Constrcut: Still great, but reconsider your free license

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From the Asset Store
Adventurers of Renown: The Rogue Prince™ (Licensed Website Source Code version)
$12.99 USD
This is a single chapter about "Decision Science" strategy games from the "Construct Starter Kit Collection" workshop.
PBMCube's avatar
PBMCube

  • You just said you can do a lot in the free version, so what limits would you expect to allow for comfortable teaching? If I was doing a game design workshop in Construct I wouldn't allow them to start using a free 3D engine, that sounds like they're not following my course.

  • 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.>

    Yes that's true, but you don't buy a subscription for 100 or 200 pupils every year and/or swithing seats (licences) all two month.

    The educational license doesn't seem expensive to me.

    It gets expensive very quickly if you need licenses for multiple classes. Example: 4 classes a 30 students over one year with 29,99 per license makes 3.598,80€ per year!

    That's not the world, but not exactly little either!

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

    Well talking about Adobe is a good point.

    Not long ago, all Adobe products were free for teaching. This has only changed with Creative Cloud. However, Substance Painter and XD, for example, are still free for education. Even the very expensive licenses from Autodesk (Inventor, Fusion 360, Maya etc. are free for education.

    All have something in common: they are largely market leaders (some were before, some are now).

    The same is true about many other UX and design tools like AXURE or Figma. The list is very long indeed. And I think that's a good decision, because students grow up with these products and buy them later or expect them from their company.

    By the way, Media University Stuttgart, for example, now uses Affinity Designer and Photo in all subjects where Photoshop and co are not mandatory, because otherwise they would have had to buy several hundred licenses. That's just the consequence.

    Photoshop is still the better product. But we (usually) don't teach it anymore.

  • You just said you can do a lot in the free version, so what limits would you expect to allow for comfortable teaching? If I was doing a game design workshop in Construct I wouldn't allow them to start using a free 3D engine, that sounds like they're not following my course.

    More than 50 events, more than 2 layers, no JavaScript limitations. This tree things are the most painful things.

    We do not allow them to use another engine. The course is designed for Construct only. So, at least for the younger ones it doesn't make sense to use a different engine in the process.

    But many are not happy with Construct and the reason is not the engine itself, but that after the course they no longer have a license to continue to build in the same form.

    The same goes for teachers, which is why I'm asked if I can't do it in another engine. But I like Construct 🙄

  • If ordering more than 30 seats do use the quote tool on the pricing page as we offer reduced pricing.

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  • > 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.>

    Thanks for the official answer.

    I am well aware of the post on how much you can do with just 50 events. But it's not just about the events. Also the limitation of the layers and scripts bring the game design quickly to the limits or make sure that I have to think of complicated workarounds.

    To bring it to the point, the most disturbing things for me are:

    - Limitation to 50 events

    - Limitation to 2 layers

    - Limitation to two JavaScript files with 50 lines each

    However, I would put it this way. You can do quite a bit with it, I just would never do it that way if all the features were available to me. So I bend structures to meet the limitations and I don't know if I want to teach that.

    In this respect, I consider the current limitations to be very incisive for the learning process.

    We don't have to discuss that Construct is a paid software and I don't want to point out or suggest to make the full functionality available for free.

    But wouldn't there have been less drastic options for non-commercial use?

    Just thoughts from me:

    - Watermark in Build

    - Limitation of screen resolution (game resolution)

    - Limit storage space size for assets

    I'm not talking about professional use either, I'm just talking about teaching. And there Construct makes itself useless for most teachers with the restrictions. At this point, the objection comes: "Yes, we want to sell our education license. "

    I can only say that in several years I have not had one school that has purchased several licenses for teaching.

    The result is always that despite the higher entry hurdle switched to another engine. And apart from the fact that it is bad for me 😉 I just ask the question whether this is beneficial for Construct. Of course, I can only speak for myself in my small environment in Germany and do not know how others are doing.

    Watermark does sound like a good idea if they would upgrade the free version.

  • since the output is just html pages a watermark would be very easy to get rid of..

