A name change for Corona seems like an increasingly good idea, given these changes, and the pandemic taking over “corona” completely. Any thoughts on this Vlad? Could be a variation on the current name, something as simple as OCOR. Or open it up to community debate and you’ll probably get some better name ideas.
@dooq While it’s not my call, I would suggest keeping the Corona name. Corona SDK has a bit of a brand (though not big, still some), once it goes open source, there is even less resource for rebranding & marketing. To the degree community spend resource, I would rather it be on the product itself.
@doog, there has been plenty of discussion on rebranding happening on our Slack channel.
There is a lot of people who don’t like the name and many people feel the rebrand from Corona SDK to Corona was a negative move, but almost everyone agrees that we are not really an SDK. There have been quite a few suggestions thrown out. But let me provide this perspective on this.
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Brand confusion. Sure there is a beer named Corona. There is a 3D rendering tool named Corona. It’s the shiny part around our sun. It translates to “Crown” in many languages. But many other name choices are going to have similar brand confusion, name collisions, and reasons not to use it. For example, a name I liked was the Phoenix game engine. The whole “rise from the ashes” metaphor is fitting, but domain names are taken, there is already a failed game engine with that name.
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Rebranding is hard. It’s not just a matter of a new logo and a name. You’re starting from zero. And we have a recognized brand in the industry and overall we are, at least as a platform well received.
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The CoronaVirus is unfortunate. Apple has rejected some apps with our splash screen enabled. Google Play is taking down apps with “Corona” in their name. So we need to evaluate it. The pandemic will pass and this will likely end up being a seasonal flu type event and we will get vaccines and treatments that will hopefully make it less of a mass-news event.
So right now, we are listening to you and evaluating things. Most guidance would say no, don’t change, but we can’t be closed minded either.
Rob
Keep it as Corona unless and until you’ve earned a large enough sum to rebrand it. My two cents.
Thanks for the well thought-out reply. Glad you’re evaluating it on all the sides.
Your thinking and approach seem sound, Rob.
Many thanks to you and Vlad for being such steady hands in this time of upheaval and transition.
Steve
I started using corona around 6 months ago. I had never heard of it before, but googled around for 2d game engine because i disliked unity as 2d engine too much. I found love, but didnt like it enough and i asked from love forums for other ideas and someone said corona is good too. There was siome debate if corona still existed or what it was.
I then found that corona had not been upgraded in 2 years. I still read corona forums and learned that there were daily builds and so i decided to try it and I do like it. There are some very big issues - but that is not the point.
I searched for ”corona” and found the beer and renderer first. I thought the love forums guys meant it but then I saw the corona sdk too
When corona labs announced it would close a lot of the forums that i use and reddit was full of questions like ”what is/was corona” and stuff like ”i thought corona was dead/abandonned ware/such 2/3/5 years ago”.
am not a very active user here or not at least helpful poster. But i have a relatively fresh eyes to this matter. Out of the like 8-10 game engine/dev forums that i visit, no one really knows or cares about corona, but many seem to have gotten their start with corona, they think it is ancient. I dont wanna be mean but you people are living in your own special bubble when you say that corona is well known or respected. Outside of actual corona users the corona brand awareness is close to 0% and those who know it dont want it - the brand is diluted and is dog turd to put it nicely.
Corona has a special place in all your hearts. period. If it was as famous and as well know then why wouldnt more people use it??
If there is to be a new name then that time is best now when corona labs dies and corona sdk goes open source. There wont be any marketing budget for it - so dont bet on that - the only marketing that will be done is corona developers jams, games, etc marketing efforts. So dont say ”lets look at this later when we have more monies” because any money should go and will go to developing corona.
If the nswer is lets look at it later when we have more time and money then that is liike my mum sayin we will go to disneyland when she has the time and money - i am 27 and still waiting
There are gazillion reasons to change the name and only one to keep it - because you and only you people love it!
I hope i didnt step on any toes but these are my feelings on the matter
You’re absolutely right in my book.
I don’t really care, but I do think people go off on tangent. It could be called DogTurd SDK. If some random person creates a good game, hires a publicist, has enough capital to do some real UA, and hires a child actor to show up on Ellen show as the author of this awesome game we would have a 1M people and newly minted indy developers downloading the DogTurd SDK trying to make the next awesome game.
Bigger studios would never use corona or whatever name you come up with. What they use to say about IBM is true of Unity in the game development world: “Nobody has ever been fired for picking Unity as the engine to develop games”. Even Indy developers using Corona if they get big enough will probably be forced by a publisher to move to Unity.
