@info6357, that’s a bug as Rob mentioned before. You should take a look at this: https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/65637-corona-enterprise-20162949-android-splash-screen-bug/
Ok thanks! That just saved my whole day.
I had a minor freak out this morning with this. Too much coffee and not enough patience to sort through 6 pages of this thread.
I think communication should of been better.
@wilsonwansun, we have seen reports of this. However to keep this thread focused, please open a new topic to discuss it.
@apps30, Thanks for that bug report. I’ll bring it up with the engineers and see if we’ve seen this in our testing. This is also a discussion that probably should be it’s own thread.
@mynet, @info6357: there were some bugs regarding Enterprise that were fixed yesterday. If you are doing Enterprise iOS builds, you should have not experienced an issue with the splash screen. If you’re doing Enterprise Android builds, there was a bug that’s fixed in today’s daily build. There is a work around to removing it. See: https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/65637-corona-enterprise-20162949-android-splash-screen-bug/ for details on the work around, though getting daily build 2953 or later will address it. If you’re an Enterprise customer doing Simulator builds, you should be fine now. We made some changes on the server to make sure Enterprise subscriptions are recognized correctly. As for the “App thinning” message, you should also be using build 2949 or later.
@Hey Topher: Regarding feature requests: We most certainly look at them and we complete a lot of them. Somethings are easy, others hard and some just not practical. Somethings benefit the whole community, some only benefit a few. A lot goes into deciding which features we can and can’t work on. I don’t want to derail this discussion further. You can always open a new thread (or bump an older thread) and query for the status of a feature request and I’ll do my best to answer you.
@everyone, Corona is an incredible tool. We work hard to make it a great product for you to build amazing things. We have some great things coming too. We think Corona rocks! And we hope you think it’s awesome too. Supporting our product so that it we can keep rocking new features and build the best tool for you should be important to you as well.
Rob
@Rob I understand not derailing the conversation but I disagree with your advice (it’s mostly just ignored in lieu of new ‘plugins’ for monetisation, zero transparency and communication). Regarding this splash screen ‘feature’ - I do hope it works out for Corona Labs but experience tells me otherwise. ‘Made with Corona’ is gonna have the same image problem as Unity (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/06/unity-indie-gamings-biggest-engine-john-riccitiello)
+1
This may not be the place to ask – feel free to move it elsewhere if needed. I was hoping that by now we’d already have seen a more formal announcement on why the new business deal was done, but this makes 3 sales/buyouts of the company in the last 3 years:
Sep 2016 - Corona goes private
Nov 2015 - Perk buys Corona from Fuse
Nov 2014 - Fuse buys Corona
add in that a group of staffers spun off a new (and competing) game engine, the HTML5/Corona Cloud/Chromium startups and shutdowns, and that’s a lot of corporate churn in not-so-many years. Obviously, we all got involved while Corona knowing it wasn’t a giant corporation and (we should have known) that this kind of stuff is bound to happen.
But for those who might now be feeling skittish, or at least not getting the warm-fuzzies that we used to get … can someone give us some insights: how does the new business model make things better for me? how is Corona Labs more stable now compared to 6 months or a year ago?
Another (more honest sounding) option:
Just charge $99 / yr for Corona and dump the splash screen “feature”.
@jbp1, this really isn’t the best thread to discuss this. But I’d like to assure you it’s business as usual here. When we were sold to Fuse, you could still get Corona, build great apps and submit them just like before. When Perk bought Corona, you could build and submit your apps with a great framework. Today and tomorrow and for the foreseeable future you will be able to build and submit your apps and continue to get an every-improving product. Our engineers are coding. Our QA team is testing. We are rolling out new features. We are providing more customer support than ever. The sign that we have a solid platform is that these purchases always end up being non-events for you, the customer. We dream. We build. We ship. Corona has gotten stronger with each time. This will be no different.