  • - Watermark in Build

    - Limitation of screen resolution (game resolution)

    In an education setting I doubt either of these would provide any incentive at all to purchase the software, so we'd lose loads of sales, and possibly go out of business.

    - Limit storage space size for assets

    You could probably make the same arguments about why limiting the size of assets restricts teaching uses.

    The whole point of the free edition limits is they are meant to be slightly painful so that the incentive is there to purchase a plan, as we need sales to stay in business.

  • I just want to add a few points to the discussion and keeping myself in a neutral position because I understand both side as both business owner and occasional Construct teacher.

    As stated in the past, I don't love at all the subscription model I prefer to pay more but once. Ashley and Tom already went many times on this so I understand their reasons and I am not going to argue with that. I consider therefore the current model a "Constant".

    Now, let's check the "Variables".

    I haven't read the tread about what's possible to do with 50 lines, I am well aware of the potential of Construct on expert hands after using for over 8 years. However a student that is not only learning a new software, but that is learning about programming, game design and maybe even art and music, will create a lot of not optimised code. That's understandable. It's impossible that even with a good teacher they can optimise the code by themselves without being carried on hand by hand.

    So we have 50 events, the layer and other limitations aren't really limitations for beginners, what can we do to improve it? My usual solution is to offer to my students that can't afford a C3 license (or that wants to play around with it before buying), to use C2.

    C2 is still available in its trial version, it has 100 events and 4 layers and can export in HTML5. The game can be loaded on a school website, itch.io, GameJolt and so on. There is a lot of potential to showcase the game and there is still a lot of space to experiment.

    Yes, it doesn't have the latest feature of C3 and neither its performance, plus it runs only on Windows. But, hey you get an amazing product that you can use for free without time limit and that you can get a good idea about how Construct works. Students can spend even 6 months straight on it or work on it occasionally without penalty.

    I had some student that started with C2 free edition and then after a couple of weeks they were already convinced about its potential and bought the C3 license for one year.

    I think this is the best card that give a good balance and lets everyone win. Teacher can do it without costs, students can have an unlimited time to play with the software and Scirra can get their good share of money when the student decide to become a real developer.

    The ones that will not like the tool will just move on without giving bad advertising to Construct because they paid for something that they don't like and the satisfied ones will be happy to have access to all the other extra features that makes development easier, like families for example.

  • You can't really compare Unity with Construct3 because it is used for completly different stuff! We work with both, Unity and Construct. When it comes to 3D projects we currently use Unity because it has way more options. BUT if we do any 2D projects, especially for mobile, we always used Construct3 because it saves months of work! It is way easier and faster to do 2D in Construct3 than in Unity and everyone who has ever worked with Unity knows that!

    To the pricing / free thing:

    Unity only wants money if you want to remove the "Unity-Logo" on start-screen of your project or if you earn more than 100k / year with your project as I remember and it's not revenue based, it's just 1k / year or something like that if you do more than 100k / year.

    I guess Unity is making their money with the big asset-store and also with their ads-network (Unity Ads) and not with their game engine.

    And yes, you can use Unity for free, but if you compare the work for a specific 2D project (like 2 months with C3 and 4 months with Unity), the time you save is worth way more than the fee for the C3 paid plan.

  • I think my point about large AAA companies paying the majority of Unitys devolopment cost still stands.

    Edit: after some research it seems that Unity makes more money from ads and IAP then from lincensing. so I was wrong!

    It's still revenue based just with thresholds. Assuming you are a 100 people team buying the enterprise license, it would cost 240,000 $ per year in licensing fees.

    For example Mihoyo (Genshin Impact) is using Unity, having 2.400 team members, Idk how many actually need a Unity seat... but I think it get's clear what I mean.

  • my answer was directed at this:

    it's not revenue based, it's just 1k / year or something like that if you do more than 100k / year. I guess Unity is making their money with the big asset-store and also with their ads-network (Unity Ads) and not with their game engine.

  • Also I think you must be mixing up Genshin Imapct with another/other games.

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