One of the primary reasons to push my upgrade to pro was kiip - so this upsets me, Seen as we are paying for the pro service I would have at least like to have gotten A community vote henceforth that leaves us with 2 monetization features and for the moneyI have payed I would love to see more, as always I do appreciate which opinionatory direction GameSalad takes as a whole with its business but I would like to see more 'bang for your buck's with the pro account
I understand where all you guys are coming from with the AdMod comments but they feel off topic. I would love some kind of reply from GS regarding the questions about Kiip. I can not stress how much time and effort I've put into Kiip, which has now been wasted.
It seems to me that there is more going on then just "not enough developers utilize this feature"
Let's make one thing clear - if you can't earn money from making games with GS, you won't earn them if GS adds Admob, or any other monetization services. This is pretty simple - if you can't earn money, your game probably isn't good enough - adding ads won't make your game any better - it can make it only worse, if you ask me. As a player I hate ads.
What!! You cannot be serious. Some apps and a lot of apps that are NOT games can make money from ads. I have the evidence in some of my own apps. I make good money from Ads. Your generalisations are simply wrong.
I accept the different opinions about Ads but even if Admob is functional in GS you can still choose NOT to use them in your publications and I can choose to use them. Everyone is happy.
(Kiip discussion does relate to ad revenue as admob does....basically the Admob agitators are going to keep agitating wherever they can!)
For Gamesalad to be a productive pro tool the have to keep up! The current trend is the free model using IAP or ads and the like. I was planing on using Kiip in my game I have under development and now GS is pulling the plug and they have no plan B. Hey Steve do us all a favor and hire some REAL talent and people who can get things done and who can make business deals! GS needs to seriously step up their Game. I'm glad I'm learning Unity.
Wow! This stinks. I really liked Kiip. It was just starting to pay off. I'm not happy about this change at all. How are you going to motivate people to use your product when you discontinue services after such a short period of time?
It's hard for me to believe that we are getting the full story on this one. GameSalad must know how much time it takes to create a high quality game even with a fast tool like GS. When Kiip came out I began the process of adding it to some of my older games. I then began to think of ways to add it to the games that I had in my development pipeline. Recently I have changed the entire scoring system of my Spinja game and purchased new art to make it all work so that I could implement kiip. I also had two other games that had the kiip achievement system as an integral part of the game. My kids go back to school tomorrow and I will finally be able to get back to work. The plan was to release 4 kiip games this fall. Needless to say I'm not pleased.
This sounds like a business decision that was made without any thought to the effect it would have on GS developers. Frankly, I'm disappointed and a bit offended that the official reason for dropping kiip was blamed on us. I'm not buying it.
Without users seeing that it works in the first place how can you expect users to start using it. By hiding the revenues it produces and delaying payments you can't expect people to welcome it with open arms.
By removing Kiip it stops people seeing visible results the product produces and therefore later attempts of integrating Kiip are likely to be as unsuccessful as the current system (unless it builds a reputation from other IOS developers outside the community).
i'd say stop wasting your efforts on these side things... and focus on building a really fast performing and easy to use software.. if you can't get people to buy into the main product you sell, it doesn't matter how many trinkets you incorporate. focus on your core product... and we'll focus on building amazing games, instead of these advertisements! seriously, how does advertisement add value to the player? we've all seen the millions of trinkets that's tried and failed. how many more times do you need to try? put every effort towards the items on the roadmap that gives us more functions/ features / performance/stability/more platform(windows 7 for example, or xbox,playstation etc). REAL BENEFITS= REAL RESULTS!
Hi everyone, I am convinced that NextPeer Multiplayer is the add-on that will power up Game Salad. I have talked to the CEO and they can help with the integration.
tenrdrmerMember, Sous Chef, Senior Sous-ChefPosts: 9,934
I gotta be honest GameSalad. I don't see how this was a well thought out business choice. I'm forced to agree with most of the users posting there complaints here.
