Corona2d-x :wub:
I don’t care what it’s called, but the “powered by love with corona labs” doesn’t site very well these days… Maybe the splash screen could be temporarily ommitted during the pandemic?
Download the latest daily version.
The splash screen have been removed for everyone.
“Powered by love with corona labs” was appearing in the splash screen?
Really?
Indeed…what a load of old guff 
Great!
The splash screen, at least before it was removed, read: “Powered by Corona”. There was no “Love” mentioned there.
Still, from personal experience of attending game expos in Northern Europe, when I’ve talked with publishers, investors, ad networks reps, etc. I’ve never met anyone who has known of Corona. Some fellow game devs have mentioned remembering having read about it or played around with it years ago.
The splash screen has been removed, and I think the name change may not be so urgent, but as @jdsmedeirosbr said, this virus has killed too many people, and people will really be afraid of this name.
Here are some of my experiences ↓
I am from Taiwan (a small country in East Asia) and I am a Taiwanese.
According to Google Play statistics, the top five markets in the world are the United States, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan.
In my country, there are many scientific and technical personnel, but when I was in the largest forum (equivalent to Reddit in the United States), when everyone talked about a topic “what do you think of Corona?”, There were thousands of messages below, almost All are, “It used to be beer, now it is a virus”, and someone will add it below, It is still a renderer.
I’ve been waiting for someone to mention CoronaSDK, but not have until the end.
After that I watched the games on the Play Store. In this big market, I can hardly find any games made with Corona. Everyone still uses Unity.
This is what I see. Although I support the name change, if not, I will still use CoronaSDK, after all, it is friendly to individual developers.
Splash screen can be disabled in latest daily builds for free.
As I’ve said before this is what I’ve experienced too. If the brand is known at all it’s among indie devs, and not always a positive association either. Whatever message they were trying to get across in the past about Corona’s capabilities, they failed dismally.
I just did a google search for “top 2d game engine sdk” and “best 2d sdk”, etc, etc… and Corona always shows up and often in the Top 3. So, I don’t know if pixec was trolling or what. I have no idea how anyone can call Löve better than Corona. There are about 15 failed attempts at implementing a GUI in their user “library”.
IMO, Corona is the complete package. If anything, it has not had sufficient marketing or social media backing it, but technically, there is absolutely nothing to complain about. Yes, the name is unfortunate for this time in human history, but I am willing to bet people will start drinking Corona beer again once the coronavirus is under control.
AND, as mentioned, they just removed the Corona splash screen, at startup, so no-one should be afraid of anything.
That’s because you know to use the sdk keyword which helps bump Corona nearer the top. Realistically no-one is going to type that. Use ‘2d game engine’ and Corona appears on page 3 for me. ‘2d game engine’, ‘free game engine’, ‘game framework 2d’, none get Corona on page one or in the carousel of logos at the top, despite it being around for 11 years. And when you do find it, ‘last stable release - 19 months ago’ is not going to inspire confidence in a newbie…
Thats actually something i’ve seen too. Searching for stuff like ”corona touch” yields a lot of Covid19 stuff, but entering ”corona sdk touch” it gets better results. Funny thing is that based on what ive read, corona hasnt been corona sdk in years. The only case where you find search results is if you add terms to the search that dont exist anymore. I’m sure if search for ”corona sdk ansca mobile corona labs 2d game engine” then you have good search results :DD
Actually like sherman said, i searched for ”2d game engine”. You know the little box that google shows for good direct results? They were in order of: game maker studio, cocos, lingdx (wtf is this?), love, monogame, phaser, box2d (i thought this was just physic lib?), orx (again, wtf is this? :D), renpy (a visual novel engine for web? Come on!), flixel (never heard of this either…)
Corona isnt there but theres all sorts of random scrub
Anyone who thinks that corona has good seo doesnt understand that new users dont search for sdks - they want game engines. Also google, bing and such are surely going to devalue all non-covid19 corona pages, so the downhill is just getting started. Change the name! Also - sorry for triple post spam
I think your observation points to how changing the name from Corona SDK can be a really bad idea…
Right now, people can still find Corona stuff by searching under Corona SDK. If the game is changed to something completely different. It wouldn’t even how up on google search. Plus, all the domains should be changed. Partners who already have Corona integrations (eg. https://github.com/adjust/corona_sdk) would need to rename their stuff. And if they don’t (which is likely) Then that can actually create even more confusion.
A rebrand is expensive, even for a small brand. And if we just change the name without going through the effort of re-educating the entire ecosystem and getting them to adopt to the new brand, then it can create utter chaos and confusion.
I rather we save all that time and effort actually improving the engine…
For a point of historical reference, the splash screen on it’s initial release did have the “with Love” as part of the language. You, the community complained about it and it was quickly abolished (the with love part). So if you’re seeing that, you probably have a version of Corona from 2016.
If you have suggestions on SEO, please feel free to do a View Page source, look at our titles and descriptions tags and offer us better keywords that we need to include.
Just keep in mind, Google 100% ignores the <meta keywords> tag. For news sites, they can use the News Keywords tag as long as they don’t abuse it, and it’s still the next-to-last thing considered. Bing, Yahoo and a couple of other search engines only pay minor attention to meta keywords.
Changing the name to “Corona 2D Game Engine” would probably help with SEO, those are probably the words people are searching that would like Corona. We’d continue to just call it ‘Corona’ commonly. Even calling it “Corona 2D” could help differentiate it from the negative connotations somewhat
There is no easy answer to this conundrum. Yeah sure 301’ing a domain is an easy win but 3rd party plugins, git repos, etc will be a pain.
@Rob what century are you in? SEO is not about meta tags (which all get ignored by Googlebot) at best meta description is merely a hint for SERPS (and often ignored completely). That’s as bad as promoting 320x480 as a default canvas size!
If I Google my game name, every hit on page one is my game - be this Google Play/Images, Apple, Amazon, Pinterest, FB, Insta, etc. you get the point.
SEO Is SO much more than meta tags… SMH. Active offsite links and social media is much more important and something Corona has sucked at for so long.
(FYI this was my business prior to game dev and I already extended help on this but you guys were not overly interested… and look where we are)
I respect your opinion, but you can’t improve a mechanism that doesn’t have new followers, we’ll always be in a minority and worried about the framework not dying for lack of people engaged in making it grow, even changing its name to "Corona something ", there will still be results about the virus, as this is already marked in history and has more relevance in searches than a 2D game engine, it is like trying to search Google about 2D Holocaust to look for a engine and think that it will appear earlier than the Nazi-era Holocaust.
Sorry for the example.
So many good and interesting points - it’s only a matter of time before people start calling Corona the killer game engine. Sorry for the point, but we’re stuck with the association to the virus no matter what. Therefore, I would recommend changing it from “Corona” to “Corona Game Engine” or “Corona 2D Game Engine” or “Corona Open Source 2D Game Engine”. If you do this, the search engines will learn the difference between the game engine and virus over time. The sooner you make sure the word “Game” follows every instance where we use it, the sooner the search engines will learn the difference.
As for being a money thing - I wouldn’t spend a dime on it. Just clarify the rebranding with Game when referring to it in the future, as its not realistic it will ever become a favorite biz app engine.
So for clarification, don’t change the name other than adding an adjective to describe it as a 2D game engine. And certainly, keep any money you have for those of you working to kee it relevant.
May I suggest an email marketing campaign to college professors and students? I have some expertise in that area and would be happy to lend and spend to promote this new direction once you guys have it ready for launch. Of course, we’ll help any other way we can!