It’s not that simple, the problem is discoverability. Paid apps are extremely difficult to be discovered. But going free and offering IAP, you have a much better shot of getting people to try your app.
Sounds like a great idea for a test – two people create the same game using the same artwork, music, etc. One charges 99 cents, the other is free with IAP. Same marketing for each one, and see what the results are in 30, 60, 90 days.
(Or maybe one person writes the game and the clone and names them very close (That Cool Runner & This Cool Runner), the 2nd person just submits the clone (since 1 person can’t submit the same game twice) and then they do the marketing, press releases, etc., exactly the same.)
It would need to be done “under the radar” until after the results were in so one camp wouldn’t try to sway the results. And so Apple wouldn’t pull one of them as a dupe. 
Someone do it!
Jay
After reading this thread I feel I would like to reply regarding the free/paid versions of Corona.
I am one of the few under 18 year old developers here ( I like to call myself that ). I have been using Corona for just over a year, I purchased an Indie developer (used my student status) account last September after building my first game.
I have since learnt much more with the help of some marvellous people here who have spent time answering questions and leading me (thanks Ed).
When Corona changed the price plans I thought great , thank you for the free pro upgrade. In all honesty it didnt make any different to me because I work with android, cant afford a mac etc etc.
I then looked into what the Pro license offered me for the cost. Ok, I thought fair enough but then I discovered that IAP was missing from the free version. My heart sank as TBH I have never liked using ads in games and the IAP option was going to be used with my game under development now and more importantly in the future.
What I am left with is not being able to use IAP at all, I cant afford the 599 either.
I would have gladly saved my money for another indie license, in-fact I had started to do just that.
I just develop for android at the moment so dont need the benefits the pro version offers, well just the IAP
So for me even though the corona community is awesome I am stuck from paying 149 for my student discounted Indie license to 599 for a Pro. Ridiculous.
Corona can you not bring back Indie licenses with just the IAP? say at 199 again.
I know I am young but I am not stupid and my parents own business’ but in my opinion I think you have made a mistake dropping the Indies.
Maybe restrict the free version with the splash and no IAP, bring back the Indies.
You shouldn’t have gotten rid of that splash screen, I bought the Indie to remove just that.
Thanks for listening.
You’re thinking like a terrible marketer, and yes you are wrong. Very wrong. A good game doesn’t assure anything. Just take a look at “Punch Quest”.
bubblebobble - Thanks for the post. I do agree that the people that ONLY wanted an Indie subscription for the foreseeable future are indeed now faced with a situation of paying more if they want IAP. Unfortunately we cannot make everyone happy all the time.
HOWEVER, a couple of things:
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what is included in Starter vs. Pro will evolve over time. The platform will naturally have more and more features and some things will move down to Starter from Pro
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If you are still a student, then you can still buy Pro at $249 (http://www.coronalabs.com/store/corona-for-education/)
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If you are a current subscriber (on April 30), then even if you are not a student, you will be able to renew for $349
Check out the top grossing apps in the App Store.
http://appshopper.com/bestsellers/games/gros/?device=iphone
Most of them are freemium. Which means, IAP.
Discoverability is the main issue when it comes to IAP/Free/Freemium.
And BOY oh BOY, do I wish “a good game” was the assurance. However, the app store is chock full of rip-offs of rip-offs of freemium timer-based paywall nonsense - that people actually pay for. Weird.
Also, as sucky for me as it is, I agree with David, not everyone can be pleased, especially those of us that only planned for the 199 package or what-not. They can’t tailor it for absolutely everyone.
This just means I’ll have to release to all of those other markets as well.
"
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If you are still a student, then you can still buy Pro at $249 (http://www.coronalabs.com/store/corona-for-education/)
-
If you are a current subscriber (on April 30), then even if you are not a student, you will be able to renew for $349"
I appreciate what your saying but for me at least it is a $100 increase which is hard to come by.
When you say" Unfortunately we cannot make everyone happy all the time." surely this is something to look at ?
I am of the opinion and feel strongly that removing the Indie subscription is a mistake especially with the likes of Moai around the corner.
I think the way in which Corona used the splash made sense, its as if you have literally “display.remove(indie), indie = nil” us all.
I am just a little disappointed that having spent best part of over a year learning lua and getting to grips with the corona apis the Indie devs have been wiped out.
The starters have gained a great deal not so much the Apple devs but what have we? Cheers! There is a big gap in that business model, and someone will fill it.
IAP is a staple monetization tool without it I see an issue for all the Indie devs who were here before. Well will they pay $599 for the priviledge ? who knows
Anyway this is a unity vs Corona thread and I have said my piece.
Again thanks for listening and I actually do like Corona and everything it stands for very much (apart from the IAP)
It’s funny you use Punch Quest as an example since it “failed” as a freemium game and was switched to a paid app so they could make more money (it has since switched back to free).
All I’m talking about is making 600 freaking dollars, because that’s what sparked this whole thing. The cost of putting IAP in your game.
