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Adobe to charge Flash coders to use 'premium' features

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Re: Adobe to charge Flash coders to use 'premium' features

#31

Post by user2459 »

"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 to make over $50k with your flash product and you have to use the premium features.

Weather you like flash or not, these new features are great for online and ios game developers and cost Adobe a lot of time and money. Also weather you think about it or not, many of the mobile games you play are written in actionscript and running in Adobe air and air apps are specifically exempt from the fees.

So all in all, this is interesting news, but it's in no way as dramatic or devastating as some people would like to believe.

Re: Adobe to charge Flash coders to use 'premium' features

#32

Post by user2459 »

chanon wrote: post #8

More info at: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/premium-fea... Specifically: Premium features licensing will only be needed when both of the following APIs are used in the same application run in Flash Player: * ApplicationDomain.domainMemory, which provides access to domain memory * Stage3D.request3DContext, if using hardware acceleration -- From the article, it looks like ApplicationDomain.domainMemo…

Perhaps Unity and Epic declined the offer.

Re: Adobe to charge Flash coders to use 'premium' features

#34

Post by king_magic »

Mansyn wrote: post #7
king_magic wrote: post #4

Adobe sounds pretty clueless on this. I personally don't use Flash (unless I really, really can't help it); I look forward to the day when it's gone the way of the dinosaur. I think... I mean I guess it sounds like Adobe sees that Apple is able to get a percentage of revenue and be successful attracting developers, and they somehow think that they can do the same thing and also attract developers? Sounds like... a wi…

I think you're giving them too much credit. They are just relying on the staunch Apple/Adobe designers who refuse to use anything but what they've always used (like an artistic VB developer). Also Apple people are used to saying "How high?" whenever their beloved says "Jump".

Ha, yeah, I bet you're right. It blows my mind though - it just doesn't seem like a great business strategy.

Re: Adobe to charge Flash coders to use 'premium' features

#35

Post by brico »

khalidmbajwa wrote: post #23

I am a flash devoleper. Have been an ardent flash supporter for the past 7 years, but sadly, at this point, even i have to admit, it's Game Over. Adobe fucked up. Over, and over and over again. They had everything going for them, a large and and extremely smart, devoted community, a very rich and powerful authoring platform, and ,most importantly,ubiquity, but they got complacent, deluded by their own hype. They fail…

No, it's not over. Not yet. I think only a small percentage of developers make $50k / year per game/app.

And Stage3 is way ahead of what one day hopefully WebGL will offer. There's no way (at the moment) of producing the same quality application in HTML5/js with the same effort you need for Flash.

Mozilla released their cute browserQuest game yesterday, something "Realm of the Mad God" did 2+ years ago in Flash.

HTML5 is very likely to be the future but there's no way they can compete with Flash at least in the areas of Games (and Audio) at the moment..

Re: Adobe to charge Flash coders to use 'premium' features

#36

Post by kj12345 »

user2459 wrote: post #31

"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.

Re: Adobe to charge Flash coders to use 'premium' features

#38

Post by Danieru »

Trollhaven wrote: post #17
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not Reddit.

It's much less useful, it's much less open, it's much less intellectual, it's much less friendly, etc. Hacker News is a joke.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Re: Adobe to charge Flash coders to use 'premium' features

#39

Post by mikeocool »

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?

Re: Adobe to charge Flash coders to use 'premium' features

#40

Post by SteveMcQwark »

mikeocool wrote: post #39

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?

1. Flash sites won't be using the features in question.

2. Flash sites should die a horrible horrible death.

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