I'm torn on the whole thing. I have not personally used Kiip at all but i have mainly been doing contract work since Kiip came out. And since Kiip is tied to my GS account its not something i can offer a client. So I really don't know what to think about the option being removed. It seems like the major thing would be an immediate replacement for kiip should have been right here with this announcement
I think another reason a ton of people have not used Kiip or Playhaven is we have nothing for multiple months in regards to anyalitics so we cannot judge for ourselves how its doing. 2 months down the road is way to long to find out your app has flopped.
I understand GS needs to find more revenue streams but surely there could have been a way to have the kiip behavior add some sort of identifier to our own Kiip accounts so kiip knew what apps where GS apps or not. GS could still be paid out of Kiips share and We as the developer have control of our reporting Anyalitics. and know how its working. The more people have success and able to report early success would have made a huge difference in users adopting this new model.
As far as Admob. (Sorry for the deviation from the thread topic) You guys have the numbers to say Admob doesn't make enough to be worth it and that fine and dandy but who's call is it as to whats enough. If you can get it put in easily as people say then why not? its something else to offer. If there's a legit hurdle besides its not worth the effort just say what it is. And My god i really hope its not because you cant get Google to give you a cut. that would be a horrible revelation to the priorities of GameSalad.
Cheers guys. hope to here more explanation on this in the future
To me it's starting to look like GS as currently constituted can't take this software to the next level. I think it's time for GS to begin looking for a major software company to buy their company and take this thing to the heights it needs to be at. I seriously wonder about the Leadership at Gamesalad as it seems to be lacking. It's time for Steve to step up his Game and push this company along or find someone who can.
I think I have a different attitude about this whole situation, and GS. I just prefer to keep making games, and enjoying this great piece of software, which helps me making dreams come true, than worry about little bugs, or absent features. Sure I would like Universal binaries, sprites, and custom, good looking fonts in Display Text Behavior, but I'm pretty much happy with things, there already are. Think I'm just a type of positive optimist
@tshirtbooth agreed... these are the benefits that we need. and I can imagine if i was an investors, I probably want my money back asap too. the thing is... if you as a company panic and tries to find ways to make that quick buck, your investor won't have enough confidence in you either, you really need to stead fast and focus on your core product like tshirtbooth said. it's like watching a tower falling in slow motion... c'mon guys.. step up to the game... u been doing good so far... and we are all still here...
Klip or no Klip doesn't affect me as I don't see rewards and games as viable. I just wanna play a good game. I'm not going to sign up for rewards system to play a game. I'll just download something similar!!!. I downloaded a game recently by a major studio that wanted me to login elsewhere to earn content for a game I'd paid for!! Not good.
I do agree that removing it this quickly and with little notice is not a good look. I can only guess that the cost building and integrating the backend has blown out and doesn't track well with the conversion rate! In today's short term ROI world this is inevitable. But also short sighted as this backlash tells you! Real point is that community is desperate for AdMob!
That said, if you asked me, Do we carry on throwing money on Klip or pump out an improved creator stability and engine performance sooner? The answer is simple :-). The issue is that we are NOT asked!
I guess the windows version was inevitable as there are only so many mac based, so called non programming game creating enthusiasts with time and capability out there. The web based publishing should see an increase in windows users going pro rather than rely on a friend to publish for them I guess. This might address the revenue opportunity base.
Bugs and feature balance is also just a fact of life bug not knowing if it's getting anywhere near being considered is frustrating for many it would transpire!
Real issue is the 'OVERALL COMMUNICATION' has been poor recently. I do sympathise in some respects when roadmap promises are missed/not as expected and people jump on the bandwagon! And publishing a roadmap gives a heads up to competitors so I understand the challenge!!!!
I bought a very expensive mac and a month later a windows version announced!!! I'm happy with mac but my choices were at that time limited to other creators! I choose gamesalad purely for the tables feature and because it was an established large company!!!! Now, please start acting like one!
I’d like to add some additional background on Kiip and a few thoughts on how we are going to improve ad supported solutions going forward.
