Ending pro license and moving to Basic

Solar2D Daily Builds and Public Releases
#1

Hi,

Ive been developing for Corona for about 2 years now and things have changed substantially along the way, especially with the pricing structure and other options for indie development (like free Unity 3D option with IAP).

Since I have been updating my app once in a while it would be nice to continue and do that as a Basic subscriber. The problem is that my app uses the BitOP plugin for some low-level math during AES encoding/decoding of game data.

Would it be possible to get the BitOP plugin with the Basic license? I may pay for the plugin, but the $396 higher price for PRO is not justified when I only need the BitOP. Doing bit math in lua is too slow (it takes several seconds for the AES encoding/decoding).

Total revenue for the Corona based app the last 12 months has been $8 USD. It doesnt justify a licence, so if I am to continue updating the app and support Corona it would only be as a Basic subscriber (and with BitOP support).

What is Coronas policy on this?

Best,

Renato

#2

Sorry Renato - we think the right place for that plugin is for Pro users. After all, we have to give people an incentive to upgrade if we are to make money. We feel Corona SDK Pro compares very favorably in price with Unity, especially when you take into account the time it takes to build things.

#3

On a side note, if your app has only made $8 USD in the past year you might want to rethink even supporting it anymore or look at marketing, price changes etc.over the course of a year your app/game should be able to cover the costs of your development regardless of what you are using to build the app/game, if it isn’t then you need to go back to the drawing board.

Just my two cents :slight_smile:

#4

DavidR is right. There has to be some way to make a living for Corona and their staff and backers, after all.

Unity acts as a loss leader IMO. Free Corona is, well, free, and it’s always clear what you get with each step (and actually the full bore Corona isn’t *that* much for a development tool). Unity is free, but it’s more of a pretence, it’s more like ‘free but buy lots of other stuff’. (Try doing Admob in Unity for example).

If people don’t like your game it is unlikely to be the development system. Unity does have some advantages, but like all click and point with code systems, it tends to fight back against what you are doing. You can produce stuff very quickly, as you can see from the tutorials, but to produce the same quality requires the same amount of work. Unity does 3D, of course, which Corona doesn’t. 3D gaming isn’t essential, never was, and often is used as an alternative to actual game play, notwithstanding issues about doing it with 4 inches of screen space.

If you have only made $8 it might be worth considering whether  your game is actually fun to play, or overpriced. There have been countless games that look beautiful that are incredibly dull.

#5

Shure, I know Unity is more pay-for-what-you-want than pay-for-all-at-one, but its a good business model which also works well for apps (the ones that get DLs at least). All top grossing apps have that model and if you go to GDC everyone will tell you thats the way to go.

@paulscottrobson: There are others here that also ask for a plugin-store for Corona, so I dont think its a bad way to go. But I will leave the decision to CoronaLabs. My decision will be to stop supporting new versions of that game, at least until I can find a way around the BitOP problem. You can check it out here if you want: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/smartball-gravity-games/id640096010?mt=8

@Christopher Bishop: I dont know why its not grossing or getting DL but  80% of the apps in app-store have it that way. I havent paid for any commercial or CPI campaign, so that may help. It will be quite expensive DLs but maybe I can put it to the premium version only (its 5.99). Paying for DL of the freemium is a waste (if your name isnt Clash of Clans).

#6

@renato,

Your game isn’t bad but 5.99 for your game is pretty high, you might want to try .99 I think you will find you will make more money at a lower price. 

I don’t advertise at all on any of my games because this is more of a hobby so if they do good great and if not no biggie, you also need to keep in mind that you are currently in the category of “Games” with no sub categories etc. I think you will find if you move your category to Strategy, Puzzle etc. you will see more downloads.

Having your game in just Games or Casual makes you go head to head with Clash of Clans, Candy Crush etc. and so forth.

There are a ton of things you can do that don’t cost any money to get more downloads, the first and foremost being play with your pricing and since you are in iTunes you can actually try a FREE for over the weekend promotion and sites will pick up the fact that you are having a sale and promote your app for you.

