signaljacker's Forum Posts

    Regarding retention. I think some of the things Tom listed are good. Despite having been playing around with Construct for years I really enjoyed poking around the example games in C3 so more 'full' games in different genres is a good idea. I also think that more detailed, cohesive and professional tutorials are a must. The community tutorials are great, don't get me wrong and I want to see them continue and flourish. But many of them show very esoteric or downright inefficient ways of doing things and sometimes reading them it's like the blind leading the blind. Good quality tutorials from the devs on efficient and proper ways to do things I think will help Construct's image and bolster the overall quality of the community's output, which will in turn attract new users and retain current ones.

    However I don't think these points will be enough to improve user retention and the reason is that hobbyist game devs are pretty transient. We hop between different software, trying new things, experimenting etc. All of those guys that impulse bought C2 aren't going to impulse subscribe to C3, because psychologically buying something and renting something are two different things. I've done a few team based game jams and really it depends on the team, but every time we've used different game making software. None of them have been subscription based, I don't think it would work unless everyone was already subscribed as subscriptions don't really fit into that flexible, spontaneous mentality. The monthly subscription thing might help with this, but it might harm you as well. It's quite a difficult situation.

    For those still sceptical about subscription model, I'm going to try explaining why I think they chose that way.

    Why pay once is not a good idea for scirra.

    Let's say 1 user buys a licence for 100€ ... Scirra earn some cash... 100€

    Now let's go to the cost for running their business:

    Scirra has some costs to keep their business running. We all know that right? Server costs, staff costs, tax, licenses, phone and internet bills, office rent, printer paper, etc etc. Let's say scirra has a running cost of 1000€ / week (just as an example) If they are using a pay once model, they have to make sure they sell AT LEAST 10 new licences per week just to cover all the costs.

    They have to earn 1000€ per week, to be able to pay their bills for 1000€ per week. But if they sell 10 licences per weeks, that means they get more active users, so most of their costs would increase as well.... After a year, maybe the weekly costs will be 1500 per week, they are forced to sell 15 licences per week to keep up with the costs.

    So after a while.... Maybe you payed, 100€ for a licence, but every month you will cost them a little. You are using their software, You are using their forums, maybe you need support, you expect updates, bug fixes etc. Let's say every customer cost scirra 1€ per week just to keep them happy. After 100 weeks (about 2 years). You will still cost them money 1€/week, to keep you as a satisfied customer. You're still using the forums, and you're still using the software, and their support and getting updates. The only way to make sure you are not costing them money from that point is to release a new product, that hopefully you will buy. But now they have 2 products they need to maintain... the old product AND the new product. Double work to keep both groups happy.... that both expect updates, support, access to forums, etc etc.

    Instead of releasing a new product every other year or so, hoping old and new users will buy it, they created C3 with a subscription model, so that they can make sure they get a steady income without having to start planning for C4 already, and taking care of all old customers, that are still costing them money. If they made C3 a pay once model, they are back to step one, they have to make sure they sell enough C3 licences every week, to cover all the costs, they have to update, and release new features to keep existing customers happy.

    Locked out?

    So why are you locked out when you are paying a subscription? Because..... if you subscribe for one year, but still can use, the software, the forums, get support, etc you are still costing them money...They NEED your income on a regular basis to keep scirra going as a business and continue to update their product, with new features and bug fixes.

    They are not punishing anyone, getting greedy, or locking people out, they are trying to find a way to make sure you will continue to support their continued development. If they gave people full access to editing after the subscription ran out, you're still costing them money, as long as you don't subscribe again. It would be the same as selling a pay once licence. I totally understand why they moved over to a subscription model, but sadly many people here still don't...

    I understand why they get frustrated, when people don't understand their decision to move to a subscription model. Many customers don't see that scirra NEED their support on a regular basis to continue to provide a good product, without having to worry about get X amount of new users every week just to keep scirra alive as a business...

    Principles aside

    If you like C2/C3, please put your "principles" aside, and try to understand WHY they moved to a subscription model. They are doing a great job, they are active to answer to your concerns, and it's not an overpriced product, for what you get. Asking you to pay once a year for a product that you love to use, is not too much to ask... hobbyist or professional. It's still worth the money... I would also hope for a monthly option, because I can also be inactive and during extended periods of time, but they probably have a reason for not offering that at the moment, but maybe it will come.

