IMPORTANT RE: Enterprise Plugins

Solar2D Native builds
#1

This is the email I received from  Kegan Blumenthal , probably like all other Enterprise users:

Dear Enterprise User,
 

Beginning  October 1st , we will be enforcing a new policy across our user base. For Enterprise and Free customers alike, we will be requiring our customers to use our in-house built plugins to ensure build quality and more importantly ensure the sustainability of the platform. 

Ultimately, the Corona team has come to this decision based on two factors:

  1. The current business model is simply not sustainable to support the platform for the long-term.
  2. The new business model will be based purely on performance. In other words, there is no upfront fee - we only make money when our developers make money.

We believe that our 23 new plugins are more stable than community plugins and between various ad units including mediation, video, rewarded video, interstitial, banner and many more, we have your needs covered. 

Most importantly, we want to continue adding features, supporting our community, and providing updates to the core product. In order to do so, we feel confident this model is the least obtrusive path in doing so for years to come. 

I’d be more than happy to jump on a call to answer any questions, discuss our partners’ ad units, and even recommend solutions based on eCPMs or appropriate geos. 

Looking forward to seeing you at the top of the charts!

Are you only going to drop the community plugins from the website, but still allow custom made plugins for Enterprise? Or you are going to enforce usage of yours and yours only plugins?

#2

I’d also like some clarification around Enterprise.  You’re not discontinuing this product which means I can write all the custom code (ie. plugins) that I want for my own app.  Is this a correct statement?  What you are discontinuing is the marketplace for 3rd party plugins.  Is this a correct statement?

#3

Well to me it sounds like the marketplace will be limited to Corona plugins only.

If that’s not true, then why would there be enterprise at all?

I have plenty of custom in-house plugins, and no way I could live without them.

Indeed, clarification is required.

#4

Clarification please as it could force us to revise our decision of using Corona

#5

Firstly, thank you for using Enterprise, which has been and will continue to be the premium way to write and hook into native code and libraries for Corona.

Here are clarifications for the questions asked.

“You’re not discontinuing this product which means I can write all the custom code (ie. plugins) that I want for my own app.  Is this a correct statement?”  

Yes, you can continue to write native code and create plugins for both your projects and others. That usage does not change.

“What you are discontinuing is the marketplace for 3rd party plugins.  Is this a correct statement?”

No, the statement is not correct. We are not discontinuing the marketplace for 3rd party plugins. In fact, we are working hard on a marketplace where you can sell plugins and assets.

“Well to me it sounds like the marketplace will be limited to Corona plugins only.”

No, the statement is not correct.  Both free and paid community plugins will be accepted into the marketplace, just as they are today.

“If that’s not true, then why would there be enterprise at all?”

 

Enterprise was originally released to give developers the ability to access native and third party libraries, including code written by the developer themselves. This usage is not changing.

 

“I have plenty of custom in-house plugins, and no way I could live without them.”

 

You can continue to use your non-monetization in-house plugins. Customization will continue to be a major strength of Enterprise. 

 

So here’s the issue at it’s core.

 

In the past, Corona offered only a few monetization options. So, some developers decided to use Enterprise to create their own monetization plugins and that made sense at the time. However, now that Corona offers a library of monetization plugins, which are enhanced and maintained by the Corona engineering team, it doesn’t make sense for developers to also spend their time and resources recreating the wheel.

 

At the same time, Corona’s business model has changed over the years from paid to free, which means that developers can explore ideas and find success without investing hundreds or thousands of dollars a year up front. To offset the obvious costs of running build servers, paying smart engineers, and other normal operating expenses, Corona now relies on performance based ad revenue, which is generated from the community’s usage of Corona built monetization plugins. Essentially, we win when Corona developers win. The rest of the time, we take on all the cost of development and maintenance of the platform. So, when Enterprise keeps developers from using our monetization plugins, it hurts the long term sustainability of the platform and we know that’s not the true goal of Enterprise developers.

 

There’s no need to parse the language here. Enterprise developers will continue to create plugins and use native libraries for both themselves and others. The only change is that we now want everyone to use the Corona built and maintained monetization plugins.