First off, we wanted to be early adopters of Kiip so we could bring an innovative monetization opportunity to our community that no other game development platform was offering. We took a risk in being a pioneer and over the coming months we discovered some drawbacks to the current Kiip implementation, which was compounded by the relative lack of adoption by the community.
It’s important to understand that 3rd party products require significant integration and support costs to maintain full functionality in each build of Creator we release. As such, we learned that we needed to be selective about the number of products we choose to integrate going forward, as each one increases our ongoing engineering overhead and impacts our ability to develop new features.
We believe that having a solid ad supported solution is a high priority for our community. Our current implementation of Kiip was problematic for a few reasons: 1) it did not have strong coverage internationally, making it ideal for US games only, 2) we noticed that unless your game had a certain threshold of traffic, it was hard to generate significant revenue compared to traditional ad networks, and 3) it required our developers to integrate the service into the game design process, which resulted in unexpectedly low adoption by developers.
So based on all of this, we had a tough decision to make: do we continue to invest time and resources into maintaining Kiip at the expense of other features for a small set of developers, or do we move forward with a more traditional ad solution that will be easier to maintain and ultimately monetize better for a broader group of developers? We chose the latter and hopefully you can understand our thought process leading to that decision.
I’d like to personally apologize to those of you that invested your time in implementing Kiip. We feel bad that it didn’t work out as well as we had initially hoped for, but we also wanted to move forward quickly with a solution that makes the best sense for everyone. We knew that this would upset some of you, but we made a tough decision that we think will ultimately benefit the vast majority of our developer community over the long run.
So what are we going to do to address the need for better ad-supported solutions?
First off, I’d like to remind everyone that Playhaven continues to generate over $10 eCPMs and has consistently proven to monetize significantly higher than AdMob or other similar ad supported solutions.
Second, we are finalizing a partnership with what we believe is one of the best ad supported solutions out there and is both easy to implement for developers and easy for us to maintain. We’ll have more details to share at a later date, but I can tell you that we’re targeting a mediation solution that will provide access to multiple networks (including AdMob), works on both iOS and Android, has excellent international coverage and fill rates, and has a great reputation for being one of the most effective monetization solutions in the industry.
With respect to the reporting concerns, we are working on an automated solution that will provide timely updates on revenue performance. This will take some additional time to build out, and since only a small number of you are currently using Kiip, we’re likely going to send out a manual update in a week or so. We’ll have more details on Kiip reporting in the coming days.
Lastly, this thread is also bringing up a lot of other good questions regarding feature development priorities. Instead of responding to each one individually, I’m going to post an updated near-term roadmap so you have a better sense for what’s coming down the pipeline and how we’re trying to balance the numerous priorities of our developer community.
Again, I’d like to apologize for any frustrations this has caused some of you. Please understand that this was a difficult business decision we made because we think it’s in the best long-term interest of the community.
Back to Klip. I believe that the number of users (or lack of) utilising Klip at this stage is based on its worthiness to the community and game world in general. Rewards systems are purely marketing machines in the real-world. Rewards Cards for this. Membership point to get a cheap toaster etc etc. If me little world I wish I just had one card that could be used in all stores and that gave me a reward that mean't something i.e. cash.
The Crux of the issue ==============
I believe like any business GS would need to rely on conversation rates and the trend of these conversions held justify or not the ongoing cost of feature/maintenance/support.
Best way to get the conversion rates up are (in no particular order)
1. Broaden your PRO user base (Recent price reduction should help there). 2. Maintain your existing PRO members(New features). 3. Broaden you overall user base. (The addition of the Windows Creator should see a gradual incline in PRO's users). Especially when the web based publishing is available. I am assuming here that eventually we will be able to add the relevant certificate etc in a cloud service and allow GS to build and publish! 4. Reporting for Klip/Playhaven. All the forums have said for months is "When will I get?" etc etc. Puts others off of trying 5. Publish the success stories. Then others will add the feature to their games. 6. Give it time. Success breeds success.
Trust me to fire off a post and in-between SF gets in there with a clear post.