    Keep up the good work, Scirra team..., and people still sceptic towards "renting model" read through my post again, and maybe you will understand. It's purely a business decision to stay afloat, and to be able to provide updates, bugfixes, features, support for years to come for existing customers, without the worry to get more sales and getting new customers to stay afloat.

    Everyone understands why they're doing it. People are fighting to make it better. There is an opportunity for Scirra to get exactly what they need from us and us to get exactly what we need from them if a proper dialogue can be established but there is a barrier and it's a refusal to change. C3's wonky launch reminds me of that time Valve tried to introduce paid mods on Steam. There was a huge backlash and in no time at all they had (quite sensibly) completely reversed that decision. Scirra's rental model, compared to many other software subscription models is shortsighted, with little attention payed to the needs or wants of its users as demonstrated by the lock out. If they want respect and loyalty they need to be less dismissive of concerns such as people being locked out of their own hard work, which is quite frankly insulting.

    Now I realise that the wheels are already in motion, and Ashley has said they want to try to go ahead with their current plans. That's fair enough and it's his right to do that. They probably can't change course at this stage even if they wanted to. I will probably subscribe to C3, but I will remain highly critical of its rental model if changes aren't brought about for better users rights. As many have pointed out, others are already copying the event system - your competition is all over this. You guys really need to up your game so hear me loud and clear - your proposed rental system sucks but you can still fix it. And by fix it I don't mean go back to one off payments. I'm happy to subscribe, just work out a solution for the lock out - no one wants to live in a future like that.

    >

    > > After the many posts and the locked thread, it seems the best option for Construct users now is to wait and see how the subscription turns out. Scirra really wants to try it, and if it works out then that's great for them (and us) !

    > >

    > > If not, they'll hopefully have a backup plan ready in time

    > >

    > > But, I would say it will be one or two years from now before we know for sure (eg: many people might try one or two years before trying something else, so it's still pretty risky for Scirra if big/long-term projects aren't being made).

    > >

    > > That's okay though, we've all been waiting many years already for HTML5 to be the high performance multi-platform export format of choice for 2D gaming anyway, what's the harm of waiting a few more?

    > >

    >

    > The problem with this I think is that at the moment there is actually very little incentive to subscribe. The overlap between C2 and C3 is vast, and who knows how long it will take C3 to mature enough plugin wise for many to transfer their projects over? I say this as someone who is knee deep in 3 projects, all of which use plugins qhich quite frankly should be part of the base construct package. If I subscribe in the near future I'll pretty much just be throwing $99 away (or whatever discount I get from being a customer) the only incentive to subscription at the moment is support of Scirra's vision, but unfortunately some of this vision I'm not interested in. I think people will continue to discuss and criticise this model and that won't go away. We're not stirring a frenzy, the fact is it doesn't fit the needs or wants of the greater community.

    >

    How compatible are construct2 plugins with construct3 ?

    I wonder as construct3's runtime continues to mature- will that compatibility continue to be maintained?

    In that sense then, plugin developers will need to port their work to c3.

    Do you think some paid plugins will also start moving over to a rent model too?

    I'm not sure on compatibility between C2 and C3 plugins, but it is certainly something that worries me. I'm very glad that people can write plugins for Construct, but I actually feel that Construct itself is lacking some very important features that plugin developers have picked up the slack for. I've always found it odd that there is no native tweening, or even audio fade in/out for instance. And for software that touts itself as being easy to use this seems like such a glaring oversight. And I know you can do all that stuff if you jump through some hoops, but honestly plugins save a lot of time and those kind of things should be in the base program.

    My worry about the proposed rental system is that the timing is so weird for it. I don't really need to jump to new software yet because C2 is still fulfilling my needs and probably will for a while yet. But because C3 is coming, C2 sales will probably drop off a cliff as people perceive it to be dead or dying (even if that isn't the case as Scirra has said they will maintain it for the foreseeable future). So if C2 sales dry up completely as psychologically people perceive it to be dead, but no one jumps to C3 because they don't need to yet, that's going to be quite a long period with little sales to Scirra.

