new venture for us and it’s going to be a long time before games are a noteworthy revenue stream, but as a whole, my company is over this threshold and we’d have to pay $35 monthly right from the start. Bearing in mind it takes time to learn a new framework, time to build something worth publishing, and time to properly market a published product before it picks up traction and starts to bring in a reasoable sum of revenue, $35 p/m is a hefty cost. Corona though, is free.

I did also look at Admob originally too. We’re a web company really so experienced with Adwords and Adsense, and I’ve used Admob previously in Phonegap built apps, so this seemed the obvious choice. But having since researched the different options further I came to the conclusion Admob wasn’t the best approach. Partly because of the plugin fee, but mostly because most of the developer blogs I found pointed towards Applovin as having better CPM’s and, importantly for me, being a nice company to work for. I like to support companies with high morals so if the staff are happy, I feel encouraged to give the company my time.

I also discovered that Corona uses these integrations for monetisation themselves, which is why the framework is free. With plugins like Applovin, they’ve worked with the service provider to create the plugin and take a cut of the revenue you earn through it, which is absolutely fine with me. Corona have to turn a profit just like the rest of us, and if they can do that by taking a bit of what we earn from our apps instead of charging us for something before we’ve chance to earn from it ourselves, like Unity does, then that’s fantastic. Presumably this is why then, the Admob plugin costs so much. I expect Corona reached out to Google, couldn’t get a deal settled, and resorted to having to just charge for the plugin. It’s a shame for sure, but again there are apparently better ad services anyway, like Applovin.

The splash screen however I’m still sitting on the wall for. On the one hand again this is a free framework and the splash helps to give it some free marketing in return, which I’m fine with. But on the other hand it’s admittedly a fairly ugly looking splash (sorry team!) and I’d quite like to be able to just grab that license and do away with it myself. This comes back to my problem with Unity though - I can’t warrant spending anything on something that so far isn’t a worthwhile revenue stream for us. If we start to see a reasonable monthly earning from games or Corona plugin/template submissions then some of that will no doubt go towards things like the splash removal plugin, but until that point we’re very much just testing the water, and that’s something that needs keeping free.

My point is probably this: last year I found Corona, and initially came to similar conclusions as you - those plugins seemed a necessity and almost caused me to skip over it the same way I did Unity, but in the end I’m very, very glad that I didn’t and now that I’ve given the framework some time, liaised a fair bit with the support team, become more active in this community, and learned how the monetisation plugins are used to fund Corona itself, I’ll be more than happy to pay $99 a year for it when the times comes.

Besides, Unity as far as I’ve been able to tell is a drag and drop thing, and I don’t think I’d be happy working that way. I’m old-skool and I just don’t see dragging a cube down, right clicking it, and attaching some pre-programmed mechanics to it as programming. Show me a shiny looking 3D game built in Unity and I’ll look at it and wonder how much effort actually went in to creating it. Show me a less shiny 2D game built in Corona and I’ll be more impressed, because I know it was actually built with code.

#20

I also want to point out something that Richard mentioned that I didn’t even think of. I believe unity is by seat. The moment you have one more than one developer those cost are per developer. It clearly states in the EULA that if you have to pay for one license of Unity Pro or Plus then you are not allowed to use the free version for anything. All your licenses have to be of the same type.