Rob
That seems like an entirely rational pricing plan to me. Free to tinker, $149 for desktop deploy, $448 for single mobile deploy, else might as well get master for $799 if need multiple export modules. Very straightfoward, and not exhorbitant, and perpetual, so you can plan a business without it changing every 12 months.
(i am NOT suggesting anyone should switch, and i’m on record that the $99 splash remove isn’t an issue for me – just that I don’t see anything wrong with their pricing, especially when compared to the “old” pre-fuse pro pricing that I paid for several years)
I would have added “We regularly change our pricing model.” (btw, i’m already on record that the $99 splash remove plugin isn’t an issue for me - just so you know where my poor attempt at humor is coming from)
Is it still true that the bulk of Corona’s nearly-invisible stream of “real” revenue beyond subscriptions (ie, the stuff that actually keeps you solvent day-to-day, not the nickle-and-dime splash screen -type stuff) is from ad network rev-share? That is, deals along the lines of: “Hey Vungle (et al), if we drive you more traffic with a plugin, will you cut us a share of your gross?”
And, assuming that still is a significant portion of your operating revenue, to what extent are the newer ad network plugins (fe CA, FBN - that take their cut from the developer’s net, rather than the ad network’s gross) contributing to that? Are you headed more in one direction than the other now that the perk/fuse experiments have failed?
For example, and now with a paid plugin market, are you perhaps moving towards a choice between paid ad network plugins with back-end cuts, or free ad network plugins with front-end cuts?
Your user-base seems widely divergent, from entry/newbie/hobby/indie/poor to very lucrative professionals. (and, of course, all of the vast middle ground, myself included) Flat fees versus percentages have an entirely different business impact on those two opposite ends of the spectrum. The pros drive all your ad traffic income, but they’d likely pay the $99 without hesitation to eliminate any possible ‘nuisance factor’ that has even the slightest possibility of affecting their retention. So no splash presence there. On the other hand, it’s brutal out there, and many of the entry-levels (short of the 1-in-a-million next flappy fad) will be lucky to find 100 total lifetime installs, so I doubt they’ll be effective promoters of your splash OR generate much ad traffic.
Just trying to puzzle together how all this fits together into some kind of cogent business plan, that gives us some sense of what your NEXT pricing policy will be twelve months from now. I know you’ll say you have no plans for such at present, but history strongly STRONGLY suggests that it’ll happen anyway, planned or not – and not just an increase/decrease in response to changes in the economy, but likely a whole new model, with little advance warning – because that’s what you’ve been putting us through to date.
I’d prefer if you guys stayed solvent, so I don’t mind contributing towards that. (but not beyond levels that would negatively affect my own self-interest/self-presentation/self-solvency)
[edited to restore Rob’s original quote]
I’ll be honest, I’ve paid 2 times the Pro edition but I don’t have the resources anymore to start paying again per year, I kept using Corona just because it was free but I’ve started working with Android Studio some weeks ago, it’s not the same but the control you have over your application is awsome. Corona gives you a lot of easy tools to use, but from my experience using it, the changes the company keeps making are not good at all.
So, with that being said, I’ll keep looking for alternatives.
Hi Dave. First, I would respectfully ask that you update your post and not attribute that quote to me. Feel free to make it your own as part of your text, but editing a quote isn’t helpful to the discussion. I know you meant it in jest, but others may think it’s something I actually said.
I also am not in a position to go into any details about the rest of your questions, but I will say that as a business, its a best practice to have multiple streams of revenue to be successful. This is a competitive market and it takes resources to maintain a competitive edge. We now have experienced business leadership in place that has a history of creating successful products. We are going to steer the ship in the right direction. You want us continue to build a great platform. It’s only logical that you should want us to optimize our revenue streams.
Rob
Thank you for continuing to make Corona SDK available for free to me and to new users. This is an awesome opportunity to give back to a great organization and stay in a mature community of very helpful developers. I volunteer with several non-profit and I teach Corona to kids and handicap adults. I appreciate your need to market while keeping your product accessible. You do a great job.
