Plugin Future

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Hi,

 

After a happy 7 months with Corona we have been truly satisfied with the SDK. However, we have recently really come to need native plugins. We are only high-school students so getting Corona Enterprise is out of the question. This makes us very interested in how plugins will be handled in the near future. Will they be paid or free? Possibly both? This is very important for us as it HEAVILY determines the plans for our next game. Also it would be nice if you could tell us around which one month you plan to have plugins ready. Again, we think Corona is an amazing framework that insanely speeds up development, but is lacking in other aspects behind other SDK’s that provide plugin/native access with standard licenses or even for free.

 

Any info about these questions would be greatly appreciated!

#2

Into-it, an exact answer depends on what you mean when you say you need native plugins. Can you give me a little more info?

Do you want to make plugins? or do you just want access to certain plugins/services?

 

 

Also, I am moving this thread out of the Cloud forum and to the General Development forum

 

David

#3

As far I as have understood Gluon will only enable you to use plug-ins built with Corona Enterprise.

 

Unfortunately, Corona Enterprise is way to expensive for indy developers (who need it bad because the monetization options in Corona are very limited ATM).

 

Can’t understand they reasoning behind it. We are paying the Pro license every year, isn’t that enough to give as such core functionality as access to third-party libraries ?

#4

David will probably answer this better, but Gluon will be for Pro developers.  Corona Enterprise allows your Corona app to attach and call any outside code, where Gluon will allow specifically designed plug-ins created by Corona developers.

#5

Hey guys - ok, here are the facts:

 

  1. Corona Enterprise users today can build their own plugins and use them. That has been the case for months - no need for Gluon

  2. Gluon is a way for all Corona SDK (not Enterprise) subscribers to use plugins that are provided by us and third parties. 

 

The first step of getting Gluon up and running is the deployment of our new build system (that happened this week). The next step is testing out a number of plugins and then making them available to the general community. That will happen over the next few weeks. 

 

David

#6

Yup, that’s right Raphael. Thanks for chiming in.

#7

As it stands, I don’t know a great deal of Objective-C, so grabbing some company’s SDK may be a stretch for me, even if I had Corona Enterprise.  But, if someone were to take the SDK and create simple Corona API functions to call it, I could easily handle that.  That’s where Gluon comes in.

 

The way we’ve seen new commands and functions pop in to our API documentation, whether it be gameNetwork.*  for Game Center and Corona Cloud, lfs.*  for the robust Lua File System, we’ll likely see for other Gluon plug-ins as well.

 

This relieves the burden of having Corona Labs maintaining so many additional, different, and complex frameworks, and the ongoing, evolving changes (sometimes breaking) within those frameworks.  We’ve seen OpenFeint come and go, as well as other services to which Corona had support for, made documentation for, but soon after had to be deprecated and removed.  If Enterprise developers find that a plugin for things like Apoxee, face recognition, QR scanning, augmented reality, Anticrack, Bluetooth HID devices, etc. could benefit Corona SDK users, they could create and sell or provide the plug-in and make easy APIs for us to access it.

 

I would much rather have Corona Labs make sure they focusing on continuing to build the fastest and easiest engine to create games and apps for, rather than having to fix so many different provided frameworks that could really be handed off to developers who are either passionate about those particular frameworks, or who have close ties with the developers of those frameworks, or even the framework developers themselves.

 

Looking forward to Gluon, thanks for the update, David!

#8

I am sure those students are willing to learn Objective-C (so am I) only if Corona Enterprise would be reasonably priced.

 

Waiting for some others to make a plugin you need and then paying another few hundred bucks for the plugin is also not an option for many developers.

#9

I don’t expect someone’s individual plug-in to be priced at a few hundred bucks.  Granted, I don’t know what particular framework you’re thinking to do.

Many of the popular third-party add-on libraries and utilities for use with Corona SDK, such as X-PRESSIVE’s Particle Candy / Text Candy / Widget Candy, Outlaw Game Tools / Corona Project Manager, the recent Spine from Esoteric Software through Kickstarter, Bogdan Vladu’s triple threat of CodeHelper, SpriteHelper, and LevelHelper, andLua Glider IDE from M.Y. Developers, are all very powerful and very reasonably priced.  I’ve bought nearly all of them, and with the apps I’ve created with them, I was reimbursed in less than a month’s time.

I would assume that someone paying for a Corona Enterprise license would likely be developing an app (or a bunch of them) that would make its higher-tiered price worth its cost, and that would include creating affordable Gluon plug-ins for the 200K+ developers in the Corona SDK community.  I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone can offer, as it can literally spawn another tier of developers within our already large community.

#10

Actually, they are, at least ATM. I do not have time to wait for price drop.