Thanks Steve. I guess many of us understood the issue (Made a stab of assuming what was going on and the real reason) but were getting a little frustrated about not knowing what is and isn't getting worked on too which, IMHO, compounded the issue.
Very much looking forward to the roadmap type post Steve.....seems a pretty long time since the last one!
As @tshirtbooth has said though... it is VERY frustrating to even be thinking about talking about ad solutions for this, or that or the other, when it seems there are some very frustrating things about the creator as it stands at the mo.
Many of us here have been soldiering on for what seems like forever in the hope that the "little things" would get improved upon over time. And, yes, to some extent, this has happened.........slowely.......
Who here remembers initial loading times of 20-30 seconds for a pretty empty game? I do!
And yet, soooooooooooooo many niggles still exist. Let's be honest here, the scene designer (which SHOULD be the biggest selling point for GS in my opinion....only Stencyl has anything as like for like) is kinda terrible to use much of the time....only recently does it seem like anything is happening with it, but frustratingly to the majority of us, it's happening to the side....on windows......and who knows when some of these changes will arrive for us mac users???? This year???? Next year????? The GS team's fear of even hinting at any kind of timescale still persists after all these years.
meh.
---edit That's not to say I won't keep soldiering on.....and moaning about it a bit now and then.
@Sparkyidr I hear you. Please understand we get so many different requests for feature development that it's impossible to make everyone happy at any given moment, but we're doing our best to systematically work our way through the community's top priorities. I'll be sure to address the plans for the Mac scene editor redesign in the updated roadmap post.
RiP Kiip and Playhaven may be not far behind. Developers need to see stats or they will not use it. I'd rather throw my lot in with Admob thanks as I can assess my own progress, have payment records etc.
Good to hear from @SF that there is something in the works. Beware GS of jumping on early platforms - you have learnt some valuable lessons from Kiip (stick with the bog boys!).
@uptimistik I'll address many of the feature requests you made in the roadmap post. FYI, we update the HTML5 engine continuously, though it definitely is in need of some key improvements.
Comments
I would love some kind of reply from GS regarding the questions about Kiip. I can not stress how much time and effort I've put into Kiip, which has now been wasted.
It seems to me that there is more going on then just "not enough developers utilize this feature"
Please can we get some responses GS
I accept the different opinions about Ads but even if Admob is functional in GS you can still choose NOT to use them in your publications and I can choose to use them. Everyone is happy.
(Kiip discussion does relate to ad revenue as admob does....basically the Admob agitators are going to keep agitating wherever they can!)
Kiip is Dead, Long Live Admob
Guru Video Channel | Lost Oasis Games | FRYING BACON STUDIOS
Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home...
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Quantum_Sheep
Web: https://quantumsheep.itch.io
This sounds like a business decision that was made without any thought to the effect it would have on GS developers. Frankly, I'm disappointed and a bit offended that the official reason for dropping kiip was blamed on us. I'm not buying it.
simply because it is summer vacation time
Without users seeing that it works in the first place how can you expect users to start using it. By hiding the revenues it produces and delaying payments you can't expect people to welcome it with open arms.
By removing Kiip it stops people seeing visible results the product produces and therefore later attempts of integrating Kiip are likely to be as unsuccessful as the current system (unless it builds a reputation from other IOS developers outside the community).
i'd say stop wasting your efforts on these side things... and focus on building a really fast performing and easy to use software.. if you can't get people to buy into the main product you sell, it doesn't matter how many trinkets you incorporate. focus on your core product... and we'll focus on building amazing games, instead of these advertisements! seriously, how does advertisement add value to the player? we've all seen the millions of trinkets that's tried and failed. how many more times do you need to try? put every effort towards the items on the roadmap that gives us more functions/ features / performance/stability/more platform(windows 7 for example, or xbox,playstation etc). REAL BENEFITS= REAL RESULTS!
sincerely,
-U
I'm torn on the whole thing. I have not personally used Kiip at all but i have mainly been doing contract work since Kiip came out. And since Kiip is tied to my GS account its not something i can offer a client. So I really don't know what to think about the option being removed. It seems like the major thing would be an immediate replacement for kiip should have been right here with this announcement
I think another reason a ton of people have not used Kiip or Playhaven is we have nothing for multiple months in regards to anyalitics so we cannot judge for ourselves how its doing. 2 months down the road is way to long to find out your app has flopped.