    When I bought C2 I didn't really need it, for one it wasn't mature enough compared to Classic (and at the moment I feel the same about C3 to C2). I bought it as a kind of future investment, to learn slowly and transition over to and it worked well. If C3 had been a one off payment (no matter how much, name your price) I would have done the same. But if I were to subscribe any time soon I would probably still spend most time in C2 and would pretty much be wasting money on the C3 sub at least for a couple of years... I work slowly and on fairly big projects and I don't like paying for something I'm not constantly using or won't have access to use in the future.

    After the many posts and the locked thread, it seems the best option for Construct users now is to wait and see how the subscription turns out. Scirra really wants to try it, and if it works out then that's great for them (and us) !

    If not, they'll hopefully have a backup plan ready in time

    But, I would say it will be one or two years from now before we know for sure (eg: many people might try one or two years before trying something else, so it's still pretty risky for Scirra if big/long-term projects aren't being made).

    That's okay though, we've all been waiting many years already for HTML5 to be the high performance multi-platform export format of choice for 2D gaming anyway, what's the harm of waiting a few more?

    The problem with this I think is that at the moment there is actually very little incentive to subscribe. The overlap between C2 and C3 is vast, and who knows how long it will take C3 to mature enough plugin wise for many to transfer their projects over? I say this as someone who is knee deep in 3 projects, all of which use plugins qhich quite frankly should be part of the base construct package. If I subscribe in the near future I'll pretty much just be throwing $99 away (or whatever discount I get from being a customer) the only incentive to subscription at the moment is support of Scirra's vision, but unfortunately some of this vision I'm not interested in. I think people will continue to discuss and criticise this model and that won't go away. We're not stirring a frenzy, the fact is it doesn't fit the needs or wants of the greater community.

    I think it's pretty obvious if you ask a question which amounts to "do you want to pay more or less?" people are going to click the "less" option. Or if you ask "what other payment models should Scirra use?" the answer will be "the one I hardly have to pay anything at all". The business has to also at least survive, and ideally be able to keep improving the product.

    I don't think the poll really shows that, there is no price on the one time payment so who says it's cheaper? It just demonstrates that people don't want to rent software. If you charged $500 for C3 and I could buy it outright, I wouldn't even hesitate. Bang, it would be bought. You've already proven yourselves to be excellent developers with C2 and I want to continue using that kind of workflow. And you'd have 5 years of 'subscription' money from me straight away, you wouldn't even need to wait for it. With a rental system, I am hesitating a lot. Very ambivalent. Most of your critics of the rental system don't want your company to fail, we want it to keep improving and want to keep being a part of it and in a lot of cases money hasn't really got anything to do with it, it's the direction it's going that is the problem. But that's just me, someone else in the community might be horrified at paying $500 up front for a piece of software, or might not be able to afford it etc. It will be impossible to keep everyone happy.

    My Problem with scirra is that they are calling it a subscription, but it really is renting.

    Here is a subscription:

    https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopi ... 7&t=477140

    you pay and you get 12 months of software upgrades and support, thats it

    Construct 3 is very different - you pay for access <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

    Ashley might decide to put out less software updates/features, while the user has no choice but to continue to pay in order to get access to the software.

    It feels like they are misleading the users a little bit on some points too. The export in construct is still pretty bad compared to many other engines, so the price tag of 100$ per year is definitely not justified.

    You're right, if you get a magazine subscription for a year, at the end of that year the magazines stop coming but you don't have to give back the ones you've already bought.

    I think the Bitwig model is fair. They did get slammed for it from a chunk of their userbase as well, but it is a necessary evil. I think this model is fairer to both users and developers, Scirra's is not.

  • Can you post a .capx and I'll have a look. It's hard to tell as there are many different ways it could be done so need to see your door mechanic first. One might be to have a variable on the door itself which is toggled when the player accesses it and depending on its state takes you to the correct place.

    > winkr7

    >

    > —

    > I preferred the new subscription model from the very beginning, because in my humble opinion, it will secure the future development of our favourite game development tool.

