Ashley's Recent Forum Activity

  • OK, sure, two years of upgrades/publishing sounds better.

    The only possible problem is the perpetual license, in the very long term, could end up being a problem. For example, Microsoft are soon dropping support for XP, so everyone who got an "indefinite" license for Windows XP can't expect Microsoft to then fix problems or provide support or updates. If Microsoft did our "perpetual license forever" type thing, XP users (having paid for XP) have the right to get Windows 7 as an upgrade and all the support and fixes, which costs Microsoft money to provide. In short, that would cost Microsoft more than the customer paid, which is why Windows 7 is a separately purchased product.

    So I'd suggest the "indie perpetual" is actually a 10-year license at �150 (which would be �200 by renewing normally). You save money compared to renewing and get the product for a very long time. When it expires you are not forced to stop using it.

    It's just not long-term sustainable to give away licenses that last absolutely forever. Nobody does that!

    Does that sound like a good compromise?

  • How about lucid's idea then: a third license, 'indie perpetual', which is more (�150 say) but lasts indefinitely? You only save money if you keep using it for 7-8 years, but it never expires. You then can choose between a lower subscription rate or a higher one off cost. I suppose we could also have an option to transfer to perpetual from a subscription, less any subscription already paid.

    Edit: it's also hard to put a price on "major" updates because our development model doesn't have any major updates. It's planned that we have incremental updates (29, 30, 31...) indefinitely.

  • Ashley, there's only one problem I see here, but it seems like a major one.

    Someone using it for free gets unlimited updates, but nag screens

    someone who pays for subscription basically gets a frozen version, so after 2 years, the free one is actually better.

    Oh, you're right... the subscription expiring has to revert back to demo mode, then. Good catch... it means users who have paid end up getting nagged again, but the message can be changed if the license has expired, and made less intrusive.

    Also another question pops up, you say that you and your team did this because you like programming, well why don't you want to keep it free.?

    Because I graduate soon, and I need to get a job, and I can't think of a better job than working on this, but to do that I need a way to pay rent, food, bills etc. I could get a job, and it would be tech related because that's what I'm best at, but there's nothing worse than doing a 9 till 5 on a computer then coming home to carry on working on a computer. There's just no time for anything else. This has in fact been responsible for some lengthy gaps between updates in 0.x. Plus, if we're going full time, we can make a much better, more capable program.

    Mozilla are a large organisation with many employees, several income streams from parent companies and advertising or search engine deals, and I'm a guy in a bedroom who sometimes writes some code. Don't take this the wrong way, but you kind of sound a bit like "hey, this guy loves programming, so why can't he just do it because he loves it then I get to have a free program as well?" It doesn't work quite like that... I suppose you want painters to work a 9-to-5 in a call center so you can have their paintings for free, just because they love painting so much? What if they could make a living from painting instead?

  • I've edited the original outline: I think it's fair that any official exporters developed will not be charged for separately, so your 2 years license will cover, for example, a desktop runtime (if we make one).

    There will not be any splash screens in what you create. There are two reasons for this: firstly, it really annoys a lot of people (it's nice some of you think it's fair, but a lot of people have been vocal about this in the other thread). Secondly, with all the javascript being open, it's probably pretty trivial to remove any splashes we put in, so if you're paying to remove a splash, you may well feel ripped off seeing demo users regularly tweaking the javascript to get rid of it.

    I also think it's fair that once your license expires, you don't get any nag screens, you can continue to use the software in a sort of "frozen" state (no more updates). No point nagging people who have paid.

    Some users get up in arms when asked to pay to upgrade to a next major version, even with discounts - I don't think there's any system we can come up with that isn't going to offend someone or other. I'm happy to stick with subscription, and providing official exporters for free should make that a better deal for you guys.

    That's what I also thought. It just makes it sort of greedy.

    It's like you first make it as a free alternative for MMF2 and after 10'000 People use this, you just turn this into a subscribe program to cash in. This makes me feel really betrayed, even if the reason would be that you make Construct as a full-time job.

    I'm sorry, but this kind of annoys me. Three of us spend over three years developing Construct 0.x in our spare time - it's about a quarter of a million lines of code - and we've not really made any money (donations just about neatly cover hosting cost and that's all). It's been tonnes of work and we did it because we really like programming. I'm sorry that we are disappointing you by moving to paid software. However, we're only asking for approximately one day's wages every two years and also making allowance to use the software entirely for free on the condition you click away a dialog every now and then, and I can't help but feel that deal is perfectly fair for everyone.

