I guess there is really not much we can do except to hope for the best for Corona’s future. Like what someone mentioned, Corona should start looking to put more emphasis on building more features to support the building of business apps, rather than just games.
Love is a baby compared with Corona. Night and day.
Not quite sure what to think about it. time will tell. I also have been using corona for 6+ yrs. But the ‘all eggs in one basket’ quote really is becoming a factor. I think one of the most important factors here is the fact an ad company has bought corona which is what probably creates the insicurities for us. I’m not against it, I just hope we are not forced into a ad network to serve our ads be it through mediation or not. Developers need options to succeed in business and again I’m not talking about mediation options and creating a middle man. I’m talking about a proper mobile development SDK where we choose what networks that work with our specific needs or apps. That’s what a mobile development sdk and monetisation is about. I know that’s what’s stated, but we just don’t know now what’s around the corner. Please don’t create a jail. I hope for the sake of corona that it does not become a marketing tool for an ad company but remains a mobile development SDK which is flexible with the options for developers. Other wise options will turn to options of other sdks which dont limit developers. That’s my concerns… With that said, I hope appodeal take corona in the right direction and do offer it as a full blown and as stated ‘flexible’ mobile development SDK.
@ Brent , Corona is not mentioned anywhere. Most people don’t even know about it but it seems to me, you guys are doing too little to make it right. According to your Twitter account, you were not there in the latest GDC! You seriously need to be more active and work on brand awareness.
You can start something like #poweredbyCorona like Unity and promote some of those games from your official account. You can even pitch some of those you find valuable to Apple in return of keeping the splash screen on so people know that there is something called Corona SDK. You really need to those some stuff like this because even your developers don’t have any reason to promote their games with Corona brand.
By the way, when I say “most people don’t even know Corona SDK” I’m pretty serious about that. People know about GameMaker(thanks to Hotline Miami), RPG Maker(To The Moon) but they haven’t even heard about Corona because even most of us don’t know which well known games are built with Corona.
One last thing, when you make everything open source please don’t announce it like you did with “live builds”. This is huge like live builds and you should treat it like that. You should make every Corona and non-Corona dev see that they can build great games / apps on both mobile and desktop with native access and Lua scripting. That’s game changing if handled well.
It is not easy but simple. You help us get traction so we have a reason to promote Corona. More people starts promoting Corona, so it is heard. When it’s heard, you get access to more and better developers producing better games and apps. I know it’s not easy but that’s how it should go.
I will say, CL can definitely do a better job tooting it’s own horn. This product is amazing! More people need to know, and that will benefit everybody. Perhaps Appodeal will lend some marketing muscle in that regard, which would be a welcome development.
Case in point: John Romero (a legend!) has put out some really glowing sound-bytes about Corona the last few years and has truly put his money where his mouth is - I can think of two Corona-made games he’s released in the last year or so, and Gunman Taco Truck is getting plenty of positive press. Hitch your wagon to that star! 
I know all of that is easier said than done, but I mean this as a pep talk. Even when we gripe, all of us here in the forums are fans of the work you do and would love to see you become the major player you deserve to be. (I mean, Löve having more market share? That ain’t right, y’all.) 
We were huge advocates for Corona for over 7+ years, basically since the dawn of Corona. I will reiterate, the BIGGEST reason why we left was the major announcement that was made last fall, giving Enterprise users 30 days notice to scramble and figure out a way to sustain their business because they couldn’t use their custom plug-ins anymore. I repeat: 30 days notice was given to stop using custom plug-ins, along with Fuse, which we heavily integrated, or they were going to charge us for ad revenue we made PRIOR to the agreement.
Pardon my french, but that was a massive “eff you” to legacy and Enterprise users who had, not only paid money for a membership with terms and agreements, but were huge advocates for Corona, and brought in a TON of business as well. As I said before, many of the engineers that were doing projects and templates for clients left, and took their clients with them.
Then, not long after they dropped this huge bombshell, they all of a sudden, decided to announce that the Corona professional bundle would be available providing Admob, Chartboost, Unity ads as a paid subscription rather than siphoning revenue. (the only reason this was done is because Admob for one, does not allow engines to siphon revenue)
Yes, we understand WHY this had to be done. Corona had been struggling financially for awhile, and needed to make money, but that whole thing did not sit well with many of us. First, during the Fuse acquisition, the only way to get access to Applovin was through their mediation platform. Then, when Perk acquired Corona, Applovin became available, but at the price of 5% revenue share, and bombshell announcement above.
Corona simply does not have enough ad monetization plug-ins to make it worthwhile.
