From The Blog: Corona Labs annual update

Getting Started Announcements
#101

I believe it won’t work.  Ironically software developers don’t like to buy software. 

When was the last time you paid for a software?  Have you ever paid for removing ads from a free application or game?

I never paid for software (I’m not taking in account Windows license that is paid when you buy a computer because its license already is in the price you paid for the hardware).

I know many developers that use Sublime daily but they didn’t paid for removing its ads.

If developers used to pay for software,  Corona Labs wouldn’t have financial problems. 

To say the truth,  even with Patreon it’s hard to convince users to contribute. 

Regards. 

#102

The software will remain free to use, but an ad will be shown during the development project, that can be definitively hide with a payment.

LÖVE is in LUA, so it’s a good candidate.

But they are also the same nightmaree to see LÖVE disapear just after.

Unity has the advantage to be an international company.

#103

Interesting that the list does not include Corona. Yet, when you do a search for cross-platform development tools Corona is always listed and most of the ones in the above list are not.
The biggest lesson to be learned here, in my opinion, is that if you have to migrate to another platform it should be one that is economically viable, otherwise you’ll be right back here again in a few years.

I would pay (and have paid in the past) for a Corona subscription.

#104

I don’t think Unity is the best alternative. 

Unless you’ve already ported all your games to Unity,   I would port the to Gideros, Defold or Cocos Creator (Gideros and Defold use Lua and Cocos Creator uses JavaScript and Typescript).

But maybe you should wait to see what will happen with Corona.

If you’re too worried about the future, you could take a not so radical approach.

Instead of port everything to other engine,  you could make new projects in the new engine.

In case you need to evolve an existing top game you have, you could port it too. 

I think it’s a better approach. You use Corona for about 10 years, so you love it.

Now imagine you converted all your games to other framework and one year later you see that Corona is better than ever.

What will you do?  Make another conversion of all your new and updated games back to Corona?

Chances are you won’t have enough disposition for that and you will get stuck with the new framework and always regretting you’ve rushed to “escape” from Corona.

#105

Well, to be fair these are VERY different engines.  We’re migrating to Unity but I would definitely not say that is a recommend migration path for most people here.  Unity is a giant and over 50% of all games made today are done on Unity alone, and between them and Unreal they own most of the market.  They aren’t going anywhere and have huge teams, and all the latest and best plugins and assets (think ad, social, analytic plugins, IAP, etc) are all being written for Unity first and everyone else after.  It’s just good business.  Corona on the other hand doesn’t even register on the radar; it’s just too small.

But Unity and Unreal are probably way overpowered for what most people are using Corona for: simple 2D games and apps.  If you want quick and easy to learn, I would not be looking at Unity.  It’s taken us months to migrate our Lua code and web platforms to build for Unity and we’re still not done.  It’s a huge effort.  For most people here looking to migrate to a larger, more influential platform that is more likely to survive I would look to migrate to a Lua based option, like LOVE.  If this is a business to you and not just a fun hobby then it probably makes sense to tie yourself to the biggest platform with the largest chance of surviving and being maintained.

The best platform will depend on individual needs.  Sticking with Corona may work for some too.

#106

I was surprised it wasn’t included too in the past, turns out Corona is considered a framework by itch:
https://itch.io/game-development/frameworks/most-projects

Quite funny when LÖVE is listed as an engine.

#107

Good find!  Interesting to see the relative size of the engine/frameworks people have been chatting about in this tread when you combine the lists:

  • Unity - 40,600 projects
  • Construct - 8,884 projects
  • Game Maker Studio - 7,376 projects
  • Godot - 2,447 projects
  • LOVE - 1,040 projects
  • Corona SDK - 49 projects

Unity is an order of magnitude larger than most of the middle-tier engines, and the middle-tier engines almost two orders of magnitude more popular than Corona.  There seems to be a lot of competition in the mid-tier engines.  The deciding factor in the mid-tier would  be the feature set for the game or app you want to develop.

It’s nice to see so much healthy competition in this space.  

#108

Since we are still a business until May 1, 2020, and if you want to use Unity Ads, you will still need to pay for the plugin. We will operate refunds on the existing Marketplace refund rules until we shut down the Marketplace. (FAQ in the footer of the page).

Rob

#109

I was really sad to see this news today.

