Developers divided on impact of new 'premium' royalty charges
Adobe’s decision to begin taking royalties from certain games made in Flash “will only affect the Zyngas and Rovios of this world”, an indie developer familiar with the tech has said.
Many developers have complained that Adobe’s new tactic – to implement new royalty charges to Flash games – will have too negative an impact on revenues.
From August, Adobe will take a 9 per cent sales cut from developers working with Flash, providing they use the combination of two new “premium feature” APIs and pass certain sales thresholds.
Developers will be charged only if they employ hardware accelerated rendering in combination with domain memory, and only when they begin to make more than $50,000 per game.
Mark Burvill, of Flash studio Antifuzz, told GamesIndustry International that the new payment model is “only going to affect the Zyngas and Rovios of this world who go on to develop the next generation of console-quality games for the web."
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However, one developer believes that all Flash developers will be affected in some form.
Richard Davey, technical director of Aardman Digital, reckons that all Flash projects will likely need to be licensed before they go on commercial release.
"We fully expect this to take the form of a digital certificate, creating a signed SWF,” he said.
Adobe’s premium feature APIs allow high-end graphics to be played through browsers by utilising the player’s own hardware.
Spry Fox developer Daniel Cook believes that all Flash developers will be affected in the long-run.
"I think it would be a mistake to see this as a move that only affects the high-end developers that want to make 3D extravaganzas," he told Gamasutra.
"The definition of 'premium' will no doubt broaden over time and basic tech like Stage3D will end up being essential to how you build modern games in Flash," he said.
"The more services that take a piece of [my game's] revenue, the less I'm able to run a sustainable business. These pieces add up. Adobe takes 9 per cent, payment providers take 5-40 per cent, portals take 30-50 per cent.
“Each middleman proclaims that they are only taking a tiny little sliver of a very big pie. But each slice decreases the value of someone playing my game."
Idiots. The Zyngas and Rovios of this world have precisely the resources and incentive to create software to bypass Flash. Faced with paying 9% of a huge amount, its a no-brainer for them to save themselves a massive slice of cash that way.
Will this affect Scaleform Licensing? That could be a massive issue...
After initially being mortified it's not as bad as it looks.
You only have to pay your 9% if you use Stage 3d and "domain memory opcodes". This latter feature is a bit of a mystery at first but seems to be to do with Alchemy (a means to run C++ style ultra fast code in Flash). These sorts of features you will see in Unity's Flash export, and presumably most Flash new 3d accelerated engines (you may see some 3d engines that don't use the faster memory access, or give an option to avoid it).
Lastly, the licensing only applies to the Flash Player in the browser. Anything using Adobe AIR is exempt.
So, 2d games are exempt. And anything else that doesn't use the fancy new 3g engines is exempt. A home grown 3d engine would be exempt too if you stay away from domain memory opcodes - but I also think we will see Flash 3d engines without the domain memory opcodes.
The one catch-all is probably going to be Unitys Flash export. But there you have the option to target the Unity Web Player and bypass the 9% fee, as well as the other exports (iOS, Android, etc. which already have 30% fees).
Generally I would prefer no % cuts like anybody else, but the time to complain about this was way back when Facebook and Apple started taking 30% cuts and nobody really cared. The same trends are coming to Windows and Mac and by then it will be too late to moan about it. Adobe's 9% cut seems very reasonable in fairness, and though they don't provide an appstore as such the reduced rate isn't a deal-breaker, and it can easily be bypassed (which could not be said from all the other revenue sharing/grabbing schemes I've mentioned).
