Corona vs Unity?

Games
#61

I think the “$600” is cheap argument is a bit under thought in my humble opinion. Let’s be honest here.

  1. The free version is little more than a demo. It has by far the worst monetization strategies (no chartboost, no iap), no custom code, and its main goal is to get a developer so time invested that they upgrade when they realize they need basic monetization strategies. 

If this was a game it would be like requiring an IAP to beat the next level.

  1. The type of 2d games you can make with corona are limited. Besides endless runners, and angry bird style games doing anything more complicated seems to be pushing the limits. 

  2. You never actually own the product. It’s a subscription which can change it’s terms at anytime (like now) and if you stop paying it, all your apps can’t be updated. Meaning there’s a grandfathered risk if they happen to fail and shut down. 

$600 is “cheap” doesn’t feel so cheap when you consider the above. Especially when to do anything complicated you really need an enterprise licence. So the true price is $1,000 to get started on a real top notch 2d game. Now the hindsight argument that if your game does well paying $600 or $2,000 won’t matter is true…

But doesn’t that argument completely ignore that Corona has major competition that offers more for less? Isn’t that the main point of this argument, that their current pricing simply isn’t competitive enough?

I know the Corona team will disagree, but the way I (and many others) see corona is as a “low tier” product aimed at novices, that you can use to build low tier games to build up your app portfolio. The main benefit is ease of use, which leads to the claimed 10x build speeds as long as you’re building simple games. $600 -$1,000 does not “feel” like low tier entry pricing.

Anything more expensive than an iPad, or more than 1 weeks pay at a minium wage job does not feel like low tier entry pricing.  

So if Corona is no longer competing in the low entry tier, exactly what tier are they trying to compete at now?

The best solution seems to be to use corona free to pump out simple games, and use those games to advertise your medium to high-end games built with something like unity. So why would a dev want to spend any money with corona now?

#62

Name some “complicated” kinds of 2D game that Corona couldn’t handle. I’m sure there are some – I’ve said before it can’t do everything – but to say it’s only good for “simple” games means you don’t know Corona.

_"_The free version is little more than a demo." Other than the lack of IAP, the free version is ALL we had six months ago unless you wanted to jump to Enterprise. To say it’s basically a demo means you don’t know Corona.

Joshua, you may be an experienced programmer, but have you written/published a complete game with Corona SDK yet? Or are you still in the exploratory stage? 

Jay

PS - Reading that back it feels a little antagonistic, but I really don’t mean it that way – read it conversationally. :slight_smile:

PPS - Admittedly, all of *my* games are simple-to-simpleish. I’m not using those as examples here.

#63

Dead City, Oscura, Gun bros. I don’t think those games could be completed without Enterprise at the least. But let me rephrase my commet. I don’t think Corona offers “corona speed boosts” to complicated games. I think that speed boost only applies when making simple games the corona way. The second you decide to do something complex the speed boost seems non-existant. I could be wrong here, but it’s what I’ve gathered from buying Corona courses, talking to members, reading forums, and looking at the show case.

As for my second comment I completely stand by it. Without IAP you are basically using a demo. IAP are so important you’d have to be a masochist not to use them, or just completely not understand marketing, and the current market place. It’s akin to bringing a knife to a gun fight. Without them a winning app is a loser. Your previous comments that if you can’t make $600 without IAP you won’t make them with IAP are absolutely ridiculous. I really don’t want to give away my marketing plan but it’s absolutely no surprise to me that a poster had went from $400 to $30,000 using going paid to freemium.

You made a point about punch quest earlier that they were failing with freemium with IAP and went to paid (eventually went freemium again) almost as if to say paid was an ok strategy. But did you dig deeper into that story? The reason they were failing with their first freemium model is because they were terrible business men. They overspent on development, and were too idealistic on trying to be “moral” game developers in their own words. They developed for fun first, and monetization last. Which was a terrible mistake.

They honestly thought making a “great game” was the most important thing. Which was complete dribble. However, like you they thought paid was an ok strategy as well, so they unlocked their entire game and went paid. And the results were crushing failure. Crushing failure. Crushing Failure. That’s why they quickly switched back to freemium.  So I think it’s safe to say that without IAP Corona free is more like a demo version which you can only really use as a user/lead capture tool, or a market testing tool. 

But you can’t make money with it, as a business and luck is not a business model. A business model means you have something that you can run traffic to predictably and make a profit from the leads. You simply can’t do that with a paid app. The cost of per install will simply be too great, and you can’t even use chartboost to do direct deals sadface.jpg.

I’ve yet to write an app with corona, because I’m still unsure where it fits into the cycle. I discovered corona though blogs that had screencasts saying it was the best and most affordable tool for 2d games and most importantly IAP. That it had limited monetization for ads (no chart boost etc) but you could use revmob, and IAP to make decent money after creating your 4th app or so and then create a high-end social game using something else like unity. 