This is all to say that in my option, the name doesn’t matter, that Corona’s greatest years (like mine) are very much in the past. That spending any resources or money in changing a name is just a waste. But maybe I am wrong and in 10 years (if alive, I’ll be making games) you’ll be able to rub it in my face that I was wrong and 2020 was the year that Corona and Yahoo both made a comeback.
I doubt anyone’s misinterpreting the actual situation — Corona is definitely far from being famous, but this statement here is the whole point. It’s still awareness, however small it is. Or do you assume that an engine with some random new name will get better in terms of brand awareness than one that has been around for years, that was (not too successfully, but still) advertised by several owners and countless users? I mean, you started using Corona because “someone said corona is good too”. With a new name you’d have to look through not only the beer and the renderer, but some posts/articles about a name change too, making the process even more complicated. And it’s not like all the people you mention believing Corona to be ancient/dead/etc. would start using the engine or even just see it in a different light all of a sudden.
While Corona has indeed a special place in my heart, I don’t really care about the name itself. Could be a Qwerty Engine and I’d still use it, the feature-set and the overall workflow matter to me, not the brand it’s under. If it was a definite advantage for Corona to have a new name, then sure, why not, but it’s clearly debatable.
moving from close to zero to close to zero is still close to zero.
I also cant see myself ever telling others or my players what engine I am using to create my games if I need to say its corona because some dummies will inevitably think of the virus and then I may need to handle PR or answer dumb questions. we all know that this doesnt concern majority of users but it is always the vocal minority who cause the most problems or ”PR disasters”
Yeah, well, to me that’s the reason not to waste the time and effort. Especially when it could not only fail to improve, but make things worse instead.
While I don’t share it at all, that’s a valid concern. Then again, you could always avoid telling your players what engine your game is made with, as many devs do anyways. As for the devs themselves (and that’s the only part that really matters for the engine success), I’m sure it wouldn’t stop most from using Corona.
Out of curiosity searched for the Corona Renderer’s stance on their name in the current environment. Here’s their marketing specialist’s response to a question about “free marketing” influence from two weeks ago:
I don’t think it makes any difference for us, other than a few people trying to join Facebook groups who are not 3D people and belong to lots of COVID-19 related groups (they aren’t allowed to join). Could be that more people are seeing Corona Renderer, but they wouldn’t be people in the market for a render engine, so that doesn’t really count for anything
And here’s an interesting article about Corona beer’s silence that also mentions other similar cases outside the whole virus context:
Brand names matter only if you have a brand… clearly in the wide world Corona means little (if nothing).
Maybe it had some meaning (before our time) but now it means " isolation and death"
So now it is time to change.
Have you thought about creating a topic with requests for new plugins and libs for Corona? it would be a good topic with requests, for those interested, create libs so that from May, you already have a large amount of libs and plugins to use.
I know there are a few such people who are building plugins and libraries and such already
I think so, but if people can give tips, it is also valid, there are libs that not everyone has the idea to create.
It’s MIT licensed now, you can do what you want. Tell people it’s an in-house engine if saying the name Corona embarrasses you, but it’s not like people will think you created a game with the virus. You could also say, “The engine is called Corona, which was around long before the virus” and just head it off that way. Or, like I said, just call it something else.
I do agree with your assertion that Corona is almost entirely unknown outside the community – in almost 10 years of using it I’ve never found a developer who already knew about it – but it would be *entirely* unknown if it were rebranded.
I’ve been out of the loop for a while so didn’t know it was changed from Corona SDK to Corona – the only name change I’d get behind would be to something like Corona Game Engine. That gives it an identity more specific than just Corona, but it’s not a complete rebranding.
Jay
I disagree that Corona is unknown. When we work with 3rd parties - from integration partners such as attribution, analytics, push notification, etc most know about Corona and some are still providing Corona-specify support. Similarly, I think platforms such as Google and Apple are aware of Corona and its idiosyncracy. The support of these partners are crucial for success of games on Corona. Asking all of them to adopt/change/reeducate them on a new name for Corona is very time intensive, and a complete waste of time & resource.
Among the wider developer community, I agree the brand recognition is lower, but still not zero.
For these reasons, I am fairly against a complete rename. I think a tweak like calling it Corona Game Engine or Corona-2d is OK to clarify what it is.
That’s my vote.
My vote is that the name be changed, Here in Brazil not even Lua is used a lot, even though it is a Brazilian language, Corona is still more unknown here.
I think the name should be changed because it will always remember this damn virus that has already entered history, there is no escaping the jokes about the name, I even think it is disrespectful that a developer who has a relative killed by the virus comes across a framework with this name.
Why nobody knows Corona? I just did a Google search about 2d game engines for Android and Corona was there.
I would like a name change but only if it doesn’t backfire. Corona Game Engine sounds good to me. A new icon is needed too.