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Sounds like Adobe finally figured out how to monetize Flash. Too bad it's at the expense of their most important resources, their developers.
> Sounds like Adobe finally figured out how to monetize Flash Adobe sells a Flash authoring app for $700, wouldn't that be considered monetizing it?
Seems like a pretty ridiculous idea to me.
This move is currently getting HA-HA'ed here on HN but it's a fairly decent move. Some people have no choice but to use flash (mostly game-makers). Some of them, like Zynga rake in big money. Adobe looks like they might get a piece of that action. What's to laugh at?
No options? Silverlight? WebGL? Sure they may not be perfect, but for 9% of revenue, companies will consider alternatives pretty quickly
The sooner Adobe makes Flash go away, the better.
Adobe announced a brand new licensing structure for Flash games You should definitely read the details as Adobe explains them here: www.adobe.com/go/fpl and here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/premium-fea... The short version is that Adobe is introducing a new revenue share licensing model where they will take a revenue share from some content publishers. Adobe will charge publishers 9% of only the revenues directly caused by the game which exceed $50K. If revenue is not directly caused by the game you pay nothing. i.e. An online teaser level for a iOS / Android game, a car company having a realtime 3d demo of their newest model which you can inspect and drive around, a 3d walkthrough for a library, etc, all would not pay the revenue share. We see this as Flash positioning itself alongside other well known distribution channels: make money through the App Store, Apple takes a share. Make money through the Android Market place, Google takes a share. Make money through Flash, Adobe takes a share. It’s also worth noting that the new Adobe license will prohibit scenarios where you’d have the first level of a game in the Flash Player, and the full experience inside the Unity Web Player. Alas, this is something you’ll need to be aware of if you were considering such a route.
You see, Flash is not web technology.Neither is iOS, or Android. Flash was web tech, a long,long time ago, but frankly the web hasn't evolved fast enough to keep up. HTML5 is still nowhere close to flash. WebGL is, but that's not exactly standard.
I'll be curious to hear how Adobe plans on enforcing/auditing this. There are but a handful of gaming companies, I suspect, that would be affected (Rovio, EA, Zynga), but still.
I wonder what counts as making net revenue with Flash that would cause this to kick in. Advertising agencies have been charging clients well over $50,000 to build flash sites for years. Are they going to have to start giving Adobe a 9% cut of everything made on their client work?
"It's not clear to me how requiring programmers to pay to use something that was previously free will spark innovation." Steve doesn't understand his own article. The whole point is that they're changing for completely new functionality. These aren't improvements of the existing flash player, they're completely new additions. And beyond that the vast majority of devs will never even have to think about it. You have t…
It's not completely new functionality. Adobe Alchemy, for example, has been free since 2008 and is used by a number of popular Flash apps and games. Of course they can charge for it if they want, but they're now competing with Unity, NaCL, UDK, and HTML5, so it is going to be a hard sell.
Plus UDK has a similar deal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No options? Silverlight? WebGL? Sure they may not be perfect, but for 9% of revenue, companies will consider alternatives pretty quickly
Why would they switch? These are new features they haven't been using and which probably aren't available on Silverlight or WebGL. Switch because they're adding an option you don't want to chose?
If a company has no plans to use these premium features, then yes, I would imagine they will continue along as-is with Flash.
But a last thought; a revenue sharing plan like this will make big players nervous - what might Adobe starting charging for next? It will cause developers to start at least considering alternatives.
I don't really see a problem with this. From the Unity3D blog [1]. Adobe announced a brand new licensing structure for Flash games You should definitely read the details as Adobe explains them here: www.adobe.com/go/fpl and here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/premium-fea... The short version is that Adobe is introducing a new revenue share licensing model where they will take a revenue share from s…
What I don't understand is the timing of this. Since it is popularly believed that HTML5 will kill Flash in the near future and that Adobe has stopped developing the mobile plugin (neither is true). This will only give Flash detractors more ammo. Adobe needs to do some damage control before they add more drag to one of their flagship products.