If your game can’t make $600 as a paid game, I seriously doubt it will make $600 with IAP.
The price of the Pro package is an imaginary block to making money using Corona SDK. The people who say it’s what’s keeping them from being successful are fooling themselves.
Jay
I’m not saying IAP isn’t important. And I’m not saying a good game is an assurance of “striking it rich.”
I’m saying between the two of them the latter is far more important. Especially in the context of this conversation , which can be summarized as: “$600 is too much for me to pay! And without it I’ll never make any money because I don’t have IAP!”
My belief is that if you can’t make $600 without IAP, you probably can’t make $600 with IAP.
Jay
Out of curiosity, what makes you believe that?
Average hourly salary in US $23.87
Minimum hourly salary in US $7.25
Ref http://ycharts.com/indicators/average_hourly_earnings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States
Say you earn $x in your current job or have the earning potential at $y if you were to get a paid job. Or say you make $z as a contract developer. In any case your time has value. Somewhere at or above the minimum wage and sky is the limit!
The question for me is whether Corona will save me x number of hours compared to other tools which I could be using to get the outcomes I need. I can easily calculate what Corona needs to do for me in terms of hours saved before I call break even.
Let me say this much… even at minimum wage levels I can easily see Corona SDK more than paying back the $599 it now costs per year. What you get at starter level for free is a steal IMHO… Corona Labs, thanks for making it happen.
Talking about steal… My only wish is that there is some added benefit to being a paid licensee in the form of a direct support line and perhaps higher priority on forum responses to paying customers.
Have a great weekend.
Um, logic?
Not counting Apple’s cut (to make the math easier) you need 600 downloads at 99 cents to make $600. If you have a 3.8% conversion rate with a 99 cent IAP, you need about 15,750 downloads.
Why did I pick 3.8% as the number? From the research I’ve done I’ve seen 0% to maybe 4% as an average - Tiny Tower by Nimblebit has a 3.8% IAP conversion rate – is your game as good as Tiny Tower? Of course, if your IAP conversion rate is 1% (and apparently a lot of them are) you’ll need 60,000 downloads.
So how easy is it to get 15,700 downloads? Until you’ve done it, the answer is, “Of course my game will do that – the first day!” But then after you launch a game you enter the world of reality. In 2012 I had one free game downloaded 215,442 times. The next closest? 1,285 downloads. After that, a couple hit just south of 600 downloads. For the entire year.
Getting 15K downloads for a free game is NOT a slam-dunk. According to research firm Canalys 2/3 of apps get fewer than 1,000 downloads their first year. Get 1,000 downloads of a 99 cent app and you make enough to buy Corona Pro. Get 1,000 downloads of an app with 99 cent IAP and you make enough to buy a couple pizzas.
IAP can be good. Not having IAP will not keep someone from making $600. It’s just an excuse.
Jay
Not true at all in fact very very wrong, I have a paid app in the app store and it made $400 as a paid app, I released a free version of the same app but with IAP’s and I have made $30,000+ from it over a period of time so IAP is very important, (BTW the App’s were not written with Cornona but all the same it’s all about IAP) I added some IAP’s to the paid version and that version has now exceeded $8000. I am doing updates for both Apps’s currently and have re-written them in Corona.
So I feel and it’s my opinion that IAP’s in today’s climate are pretty essential.
Right, and if I use my apps as a standard, the average app gets downloaded 31,000 times. But if you use statistics from across the board, most apps will be downloaded less than 1,000 times, so my experience is a drop in the ocean - meaningless to use as an example to be extrapolated to others. As is your experience.
I’m not opposed to IAP – I’m opposed to people saying they’re sunk because the free version of Corona SDK doesn’t have IAP.
Jay
That’s fine but I was really replying to your comment…“but I don’t think a game that can’t make $600 as a paid game will EVER make any more than that as a freemium game”
At $400 you changed your game from paid to free. It’s kind of impossible now to know if it would have made another $200 or not. (Phew!)
Jay
:) true, but it took 6 months to make that $400 
The point was that it made considerably more as a free game with IAP not just another $200.
I’ve been in the game industry a very long time and I started as a teenager in school with my first products published by a big company and have seen so many up’s and down’s and this is a new age that people now expect to get something (rightly or wrongly) for free, some people see IAP’s as the devil and will never pay anything and assume us developers are here to make free games for them. As time goes on IAP’s are going to be more and more important, it is estimated that within the next couple of years almost all apps will be free and will use IAP or ad’s to make any money.
Of course you still need to make something worthwhile that people want to play or use.
Something to think about, about 75% of all the App Store revenue is generated from freemium apps not paid apps.
This number has been climbing very rapidly over the last 12 months.
The answer is pretty obvious. Paid apps are becoming less and less common and far less effective.
If you are really concerned that you can’t justify the cost of Pro, then release your app/game COMPLETELY free using Starter. If you can’t generate 2000 downloads/month then you won’t make enough $ using IAP to pay for Corona. If you are getting more downloads then that than buy Pro, insert IAPs, and hope for the best.
