Corona Labs annual update

12 February 2020

Corona Labs annual update

It’s 2020 and many of you have been wanting a roadmap for the next year. We’ve got several major updates to shed the light on Corona’s future and give you more perspective on your business goals connected to our product.

First, let us separate the business entity Corona Labs from the product Corona. On May 1, 2020, Corona Labs Inc. as a business entity will cease to operate. The main reason for this decision is the difference between income this business generates and operational expenses demanded. We assume that many of you, as mobile business owners yourself, can relate to this move. We appreciate your understanding and would like to thank everyone who contributed to our community growth. We’ve seen a lot of great games and apps produced by you, the community. From large studios to determined indie developers, you’ve surprised us and amazed us.

While Corona Labs will fade into an entry in the computer software corporate history as a business entity, Corona the product will go on as an open source project. Here are the details on how we’re planning to proceed.

TL; DR:

Your existing and new games will continue to work. After we finish with the changes to the Corona Simulator, Native and CoronaCards, there should not be much difference in the development workflow for Corona users.

1. Some of the Corona Labs staff have expressed an interest in continuing to work with Corona as an as-available hobby project, so some engine development will continue. There is a possibility that engineers would seek funding through platforms like Patreon or Github Sponsors to continue work in larger capacity.
2. Appodeal will continue to fund infrastructure costs and work with the open source staff to keep the Appodeal plugin up to date.
3. The Corona open source license will change from its current dual license state (Commercial + GPLv3) to a single, much more permissive license: The MIT License will make building the open source version of Corona easier for you and lift distribution restrictions on your apps and games. If you are using the GPL version of Corona, you can continue doing so in your fork.
4. Corona Labs will remove Splash Screen restrictions and plugin license checks from Native and Simulator builds. All first-party plugins will be open sourced and be available on GitHub. Corona’s “daily” builds will be built using tools available for Open Source projects, and would be available on GitHub releases.
5. We will change the Corona Simulator to be an offline tool, building for all supported platforms using local storage as a source for plugins.
6. Marketplace sales will cease. Vendors will be paid what they are owed, and will have to distribute updates for their plugins themselves. Users will be able to download purchased plugins and assets before the store closure. Corona Labs will stop accepting new submissions to the Marketplace on February, 15. 2020. Self-hosted plugins will be turned on for everyone so community plugin developers can continue to provide plugins.
7. We will migrate the forums and coronalabs.com website content to another platform, since the current setup is tied to an expensive infrastructure. We may need several community members to volunteer to administer the new Forums. We are still working on what the coronalabs.com website access will become.
8. The community is welcome to spin up discussion forums. Possibilities include using GitHub’s Issues, Reddit’s /r/CoronaSDK page, a Facebook Group, etc. The community Slack will remain.
9. The Corona Labs maintained social media accounts will remain open, and we will turn them into sources of useful information for developers (i.e., industry news, development and monetization tips, etc.).
10. All these will not happen overnight. We are working on changes to the parts of the engine, and will release them gradually, moving the build process offline as well as migrating content to different platforms. We will post updates on the progress, as well as send out one more final email with all the details Feel free to follow Corona on Github or get involved in development. Progress will be reflected in this Github Project.

We sincerely hope that Corona can continue to thrive and that our great community can be more involved in its future. If there is anyone who would be interested in volunteering, a partnership or acquiring Corona Labs, please, contact us by emailing [email protected].

If you want to discuss this, please use this Forum thread.