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  • For example, why should I pay 40 Pounds every two years if I could just buy MMF2 for 90 Euro and have it forever?

    This way, traditionally you are also charged for every additional exporter, and when new major versions come out, you're charged all over again. So it's not quite one payment and you have it forever. With the subscription, you're guaranteed all these updates (and I think it would be a good idea to include additional exporters) with that. It could even work out cheaper in the long term.

    Also, I'd like to put things forward from our point of view: Construct is and always has been an extraordinary amount of work, and it would be kinda hard for us to slap a "pay-what-you-want" license on only to see it installed on 1000 computers at some corporation who then don't pay anything to save on running costs. Also, I don't think ?40 is a lot of money for an individual, probably a day's work for most people. Is it so much to ask, especially without any DRM?

  • Hi all,

    We recently discussed close-sourcing the HTML5 exporter. We've thought a little bit harder and I think we've got a better idea of a licensing model now.

    In short there will be the following options. It's modelled after the pricing model of Reaper.

    • 30-day demo - free and fully functional - starts 'buy now' nag screens after 30 days. To prevent piracy/cracks and allow legitimate customers to do what they like with the software, there is no copy protection or DRM. You can click away the nag screens and continue using C2 after 30 days (like WinZip, WinRAR, mIRC), you just have to put up with nag screens. The fact is people who don't want to pay will ultimately find a way to use it anyway.
    • Discount license - �40 for 2 years - all updates free as well as any official new exporters released - for indie/personal use (where associated revenue is below �20k/year), or educational or not-for-profit use
    • Commercial license - �150 for 2 years - for commercial use (where revenue is over �20k/year) and businesses.

    Some other points:

    Bulk license provided on demand for licensing entire offices/institutions etc.

    No DRM so you can install C2 to a thumb drive and take it with you and use it however you want, or install it on all the machines in your house (technically the license will specify that it only covers Construct 2 running on a single machine at a time, but this is mainly so it can be licensed per-machine in business) - there will be a way to install a license portably - it won't connect to the internet or anything though.

    HTML5 exporter - this will still be open source BSD and 'free' (as in, not charged for, since you paid for the editor). This allows for other developers to see how an exporter is made, and makes it pointless to try and start a competing exporter.

    The Construct 2 editor will be closed source. It is what you are paying for, and there doesn't appear to be a good way to license the editor when it is open source. It also represents the largest body of work in the project (it is the largest and most complex single component). This way, we can also encourage free open-source exporters, and if it means we sell more editor licenses, we're happy.

    No splash screens on your creations. Your creations are not altered in anyway way.

    Some people have asked what's happening to the code on SourceForge: while we work this out we have stopped committing code for now, because if we go closed source, the sooner the better. I've contacted SourceForge about the changes. I'm not clear on whether or not it'd be legal for someone to fork the existing editor code after going closed source, and obviously we'd prefer it if nobody did. However, we'll be working tonnes on the editor from now on, so the risk is probably reduced, since we should get way ahead of anyone doing it part-time, and the existing GPL licensing on the editor effectively makes it impossible for anyone else to profit from it.

    I know some of you have become accustomed to having the entire product free as a hobby project. However, this is becoming way more than a hobby project, and these changes should make it better for the users too - genuinely - if you think we did a good job with irregular patches, think what we'll do if we can go full time on this. Also, since there's no copy protection, if you really insist on using it for free, you can do so easily.

    Let me know what you think. As before, the poll is to gauge the popularity of the idea, we're not going to make a decision solely based on the poll result, but your feedback will as always be read carefully.

    Edit: specified that all official exporters will be free.

  • Yup, new redesigned ones.

  • Interesting! If you could make this export even a rudimentary C2 project, I think you'd gain a whole lot of fans

  • It looks like behaviors + image editor are the way to go, I'll try get davo kicked off on the image editor and make a start on behaviors. Both are very big chunks of work though, and I'm supposed to be taking a break (:P), so things might be quiet for a bit.

  • Sandy said in the comments:

    [quote:2r7lgxkb]We started work on this less than two weeks ago

    Interesting! That would be approximately one week after the Construct 2 public preview started

  • Hey all,

    All the above features are planned for implementation, so don't worry about us not doing any of them. It's just that there are only so many hours in a day and we want to cover the most important features first. So what feature do you need next most badly in C2? This way we can cover the most important ground earliest of all, so we don't have painful omissions going on for too long.

    If you have any other things you think should be done first, post them in a reply!

  • None, unless we make a WebGL exporter, which depends almost entirely on whether or not Internet Explorer adds support.

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Ashley

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