While I think there are a lot of good points here on both sides of the debate I really can’t see why people are getting so upset at Corona’s price vs Unity. I will preface this by saying I own a small indie studio and work with Corona almost everyday.
Unity has started a subscription service just like Corona if you compare the prices for “all in Unity” ( Unity Pro ($75), iOS Pro($75) and Android Pro ($75)) it totals $225 / month or $2700 per year. https://store.unity3d.com/products/subscription Even if you are paying for Corona Enterprise ($1k) that is still 2.7 times the price. Is Unity 2.7 times better than Corona? Personally for me as I am not doing 3d i don’t think it is. Don’t get me wrong I think Unity is great engine and if I was doing 3d i would be there in a heart beat.
The development time for apps on Unity is far longer. Prototyping things quickly on Corona is by far one of its strongest features. I even think there is a case to be made that they could charge more because of its speed and ease of use. Have you ever tried to prototype in Cocos2d quickly or most of the other serious engines out there? Not fun!! You often get so bogged down in code that you never get around to finish it.
While Corona may not be perfect for all games/apps it can be used to make most 2d apps pretty well. Could something Candy Crush have been made in Corona? I’m not sure, but after seeing ‘Tomb Breaker’ (by far one of the most polished Corona apps) this week I am starting to believe that maybe it could be. Unity will always win for 3d. But if you want to make 3d games you better have a budget that goes far beyond the cost of your game engine. 3d assets are way more pricey than 2d games. Just look at the prices of related software like 3DS Max at over $3.5k.
I agree with Cublah that you can often make a LOT more with IAP (especially in games), but if you are making the business decision to go that way then have the guts to believe in yourself and make that investment of $600. For Cublah it clearly paid off with a substantial return (congratulations thats a big feat). If you are not sure whether it will work and you want to play it safe then go with the free version of the time being and use Jay’s strategy as that can work as well to raise your $600. Jay summed it up perfectly “IAP can be good. Not having IAP will not keep someone from making $600. It’s just an excuse.”
The simple fact is most game developers make games that 99% of the population is not interested in playing and then try to blame it on others or complain of the high cost of their tools. The days of throwing out apps on the App Store, getting a million downloads and making a fortune are on the way out, if not already gone. Nowadays to get that you will need to have a seriously good user acquisition strategy, a marketing budget and still have a bit of luck on your side. $600, $1000 or even $2700 should not be your no.1 concern if you are seriously trying to produce a game with a million users or more. Companies like Super Cell will spend upwards of $50k just to test the beta of their games, not to mention the millions of dollars they spend on user acquisition monthly.
If having to have Corona Labs charge $600 to keep them going and not have to prematurely go back to Sandhill Road to raise more cash is needed, then that is best for the whole community. I don’t think anyone here would want to see Corona go broke. All Businesses have risks, personally i don’t see spending $600 on a cost for 1 year licence as a big risk. Corona’s offering is providing a lot of value for the price.
Where I would love to see Corona improve is in some of the services that they provide the Pro/Enterprise guys. I personally have seriously considered upgrading to Enterprise from Pro but delayed simply because of the lack of documentation.
How easy is Enterprise to use?
Can I still use the build servers to compile apps in Pro for apps which don’t need the Enterprise features or do I have to do everything in Xcode / Android IDE? Is the sdk a static lib( .a file) or can we edit it?
Are there any tutorials that are available for us to watch/read? Its interesting to see that Google’s keyword suggest shows ‘Corona enterprise tutorial’ as an often searched term yet there are hardly any relevant results. If we develop plugins with enterprise can we share them or sell them to Pro users?
Also for the Pro Plugins
- When are we going to see user acquisition plugins like ChartBoost etc? Are they coming at all? While tap for tap may be there, it is not an industry leader or what the main big gaming companies are using.
- How long for Amazon IAP ?
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When will the new Graphics 2.0 arrive? Does it deliver pixel level bitmap manipulation?
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Automatic masks for widgets? Are they coming?
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Platform support for Android TV systems- Oouya? Samsung?
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Finally Support for Mac/Windows apps (i do realise this is a massive feature but I am currently looking at other engines to be able to port our apps to these platforms)
Why doesn’t Corona copy what is working from competitors. Both Unity, Titanium and a number of other engines are doing very well with their resources and plugin stores. This takes a lot of the development work away from you guys and allows us as developers to recover some of the investment we put into developing features by being able to sell them to the community.
While I am sure that a lot of these things are in the works, is there a roadmap that we can use to plan by?
I understand at a startup you are always understaffed just by the shear amount of growth you have to go through and the amount of things you are working on simultaneously. I also appreciate how far you guys have come in the past 3-6 months. I am really seeing improvements in the API documentation (thanks Brent), in new features like Network 2.0 etc. I guess the biggest thing many of us would like to see is some more communication on whats going on in the background and what exactly is on the roadmap.