@slackmoehrle
No,I actually i don’t want to play any game , i try to help here and im very serious.
As i see it now you cocos guys in the last year struggling to find
Fair and good business models to monetize the engine ,
Also i see you are spreading in different directions you took great top notch cross platform 2d engine and somehow you Made things complicate and unexpected for example critical bugs not fixed wired half baked features are developed .tools canceled.the performance get worst .
Now from small indie developers point of view that used to relay on this engine it is bad .
i still try to convince developers to use cocos but it gets harder and harder .
@Zinitter
I can tell you from my experience from Open Source engines from different disciplines like :
ZeroMQ , ACE , TOW , Mongodb and many more …
That Professional services model is very good model to keep the open source project alive .
Nothing is going to be broken here . the open source community will continue to be supportive if they will feel the engine is growing with them and get improved .
I will stick to it. There were a lot of postings, that cocos2d-x is in need of a good editor and that it will be taken care of.
If you don’t have an editor, point 3 would be pointless.
Asset store? Well, that does not seem to fit your company and there are tons of asset stores already.
Ad network? The ad business is already very crowded.
Point 1 seemed to be the easiest to pull of.
I want to throw in point 5: The cocos cloud will be released soon
Paid support services are definitely fine. It should be done in the same model as Linux support services like Red Hat and Ubuntu and many others.
I was almost going to write a very negative comment, but then took a break and realized that as with almost all things that irk or sort of make one feel mad it’s usually a gut reaction that is far more severe than the actual thing one is upset at. But then IQD Meir_yanovich posted and I feel like I should say my peace.
However, I totally agree with the fact that the engine has sort of been pulled in many directions and while it’s recently starting to find one direction to focus on that direction is geared toward a focus on money. It’s a business, I understand this over and over again. However, I’m much less interested today in starting new games in cocso2d-x, recommending it to others for new projects, and overall think that it’s now the engine for IAP-driven, ad-driven, cute, toy, games in the mostly mobile space that companies can use to make money-making games.
There is nothing wrong with this. And the business, team, and community can go in whichever direction they like. I do realize there has been a lot of great work that has gone into the engine even in the recent months, but I think the parts that would be used to make great games have taken a back seat to the parts that make games money. We all need to eat, so I’ll repeat that this is fine and nothing wrongs with this, but what is the elevator pitch in choosing this engine over Unity, Marmalade, GameMaker, Unreal, etc.
It used to be: performance, relative simplicity, decent physics, c++ or javascript (usually one will satisfy a team’s desires and allow for portability), easy creation of simple menus (cocosbuilder, now CocoStudio only really good on Windows).
Just my 2c - sorry to troll this thread specifically.
As for the guessing game.
It’s definitely this one. Alrady stated it’s being worked on. It needs to come to Mac, please.
Likely this one is a work in progress, but it’s not a major money maker, so not yet.
I can totally see trying to do this, but yep requires #1
I can see this being developed with the mistaken focus on generating revenue, but as IQD states it’s a crowded market and many have already chosen a service
Godspeed to the business trying to find a revenue source. You could always just sell it to Amazon, heh.
@slackmoehrle I was probably a little harsh, but at least honest. I do plan to continue following and will still probably relatively active in this fine community. We also have games to support that use cocos2d-x. We also are mostly using Unity going forward.
This last year it just feels like we’ve added more code to the engine to fix bugs or to work around the engine bugs than we’ve had to in the past. Partly because we adopt things quickly like Camera, Sprite3D, Materials, etc. And they’re great additions reducing time and low-level stuff we no longer have to write ourselves, or less code to achieve the same solution. However, we spend prob just as much time due to dealing with bugs (compile-time, run-time, and worst of all rendering bugs)
I’m just trying to nudge y’all in the direction I want, but I fully realize most everyone else probably wants more of the SDKBOX stuff or priority paid support. Most of which we don’t use.
If you’re getting tons of support requests, why not just test out paid support by having the company setup the system for paid support and offer it to people when they ask you for it. Direct them to the forums first, but they’re probably direct messaging because no one is answering?
I don’t think you should ask us if we want paid support because I don’t think it would cost you much to setup the service to offer the support. You as a company should just offer it. Or don’t. But it’s really up to you, not us. If you offer it and no one shows up for support will it cost you much? Maybe you have some legal work to setup forms and contracts or whatever, but if you’re going to do contract work that just comes with the territory.
Could also hire 2-3 people to become experts and answer questions on the forums?
I think this thread won’t help you much in your decision, as it depends on the amount of users reading it and giving feedback(including your poll).
The most complicated part on providing paid support is the paperwork. You would need to get some sort of SLAs in place.
What’s your targeted response time?
How will the support be handled? Which support will actually be offered? E.g. someone is paying you for fixing an engine issue. Are you gonna release that fix to the public? If so, it might be unfair to the user that paid for it and all others get it for free as an engine update.
To conquer that, the support can only encompass game specific support. Basically offering “contract” work or tutoring on something, a client is unable to pull of on his own.
Regarding the SLA. What are the penalties, if your company cannot deliver a fix in time? Will there be some fine?