What needs to happen going forward:
Allow the marketplace to have ALL ad plug-ins submitted by 3rd parties, and not controlled by Corona. Allow any and all ad monetization plug-ins & other plugins to be submitted.
Give Business users a choice when it comes to using ad plugins. For those of us that want to PAY for Applovin, ALLOW THAT, and provide Applovin as a paid, annual plugin like Admob, Chartboost, Unity Ads, & other plugins that are part of the professional bundle.
Corona is a great engine - it’s lightweight, easy to use, and a wonderful engine, but the lack of features that come with this engine, funneling people into revenue share ad plug-ins is not going to make Corona an engine that professionals use. It will, and always will be, a hobbyist engine, unless this drastically changes. I have said this from the beginning, but it fell on deaf ears with previous acquisitions.
Here’s to hoping that Appodeal will listen to it’s customers, and take feedback into consideration. Until then, a good 80% of our apps are being programmed with Unity, and a bare few will be done with Corona using Admob for the next year. If things do not change, then we are 100% moving toward Unity.
I really hope Appodeal gets it right this time. This entire debacle that has happened over the last few years has been an extremely frustrating ordeal, and has caused a LOT of issues for people that have relied so heavily on Corona to sustain their business. The 30 days notice thing they pulled was a real deal killer for so many. That eliminated any and all trust that anyone had with Corona after that, and clients were extremely skeptical about using Corona, because they wanted to keep their ad revenue.
Again, lets’ hope Appodeal listens, and gets it right.
Really good feedback so far, and much appreciated. While it’s impossible to satisfy every developer/client on every aspect they need/desire for their own unique business model, I will do everything within my power to make sure these concerns are heard.
A fairly common theme here is that Corona isn’t really “technically lacking” from a core engine standpoint. True, everybody will have some particular things they need/want which we don’t yet offer, but I sincerely believe the Corona Marketplace has helped to address many of those needs… in particular, the machine-like output by Scott Harrison who currently offers 30+ plugins (wow!), most of them for free.
Rather, heavier marketing, promotion, and “tooting our own horn” is what has admittedly been lacking, and I sorely realize that. 
As a side note, even before I used Corona or worked for Corona Labs, I never understood the “default” choice to use Unity. It’s a great and powerful product in many ways, but I can’t imagine building any application except a 3D game using it… not a 2D game, not a utility app, not a business app, not an eBook, nothing. To me that seems illogical, like using a hammer to tighten a bolt.
Anyway, enjoy your weekend everybody… and keep the input coming!
Brent
If Enterprise is going to be free. How will Corona generate revenue for itself? All that’s left is plugins. I fear revenue sharing will be a part of their strategy. Can we get some clarification on these details as soon as they are available?
Thanks
MMS
cannot agree more!
I had to step away from Corona for a while over the the last couple of years or so and almost didn’t come back as every time I came back there was news like this. I hope Corona does stay strong, but it needs to be much stronger to stick around. Not sure how I feel about the open-sourcing.
At least another purchase means Corona is around for now, right? I, too, would like them change the ‘never will be profitable’ and I do think there are ways to do that. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that it would be charging much more than even their original pricing.
I disagree that Corona is no longer the best option for beginner who want to try out the App Store or their first game and I think that is Corona’s strongest point. Sure, there are strong options around these days, but Corona is the easiest to get into. However, “trying your luck” on the App Store has not been a valid option for a long time as even the simplest of games has been turned into huge cash cows by the big studios. What you need now, for anything on the store, is time, assets and marketing - none of which Corona can really help with.
I still believe that if Corona were to provide a ‘native layer’ it could start building on the Business Market. So far the support of native objects has been extremely weak. I’ve had so many ideas for business apps (admittedly more for games!) but when I come to code something I’m always asking myself IF Corona can actually be used for it. AFAIK any accessibility integration with iOS is lost because of the graphics layer dependency. If the native objects could be mapped directly, and without the reliance on the OpenGL layer (maybe via a switch in the config file) Corona would open itself up to a huge market of serious business developers. I see the slogan being “Easier than Swift”. I’ve banged on about the business market in the past, but it remains as true now as it ever has. Whether in the gaming arena or business, the self-supporting/money-making strength of competing platforms has been in their relevance to businesses willing to pay. That alone should be convincing enough to perform the relatively donkey work effort of Corona-ising the native controls API.
(Got limited on the number of quotes allowed…)
I’d like to ask what thoughts there are on the point I made above about native controls. To be explicit, I’m referring to anything you can drag onto the stage in Interface Builder in XCode. I don’t mean to imply that Corona should have a UI Builder which replicates the IB experience (I’m sure someone would build an interface builder in Corona just for that.)
