Over the past 2-3 years they already :
- spent 1+ year working on working on a new seperate product targeting a different audience : Construct Animate (back then Scirra said it would allow to expand their team so it would benefit us, which has yet to be seen...)
- increased the subscription price for gamedev users even if less time was allocated to gamedev features as lot of time was allocated to Construct Animate instead
- spent several months to work on a RTS game instead of improving the engine (EDIT: to answer Dop2000, you're right it was a personal project but it wasn't presented that way and it was Scirra allocating their "limited resources" on this instead of other stuff)
- Then spent many months developing a opinionated Flowchart feature
Sure those projects maybe allowed to add a few handy features useful for specific gamedev needs but who asked for it ? i'm pretty sure it would have been 100x better for anyone if they focused on community requests, you know the actual subscribers needs.
Now we're here funding a massive regression in the expandability of the engine and the destruction of 6 years of collective work (actually 13+ years as there is also a bunch of working addons that were ported from C2 and that will also be impossible to port in SDK2). We know we'll have to stick to a frozen version forever to expand the engine meaningfully and still need to pay a yearly subscription just to open old projects on obsolete versions until they no longer work at all in a few years. Feels great paying a subscription. 👌
I mean if you don't have time or don't care about community requests and feedbacks, then at least just let 3rd party devs do their stuff 🤷♀️
official UI plugins
This is a perfect example of the whole issue with Construct and community feedback. Everybody has been asking for in-editor UI features (like Unity or Godot) for years, and instead, they chose to spend about a year implementing a solution that requires CSS/HTML. This solution involves tedious workarounds and shenanigans, doesn’t allow any preview of what it would look like at edit-time, and has very limited synergies with other C3 features. HTML/CSS support is a cool feature, but who asked for it? Is C3 really a beginner-friendly engine if it requires using Eventsheets, JS, HTML, and CSS with an unintuitive workflow to make a simple game?
Addon devs have been asking for years to expose existing hidden methods, that would allow to easily create 3rd party UI Solutions, in the Editor SDK (which is fully locked/obfuscated, making it totally impossible to create relevant stuff with it : exactly as the Runtime SDK is about to become with SDK2), and the answer is just "we prefer users to use HTML/CSS to create UI". So not only they don't want to create UI system themself, which could be understandable, but they also don't want to spend a few days providing the capabilities for anyone to do it themselves and share it with the community. Great example of collaborative effort with Addon devs !