I understand GS needs to find more revenue streams but surely there could have been a way to have the kiip behavior add some sort of identifier to our own Kiip accounts so kiip knew what apps where GS apps or not. GS could still be paid out of Kiips share and We as the developer have control of our reporting Anyalitics. and know how its working. The more people have success and able to report early success would have made a huge difference in users adopting this new model.
As far as Admob. (Sorry for the deviation from the thread topic) You guys have the numbers to say Admob doesn't make enough to be worth it and that fine and dandy but who's call is it as to whats enough. If you can get it put in easily as people say then why not? its something else to offer. If there's a legit hurdle besides its not worth the effort just say what it is. And My god i really hope its not because you cant get Google to give you a cut. that would be a horrible revelation to the priorities of GameSalad.
Cheers guys. hope to here more explanation on this in the future
Guru Video Channel | Lost Oasis Games | FRYING BACON STUDIOS
Sure I would like Universal binaries, sprites, and custom, good looking fonts in Display Text Behavior, but I'm pretty much happy with things, there already are.
Think I'm just a type of positive optimist
I do agree that removing it this quickly and with little notice is not a good look. I can only guess that the cost building and integrating the backend has blown out and doesn't track well with the conversion rate! In today's short term ROI world this is inevitable. But also short sighted as this backlash tells you! Real point is that community is desperate for AdMob!
That said, if you asked me, Do we carry on throwing money on Klip or pump out an improved creator stability and engine performance sooner? The answer is simple :-). The issue is that we are NOT asked!
I guess the windows version was inevitable as there are only so many mac based, so called non programming game creating enthusiasts with time and capability out there. The web based publishing should see an increase in windows users going pro rather than rely on a friend to publish for them I guess. This might address the revenue opportunity base.
Bugs and feature balance is also just a fact of life bug not knowing if it's getting anywhere near being considered is frustrating for many it would transpire!
Real issue is the 'OVERALL COMMUNICATION' has been poor recently. I do sympathise in some respects when roadmap promises are missed/not as expected and people jump on the bandwagon! And publishing a roadmap gives a heads up to competitors so I understand the challenge!!!!
I bought a very expensive mac and a month later a windows version announced!!! I'm happy with mac but my choices were at that time limited to other creators! I choose gamesalad purely for the tables feature and because it was an established large company!!!! Now, please start acting like one!
I’d like to add some additional background on Kiip and a few thoughts on how we are going to improve ad supported solutions going forward.
First off, we wanted to be early adopters of Kiip so we could bring an innovative monetization opportunity to our community that no other game development platform was offering. We took a risk in being a pioneer and over the coming months we discovered some drawbacks to the current Kiip implementation, which was compounded by the relative lack of adoption by the community.
It’s important to understand that 3rd party products require significant integration and support costs to maintain full functionality in each build of Creator we release. As such, we learned that we needed to be selective about the number of products we choose to integrate going forward, as each one increases our ongoing engineering overhead and impacts our ability to develop new features.
We believe that having a solid ad supported solution is a high priority for our community. Our current implementation of Kiip was problematic for a few reasons: 1) it did not have strong coverage internationally, making it ideal for US games only, 2) we noticed that unless your game had a certain threshold of traffic, it was hard to generate significant revenue compared to traditional ad networks, and 3) it required our developers to integrate the service into the game design process, which resulted in unexpectedly low adoption by developers.
So based on all of this, we had a tough decision to make: do we continue to invest time and resources into maintaining Kiip at the expense of other features for a small set of developers, or do we move forward with a more traditional ad solution that will be easier to maintain and ultimately monetize better for a broader group of developers? We chose the latter and hopefully you can understand our thought process leading to that decision.