On tooting their horn, I’d also like to ask how Corona identify marketing opportunities. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an advert for Corona. Anywhere. I would have expected, being a heavy Corona user (for the most part) that my web experience would be saturated with ads for Corona and it’s plugins, etc, just like it is for enhancement pills and escorts (that’s not just me, right?)
I would expect to see ads for Corona on stackoverflow, daring fireball, loop insight and any mobile-specific technical forum.
Corona isn’t technically lacking at all for what it does. Every time I build something (and certainly every time I demo how easy it is to build something) I’m amazed that it’s possible in such small code. (I hope that never stops.) I literally convinced a guy who had never coded before to give programming a try on this one strength, on a 20 minute train ride home. Never met him before and he just asked about what I was building. That needs capitalising on.
While Unity is great for 3D perhaps there could be a 3D-esque option for Corona in the future. I’m talking about either improving the 2D+ option or actually allowing 3D objects. The basic would be “you can render 3D objects defined in Corona code but that’s it.” Essentially, they would not have to have the full 3D experience, just be able to render. The developer would then find it easy to map that to 2D positions etc and a 3D life for Corona is born. (I have actually built this in Corona already but low-level support with the 1-line implementation would be awesome.)
To address the 3D comment above
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjUkpOzKUkNbyVjjp5TXE6wqhkS0xFeLn
Ps I have a lot more plugins on the way 4 in the plugin qa process, 1 about done, and 1 a work in progress.
Edit: thanks for the shout out Brent
Nothing short of awesome.
I have to step in on this - I’ve just started toying around with Corona a bit but, if I didn’t miss something, the first fundamental thing I think is missing is a raw lowlevel renderer. I.e. just a simple and really fast batched drawPrimitive/Quad system your typical renderer (and I guess it’s the same for Corona) is internally built upon anyway.
The relatively new mesh support is a small step in this direction but as long as I have to duplicate the data on the Lua side I can tell that it’s not even close to the performance, flexibility and simplicity it could and should be. For a very decent and easy version, just go have a look at how Love2d does it. Add LuaJIT on top of this 
Not every game is just a bunch of physics driven objects, f.i. my main project is a tycoon/simulation game with hundrets of characters each built from multiple layers of images neither would this make sense to implement as sprites nor would I even think about doing it as it’d be a much more complicated solution than what’s required.
This might not be that relevant for beginners but honestly what Corona might also miss is more experienced developers (like Romero) who do have a budget and have a much higher chance to make more impressive games which in turn will improve the showcase section and may create a positive feedback loop.
Stories about teenagers who can’t code but get rich by releasing an app or game made with whatever may make for some nice fairy tale but it’s not a stable source of hype generation - it’s more like someone winning the lottery turned into a quick PR burst.
Besides this, so far I very much like what Corona has to offer and I hope I’ll be able to use it for quite some projects to come - but I’d feel even more convenient knowing there are as little obstacles awaiting as possible.
This seems pretty cool. I haven’t had the time to look into what can be done with extensions but you seem to be very experienced.
Is it possible to add/extend Coronas 2d rendering with a native extension? This would be some really great info and would lower my fears by quite a huge margin
Absolutely, if you want to do it in a more integrated way view this blog post here https://coronalabs.com/blog/2016/09/22/introducing-external-bitmap-textures/ . My 3D scene kit plugin was a little more hacky and took about to month and 1/2 to write vs with bitmap textures it is much easier.
Edit: peace out bedtime for me. Will answer more questions tomorrow if there are any.
Such great work. I really look forward to using your 3D plugin.
Now we just need someone to write a plugin which covers all the iOS native controls (followed by Android etc) and Corona becomes truly competitive on all fronts.
@brent Perhaps Corona could support development efforts like @ScottHarrison’s as they did with Coronium?
It depends whether you view building the one project in front of you in isolation, or are looking at wider career goals. If you build something cool in Corona but it fails commercially, there aren’t many opportunities to take that to an employer as an example of proficiency in the specific skills they want. Nearly every game job posting I see is either C++ or C#. I’m just starting to think I want to get into the industry full-time if my side-projects don’t pan out, and this is a problem for me.
If you build a cool game in Unity and it fails, you can still take the project and the skills you’ve developed to an interview and have a shot at a job with the thousands of studios using the framework or even a different framework that uses C#. It might have taken longer to build, but it will never be time wasted.
Amazing work. Corona should hire you if you are not already part of the team. Do you have plans to develop fitness related plugins like access to CoreMotion / HealthKit / Google Fit, etc?
That’s your strongest selling point right there
Don’t underestimate Unity’s 2D capabilities though (for games).