 

Let us know if there are other questions. We will be happy to answer them.

#6

Thank you for the clarification, it makes sense. Please be more specific on future announcements to avoid confusion.

#7

Make sense, thank you for the quick reply.

#8

Hello, 

I still have some questions about this. In the post you mention that we can still use non-monetization plugins.

Does this mean that we will not be able to use any ad network library not developed/maintained by Corona?

How will this work or be enforced?

Will we have to drop our current monetization plugins if it from a partner Corona does not currently support?

#9

I’ll try and get clarification on that for you @gmarchetti.

#10

@gmarchetti, to answer your questions:

“Does this mean that we will not be able to use any ad network library not developed/maintained by Corona?”

Yes, that is correct. You will need to use a Corona built and supported plugin.

“How will this work or be enforced?”

 

Initially through policy only. More details will be shared as they become available.

 

“Will we have to drop our current monetization plugins if it from a partner Corona does not currently support?”

 

We will work with you to match your existing monetization formats with replacement options. If you have special terms with a network, we can discuss those details with you as well. Whatever ad units you are using, we can match in a number of different ways.

#11

@Charles

Did you think about developers who create apps and are NOT publishers?

It’s not within our right to discuss this, we get a requirement of using specific ad network, we create a plugin for that and we use it.

Now this change, means that all the code base we have created through years of using corona sdk and enterprise, will become useless because we will be limited to the ad networks you can get in arrangement with.

Cool, do that with the free version, but now limitless enterprise is becoming a very limited one.

Apart from custom ad networks plugins [and sorry to say, even if you do have a plugin for a network, there’s always something that needed to be fine tuned for our needs and we ended up using a custom one], there are only a few other that we worked with.

Anyway, plugins aside, we are not going to force our clients to go into an arrangement with you, over direct arrangements they have with ad networks.

If you are not going to limit this move to corona sdk only, then this is a really crappy move to make on you enterprise users. Being committed for few years now, created a large code base, spent quite a lot of money on training employees etc etc, and now I get an info that all of it can be thrown away.

I understand you are looking for a business model that would make you profitable, and you probably don’t care about few users who could loose their business, but seriously, consider the fact, that we have invested a lot more money into the platform than your license fees.  Fine, when someone new comes in, enforce this new policy on them, but think some more about existing customers who never expected for this to happen.

Thanks

Krystian

#12

Echoing this.

As a long term Enterprise user, this is a total deal breaker for us.

We are very dependent on existing deals and our own custom monetisation plugins. We would of course consider alternative ways to cover this cost (highter monthly fees?), but as of now, having your premium Enterprise customers affected by such a huge change feels very invasive. You will in other words dictate what business partners we can engage with as a company? For all serious developers with bigger reaches and ambitions than a small hobbyist studio, this is a major red flag. We have spent money and time to cultivate relationships with our partners, and we cannot simply throw our existing structure away.

We have been very loyal and promoted Corona in our local community for years, but in all honesty we have now lost a huge amount of faith in you. Also, giving us about a month of notice with for big of a change feels very out of the blue.

I have total respect for Corona and I want my tone to come across as humble and civil, but I need to make my point as clear as possible: This will make us have to take our business elsewhere. Our developers are as I write this actively researching how to switch our codebase to Unity in the shortest time possible.

#13

Over the last couple of years, we have spent a huge amount of time and effort learning about, building and optimising our ad monetisation strategy. It has been a difficult process but we’re happy with what we’ve managed to achieve - though we have many plans to improve this further. (FYI we use Fyber for mediation, with a variety of networks. Also important to us is FAN for native ads.)

If we can no longer use the tools we have built, not only will it take time and money to migrate to alternatives but we will make less revenue because of it, harming LTV and our business model in general. I find this very hard to accept.

When we started making our games Unity wasn’t even an option for fast 2D. I have no doubt that Corona was the right choice for us and it has been great to see it mature into the powerful stable cross-platform engine it is today. It has also been brilliant to see all the positive changes that Perk have bought since the acquisition.