Regarding the plugins, I agree that having a store for plugins would be nice and would also help out the people who make plugins etc. but for your current game you really don’t need to use any BitOP to encode/decode game data and “don’t take this the wrong way” but I wouldn’t even need access to your data to reverse engineer your game pretty quickly nor would it even help me.

AES encryption is fine and all but unless you are storing the key remotely and using a rotating public key on every request, all the info to decrypt a file is 9 out of 10 times stored in the program itself and can be hacked by anyone with decent math and c++ skills.

I guess the bottom line is if you want to go basic then just remove the encryption there is really no need for and if you just want to protect it from the “random” eyeball, just use something like Rot13 to garble it up a bit.

That being said, I do see your point :slight_smile:

#7

@ Christopher Bishop:

Thanks for your feedback, I guess Im not a marketing man. :stuck_out_tongue:

I will try to set up an ad campaign for the paid version of the game (there is also a freemium on the app store). There seems to be some CPI-only possibilities out there so I can actually make some profit if it works. Maybe lowering the price can drive more DL as well, but 5.99 is really not much (at least here in Norway were CPI is around $5…). Unfortunately App-store doesnt allow price differing from country-to-country.

The free-over-weekend campaing may work to get some DL. I have already tried a half-cost-over-weekend campaign, but none of the sites picked it up so no DL from that. They state that they only probe for apps with a certain install volume, so I may need some DL base before it works.

I will try to change from “Game” section to “Puzzle”. I though it was in the puzzle, but I forgot to check the details there… :stuck_out_tongue:

Without DL the encryption is probably too much for such a basic game. It was probably too interesting to interpret the algoritms, so I overdid it… I have encrypted the encryption key as well, so its no open text, but you can probably get to it if you try. I will look into other simpler ways if I cant get bitOP.

Thanks!

#8

5.99$ US? is pretty high. I rarely see these prices in app stores (in general). Most games are ranging from 0.69€ to 1.29€. 5.99 is pretty much money for any mobile game.

#9

Sorry Renato - we think the right place for that plugin is for Pro users. After all, we have to give people an incentive to upgrade if we are to make money. We feel Corona SDK Pro compares very favorably in price with Unity, especially when you take into account the time it takes to build things.

#10

On a side note, if your app has only made $8 USD in the past year you might want to rethink even supporting it anymore or look at marketing, price changes etc.over the course of a year your app/game should be able to cover the costs of your development regardless of what you are using to build the app/game, if it isn’t then you need to go back to the drawing board.

Just my two cents :slight_smile:

#11

DavidR is right. There has to be some way to make a living for Corona and their staff and backers, after all.

Unity acts as a loss leader IMO. Free Corona is, well, free, and it’s always clear what you get with each step (and actually the full bore Corona isn’t *that* much for a development tool). Unity is free, but it’s more of a pretence, it’s more like ‘free but buy lots of other stuff’. (Try doing Admob in Unity for example).

If people don’t like your game it is unlikely to be the development system. Unity does have some advantages, but like all click and point with code systems, it tends to fight back against what you are doing. You can produce stuff very quickly, as you can see from the tutorials, but to produce the same quality requires the same amount of work. Unity does 3D, of course, which Corona doesn’t. 3D gaming isn’t essential, never was, and often is used as an alternative to actual game play, notwithstanding issues about doing it with 4 inches of screen space.

If you have only made $8 it might be worth considering whether  your game is actually fun to play, or overpriced. There have been countless games that look beautiful that are incredibly dull.

#12

Shure, I know Unity is more pay-for-what-you-want than pay-for-all-at-one, but its a good business model which also works well for apps (the ones that get DLs at least). All top grossing apps have that model and if you go to GDC everyone will tell you thats the way to go.

@paulscottrobson: There are others here that also ask for a plugin-store for Corona, so I dont think its a bad way to go. But I will leave the decision to CoronaLabs. My decision will be to stop supporting new versions of that game, at least until I can find a way around the BitOP problem. You can check it out here if you want: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/smartball-gravity-games/id640096010?mt=8

@Christopher Bishop: I dont know why its not grossing or getting DL but  80% of the apps in app-store have it that way. I havent paid for any commercial or CPI campaign, so that may help. It will be quite expensive DLs but maybe I can put it to the premium version only (its 5.99). Paying for DL of the freemium is a waste (if your name isnt Clash of Clans).