Many thanks to Rob and Corona for their help, and received a lot of help in this forum.

My idea is the same as dooq, after all, I am a lone wolf developer, and will probably release my multiplayer online game in March.

Since most of the logic is controlled on gamespark, it will not be difficult to move data to other platforms at that time.

However, I still hope Corona is better.

Although I have spent hundreds of dollars in the market, I will spend more money to fund Corona when I have funds after the game is actually released.

I really appreciate Corona for giving a single developer the opportunity to make a big game.

#110

**UPDATED ANSWER**

I  disagree.  Professionals pay for their tools.  We understand that this is the only way to keep the ecosystem alive.

As well, we want folks to pay for our products, so taking others’ work for free doesn’t sit well with us.

Indies and hobbyists being less inclined to pay for things I understand.  It makes me sad, but I understand it.  

The thing I don’t like is the ‘everything free all the time’ mentality that really started to come into play a few years back when all the major players decided to give away their engines/SDKs for free.  I think it would have been wiser for everyone involved to keep them paid.

#111

@firerabbit.info it was a big surprise for me to see that Defold has 165 projects in itch.io. It’s 3.37 times greater than the number of projects made with Corona. I always thought Corona had much more users than all other Lua frameworks together.

@roaminggamer I agree with you that this mentality of getting all for free is unhealthy but unfortunately it’s a reality. So that many good tools (Corona included) have financial problems.

I really hope Corona survives and get better and better. Let’s see how much the Corona user community is committed to maintaining its development.

#112

I’d say it’s important to note that desktop games are a lot more popular on itch.io than mobile ones. Game jam projects are often uploaded to itch.io as well (my team alone has five jam games there). If you look at mobile stats, the situation is quite a bit different. For example, Corona beats both Game Maker and Godot on Android according to this:

https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/corona/corona-sdk

0.35% of apps

0.31% of installs

https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/yoyogames/gamemaker%3A-studio

0.30% of apps

0.13% of installs

(Not sure if this is actually the first one only, but this GMS is the only GMS listed under YoYo Games.)

https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/godot/godot

0.04% of apps  

0.01% of installs

Couldn’t find Defold or LÖVE stats for comparison, though maybe I just missed those in some less obvious library types.

I guess desktop devs just prefer having an editor more often, plus iirc Corona didn’t support desktop builds for several years of its existence, while Defold had it early (or since the beginning, not sure).

Personally, I consider Corona great for desktop games as well, but public perception most likely differs.

#113

@Gil44liG Thank you for clarifying it. I appreciated it.

#114

Hello everyone.

This is Vlad. I was with Corona Labs Inc. for almost 5 years. I love my job. I have been leading development of Corona for over 3 years now and I have hopes to continue doing so.

Corona will not die with death of Corona Labs Inc. This are not same things. Corona Labs at this point is a financial burden to parent companies, and I am very grateful to Appodeal that they allowing and funding generous transition period.

You may ask, where are we transition? Answers are in the blog post. We will transition to close-to-zero cost of infrastructure. All builds would be local, with plugins pre-downloaded to the disk. As I see it, at some point you would be able to press a button in Corona Simulator, and all your purchased plugins would be downloaded and you won’t have to worry about the thing, and all your apps would continue to build, only faster, because everything would be local.

But this is not what you worry about. Most of you expressed concerns about supporting Corona moving forward. I would like to continue working on Corona, supported by Patreon or GitHub Sponsors (this is proffered way, since they match money for some time). This are services which would allow community to chip in directly and if I would get enough money to support my family, it will be my full time job. I think this is extremely simple and transparent business model for Corona to move forward.

For now I am getting payed to complete transition towards not relying on expensive infrastructure we have now. After that, it is up to community to directly fund all the development, get involved themselves, or both.

Links are to my personal crowdfunding accounts. I am still payed by Corona Labs, and moving forward I’d like to get everyone involved in project payed as well (like Rob), so may be some changes would have to be made there. So don’t rush to give me money, unless you really want too.

I am actually positive about this thing happening. Corona Labs Inc.'s business model wasn’t working for quite a while now. Having a clear path to future is somewhat comforting at this point. After our announcement we received plenty of concerned emails from companies about the future of game engine powering their profitable games. I am sure we would be able to secure necessary funding for Corona to stay relevant in future.