It was sold to me, (in my mind) on the benefits of being 

  1. Easy to use, 10x speed on simple games

  2. Cheap, You could build on one platform for as low as a week’s disposable income, spend the extra money on really nice art/sound work, and still have enough to buy some advertising to test your app. 

But now the game has changed. I remember holding the cash in my hand right before the price was going to go up, and then not pulling the trigger because it just didn’t seem worth it compared to other platforms. I guess corona couldn’t answer this question for me.

Why pay for Corona, when I can just use corona free to build several simple games to capture users/leads and then direct them to higher end games built with Unity? Why bother investing money and resources into Corona?  If I do it this way I can.

  1. Get all of the Benefits of Corona (cheap, fast builds)

  2. Get non of the downsides to Corona (paying for it)

  3. Invest resources into a higher end sdk (unity)  that will pay off for decades, scale with my increasing income (2d or 3d with dedicated 2d coming)

  4. Avoid platform failure risk. If Corona disappears all I lose is my free games, that were easy to build, so if I can’t update them it’s no big deal. Unity doesn’t force you to upload your game to their servers so there is no platform failure risk there. 

PS - I think your tone is perfectly acceptable and not antagonistic. We’re all developers and business people. It’s good to be passionate. 

#64

I do not see any problems with these examples. It all depends on your art skills. The last one seems to be using isometrical art (hope I used the right term) with a nice depth effect.

Oscura - I am not experienced with that kind of stuff but I heard that you can achieve such an shadow effect with raycasting and filters.

Anyway, I am very busy right now and just wanted to clarify this argument

#65

I think corona SDK lost the way a while back, and I have to agree that corona apps have been going downhill for some time. Look at the showcase, you don’t need to go any further, both the quantity and quality continue to sharply drop.

Corona was going somewhere once, now just look at the engagement level of their staff. I have yet to see a staff member reply with good, solid code… most of the time they just say file a bug report, request that feature, buy enterprise, or wait forever until xyz happens. I know they think we don’t notice, but surprise! Everyone sees it. Your users are not that stupid.

Used to be, I would come to the forum and learn something new, or see someone doing something interesting, now we get a bunch of kids, (no offense to you all) and we get a bunch of people asking how to press a button and make it play a sound. 

corona going free opened the doors to a wider audience and probably an audience that was not the intended target, so i have to agree with the fact that who is corona competing with? and for $600.00 with no proper IDE, debugger, profiler, etc is like robbing the bank in pain daylight and in front of a police station and not wearing a mask.

So how can it be 10x faster without the proper tools to support it from CoronaLabs. I know there are a bunch of 3rd party tools and thats why JHWYE always jump to defend corona cos he knows that his editor’s sales and video sales depends on the success of corona. It is 2013 and here is a product priced out of the intended target without proper IDE, debugger, profiler… really, it is 2013, even gamesalad has a visual editor. Coronalabs should be ashamed at their so called worlds’s number one platform. Really?

The business model is all screwed up, and if you think this is a Unity vs Corona debate, it isn’t. It is a Corona labs identity crisis. They have lost what they have, and have and continue to disappoint. Levels, Mac Apps, and other initiatives, trashed. Yet, they removed features, introduced a free product, and without any new features, Pro is $600.00

What is it to prevent them from switching the price again once they release graphics 2.0 or Foo 2.0 Widgets 3.0 - A Joke. Even Widgets 2.0 has been quite a joke. 

Coronlabs is its own demise, its leadership is questionable and for being a company that gets hand picked to demo at Google I/O I would expect more out of them than any other company they compete against. Guideros Mobile, Appcelerator, Lanica, Moai, Unity, have had plugins for quite a while now. This is not something novel, new or groundbreaking.

Cloud? seriously? 

Widgets? Seriously?

Even the 3D page flip that Walter showed a few weeks ago, part of the iPhone since 1.0 and it is now introduced as a “3D without the complexity of 3D”… Ground breaking, earth shattering, I will pay $600.00 for that feature alone. Wow. I am impressed sign me up.

Appcelerator, Lanica, Guideros, Unity, Stencil, Marmalade, Torque, and a bunch of others all come with an IDE, debugger, some with profiler and on-device debugging. Real tools for real developers. Corona is the wanna be. Look at me, we are awesome. Not really. I would rather go with Unity and or Appcelerator than with a company that has less than 20 people claiming to be the worlds number one development platform. That right there is the real problem. Hubris.

#66

The last three months Corona has made some very big well needed changes. There still things it desperately needs an IDE is not one of them.

There are tons of options although most of them are kludges an IDE for something like Corona is hardly a high priority. There is not a single tool Corona is lacking, just need code features.

You obviously haven’t been paying attention as in the last couple months have had some great apps designed with Corona.