I’d like to personally apologize to those of you that invested your time in implementing Kiip. We feel bad that it didn’t work out as well as we had initially hoped for, but we also wanted to move forward quickly with a solution that makes the best sense for everyone. We knew that this would upset some of you, but we made a tough decision that we think will ultimately benefit the vast majority of our developer community over the long run.
So what are we going to do to address the need for better ad-supported solutions?
First off, I’d like to remind everyone that Playhaven continues to generate over $10 eCPMs and has consistently proven to monetize significantly higher than AdMob or other similar ad supported solutions.
Second, we are finalizing a partnership with what we believe is one of the best ad supported solutions out there and is both easy to implement for developers and easy for us to maintain. We’ll have more details to share at a later date, but I can tell you that we’re targeting a mediation solution that will provide access to multiple networks (including AdMob), works on both iOS and Android, has excellent international coverage and fill rates, and has a great reputation for being one of the most effective monetization solutions in the industry.
With respect to the reporting concerns, we are working on an automated solution that will provide timely updates on revenue performance. This will take some additional time to build out, and since only a small number of you are currently using Kiip, we’re likely going to send out a manual update in a week or so. We’ll have more details on Kiip reporting in the coming days.
Lastly, this thread is also bringing up a lot of other good questions regarding feature development priorities. Instead of responding to each one individually, I’m going to post an updated near-term roadmap so you have a better sense for what’s coming down the pipeline and how we’re trying to balance the numerous priorities of our developer community.
Again, I’d like to apologize for any frustrations this has caused some of you. Please understand that this was a difficult business decision we made because we think it’s in the best long-term interest of the community.
Regards,
Steve
The Crux of the issue
==============
I believe like any business GS would need to rely on conversation rates and the trend of these conversions held justify or not the ongoing cost of feature/maintenance/support.
Best way to get the conversion rates up are (in no particular order)
1. Broaden your PRO user base (Recent price reduction should help there).
2. Maintain your existing PRO members(New features).
3. Broaden you overall user base. (The addition of the Windows Creator should see a gradual incline in PRO's users). Especially when the web based publishing is available. I am assuming here that eventually we will be able to add the relevant certificate etc in a cloud service and allow GS to build and publish!
4. Reporting for Klip/Playhaven. All the forums have said for months is "When will I get?" etc etc. Puts others off of trying
5. Publish the success stories. Then others will add the feature to their games.
6. Give it time. Success breeds success.
Thanks Steve. I guess many of us understood the issue (Made a stab of assuming what was going on and the real reason) but were getting a little frustrated about not knowing what is and isn't getting worked on too which, IMHO, compounded the issue.
I eagerly await your update.
Many Thanks.
[EDIT] - Fixed a typo!
As @tshirtbooth has said though... it is VERY frustrating to even be thinking about talking about ad solutions for this, or that or the other, when it seems there are some very frustrating things about the creator as it stands at the mo.
Many of us here have been soldiering on for what seems like forever in the hope that the "little things" would get improved upon over time.
And, yes, to some extent, this has happened.........slowely.......
Who here remembers initial loading times of 20-30 seconds for a pretty empty game?
I do!
And yet, soooooooooooooo many niggles still exist. Let's be honest here, the scene designer (which SHOULD be the biggest selling point for GS in my opinion....only Stencyl has anything as like for like) is kinda terrible to use much of the time....only recently does it seem like anything is happening with it, but frustratingly to the majority of us, it's happening to the side....on windows......and who knows when some of these changes will arrive for us mac users???? This year???? Next year????? The GS team's fear of even hinting at any kind of timescale still persists after all these years.
meh.
---edit
That's not to say I won't keep soldiering on.....and moaning about it a bit now and then.
Good to hear from @SF that there is something in the works.
Beware GS of jumping on early platforms - you have learnt some valuable lessons from Kiip (stick with the bog boys!).
Not "quite" true.
Deffo "run" by one guy from my understanding. But there are a number of people coding, seemingly in a sort of collective fashion.