Here is what I plan to do after the transition to offline/open source project is done:

  • Support Apple’s Metal APIs. Directly or through MoltenVK.

  • Migrate to AndroidX artifacts, which would allow for far more easier support of plugins for Android, including updated AdMob.

  • Migrate build system for Apple’s platform to Xcode-based, to allow easier management of provisioning and other capabilities which got integrated into Xcode smoothly since when Corona was launched.

This tasks are not easy, but quite achievable, and I have quite high level of confidence that they can be implemented in timely manner.

In short, Corona Labs Inc. is dead, long live Corona.

Thank you

Vlad.

EDIT: of course, there are still many things to figure out. Above is rough draft of my personal plans. It can change, it can become better and I am open to suggestions. Feel free to reach out, or comment here.

#115

Great to hear from you. This is the first big positive news since the announcement of the impending closure of Corona Labs. I am sure many of us will definitely support you to keep Corona alive. :slight_smile:

#116

As Vlad and Rob have already pointed out, it is generous and outright fantastic of Appodeal to fund this transition to offline builds and true open source, especially when the easiest and cheapest option for them would have been simply to drop everything.

#117

@vlads yeah that is so good to hear and you are worth everything to corona. I have such high praise of your work… I will 100% be supporting and backing you whichever way needed financially. Definately would be cool for @rob to still be around to, he feels like the face of corona :slight_smile:

#118

This is great news, thanks @Vlad!  It seems like we should all do GitHub since it matches funds for a while, right?

I have another idea.  Since Corona will be open source, we could have a place where we post a wishlist for Corona features.  If it is low on the priority list but we really want it made we could personally  post a bounty to attract a developer who would add that feature to Corona.  It could be @vlad working extra hours or a developer anywhere in the world.  I used to subcontract to a developer in India and it was quite reasonable financially.

For instance:

• I’m always asking for sprite sheets to be available for composite paint (currently it’s just images)

• @SGS is always wanting access to the frame buffer

• @everyone is always asking for Switch support

so (just making up numbers here)

I could post a $500 bounty for sprite sheet integration with composite paint

@SGS could post a $5k bounty for frame buffer access

@everyone (maybe 200 developers together) could post a $15k bounty for Switch integration

The money could be put in escrow to be paid when the work is complete (maybe a portion gets paid upfront).

I used to hire industrial design grad students to work on my projects and they were talented, hungry for work and relatively inexpensive.  I’m thinking there is a corollary for our new Corona 2.0.  This would be a great way to bring some talent to the open source Corona engine and also a way for @vlad to supplement his GitHub/Patreon income.

#119

I’ve got to admit I’m personally feeling a bit more excited by the prospect of Corona being a completely open source project now. For as long as Vlad is able to work on the core I think we’ll be fine, and there’s clearly a lot of people here willing to support with that.

If Rob sticks around too we might not even really notice much of a change :+1:

One thing has occurred to me. Until now, there’s basically been a restriction on the creation of monetisation plugins. All of the ad network plugins have been built by Coronalabs through affiliation with those networks, and mostly offered on subscription based models. With Coronalabs dissolving and the existing plugins going open source + the splash screen being removed etc, will this restriction effectively be lifted?

We’re a Sagepay partner and might at some point be able to put together a Sagepay plugin if so. I.e. a plugin to add payment forms directly to apps/games.

Not something we’d be looking to do any time soon, and perhaps not useful given the app stores have their own APIs for IAP sales, but it would be good to know that this kind of thing would be an option now.

#120

I will continue using CoronaSDK. I have some experience in the use of other tools and the truth Corona SDK has a lot of advantages. To mention just a few advantages: Documentation, Forums, Learning Curve & Support.

Vlad and Rob are professional gladiators. Without demeriting other team members, they are the most visible.

Has anyone tried to activate a simulator in react navite, for example? In Colombia we say “It’s like a birth, it’s like giving birth.” In Corona SDK, the simulator “is there, always”

Note: I’m a developer who has just reached 60 years of age and never in my professional life had I felt as comfortable using software as I have done with Corona SDK. I do not have many or large projects published, but the few that I have delivered have been of quality.

(Apologies for my English, my  language is Spanish)

Regards for *,

Solca