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/30349-enterprise-we-have-plugins-for-sale-enterprise-consultants/

#11

ubj3d - To be clear, the developer who made that post is selling those plugins for himself. We are not associated with him, although we are completely ok with him selling those if he wants.

#12

To be completely honest, if we weren’t so deep into development with Corona with our next game, we would move to Unity which is much better priced and I am sure they can compare feature-wise with Corona.

But I am sure you will loose many developers in the future if you do not reconsider your pricing strategy.

#13

ubj3d - Thanks for the comment. But let me ask you 2 questions:

  1. When you are asking us to reconsider our pricing strategy, what exactly are you referring to? From the thread, I’m not sure I understand the problem. Is it that you think Pro is too expensive? Or are you talking about Corona Enterprise?

  2. We actually compare extremely favorably to Unity in terms of pricing. So let me know your answer to #1, and I’ll tell you how we compare.

David

#14

Hi David,

thank you for showing interest on this subject.

I am talking about the Corona Enterprise. It is not fair to the indy developers to charge  another $1000 for the ability to connect to third-party libraries.

I know what I am missing because in my games written in Java (Android) I am using monetization SDKs much better than the ones Corona is providing ATM.

Not being able to use them really hurts and the future of my game developer career is at stake.

Regards,

Damir.

#15

Damir,

Ok, again, thanks for the message. I appreciate the discussion. Couple of things:

  1. The price of Corona Enterprise is indeed $999 for indie developers. However, it is not on top of your existing subscription. So if you were to upgrade, any value left in your existing subscription would be taken into account. 

  2. I understand that this may still be more than you want to spend - which is precisely why we are doing Gluon. And that is where the whole discussion above comes into play. We do plan on having more monetization options and 3rd party services available to developers via plugins. We are getting there. 

So I think we are addressing this. I know you would like it to all be available today, we would too :slight_smile: But there is lots of work involved.

As a final comment: Unity is a great tool, that is for sure. But their “free” version requires you to pay $800 if you want to publish for mobile. And that product does not allow you to have a custom splash screen (among other things). Their full version weighs in at $4500 (again, if you are doing mobile). So I really do think that Corona compares more than favorably.

David

#16

David,

just to make it clear for the potential readers (please correct me if I am wrong), you have to pay for Corona each year, and Unity is a one-time payment.

#17

Wow, didn’t expect this thread to get this attention. Our main concern is the fact that if the Corona Labs team does not wish to support certain features or libraries like Amazon Ads, updated analytics, etc., we feel trapped and helpless because we personally cannot write up our own plugins. Not to be rude, but there is an SDK called Gideros which is very similar to Corona, which although is a bit more complicated is MUCH cheaper and provides access to building your own plugins without any extra payments. We understand that Corona is a business and your primary goal is to make money, but plugin development which results in a wider range of opportunities for developers is our #1 concern when it comes to development. Just our 2 cents.

#18

ubj3d - yes, you are correct. The Corona subscriptions are yearly while Unity is a one-time payment. *However*, with Unity you will have to pay 50% of a full license when it comes time to upgrade (say every 2 years?). With the Corona subscription you will keep on getting constant updates via daily builds.

So, given the need to upgrade Unity vs. Corona subscription, that aspect of the pricing is pretty much a wash. As mentioned, our pricing is pretty favorable when compared to Unity.

Note to anyone reading this: Unity is a great tool and I am not putting it down in any way. I am just making clear the differences in pricing.

#19

Into-it, now to address a couple of your comments :slight_smile:

Saying that we “do not wish to support…” is unfair. If you read this thread, you will see that we are saying the opposite. We do care about adding support for services and we are working hard towards that. It is coming. We care a lot.

As for your comparison to Gideros (another good tool), the price comparison today is $149 (for their Indie) vs. $199 (for our Indie) or $349 (for our Pro). I don’t think that is a huge difference, but sure, there is a difference. But we think Corona is well worth the price we charge. 

Again, we are addressing the plugin issue soon. We hear you. And we definitely care.

#20

Sorry if I sounded judgmental about you “not wanting” to support certain libraries and features! What I meant was that although you may wish to support them, you may simply not have the man power to carry out supporting more and more features while maintaining old ones. Also for Gideros, the 150$ Indie license covers both iOS and Android. Their Pro license is required only if you make in excess of 100k a year from your apps.

However, price is not the main issue her as I think what Corona offers may very well be worth more than that considering just how fast it is to develop with. The main concern is and always has been plugins and libraries. Because we don’t think it is realistic for Corona Labs staff to maintain all the libs on their own, we thought it would be a good idea if Pro devs were allowed native access to enable us to do some of the heavy-lifting with 3rd party libraries.