From The Blog: Corona Labs joins Appodeal!

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#41

Hi,

here some thoughts I have for long time. and I even tried many times to share them by emails with Corona Team…

I will be happy if @CoronaTeam related to my points

  • never enforce things, people are not stupid and they like freedom especially developers. just offer the best option, and developer will choose it when they feel satisfied and smart

  • make developers confident about Corona future, it’s not a toy, it’s stories, dreams, and livelihood

  • Corona owners always had wrong attitude,  heading to newbie: “Corona, is easy, even if you are not good programmer you can do game fast!!” Wrong!! it must be “do great games and fast”, newbie or whoever will just follow, you should target serious people… wether they new programmers or enterprise

  • Corona, should had its own adnetwork for games long time ago!

  • your daily target should be: make Corona the greatest game engine, and money will follow

  • Enterprise plan can cost much more, but never based on revenue or profit share!!

  • how much money you spent on Advertisement?!! it close to zero i guess

  • i think, owners didn’t have quite belief in Corona, and they just want to squeeze max money in shortest time…

 and that’s why it have these fast hands exchanges.

Really i wish if Corona business decisions was in my hands,

great product, poor vision… with many attempts just in the wrong directions

Good luck

#42
#43

Well, since everyone seems to be posting their opinions, here’s mine:

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!

As I said in this post, John Romero is giving the opening keynote at the East Coast Game Conferencein April.  Given the fact that he has continuously praised Corona, and his kid has a popular Corona app in the store, I am completely surprised Corona will not be at this conference leveraging a partnership with the Romeros.  The ECGC is a smaller conference, and I feel that a smaller conf would be a good audience to present a booth.  Attendees are not the same audience as the larger GDC, etc., and the opportunity to present to indies and those just starting out would be a great fit.  I believe is it not too late to get a booth there… get going!  :slight_smile:

Some other comments:

  • Coronium should not of been discontinued.  It was a great selling point, and a great feature.  Pay that man and start this up again.
  • Drag and drop IDE as part of the package.  I cannot tell you how many times newbies told me that they are turned off by not having this.
  • Revenue sharing ad plugins?  Uh, no.  Seems very underhanded.
  • (A little bit of soapboxing here) There are many people doing great stuff with Corona, but CL will only publicize your work if you are lucky enough to get popular on your own, or have some street cred.  How about a little help for those that are still trying to “get lucky”?
  • I’ve thought about submitting a blog article a couple of times, but for the life of me, I cannot find out how.  Make that easier.
  • Someone above said they have a concern about open sourcing the engine, and I also agree.  If users expect everything to be free and/or open, I don’t think paid plugins will last… free users will not pay.  I have 2 free and 1 paid plugin, and I spent a lot of time and effort on them.  Would love to see a bit of a return on them.  Open source is not the ultimate solution for everything.

Not sure what, if any, suggestions from everyone will be put into play.  I am concerned that there is so much turn over in the past 3 years, and each event results in drastic changes to revenue methodology. I think what is most concerning to me is that all these buys outs are from ad revenue companies.  There companies just do not have the same mindset as we do… their primary objective is to increase ad revenue.  I do not expect them to purchase a game engine company and run that in parallel.

–John

#44

To submit a blog article simply email us at support AT coronalabs DOT com. I’ll see the inbound email and then can reach out to you to discuss the particulars. We have run guest posts in the past and I don’t see a reason why we can’t run them going forward. 

The apps and games that we feature really only have one criteria, it’s got to be outstanding in some way. Of course getting featured, having a staggering number of downloads raises apps to that category. Successful studios tend to create outstanding apps. But we’ve featured and will continue to feature apps that are from small/indie  A recent example was Arrows & Sparrows. It was a really well done game by a one person team releasing their first app and we had no success metrics to consider. Great gameplay, great artwork, game depth etc. are the most important things. 

We also do case studies, which are more about the people behind the app, or a unique development process. 

Rob

#45

 

There are a metric ton of Unity games out there that are 2D. Yes, it’s not the most ideal engine for 2D because it’s bulky, but there are ways to reduce the file size & we often get well below the 100 meg limit.

 

I also know another dev that started a company a few years ago and is doing health and fitness apps exclusively with Unity, and has been extremely successful in using Unity, so much that they have become a very profitable company. Many of the solutions they use to create their apps are much easier to do with Unity vs Corona. 

 

It’s very hard to beat the features of that engine. There’s so much more flexibility with Unity because you have a buffet of plug-ins, and other resources you can use. Anything you can think of is on the Unity asset store, and can contribute to a reduction in time management for any project. It’s also very easy to take a template, and let designers & non-programmers re-skin a game vs Corona.

 

But Corona’s engine is very lightweight, and ideal for 2D games. There just aren’t enough features with Corona to justify putting all your eggs into one basket with this engine though. This is especially true if you rely on advertising as a bulk of the revenue. There just isn’t enough available at the moment.

 

If Corona had a marketplace like Unity, with way more ad plug-ins, mediation stuff, and other features, then it would be worthwhile. But the ad mediation plugins are currently controlled by Corona, and some of them take a cut (like Applovin) That funnels developers into having to choose to use certain plugins if they want to keep their revenue. It’s too much of a dictatorship right now, and there needs to be more flexibility for developers to choose what ad plug-ins they want vs getting funneled into only a handful of available ones.

 

Corona needs to be open like Unity in order to be successful and draw professionals into using it’s engine. Otherwise, most people will go to Unity, where they don’t have to bat an eyelash if they want to use a plugin and keep 100% of their revenue. There are less restrictions with Unity, and a medley of resources to use. Corona needs to have that in order to be taken seriously my professional app devs. No serious app dev making a large income is going to want to give 5% of their revenue to any company. It just won’t happen. (ask any of them)

 

Again, I reiterate, Corona is more ideal for 2D games, and needs to step up their game in terms of offering more plug-ins and being more open and friendly vs restrictive as they have been in recent years.