Under which license will the fix be covered? E.g. MIT?
What about copyright, as you cannot transfer it?
If you offer paid support and it will be used, perfect. You won’t dump that much money if it’s not. It’s better to offer something and being not used much, than not offering it at all. It’s not like there are 3 guys sitting around, waiting for an incoming request, is it?
But if you offer it, be prepared for legal stuff, SLAs and contracts. This is something you definitely have to decide on your own.
Maybe it’s more worth offering contract work and hiring some experts, who deal with forum requests, as @stevetranby was suggesting.
How about offering learning sessions over Skype or paid classes on various stuff?
If you want to offer such things, I recommend to check out udacity, coursera and udemy to get a feeling on how you could pull it off. Of course it’s hard to copy them, as they are collaborating with e.g. Google and Stanford University with a broader picture behind it, but great artists steal, right?
Sure, but I would suggest bringing in people of different skill levels to test it out.
Speaking of udemy and classes. The top rated classes on game development started as a Kickstarter project. Maybe that’s an option for you too.
Frankly speaking to add to what i wrote.
if you as a company wont present decent competition to Unity you don’t stand a chance.
the elevator pitch will be :
Open source .
Native code , small binary .
Consoles support ,
Support old devices .
Proper Desktop support , use available infra like SDL2 don’t reinvent the wheel.
Faster close to the metal engine . with simple ways to extend
Unity Have some kind of new c# to cpp converter that i heard is crap
you can do also java-script to native kind of converter. you have all the infra already .
No revenue sharing as Unreal .
I still think that developing ad network that is tightly coupled with the engine will do the must revenue .
As im coming from the “Download Valley” i know giant company’s based on this model .
The logic is simple and its a win/win
You do your best to convince developers to use your engine , and then you present the perfect “Ad network” to use…
See “Crossy road” + Unity ad’s example.
If professional services model would help Cocos2d grow better without break the community, that’s good to see. I worried because i seldom see Cocos team response or help on the forum user’s problems recently.
Cocos2d-x is a very good engine, open source and free to use. Anyone can contribute to develop the engine to make it better and better.
To keep it alive, Cocos team need to generate revenue. But just don’t try create something which would break the original intention of an open source engine.
I don’t wish to see Cocos2d-x walk the path of Cocos2d-iPhone, force developer to use something in order to use the engine.
I think this is a good suggestion for the paid support, normally developer would ask for help on how to use or solving certain problems. Paying to fix engine bugs would be too unfair.
If you allow, I want to throw in my 2c on your points:
I don’t really have the impression, that cocos2d-x is in competition to Unity or any other engine, as I don’t see any incentives for achieving that. I never saw any marketing campaigns or anything like that, which says: “Hey folks! Look here, we are that amazing engine you looked for. Any you will ever need. Use us!”.
It’s more like: “Btw., there is also cocos2d-x.”
Check.
Check.
It would be definitely nice to have, but it seems, that is was never intended to be that generic. The target was just mobile platforms.
Old devices as “OpenGL 1.x” devices? If not, Check.
See console support, but yep, why not just doing the same stuff, that the Humble Bundle games do? Use SDL2 where appropriate.
I’m waiting for Vulkan. The problem with close to the metal is the difference between desktop/mobile and consoles. Consoles are way more to the metal as Vulkan, DX12 or Metal. You would need to choose a balanced solution.
Maintaining different versions can be tedious.
Is there really a need for converting your JS code into e.g. C++?
Absolutely. Either license the engine or offer paid support.
But also keep that in mind:
The only kind of profit strategy that is incompatible with Open Source is monopoly-based sales, also known as “royalties”
Regarding the ad network: Of course it can be pulled off, but can a solution offer high enough fill rates and a decent amount of revenue?
Another option comes to my mind: Make a splash screen mandatory. If you want to get rid of it, you have to pay a fee. This is how some other (engine) companies make money and the reason why so many games have those annoying splash screens at startup, which you can’t click away without digging into the game configuration.
Is their success because of using Unity ads?`I guess it would be the same if they had used another ad network, don’t you think?
Anyway. If you want to make the engine a success you have to deliver additional benefits to the user and the competition is very high.
What makes me wonder is, why Chukong is thinking of monetizing support now and not from the beginning?
I could imaging monetizing the engine directly would be very complicated, based on the fact, that the engine contains contributions from individuals Would you need to compensate every contributor? What about copyright issues?`
I agree. They would also need more community managers.
I don’t see a way how it could be made any different to what RH, *BSD and all other distros use to make money. The products are free and you just pay for technical support, system integration, distribution and the like. As I stated above, this could also be due to copyright reasons. You are not really allowed to sell a product, which includes contributions which are under the copyright of the contributor. http://opensource.org/faq#contributor-agreements
Does cocos2d-x even have such a thing?
the contributor actually transfers copyright ownership of the contributions to the project
This depends on the country, tho.
And not common business. There’s a reason why you have to license/pay for those different engines out there. You are licensing the product and getting support in return.
Where’s my account manager from Chukong?