Clearly Corona needs to figure out a way to better monetise what they’ve built - I’m just not sure this is the right way to go about it.

Could someone clarify what Corona’s monetisation model is if we use the official plugins? I remember it was a % of ads for one network but then another had 0% to Corona. What if we have specific deals with networks? So far the appodeal website (the only mediation option!) does not fill me with confidence:

a) No list of supported ad networks.

b) Claims of 100% fill. Easy to guarantee if there’s no minimum eCPM?

c) Vague quotes from developers I’ve not heard of like “I have been getting some good eCPM from you guys - Hafeez Azam, Train Simulator 3D”.

d) The “Average weekly eCPM” box doesn’t say what format it’s for making it rather useless.

I <3 Corona.

Ian

#14

@krystian6, @mark.deweer, @spideri - allow me to address your concerns: 

If the only benefit you derive from your Enterprise license is to build monetization plugins, then the easiest thing you can do to save yourself money and time, is switch to Free. We have direct relationships with our partners and receive the latest SDK updates as they are released so that all of our plugins are properly maintained for all of our developers. It is our thought that developers want to spend more time building great apps and games than building plugins to (unintentionally) circumvent our business model.

The point of Enterprise should be to take advantage of other APIs not exposed in our core APIs. 

If you truly enjoy the platform and all it has to offer, the only way we can figure to continue supporting the platform and our developers, is to use this business model. Keep in mind, this is a performance revenue share. If you don’t earn, or use ads for instance, neither do we. There is no upfront cost. 

In the past, there has been little in terms of monetization options on Corona. Today, we have over 20 options which support every single ad unit you could ever want to put in your app.

I’d be more than happy to discuss this personally as we have no intention of faltering from this business model - shoot me an email kegan@coronalabs.com

#15

@kegan2 A few questions to get started:

I believe you don’t support native ads. Is this correct or being worked on? In particular we use FAN at the moment.

Will you support other more mature mediation providers like Fyber or AdMob or is this an exclusive deal with Appodeal?

What is your business model? We need to understand the rev share you take and at what point as it affects ours directly.

Thanks,

Ian

#16

@Ian -

Native ads is being worked on. The idea is to provide not only all the ad units currently available in the market but also the best providers with the highest eCPMs. 

FAN is currently supported and live on the marketplace. 

Appodeal is not an exclusive deal but so far we’ve seen pretty good results as well as good feedback from the developers using it. 

Our revenue share is direct with our partners to avoid penalizing the developers for usage of the plugin. All of the revenue you’ll see in your dashboard is yours to keep. In the case of Applovin or FAN for instance, we take 5% of the ads shown. 

#17

How does this apply to CoronaCards? I obviously can’t make your ad plugins available to my app since CoronaCards isn’t built on your build server?

#18

@kegan2 Thanks for the clarifications.

Your revenue share still impacts developers because if they already have a good deal then that may longer be possible if now Corona are taking a share as well. Not a deal killer, and probably quite reasonable, just saying.

On Android TV and Fire TV we monetise via ColorTV which is working great (let me know if you want an intro). You do not have an alternative yet are telling us we must remove it by October 1st! How can you justify that?

I believe you FAN plugin does not support native.

If this is going to work then at the very least the transition period needs to be significantly extended. Ideally until the new year to allow for building of missing (best in class) plugins.

Appodeal may well be good (we have no way to know) but alternative mediation options are essential!

#19

@Ian - 

Shoot me an email - if you have special deals we can perhaps get our partners to match. 

For tvOS, we do in fact have a solution as Applovin supports this platform. Nonetheless, an intro wouldn’t hurt. 

We are looking into more mediation solutions. Also re: transition period, we’re firm on the October 1st deadline but perhaps we can discuss your special needs via email. I’m looking to help out here as the case warrants! :) 

#20

@kegan2 Last I checked Applovin didn’t support Android TV or Fire TV. I will email you but telling your developers they have to lose key revenue streams in 5 weeks time is frankly ridiculous.