Corona vs Unity (Pricing)

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#21

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.

#22

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.

#23

@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.

#24

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

#25

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.

#26

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.

#27

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.

#28

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…

#29

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?

#30

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

Rob

#31

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!

#32

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.

#33

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