future of Construct

A company approaches you -the developers- to buy and use (with or without you in the development team) Construct, resulting in a non-free Construct.

Is this situation realistic/what the developers would choose for?

I think Lucid mentioned creating Katamari 2D would be nice to show a(nother) finished Construct product. This is Construct promotion, and I think other forum users also may have been promoting Construct once or more.

As a reward they may become paying consumers, if they want to keep using future products of Construct.

(note: another "reward" for promoting Construct is: more users, resulting in hopefully more documentation and more tutorials/examples on the forum.)

I can't uphold an argument why I shouldn't pay for a product I use a lot. So perhaps my question is not about: to pay or not to pay, but about what the developers might want with Construct in the future.

If this is mentioned somewhere already, then pardon me.

(in case my English is bothering you: English is not my native language)

Currently, their whole business model is based on donations I guess, so you're free to donate.

But I'm concerned about this as well. Construct is becoming more and more powerful and we all want to set up a working pipeline and then just stick with the tools, be creative, get the most out of them. If the tool isn't being supported in the future because the devs have other gigs that keep em busy, we're all in deep shit. If Adobe would decide that they'd cancel Photoshop, I'd head over there to nutkick their management as well.

Just because an app is free doesn't mean that you haven't commited yourself to it. Just because you don't charge money as a developer doesn't mean that you're free of responsibility.

So, personally, I wouldn't have any problem paying for Construct. It's a quality product already and I'll use it to create a commercial product, so it'd only be fair if the developers would get their share.

Since Construct started as a free project though, a lot of the users here would not have the money to pay for it. So, you'd have to be clever about setting up a business model.

A viable option could be something like:

Construct stays free and you can still simply download a full-featured version, but you can't compile to any platform with the free version. You could test the runtime just fine, but you can't compile it. If you buy a license, you'd get a couple of new buttons that'd allow you to compile for the PC, Mac, X360, etc. Heck, I'd drop a couple hundred bucks on it if I could deploy to more platforms. It'd be a win/win.

I guess a business model like that could be attractive for most users. You could still learn the app and only if you're going to deploy your game, you'll have to pay for it - it's a fair deal.

[quote:1xmtat65]Since Construct started as a free project though, a lot of the users here would not have the money to pay for it.

Construct wasn't started as a free project.

And regarding topic I have nothing to say ^^.

Construct stays free and you can still simply download a full-featured version, but you can't compile to any platform with the free version. You could test the runtime just fine, but you can't compile it. If you buy a license, you'd get a couple of new buttons that'd allow you to compile for the PC, Mac, X360, etc. Heck, I'd drop a couple hundred bucks on it if I could deploy to more platforms. It'd be a win/win.

I guess a business model like that could be attractive for most users. You could still learn the app and only if you're going to deploy your game, you'll have to pay for it - it's a fair deal.

Personally thats what I'd like to see.

Although, I doubt that it will happen.

I think that business model could work, really. Because it'd only force you to buy a license when you actually have a finished product, you could charge a higher amount of money - because you're going to make money with the game anyway. So it's a win/win again.

So if the full version of Construct would cost like 800 USD, it'd still be fair, since you're probably going to make quite a bit of cash with your game too. Unity Pro is at 1499 USD - So Construct would still be at half of that amount.

And if you calculate it up, if the full version sells 500 times, that'd be 800*500 = 400.000 USD. How large is the team? 4 heads? It'd still not be enough to make a lot of dough, but it'd be enough to live well enough while being able to work full-time on Construct. And then updates could keep the cashflow alive.

I'm sure reading numbers like that might be scary for a lot of the users that are mainly using free tools, but in order to keep the project alive and kicking, it'll sooner or later have to bring in some dough.

And if you calculate it up, if the full version sells 500 times, that'd be 800*500 = 400.000 USD. How large is the team? 4 heads? It'd still not be enough to make a lot of dough, but it'd be enough to live well enough while being able to work full-time on Construct. And then updates could keep the cashflow alive.

I'm sure reading numbers like that might be scary for a lot of the users that are mainly using free tools, but in order to keep the project alive and kicking, it'll sooner or later have to bring in some dough.

Thanks for your replies.

This topic is not primarily about free or not free, but what the developers are planning with Construct.

(I don't mind going off-topic, but I would like to see a reply from the developers)

To reply on Thomasmahler, your business model-idea is interesting, but the restrictions for the recreative builders are too high and the price is too. (I can't afford the suggestion or indication you gave)

(this article says something about lower prices generate more income http://www.edge-online.com/features/val ... -expensive)

And: Audacity, some Linux distributions and Gimp are alive and kicking. And free.

First off, before you start assigning arbitrary values to the software, you should compare Construct to the other engines out there. Based on development, usability, functionality, and everything else that matters, you will find a big difference, especially compared to those that you have to pay for.

You might ask yourself why is it that this free software has developed so quickly in such a short time, and the answer is, it's not free.

Yes my friends, the truth of the matter is nothing of any value is free. In order to get what you want out of it, you must contribute time, and effort, and if you feel that you cant, or don't want to contribute back to the community, then by all means feel free to download the software, and figure it out yourself.

Different kind of free guys, free as in freedom.

A company approaches you -the developers- to buy and use (with or without you in the development team) Construct, resulting in a non-free Construct.

Is this situation realistic/what the developers would choose for?

I don't think this is actually a realistic situation. For a commercial company to buy out a GPL program like Construct is pretty tricky: the source code and binaries are currently freely available on the internet, so if a company commercially adopted Construct, there's no immediate incentive for any users to pay until enough work has been done to improve it to make purchase worthwhile. This is probably too big a barrier for any companies to overcome (except the really big guys, who wouldn't bat an eyelid at a project this size).

Still, if it did happen, personally I would insist us developers are still on the team. Things like the object picking algorithms that power the event engine are so complex I doubt any other developers would be able to sensibly expand on it without our help.

Currently, their whole business model is based on donations I guess

We're not a business, hence we don't have a business model! Donations are there simply to support the project/developers, it's not part of our "business". We haven't got any plans right now to become a business either. While in theory we could go commercial, we face the same problems as above (overcoming the freely available branch) as well as being obliged to provide customer support, regular updates, put up with pissed off users who want their particular bug fixed, etc etc etc. So right now we haven't got any plans to go commercial ever. Free for now!

Thanks for the reply.

as long as it doesnt cost more than 150 bucks id be ok with it, but i rather have it free.

here's something for comparison. The closest piece of commercial software to Construct is Enterbrain's new Action Game Maker. These are the same guys who made RPG Maker XP, etc.

http://www.actiongamemaker.com/

It costs 9800 yen, which is about $99 US, right now.

A few thoughts:

-I discovered Construct and AGM at the same time while looking for shmup middleware. I use Construct.

-Realm Crafter, AGM, and many other indie 'makers' that feature full 3D are topping off at $100 right now. I believe a finished 1.0 version of Construct should compete at $49 US. In fact, the devs could sell Construct through Steamworks if they want a secure way of selling, maintaining, and updating it.

As I said before, we have no plans to sell any version of Construct, and intend to continue giving it away for free.

As I said before, we have no plans to sell any version of Construct, and intend to continue giving it away for free.

Hooray! especially for cheap pockets like me..

For those who have the doughs, donate to the project

Haha yep hooray! ^^

The current aim of Construct is to establish it as a serious game creation tool used by as many professionals as possible. The best way to get it used is for it to be free .