Update on Corona Cloud

21 June 2013

Update on Corona Cloud


News & Announcements

Fifteen years ago, Apple made a tough decision to cancel the Newton, Apple’s first foray into handheld computing. There was a lot of promise in the individual parts, but they never came together to something great, like they ultimately did with the iPhone.

After long deliberation, we’ve come to feel the same way about Corona Cloud. We aimed high but like the Newton, Corona Cloud in its current form has been a disappointment. While there were islands of potential, the ultimate execution of the product did not meet our standards.

As a result, we will be shutting down Corona Cloud on August 19.

Earlier this week, we sent an e-mail to all active Corona Cloud developers, as we recognized that this would be quite a surprise and shock to them.

We have refunded all payments made for Corona Cloud, as it was the right thing to do. In addition, we are taking steps to reduce the impact of this decision:

  • We are doing our best to support credible alternatives as quickly as possible. In the near term, we will be adding full support for Google Play game services (iOS and Android) with other alternatives soon to follow.
  • We are making the Corona Cloud code available to affected developers so they can continue to use their existing work by hosting their own instance on AWS.

This was a tough decision precisely because some of you have made a bet on Cloud — I know we have work to do to regain your trust.

The good news is we are now laser-focused on the core Corona SDK engine. You may have noticed some key changes we’ve made in the past several months leading up to this decision, but I want to call them out explicitly:

  1. Updates. We currently only talk about what we have already delivered, what we can actually demo, and (to a lesser extent) what we are actively working on.
  2. Ecosystem. We’ve been laying key infrastructure, especially plugins, to enable more flexibility and monetization.
  3. Community. We are actively engaging with you to make Corona the best mobile development platform out there.

In my weekly updates, I will continue to update you on the innovations we are committed to delivering.

And as always, feel free to send me (walter at coronalabs dot com) or the team your feedback. We’re listening.

walter
10 Comments
  • Dave Baxter
    Posted at 01:12h, 22 June

    What are the guys from Game Minion going to do ?

    https://www.coronalabs.com/blog/2012/12/13/coronifying-the-cloud-corona-labs-acquires-game-minion/

    Dave

  • Ariel
    Posted at 13:45h, 22 June

    I’ve never used Corona Cloud yet I have mixed feeling about this… On the one hand this gives a bad feeling about CoronaLabs, it seems like quite a few projects went down the drain… (Corona Levels to name another). Seems like a small soldier trying to find in several fronts at once…

    On the other hand it’s good that at least they do not try to force it. They came to a conclusion it’s a failure and cancelled it to concentrate on other projects that have more potential. That’s a good thing.
    That being said I’m not sure how many such cancellations Corona can handle both in terms of wasted dev hours and the response of the community to such a trend.. To me it makes we think twice about using such CoronaLabs features before they mature, yet without new users no feature can really mature, so it’s kinda catch 22

  • Ariel
    Posted at 13:48h, 22 June

    And also the analogy to Newton is not really in place. Newton was revolutionary and the market was not ready for it. It was not only (if at all) an execution issue but more of too big of a leap from what users knew before..

    Cloud services are nothing revolutionary and you have dozens of solutions + the option to do it yourself. quite different..

  • Andreas
    Posted at 05:41h, 23 June

    I was just starting to implement Corona Cloud for Leaderboards & Achievements for our game “Freeze!” when suddenly Google Play Games showed up.

    Of course after this surprise I didn’t even try the Corona Cloud, but implemented the Google Play Game Services – and it was very easy to implement, because Corona Labs delivered the needed plugin very fast and Danny solved a few small problems instantly, so now “Freeze!” is alive on Google Play with Leaderboards & Achievements.

    I guess that nobody was expecting GPGS six month ago, and the Android users needed a stable system for Leaderboards & Achievements. So I thought it was great when Corona Labs delivered the Cloud. And I understand completely why the pull the plug.

    On the other hand it will be really hard for the devs who are using it right now. And I hope (and I’m quite sure that it will happen that way) that Corona Labs will support these teams and offer help & compensation.

    Best,
    Andreas

  • Tom
    Posted at 12:22h, 23 June

    Andreas,

    Could you share how you implement it so easily ?

    Tom

    • Andreas
      Posted at 07:16h, 24 June

      Hi Tom,

      the implementation is quite similar to the Game Center implementation for Apple iOS.

      I set TARGET_OS when I compile a new version for one of the App Stores, so e.g. on the system event with the event.type == “applicationStart” I just init the gameNetwork:

      if TARGET_OS == “IOS” then
      gameNetwork.init( “gamecenter”, initCallback )
      elseif TARGET_OS == “ANDROID” then
      gameNetwork.init( “google”, initCallback )
      end

      The biggest difference was that after the successful init for Google Play Games I had to login, for Apple Game Center this is done by the init:

      local function initCallback( event )
      if event.data then
      loggedIntoGC = true

      if TARGET_OS == “ANDROID” then
      gameNetwork.request( “login”, { userInitiated=false, listener = requestGooglePlayLoginCallback4Freeze })
      end
      else
      loggedIntoGC = false
      end
      end

      Another difference to Game Center was that with Game Center I don’t give the opportunity to logout and login again, I pretty much let the user login once when he starts the game the first time didn’t think about it anymore.

      With Google Play Games I give the users the chance to logout and to login again, using e.g. another Google+ account.

      Just download “Chip Challenge” and my game “Freeze!”, have a look at it and then implement Google Play Leaderboads & Achievements. The size, format, texts etc. for the achievements on Google Play are the same as used in Game Center, so it’s very easy to set it up if you used Game Center for iOS.

      And here’s the official link to the docs:
      http://docs.coronalabs.com/plugin/gameNetwork-google/index.html

      Best of luck,
      Andreas

  • c0ppo
    Posted at 04:26h, 24 June

    @Andreas

    Like Tom, I would also love to hear from you how you implemented Google Play easily.

  • William
    Posted at 11:08h, 24 June

    I think the “right” thing for Corona to do at this point would be to open source the cloud. A number of devs, myself included, probably had not yet moved up to a paid cloud account simply because they they were still developing. Now we have to back out that code and re-think. Whatever reasons Corona has for not continuing to support the project and the code I’d like to get a look at the source to make my own determination about rolling it out on AWS or looking for an alternative.

  • helios
    Posted at 17:39h, 24 June

    u-oh??? what can the people from Titanium Appcelerator say about this?? Mr. C. Icaza, any suggestions?? >:DD

    anwyays, hopefully thinks work out for the better! CORONA SDK rOCKS!!! more power.

  • Peter Drinnan
    Posted at 10:34h, 12 January

    Seems to me there is still a need for this in some level. I was searching for recommended vendors and didn’t find much other than this article. There must be a lot of backend providers who would love to partner with Corina labs, and not necessarily just for games.