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>Similar payment models doesn't mean you're competing. It inevitably invites comparison though. >We did not observe as many free edition conversions to paid a
by Daiz 10y ago
>Similar payment models doesn't mean you're competing.
It inevitably invites comparison though.
>We did not observe as many free edition conversions to paid as we would of hoped with C2.
I can understand that, and I wouldn't mind it at all if C3 was also a one-time purchase like C2 (if that was still the case I'd be buying C3 in a heartbeat), but I definitely think it's the wrong way forward with the change in the payment model. I have a bunch of small C2 projects from over the years I've used the program, and I can go back and edit them with C2 even today. However, if I got a C3 subscription for a year and upgraded my projects to C3, then a year later when my subscription ran out my projects would suddenly become essentially read-only due to the free edition limitations, and this whole thing of effectively locking me off from my own projects just completely kills my interest in the current free/paid model of C3. (I'm not actually sure how Unity handles this same scenario, but seeing how the free version still offers the fully-featured engine and how the tiers differ, I'd expect the story to be much better there.)
>Worth mentioning is that we're planning on selling C3 for ~$99 USD per year, if you want all the Gamemaker export options you'll spend > $1,000. I feel in comparison to that, our pricing is still competitive.
While that's true for Game Maker Studio 2, you also have to consider that both Clickteam Fusion and Game Maker Studio 1 have shown up in several Humble Bundles for practically pennies at this point. I actually own both CF2.5 and GM:S along with the most important exporters available for them (Desktop/iOS/Android/HTML5) and I only paid $15 for each (and I bought both because I wanted to see how they stack up against C2 today, which cost more than both combined). From usability and performance standpoints I don't see GMS2 being that big of an upgrade, so sticking with GMS1 would certainly be a viable option for anyone interested in it as an alternative.
>And, as you put it, we are wiping the floor with the competition so we feel reasonably comfortable at this stage experimenting with a different pricing model.
Well, sadly as much as I like Construct as a 2D game IDE, it pretty much kills the program for me and also makes it way harder to recommend to other people as well, which is something I've done a lot with C2 over the years (I got a lot of people at my uni to use it and know several people who ended up buying personal licenses as well).
Personally I think you could expand the free version and make the paid version more expensive. If I ever get around to doing commercial products with Construct, I certainly wouldn't mind paying more than $99 a year for a paid version, even if it was just to get rid of splash screens. You could also take cues from how Unity differentiates the tiers in other regards, like with the cloud build queue priorities and multiplayer support etc (if you're using Scirra-provided infrastructure).