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.
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.