#13

@renato,

Your game isn’t bad but 5.99 for your game is pretty high, you might want to try .99 I think you will find you will make more money at a lower price. 

I don’t advertise at all on any of my games because this is more of a hobby so if they do good great and if not no biggie, you also need to keep in mind that you are currently in the category of “Games” with no sub categories etc. I think you will find if you move your category to Strategy, Puzzle etc. you will see more downloads.

Having your game in just Games or Casual makes you go head to head with Clash of Clans, Candy Crush etc. and so forth.

There are a ton of things you can do that don’t cost any money to get more downloads, the first and foremost being play with your pricing and since you are in iTunes you can actually try a FREE for over the weekend promotion and sites will pick up the fact that you are having a sale and promote your app for you.

Regarding the plugins, I agree that having a store for plugins would be nice and would also help out the people who make plugins etc. but for your current game you really don’t need to use any BitOP to encode/decode game data and “don’t take this the wrong way” but I wouldn’t even need access to your data to reverse engineer your game pretty quickly nor would it even help me.

AES encryption is fine and all but unless you are storing the key remotely and using a rotating public key on every request, all the info to decrypt a file is 9 out of 10 times stored in the program itself and can be hacked by anyone with decent math and c++ skills.

I guess the bottom line is if you want to go basic then just remove the encryption there is really no need for and if you just want to protect it from the “random” eyeball, just use something like Rot13 to garble it up a bit.

That being said, I do see your point :slight_smile:

#14

@ Christopher Bishop:

Thanks for your feedback, I guess Im not a marketing man. :stuck_out_tongue:

I will try to set up an ad campaign for the paid version of the game (there is also a freemium on the app store). There seems to be some CPI-only possibilities out there so I can actually make some profit if it works. Maybe lowering the price can drive more DL as well, but 5.99 is really not much (at least here in Norway were CPI is around $5…). Unfortunately App-store doesnt allow price differing from country-to-country.

The free-over-weekend campaing may work to get some DL. I have already tried a half-cost-over-weekend campaign, but none of the sites picked it up so no DL from that. They state that they only probe for apps with a certain install volume, so I may need some DL base before it works.

I will try to change from “Game” section to “Puzzle”. I though it was in the puzzle, but I forgot to check the details there… :stuck_out_tongue:

Without DL the encryption is probably too much for such a basic game. It was probably too interesting to interpret the algoritms, so I overdid it… I have encrypted the encryption key as well, so its no open text, but you can probably get to it if you try. I will look into other simpler ways if I cant get bitOP.

Thanks!

#15

5.99$ US? is pretty high. I rarely see these prices in app stores (in general). Most games are ranging from 0.69€ to 1.29€. 5.99 is pretty much money for any mobile game.

#16

Just to follow up on this: The price strategy of Corona killed this project before it even started gaining installs. It was maybe 1-2K installs in total and their steady changing policies of pricing meant that it could not be updated any further. It it still in app store, but its not working in Iphone 6.

The game took about 1 year to make and was around 10K lines of code. A cut-down version got it below the 100MB limit.

For Android it has only seen 90 installs in the last year. The average rating was 2.73 out of 3, but it has drowned in the large amounts of apps there. Premium was priced at $0.99, but no sale there…

Its been a year since I used Corona SDK, so I don’t remember much of it. Unity3D is so extremely much more and better in every way. It requires less time to get advanced things going and one can buy alot of modules.

Good luck Corona!

#17

Just to follow up on this: The price strategy of Corona killed this project before it even started gaining installs. It was maybe 1-2K installs in total and their steady changing policies of pricing meant that it could not be updated any further. It it still in app store, but its not working in Iphone 6.

The game took about 1 year to make and was around 10K lines of code. A cut-down version got it below the 100MB limit.

For Android it has only seen 90 installs in the last year. The average rating was 2.73 out of 3, but it has drowned in the large amounts of apps there. Premium was priced at $0.99, but no sale there…

Its been a year since I used Corona SDK, so I don’t remember much of it. Unity3D is so extremely much more and better in every way. It requires less time to get advanced things going and one can buy alot of modules.

Good luck Corona!