I love Construct and sometimes i agree to some criticism but i mean we all know by now where some of the shortcomings of the engine MIGHT lie and, look, it's the same with every engine. I mean i talked to a developer recently who said he only just started finally using Unity, because mobile performance used to be a headache there... familiar? Now imagine trying to optimize a Unity project vs a Construct one.
I kinda feel bad sometimes about the tone with which the developers are being talked to. Sure, it's everyones right to voice their concerns or critique but the argument of being passionate or emotional about something doesn't justify being a **** to people. I'm passionate about a lot of things in life but never feel the urge put anyone down or being sarcastic about it. I think some users sometimes forget that there are still human beings behind this product and it's not a huge corporation where an army of social media managers are replying typing stock answers and then forget about it.
Problem i see is that the great, very personal relationship we have as a community with Ashley and the other people at Scirra might sooner or later really be damaged by this. I mean if all they ever get is dissing about the same three things each and every day i, as a dev, would feel less and less inclined to engage with my customers and leave that to other people.
I also don't understand how many "C3 subscription suckz" threads you really need. I mean the concerns were voiced and heard and in this case, Scirra made their position clear and i can absolutely understand it and feel the same as the original poster: having a subscription model of $99 (which really isn't that much) ensures sustainability and if Scirra has proven one thing it is that they have a really high turnaround rate with updates etc. especially if you consider that there are basically three programmers working on the software.
I also understand the value of a browser based product. Again, it ensures more frequent updates and faster development cycles. Being a small company, Scirra has to be smart about how they ensure to keep up with development and going with one code base that runs on every system via the web is a very good strategy.
I, for one, have a very good relationship with the devs, they've always been very friendly and helpful whenever i had problems. After using C2 for two years i was one of the early adopters of C3 and reported a lot of bugs in the early days. Most of them were fixed in less than a week. Ashley even took the time to look at a .c3p file of mine... Try that with any other engine developer and you'll probably land in the spam folder.
Sure, HTML5 sometimes has its quirks. But really, by now we all know what we're getting into. And i really must say, if Scirra sais they are working on something, i'm always confident that they will release it which isn't a given either. New Construct editor? It came out. Steam Plugin for C3? There it is. Addon Database? There you go. New C3 runtime? They're even further ahead than anticipated. I just don't want them to be discouraged by their community to the point that they say to themselves "You know what, why do i even work so hard, might just as well only do what's necessary since no matter what i do it won't be appreciated."
It just saddens me and maybe it's selective perception but nowadays i feel like 80% of posts on this forum or Discord are negative and about the same thing over and over again. Being an admin on a few Discord channels myself i even thought about opening my own, safe haven Discord for Construct users (i would've called it ConstructIVE ) but i think that might not be the right path either since it might seem divisive among the community plus i don't want to get critizised of being naive and undermining anyones criticism etc. etc.
Being in the adventure game community i'm also part of the AGS discord. An age old software that has a lot a LOT of shortcomings but even there i don't experience THAT kind of negative behaviour. People are aware of the shortcomings of their tool and of course it is being discussed from time to time but not like CONSTANTLY and most of the time, everyone is really positive about their program of choice.
Now do me a favor and just google engine X + performance on platform Y. You'll find, that a lot of them have similiar problems as we do sometimes as well. Game Development in it's very nature is hard and there is a reason, big gamestudios are often developing their own engines than just using Unity.
Anyway, so much for my rambling, i just think anyone who really can't live with the way C3 is heading is always free to use another product, luckily, there are so many options today that you're really not bound to one engine. I mean i could even imagine myself maybe one day, with my third or fourth game, switching to another engine but i think C3 will always be part of my arsenal whether for prototyping or gamejams or something similiar. Plus it has the best feature of them all: it actually enables me, a non-programmer, to make my own game using very advanced concepts, with which users of code-based engines are struggling with even after years of use. So that's kind of the magic of C3. For me it's just the choice of doing ANY game at all vs. having a few more export options. Easy choice.