#67

I agree on the IDE point. I like it this way that I can buy any brand of tyres to go with my car… I don’t want my car maker to spread too thin trying to make everything that goes with the car… I’d much rather have CL focus its energy on making the engine bigger, better & faster. No need for them to re-invent the wheel, errr tyre.  :smiley:

#68

And the forum support is so slow.

Corona dont have enough tutorials and etc…

#69

I agree. You know why its so slow? Most of the times folk ask the same question over & over. I am guilty as charged as well occasionally. Search and you will prosper.

I wish CL staff would only respond to new and novel questions and respond to other duplicate issues by a simple, polite reminder to use the search feature.

I also would prefer them to respond to paying Pro and Enterprise customers first rather than getting bogged down in all sorts of duplicate, repetetive starter issues from Free edition users… 

#70

I search all the internet for my question and i dont find anything im waiting all day for respond to my question and still dont have this respond…

#71

@gman2, its a Saturday. CL staff are salaried employees with legal weekend breaks. Yes Rob and other CL staff respond a lot over the weekends but this doesn’t mean they have to. Its only because they are nice and don’t mind sacrificing personal time to help us over here. Some expectation management will go a long ways… Have a good weekend.

#72

@“david.ramano”, it’s somewhat amazing that you continue to create puppet accounts to bash Corona. Two new accounts in this thread alone, created solely to slander the company and product? You are correct: Corona users are not stupid, and they basically know who you are. So do we. You’re not as anonymous as you think.

It would be impressive to see the result if you spent 5% of the time developing apps (under any platform) that you do hating Corona. But I suppose that will never happen.

Enjoy your weekend,

Brent Sorrentino

#73

Rob spends an equal amount of time bashing on Twitter as well. He is just a troll and a very bad one at that.

#74

You can do everything with or without Enterprise if you are good programmer.

#75

Gman far from true. Without pixel manipulation there are many things that are not possible. Also the fix code is unable to keep up with certain style games. I guarantee Corona wouldn’t be able to handle something like Field Runners 2, maybe when gfx 2.0 releases but certainly not now.

There are other areas it lacks as well but third party sdk like chartboost, testflightapp, tapjoy and others is a huge limitation.

Business apps are also very difficult and some
Impossible.

That being said, there are a lot of style apps Corona does very well.

#76

And i still believe if you are good programmer you can create all of these.

But yeah corona is bad and the time you spent on writing these 3rd party programs and libs is a waste of time, even Game Maker Sh*t(Studio) is better.

#77

Being a 3D designer by trade I have often played with the idea of going with unity and learning it, but have been put off by the price a bit before. Especially the pro, which is still expensive. But this move to make it free for mobile, even though its just the standard version, makes me take another look at it. Though I don’t think I will move over for a long while still. But I will start learning working with it, definitely. But I think that for a lot of things corona will still be better. Plus after using it for 2 years now Im starting to get the hang of it, hehe. 

But Unity is a very interesting and exciting platform, people are making amazing stuff on it and it has a large community. I also want to try and use it at work, which is doing 3D architect visualisation. Think there is a lot of exciting things to do there, especially after seeing the occulus rift and what people are doing with that :smiley:

#78

Hey guys - we did indeed see the Unity announcement and we are glad they have decided to follow our lead in making mobile development more accessible :slight_smile:

As I’ve said many times before, Unity is a great tool. But we think Corona is very well differentiated:

First of all, our free tier does not have a splashscreen. We believe that most serious developers will not want a platform splashscreen on their games/apps.

But most importantly, Unity is great for 3D, and all the things 3D implies - bigger budgets, more technical complexity, bigger teams.

Corona is great for 2D, whether it’s games, ebooks, utilities or business apps. If it’s 2D you will build things more quickly, more efficiently and with better results in Corona.

At the end of the day, different tools are good for different projects. Corona is the best choice for 2D apps and games and we will continue increasing this advantage.

#79

Unity has announced they are making a 100% 2d solution as well. Also there are very successful plugins to help 2d development. Example http://www.asteroidbase.com/dangerous-spacetime/. Will Corona do anything new to compete with this? 

I agree the custom splash screen is great with corna free, but unity free allows you to have IAP. I think all developers would much rather have IAP over a custom splash screen.

The Unity splash screen is not exactly a problem for indie studios. As you’ve stated Unity seems to bring to mind big budgets which may have a social proof effect to counter act the lack of customization.

#80

As joshua mentioned, there seems to be a few 2D frameworks for Unity that look pretty good (“Futile” for example).

Also, another big reason I’m inclined to switch at this time is because of the Win/Mac/Linux publishing options. Corona made an announcement of sorts about a year ago saying native Win/Mac publishing was in the works and even had a Youtube video demo but that seems to have been abandoned?