Please enable indie developers to create plugins for Corona

Corona Marketplace Corona Community Plugins
1

Does anyone agree it would benefit the whole Corona community if we could develop plugins for free?

Today, it is real hard to make any profit from developing games, so every download counts.

Samsung is one of the biggest Android stores, but unfortunately Corona developers can’t submit to their store anymore because they require to use any of their SDKs, so a Samsung plugin for Corona would bring us a new stream of downloads.

This is just one example, there is many more SDKs which would help indie developers to survive.

Unfortunately, to develop a plugin you have to cash near $1000 per developer per year to get Corona Enterprise.

Maybe the new CEO reads this and opens the World of Corona plugins to the whole community.

Cheers!

2

Hi,

Actually, you’ve been able to create plugins for Corona for at least the last half year. For free. zilch. nada.

https://github.com/coronalabs/plugins-template-library-lua

But, there would be a big difference in making a plugin to support a “platform” as opposed to a plugins current usage as additional tools to enhance your apps.

So I think you are talking about platform support, not plugins persay.

Cheers.

3

The Samsung store SDK’s would require Enterprise due to their libraries being available for native android. I know people feel that the Samsung store is a great platform, but I don’t know how successful financially developers are through there.

Rob

4

I think I actually owed money at one point due to international tax rates/fees, exchange rates, and carrier fees.

I’m not sure who is actually making money on it either…

5

We have several games there and they have decent number of downloads (monetization model is Free with ads).

Now we are not able to publish our new games there.

6

One question to Corona team.

If I build a plugin with the CoronaCards trial, would that plugin be usable after the trial expires?

7

You cannot build plugins with CoronaCards. You have to use Enterprise. I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t build a plugin with Enterprise trial but when you build a plugin, you have to understand you’re going to be responsible for the long time support of the plugin. Samsung will update their SDK’s from time to time and put in breaking changes. Even though the initial plugin would not expire with the trial, we may not be inclined to add the plugin knowing you have no ability to update it.

Rob

8

Can you build a plug-in with Corona Enterprise and use the plug-in with Corona Pro? Does Corona have to review and publish it before it would be available? 

In the docs I saw something about a private beta for hosted plug-ins which I’m assuming is related.   

Is this different than the “self-hosted plug-ins” feature noted else where? 

Does the Corona Enterprise trial have any limitations on creating plug-ins? 

9

You can with Enterprise (including the trial):

  • create plugins to use in your own app
  • create plugins for other Enterprise users to use
  • create plugins to submit to the the Corona Labs Plugin Marketplace

With Enterprise Unlimited you can:

  • create plugins, host them on your own servers and have Corona SDK apps download them from your server

Rob