My bad, fixed. :)
The biggest problem is that the Free version gave away too much… A “Powered by Corona” splash screen should have been implemented then for the Free version, with a Pro option for $99/year, and no one would have complained because at that time we were at $500-$600/year.
That said, the sudden purchase-a-plugin-to-remove-the-annoyance approach just doesn’t feel right. For one thing, it was done with no notice whatsoever. Some people may have chosen a different technology if they’d known about this a few months ago. I would still choose Corona, but I’m just saying that it feels a bit like you have the developers over a barrel. My client definitely will not want a “Powered by Corona” splash screen on their app.
It seems like an awkward way of implementing a “Pro” version and raises questions about what else might get moved to that model in the future. For example, what if suddenly accessing the Camera or Photo Library is moved to a $99/year plugin, then other features follow. It could be good that way, or it could be bad, depending on what kind of app you’re building. I mean, none of them are as good as “free” but I understand the need to support Corona and help it grow.
One more suggestion for Corona to ease this transition. I would do the following, just to avoid all this backlash:
-
Undo this pay-to-remove-the-splash-screen and push it off a few months to give folks who truly don’t want it and can’t afford the $99 at least a chance to change technologies if they choose. I think most serious developers will grumble and pay the $99 anyway, but at least they feel like they have a choice.
-
Make the Splash Screen prettier; it’s way too in-your-face currently. It would be good if you could *always* use your own image as the splash screen, but maybe it would just put a subtle “powered by corona” in the bottom corner if you haven’t paid. That would at least be better.
Dave
Hi @all,
This was reported earlier in this thread (somewhat unrelated but I wanted to address it):
We tested and confirmed this, and we’ve issued a fix for an upcoming daily build to address it. I don’t have a specific build number yet, but it should be 2016.2953 and later.
In any case, in that fix, the API will return “iPhone OS” as before, so you won’t need to adjust your existing code base.
Brent
this + what @Hey Topher is talking about. Couldn’t agree more.
I don’t mind paying 99%, I was paying more then that a couple of years ago. But a few months ago story was ‘unity uses splash screen, we don’t force our users to that’. Now of course it’s another story. And frankly, I simply can’t justify my faith in corona anymore.
But I do wish you all the luck, and I hope you make it as a company.
Strongly disagree with $448 for single mobile deploy. Strongly.
The current structure of FREE for all platforms or $99 for no Corona logo at start is great. And makes Corona just as accessible as it was before - with the addition of advertising for the platform.
The next tier should be Enterprise, and that is the tier that turns off the monetization drain…
The only other things would be for (a) Corona to more closely integrate Level Director X into the platform and work with the developer to create more exhaustive documentation and examples. And (b) start writing Corona articles and postmortems on other game dev websites (gamasutra, gamesindustry.biz, develop, etc).
How can I make use of all the different splash screen dimensions using the CoronaSplashControl?
If I understand correctly… before this update, I would just include the splash images with different naming conventions and I believe Corona would choose the correct one based on the name. (Default v. Default-568h@2x v. Default-667h v. Default-Landscape-736h v. Default-Landscape)
Assuming I’m still providing all these images, will CoronaSplashControl choose the proper image if I just include the following?
splashScreen = { enable = true, image = "Default.png" },
In my test, it appears as though I’m getting my old splash screen. But I can’t tell if it’s the proper image or not. Also, now when I rotate my phone in portrait mode (the app is normally in landscape), the image rotates upside-down.
Some advice would be greatly appreciated as I’d like to get this release out as soon as possible. Thank you
This does not replace iOS Launch images. Your image defined in the splashScreen table would show after whatever launcher image is defined on iOS. If you want your splash screen image to be first, having an all black Default.png (and family) would provide a nice transition to the splash screen.
Rob