    >

    >

    Pretty much. Subscription = sustainable development.

    It doesn't have to be though, give the product a 5 year lifecycle and charge $500 up front for it - or 'rent to own' it for 5 years at $100 a year. I would much prefer this to a subscription. However I think due to the nature of C3 (ongoing server costs) this kind of model wouldn't be possible, and that's where Scirra have shot themselves in the foot. The nature of C3 boxes it into a very narrow set of options - which basically forces a subscription.

  • TheZinc - you need the code to set the player to the position in the new layout you've just loaded, not the previous one. What I do is have a global variable that keeps track of what side of the screen the player exited from on the layout previous, so North, South, East and West - then when it goes to the next layout it checks what the previous door was and set the player accordingly - eg if the player exited from an East door last screen it will set them to a West entry on the next, and if they exited from a North door it will set them to a South entry.

  • I haven't worked with Spriter and a lot of characters on screen at once, but it shouldn't be too hard to test. I just tried to but I've always found Spriter to be a bit temperamental and I may not have the latest plugin installed so wasn't able to get it going but my suggestion would be to download a pre-rigged spriter character (this can be done from one of the menus in spriter), load it into construct. And then at the start of the layout make a loop that duplicates the object x times at a random position on the screen and sets an animation. Then see how that runs, it should give you a pretty good idea. Obviously performance will also be dependant on how many unique sprites you're using, but it will at least give you a decent idea of the overhead that the rigging/animation uses.

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  • It does feel better, maybe a combination of things. That last blog post certainly helped I think. And maybe some of us got some stuff off our chests in the megathreads that have been happening the past couple of days, but also saw things from different perspectives. Anyway I think the future is looking a bit brighter.

  • Thanks guys, I appreciate the clarification - I just wanted to make 100% sure. I can work with that

  • Apologies if this has already been answered, but if it has I must have missed it. Currently testing the free beta, opening up one of the example games it displays a warning that the game exceeds the free version limits and some features will not be available. I'm assuming that's in relation to editing the game itself, but if you preview or debug the game it plays correctly (without limitations?). Am I right in assuming that if I were to stop subscribing to C3 but had worked on a project that exceeded the free limits, I would be able to open it up and still look at it properly? I wouldn't need to export it, or even edit it - but I would like to be able to look at the structure, and also play the game (by pressing the preview button) for personal use. The answer to this will likely be my deciding factor in subbing. Thanks.

    I Started out in CC and moved to C2 early on, still working in CC for a while until C2 had matured sufficiently. I work on big, multi-year projects.

    At the moment I probably won't subscribe. When the software is a fair bit more mature than C2 currently is I may revisit it, however by then I may have found a more suitable replacement for my needs. I was not even remotely interested in looking at other game creation software before, but now I am actively researching it. If F3, or Godot or Gamemaker or Unity really don't click with me I will probably return to Construct, but unfortunately in its current form it's unappealing to me. Time will tell, but I will probably wait until it matures further and also see if the subscripton is eventually tweaked or discarded entirely.

    > I would say that getting this community more involved would be a great start. Conducting direct polls and really having a way for supporters to give feedback.

    >

    This has worked against us in the past. The multiplayer feature was massively voted for, but from the data we look at, very few people actually use it. So the hype effect is a big distorting factor in polls. I don't regret it, it was a super interesting project to work on, but it's something to bear in mind, and is the main reason I have avoided polls since then.

    Having said that, we do have a feature-voting system planned anyway but I am going to strongly caveat it with warnings that "votes are not a guarantee of implementation", for exactly the reason we had with multiplayer. Also I can easily imagine things like 3D becoming #1 voted features, and there are a wide range of reasons why we're holding off on that.

    Glad to see that there is a feature voting system planned. Could one possible solution be to have users submit requests, but these be collated and curated by Scirra who then select several which are in line with your objectives with C3 and then the community votes on those? That way you still have control, but we have a good idea of what's coming and are still influencing the direction of the product to a degree. Just an idea anyway, I understand opening it up to everybody would be chaos, but I think that some sort of dialogue between Scirra and its customers on features is still important.