Corona vs Unity?

Games
#121

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.

#122

"

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) :slight_smile:

#123

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

#124

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

#125

Out of curiosity, what makes you believe that?

#126

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.

#127

Um, logic? :slight_smile:

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

#128

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.

#129

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

#130

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”

#131

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. :slight_smile: (Phew!)

 Jay

#132

:)  true, but it took 6 months to make that $400  :stuck_out_tongue:

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.

#133

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.

#134

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.

#135

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 ?

  • When will the new Graphics 2.0 arrive? Does it deliver pixel level bitmap manipulation?

  • Automatic masks for widgets? Are they coming?

  • Platform support for Android TV systems- Oouya? Samsung? 

  • 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.

#136

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?

#137

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.

#138

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. 

#139

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

#140

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.