Hey! This is the Daily Overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps.
Now today, I want to talk about how far are we gonna go with "free".
Okay, so this morning, I'm walking through a park that's not too far from the office.
It's like 5:30 in the morning, so I'm gonna try to keep my voice down a little bit.
But it's a really nice morning, being it was the longest day like two days ago.
Here in the UK, it's been like- we had like a heatwave earlier this week and
it's probably nothing compared to where a lot of you, guys, live. But here,
it was- everything was slowed down. Even my productivity went down. Even my
computer started get sluggish after a while in the afternoons. So, I mean it was
crazy. Anyway, I want to tell you guys about- yesterday there was this big
announcement from Corona labs, who do Corona SDK. I mentioned that we do Corona.
A lot of our games and stuff are in Corona. So, a week ago, I had
supposed- most of our games are in Corona, so I
should have learned unity back when we did it. I went with Corona just
because I thought the unity interface was a little bit- it was just really
complicated, even though I was a c-sharp developer and a JavaScript developer,
I kind of wish I'd gotten the unity root, but I went with Corona and I'm really-
I'm actually a really big Corona fan. So, I love working with it. But, it's
been- they're pricey models been really strange. Anyway, so
like a week ago I had update the privacy policy and a bunch of our apps
and I thought, you know, I just I don't want to do that, you have to go in and
and compile, go save as, almost it's like a really slow process because you
couldn't script it out. I thought, I'm finally going to buy Corona
Enterprise. So, there was different tiers so there was the free tier and it
was Corona enterprise which cost like I think it was $800 a year. And then with
that, you could take it and compile it into you can open it up in XCode, you can
add your own custom components all that, you know create your own plugins and all
that kind of stuff. As a kind of thing where I just never really paid for it
before, I pay for other kinds of stuff before but I'd have gone with that but
because every time I started use it, I still get confused by it. So, a week
ago, like less than a week ago, it was like last maybe Saturday morning,
I finally said, I say I'm gonna pay for Corona Enterprise. I'm just
gonna do that, I'm going to write this cool script with FastLane and
and I'm just gonna get all these apps compiled and
uploaded like in in 10 minutes after four hours of coding.
Anyway, yesterday there's an email comes through from Corona saying that they've
just made the enterprise version free. So, that's big news for those of you guys
who are Corona Developers out there. This is kind of huge because it used to be so-
when I started off with Corona, it costs- it didn't cost
anything, but if you wanted to release something to the App Store or you
actually wanted to compile something, put it on a device. It costs, I think it was
$600 a year. Enterprise cost a lot more, enterprise meaning you could do
your own plugins and stuff like that. Then eventually, they made it
free. They made Corona free. And then you had to pay for enterprise. A lot of
people are really happy about that, but you know, I didn't really - I was fine paying
each year, because I got so much use out of it. Then Corona SDK was
free, the enterprise was paid, that was cool. I had Enterprise for a short while,
but I didn't really use it very much. I went back to the free version and
and everybody was happy with it. And then they started putting the splash screens
in and charging you to remove the splash screens. Again, I was fine with that
too. I mean, they have to make money somehow. Now, they made -
now they changed it again where they're making the enterprise version free, which
is cool. That's great. Now, all you have to do is pay
for these to remove the splash screens. For those of you who are looking into
getting into game development, it's a really easy framework to learn and
it's cheaper now than ever. I don't really know why they've done
that. I think they were recently acquired by Apple deal, so it might be because
they're making enough money from Apple deal, they can lower that cost or
whatever. Or maybe it's just to compete. I don't really know the internal politics
of it. So, it's probably not good for me to speculate. You see,
here's the deal, when I started off in software development, the tools
are really expensive. I was visual basic, so we're talking like 2000.
In the year 2000, I wanted to get my own copy of Visual Studio. I had one
but I wanted my own. I looked at it cost like $1,200 to get
a license which was ridiculous. I mean, it's really good by today's
standards. In fact, I was so surprised when I found out that you
could code on- you can go with Java for free, or when I found out you do
like HTML for free, cuz I was- when I learned about HTML and web pages,
I thought, well how much does that cost? And of course with, mobile
android's free, Android studio is free, which is a really good tool.
It used to be Eclipse and Eclipse- we saw Eclipse was kind of clunky, on
the Apple side you got Xcode, which is free part of the platform. But I like
the Xcode is clunky, but that's just me because I'm just not used to it. I think
unity is clunky, but that's just because I haven't taken the time to learn my way
around the environment and everything. But we have all of these free
tools and it's amazing. I start to worry about where do we go with
free. But we have the same issue as app developers, don't we? If you were
gonna release a paid app and not have a free equivalent or a premium model, then
probably no one would download it. I mean, I get asked this question all the time
by people who are not in the app industry or not in the tech industry.
They say well if you only- if you had millions of people download your app, if
you just charge them ten cents, you would have like- um whatever. You just
charge them a dollar, you'd be a millionaire, right? But the
fact of the matter is, that once you start charging for something that
changes the whole scale, the whole economy as users, we all expect to have
that free. We expect apps to be free. We expect software to be free. We expect
this Premium model at least to have a free trial which is cool. That's just the
way things are going. I wonder where it's gonna end. We're gonna keep
going that way. For me, my experience has been whenever least like a paid app
without having a free equivalent, it's just done nothing. like I made, maybe one
or two downloads, but that's it. So, what I find it works best is having the
free version and a paid version, or you know either the free version with in-app
purchases to, either to remove ads which is the worst. Nobody
ever goes to remove ads. You have to have some other value add or to add the
features of the paid version, but also to add the paid version too.
There are people who don't want to mess around with in-app purchases. They don't
want to do the paid version or they don't want to do the free version.
Or they think there's something dodgy about the free version. And me too,
I start saying when I see something that's completely free and I can't see
how it's monetized, I start to question it like what are they doing with my data
all this kind of stuff. Maybe it's just because I'm older, I think maybe
younger generations are going to expect things to be free. Anyway, it's really
good news that for those of you are doing game development, Corona
SDK and stuff like that, it is free. And that's something that you can use
and check that. Or it's always been free but to use the enterprise
version which to be hones,t you're only going to use that if you're like really
into the coding side of things. If you're going to create your own, like you
want to integrate with features or cut your own plugins that are not inherently
in the Corona SDK space or whatever. But for me, I think
it's kind of cool, it means I could build that build automation tool that I was
trying to do last week. It's not going to cost me $800 a year, but you
know I'm worried about the the economics of it. I hope they're still around
five years from now, because we support all this
kind of stuff. And that's again one of those things we choose a framework.
You're always thinking about, are they going to be around for ages? I can actually
monetize this. It's great. It's free. But are they going to be able to support
themselves? And sometimes this is the thing about apps.
It's you know- right now, most of my revenue comes from ads, so we have the
free apps that bring in a lot of AdMob ads which is great. But then you think
the more people releasing apps ,means there's more ad space out there and less
where supply starts to outweigh the demand . Then all of a sudden the
impressions and everything get cheaper and cheaper to do, so that you have to
have far more impressions, far more clicks to make the same amount of money.
Anyway, those are just stopped my thoughts for today. I'll talk to you guys
on Monday.