#46

Getting ready to ship again. I’ve survived at least 3 change overs, SpriteLoq, Graphics2, storyboard-to-composer.etc… :smiley: No reason to panic. I think it was called Ansca Corona when I started. :slight_smile:  Now I wanna drop some of my libs in the store too. Congrats Rob and crew! 

#47

Business Apps need text capabiities and widgets that do the job without the need to rewrite some “basics” like buttons appearing under a row when you swipe it.This is a feature we ask for since many many years,and we still have to battle if we need to insert a bold word inside a sentence.

And developpers (CoronaLabs first customers) need a stable marketing policy. I’m using Corona since 6 years and every year there’s one or more change.

Yes, CL is great in many aspects but seems to sail without captain, I’m afraid the new owner will take a look during some months and try to resell CL one more time.

#48

Congrats on the Appo Deal… This is a great piece of news!!!

I think it would help alot if Corona was an integrated IDE/Simulator.  It would appear more robust, and be more marketable - the IDE could facilitate project creation, coding, sample code and third party libraries, marketplace and forums.

I also think that the ability to render 3D objects, even if they were treated as 2D objects would be a great addition and worth alot of bling to the marketing department.

Greg

#49

I get the feeling it’s not so much a department, as a twitter account that someone spends an hour a week on…

#50

In an attempt to make Corona known a little bit more, we are organizing a game jam. I invite you all to hop in.

https://itch.io/jam/corona-blitz-2017-01

#51

Heath stuff is not a priority. I don’t plan on doing any heath stuff due to low interest (http://feedback.coronalabs.com/forums/188732-corona-sdk-feature-requests-feedback/suggestions/10951224-plugin-health-kit) I don’t know if I should say this out loud but i did apply for job. I was asked to work on plugin and ask to give a time line and price point. I am not happy time line I submitted now that I think about it. Any this was in October and did not hear back. Any way I am glad to be independent( no strings) and be able to move fast ( and occasionally break things). I do agree with @schizoid2k about the plugin return on invest money wise. I only make about 63$ a month with my 12 paid plugins. Thanks,

Scott

Ps this is not meant to be a negative comment more of a informative comment

#52

I think it would be a good idea to consider giving the platform a new name.

#53

Apporona?

#54

Corodeal?

#55

Considering it’s history, I suggest This.Parent = Array :o) 

More seriously, I’m not sure it would change something. I would like to be as optimistic as possible, I like the platform but CL needs a management with a clear business model, a clear roadmap and a focus on essential developments. CL has announced many things, began many projects and today many of them are still in beta or have dissapeared. As of today I’m afraid in signing for enterprise as I don’t know if tomorrow the pricing plan will not change again, as it did in the past (I used to pay to have daily builds  and some months later it became free for everybody)

#56

It’s an evolving business model in a brutally competitive market.   We should all breathe a sigh of relief that Corona made this deal, the alternative was not a good one.  Jumping over to Unity is not a great option, unless you are a proficient C# programmer,  the way Unity handles gui is almost sadistic, and to make a lean and mean app in Unity ain’t gonna happen.  I looked at all the alternatives and nothing was as good as Corona for 2D development.  That being said, there is no reason that Corona can’t go 3D or evolve into a Unity killer.   It’s a question of planning, direction and $$$.

#57

Thanks for sharing. I guess it is a good thing as well since you are able to move things faster as an independent developer.

Despite the low returns, I hope you can hang on there and continue to deliver quality plugins for the community. I believe there is a very strong interest in business apps in this forum. I am not sure how difficult it is but if you can provide a plugin that incorporate native widgets like tableview, tab view, text field, etc into Corona, I am sure it is going to be an instant hit. I will be one of the first to subscribe.  Actually for a start, even a better map view is going to be very popular. 

Just my 2 cents worth.  :)

#58

I am personal have no current plans to leave. This is just a hobby. I still plan to keep making plugins. As for the native widgets objects like table view, I thought about it. The biggest problem is display groups. I currently have no idea how to access them. Corona does a hack for grouping native objects with native objects. Also there are the limitations of native objects like always being on top, harder to customize. To be fair I think the open gl widget library works pretty well. I mean open gl objects can be moved and stretched. I think it is a lot of work for little results.

I will see about other native objects. I got to clean house before I start something big like this.

#59

Tableview on OpenGL is fine for display except I feel that row touch event is not as good as the native version. The adjustment of the touch sensitivity doesn’t work well on all devices.

#60

Just a hobbyist here, so take this for what it’s worth, but your last statement is the exact thing that trips up a lot of my students in my profession of instructional design—my students imagine that their target users think like they do, instead of trying to understand what makes their target users think a certain way or make certain decisions.  I would venture to say that the lack of a GUI for creating good 2D apps has held CoronaSDK back from becoming a popular tool among many, leading them to either less-capable tools or tools really built for bigger purposes (e.g., Unity). 

If you were to complete the project started so long ago to create a GUI for developing apps (both games and business apps), CoronaSDK might be able to make headway into attracting new clientele.  Even X-Code has a GUI for app-building, and with the introduction of Swift, they were able to nab a group of people that otherwise wouldn’t have attempted to make apps with it.

Of course, the goal would be to build such an environment without adding unnecessary complexity (which often comes with such environments) or losing the power, capability, and flexibility CoronaSDK currently has.  Then, you also make ad-integration easy with drag and drop add plug-ins so that people start using the revenue sources you would like.

Just my two cents.  I hope they’re helpful, and hope CoronaSDK lives on.  It really is a great tool.