Constrcut: Still great, but reconsider your free license

Since 2015, I have now been using Construct (Construct 2 and Construct 3) professionally for game development and in education.

I am a lecturer at a university and give game design workshops for children from about 14 years. I use Construct especially because of the low entry barrier. And it works great!

There's just one thing:

Actually, at the latest after it is clear that it is a paid engine, nobody wants to work with it anymore.

That means the students do a project under my guidance and within the course with Construct and then switch directly to another engine like Unity, Unreal, Godot, Phaser or PlayCanvas. Unity and Unreal are of course the top dogs and who wouldn't want to make fantastic looking AAA games with one of the most powerful engines, which favors the popularity of these engines. But all these engines have something in common. They are largely free for non-commercial (non-professional use).

And there is the problem with Construct. It's not free, not really.

The restrictions of the free version are so limiting that even for beginner courses I reach the limits.

That's why no teacher I've taken a course with was willing to make Construct a permanent course at the school. The effort to buy education accounts for 2 months and to cancel them afterwards (and maybe to buy them again for a project in between) is too big and to buy them for the whole year for several classes is far too expensive.

I use my licenses for different students, so I have a good utilization of my licenses. That's why I'm in a much better position and don't have to worry much about it.

Nevertheless, I think that the current price model of Construct is not conducive to the distribution and use especially in teaching. Although Construct has strengths right there that other engines don't have (#Bahaviors).

I realize that you need to make money with your engine. But even if Construct is technically great, in my experience, hardly anyone wants to continue working or experimenting with it later. The limitations of the free license are too great and everyone inevitably asks themselves why they should pay for Construct when there are such great free engines. You have to measure yourself against them and compete with them.

The real clincher for me would be the aforementioned low barrier to entry. But this hardly plays a role in an advanced project. So why Construct and no other engine.

This is not only a question I have to put up with, but also a question I have to ask myself. Maybe it would be more interesting for me to use another engine in my courses.

I would like to share this experience report here publicly as food for thought for discussion with you.

As with all businesses its a numbers game. We can consider what makes the "free for non-commercial" engines work. It can be boiled down in to two things IMO.

A: The target market is triple A games with an expectation of high profits from high distribution.

B: The usual type of game is 3d.

Just wanted to point out that the algorithmic and logical lessons learned from working with Construct, as well as basic computer science principles such as variables, expressions, functions, and mathematics concepts, will carry over to any programming language regardless of engine.

So if I were an educator, I would consider that the value proposition here has nothing to do with if my students continue using construct or not in the future (I wouldn't really care), but rather how easy it is for me to teach in Construct versus another engine?

Personally I would hate to waste time in a programming class worrying about syntax and compiling issues ect if I could be focusing on building a strong foundation for algorithmic logic instead. But of course that depends on what the goal of your class is...

Just wanted to point out that the algorithmic and logical lessons learned from working with Construct, as well as basic computer science principles such as variables, expressions, functions, and mathematics concepts, will carry over to any programming language regardless of engine.

So if I were an educator, I would consider that the value proposition here has nothing to do with if my students continue using construct or not in the future (I wouldn't really care), but rather how easy it is for me to teach in Construct versus another engine?

Personally I would hate to waste time in a programming class worrying about syntax and compiling issues ect if I could be focusing on building a strong foundation for algorithmic logic instead. But of course that depends on what the goal of your class is...

Heart winning comment

Just wanted to point out that the algorithmic and logical lessons learned from working with Construct, as well as basic computer science principles such as variables, expressions, functions, and mathematics concepts, will carry over to any programming language regardless of engine.

So if I were an educator, I would consider that the value proposition here has nothing to do with if my students continue using construct or not in the future (I wouldn't really care), but rather how easy it is for me to teach in Construct versus another engine?

Personally I would hate to waste time in a programming class worrying about syntax and compiling issues ect if I could be focusing on building a strong foundation for algorithmic logic instead. But of course that depends on what the goal of your class is...

That's a very good point and I totally agree. But as you said it depends on what the goal of the class is. In my case it's game design and art, not development. And especially in school, and younger classes, the entry into other engines is much more difficult, because programming knowledge and the understanding of the Logic are required. In my opinion, Construct thus plays to one of its strengths with a target group that will very rarely pay anything for it.

Funnily enough, I recently have been considering the idea of doing some game design courses to raise money for a local charity, but I wonder if it would common for people to not be able to afford a subscription once they go home and want to continue playing around with C3.

I've not looked at the limitations of the free c3 yet, but I do remember some stuff is totally locked away. This is fine, like the "find" tool doesn't matter for a beginner with like 30 events.

But, as long as a beginner can add a few behaviours on different objects, use effects and layers, have enough events, and can preview on their phone (I recall "preview over WiFi" is a paid thing?) then it should be enough to convince people to set aside some money for a subscription (unless it's completely unaffordable to them, which is a shame, because the solution for these people would be to use gdevelop, or unity, as these are free, but I can't teach these as I don't know them!)

I'm still working with C2 and AOZ Studio from recently.

Funnily enough, I recently have been considering the idea of doing some game design courses to raise money for a local charity, but I wonder if it would common for people to not be able to afford a subscription once they go home and want to continue playing around with C3.

In fact, this works quite well with the courses at schools, in my case, I offer the students the licenses for the duration of the course. However, Construct's business model interferes with my concept, as students and teachers are not willing to pay for the sporadic use of Construct. Thus it is clear for the students from the beginning that they cannot/will not deepen the knowledge they have learned.

In this respect, I am currently questioning my concept and thinking about using a different engine.Unfortunately Contruct is pretty cool for beginners.

Someone else just posted about how much you can do with just 50 events. I think there is indeed quite a lot of scope to do things within that limit. You can certainly make interesting mini-games and such.

Something I've noticed from around a decade working in commercial software is no matter what the free limits are, someone will come along and argue there should be more available for free. We have to run as a business though. If we give too much away free and nobody buys the software, we'd go out of business, and then the software wouldn't exist at all. You can throw around some big changes to the whole business plan, but I can assure you many of them would also totally ruin us. We have our own unique market and niche and we've put a great deal of thought in to it already, and I'm pretty happy with where we've ended up.

I pay like 15USD monthly, and the games i do in Construct 3, are the same as the games i do in Unity, sometimes even better and it saves me MONTHS of work using construct 3. Even when i do apps.

P.S: I know unity really good, right now doing a survival game in 3D. But when it comes to mobile games, i use construct.

Someone else just posted about how much you can do with just 50 events. I think there is indeed quite a lot of scope to do things within that limit. You can certainly make interesting mini-games and such.

Something I've noticed from around a decade working in commercial software is no matter what the free limits are, someone will come along and argue there should be more available for free. We have to run as a business though. If we give too much away free and nobody buys the software, we'd go out of business, and then the software wouldn't exist at all. You can throw around some big changes to the whole business plan, but I can assure you many of them would also totally ruin us. We have our own unique market and niche and we've put a great deal of thought in to it already, and I'm pretty happy with where we've ended up.

With 50 events, using plugins, one can make a full game with right strategy.

In other classes..

Like math, english, geography, history or whatever there is, do you get the educational resources you need for free in those areas?

I'm not sure how schools work, maybe different in different countries, but to get or use the material needed for free is nothing I've heard of.

The educational license doesn't seem expensive to me.

What would happen if your school would teach Photoshop or Premiere classes?