Serious question: I am worried about the future of Corona SDK

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Hello everyone. I wanted to know your opinion about establishing business with important companies using Corona SDK? I’m a little afraid of making a contract with a customer for a business app and that Corona SDK ceases to exist. My fear is because I am more graphic artist than programmer and the only language I know is the one used for Corona SDK. I have found in Corona SDK the ability to take my art to apps and to be able to do business. My long-term plan is to have my own business that are profitable and then make games.

Will there be “Corona SDK” for long?

Thanks in advance

#2

They’ve been around for 7 years. No-one can predict the future.

IMHO they’ve gotten pretty savvy at picking investors and the like.

This forum is probably not the place to be asking that question, tbh.

#3

Like any technology, framework, OS, you never know the future. Just look at thing like Flash, Silverlight, etc., those were from big players, and some people invested a lot in them. At the end, they did go away. Its part of evolution! Can look terrifying but long term its working.

If your starting your business, you must always have contingency plan ready and diversify yourself, so you have a few revenue stream that can help you if something unexpected happen.

#4

I’ve built a business on Corona so I sincerely hope so too!

#5

Corona has been around for 7 years or so, but surprisingly there hasn’t been enough buzz around it, not a big enough community or online resources, unlike cocos or unity for example, and has been acquired a couple of times during that period.

I hope the new owners have some sort of a long-term plan that involves better marketing for the product and attracting new users.

#6

We are not going anywhere anytime soon. To have survived in this industry as long as we have should be an attribute to our resilience. 

We have the best, most mature 2D platform on the planet. Sure Love2D might do X better, Defold might do Y better, but none of them as a total package is better than Corona.

We recognize that we need to do a better job at marketing ourselves and to that extent we are making changes to assist with that. We have access to Appodeal’s excellent PR team and they are working closely with us.  

Let me close with our new leadership from Appodeal is taking our success very much to heart. They are actively working to help make Corona great. 

Rob

#7

@all

I actually wish that Corona Labs would continue to grow. I love Corona SDK.

#8

My main concern is Corona’s focus on mobile platforms (iOS, Android) as those haven’t been a viable route for most game developers for quite some time.

Having desktop Windows & Mac OS support is great but I hope to see Corona exporting to consoles (Xbox, Playstation) as well. For example, the Xbox Creators Program looks like a good opportunity even for not-so-experienced devs to reach a wider audience.

#9

@gsimeonov I guess it’s a matter of perspective. Many people see Mobile as the most profitable segment now and in the future.  According to this article from PocketGamer: http://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/66041/newzoo-global-mobile-market-2017/

For the near future our roadmap is about getting HTML5 builds a reality. After that, we will look at other platforms. There are requests for Linux (though primarily as a developer platform), Xbox, Nintendo Switch and others that we need to consider. There are a total of four votes for building for the Playstation at our feature request site: http://feedback.coronalabs.com

Rob

#10

+1 for Nintendo Switch.  As it is a handheld touch device it should work well with the existing Corona event system?

#11

+1’s here don’t count. We need votes cast at http://feedback.coronalabs.com

FWIW:

Nintendo Switch currently has 76 votes

Xbox/UWP builds current has 114 votes.

Neither of those are signifying a strong need for those platforms given the effort involved to create and support new platforms.  I never like to say X number of votes is needed because each task has to be compared to many different factors: How difficult, how much time it will take, cost-benefit analysis, community desires (i.e. votes).

Rob

#12

I agree those numbers are low for such a major change to the SDK.

Still is this one going to happen (barely any code changes required from your side)?

http://feedback.coronalabs.com/forums/188732-corona-feature-requests-feedback/suggestions/18637738-enable-corona-apps-to-run-on-chromebooks

#13

I’ll bring it up with the team. I don’t know what the requirements are. One of my concerns is that the level of hardware in Chromebooks range drastically. I know I’ve see some with sub-standard GPUs. 

Rob

#14

My 3 votes for both Chromebooks and, especially, Nintendo Switch support.

@dodi_games, can’t say for sure but it seems that Appodeal will try to grow the platform especially on the mobile side. If you are after a mobile business yourself, I guess you are good to go. Maybe you should check out the roadmap they shared and decide accordingly.

#15

Also, in the news: https://coronalabs.com/blog/2017/06/21/welcome-to-the-new-corona/

#16

I have been developing cross platform applications (that’s what we called them in the old days) for over 40 years. The key to a successful, small-team development company are its tools. We layered our applications then, which enabled us to have a core set of application code linking to OS specific DLLs giving us essentially a single set of source code. I spent a long time looking for a platform that would give me that capability between iOS, Android,v and at the time I thought, Windows. Believe me when I say that there are ALOT of bad “solutions” out there. I originally took a quick look at Corona and passed on it because it was a game platform and we do Business/Commercial products. I took another look after finding that there really wasn’t a platform that did everything I was looking for, and other than a few things ( read: newTextField) that have gotten better over time, it had the stability that we needed. Most importantly, Corona had @Rob and @Brent who answered every question no matter how ridiculous its seemed at the time. They never sugar coated it when there was something beyond the capabilities of the SDK. As such a major component of a product we are shortly releasing went Native, rather than trying to force through something Corona really couldn’t do. This product processes an enormous amount of data between multiple devices through a back-end server and realtime notifications. Corona handles the throughput efficiently, with no perceptible differences to the native code. And to me, THAT is impressive. If you are still having concerns regarding the platform, feel free to email or message me privately. Dave Anderson Masterbolt Development, Inc

#17

dude… paragraphs are a thing! :wink:

and really 40 years?  a PC wasn’t even a thing then

#18

I’m 61 and remember the first pc, wondering what the hell you could do in 64k. My first commercial mini product was a screen management library and disk manager for a wang 2200. (It did direct sector addressing, then) And yes, before that I kept my beer cold in the CPU cabinet and under the raised floor. Ok, if we are counting, I also was around before IBM put a ink ribbon on the punch cards, and have instructed my kids that when I go, to bury me face down, 9 edge first. (Google it). . Sorry about the paragraph.

#19

I used to program (started with) zx spectrum and only had 48K (less rom used by OS)… I am constantly amazed by the 1k challenges and what can be achieved in assembler!

#20

So true. And you realize that 99% of the folk here have no idea what we are talking about. Does this make us ancients or artifacts?