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.domainMemory is required when using the Alchemy compiler which allows compiling and running C/C++ code in Flash Player. (Hmmm.. seems like a competitor to Google's NaCl)
While Stage3D.request3DContext is required for using Stage3D which enables hardware acceleration in Flash Player. Angry Birds on Facebook already uses this.
Most games coded natively in Flash/AS3 won't require both. However, I'm not sure whether Unity's export to Flash and Unreal's export to Flash require Alchemy.
In any case, the revenue share is only required when both features are used. However, again the media aren't communicating the whole deal and again it's Adobe's fault for coming up with such weird/complex terms.
Edit:
After some quick research, it seems both Unity and Unreal's export to Flash Player feature require both Alchemy and Stage3D to work. So it looks like what Adobe are trying to do here is to generate some revenue from their 'platform' as otherwise they wouldn't receive a dime from all those Unity devs who would have easily exported their project to run on Flash Player which has a ton more penetration than Unity Web Player.
I think it is unfortunate though that they chose a 'revenue share' model.
It would have been a lot better for the end developers if Adobe just charged Unity and Epic a licensing fee for targeting Flash Player.
Well, shit... Alchemy+Stage3D is directly a competitor to NaCl+WebGL. By refusing to help NaCl become open-standards-worthy, Mozilla is going to end up watching Alchemy beat out NaCl (and Emscriptem) with a completely proprietary, revenue-shared (and therefore implicitly licensor-dependent) alternative.
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 winning proposition to me!
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".
I believe too many are jumping the gun on this one. Based on the rather strict requirements I would say this change is irrelevant to the majority of the Flash developers out there. It seems to be aimed at the developers that might be making an Unreal engine game (as an example) and wish to port it over to Flash for whatever reason. Most likely these are projects in the high dollar development range expecting a high return. Adobe simply wants a cut of that revenue just like every other major game tools creator out there. Epic Games has a similar deal with using the UDK platform. Some of you are simply reading too much into this.
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?
Is it out the question that that's part of the equation here? Adobe is making Canvas tools after all. Flash is going to increasingly become a cost center for Adobe (support cost remain as profits diminish), so why not cannibalize that business by sending developers to another one of your products? And grab some cash from the suckers who refuse to leave Flash behind.
Or they've decided that Flash has already lost to HTML5, so they're looking to squeeze as much money as they can out of Flash's remaining developers on the way down.
If I was developing for the Flash platform, this would make me seek alternatives immediately. Sure, maybe the premium licensing isn't needed for my app now, but the cat is out of the bag. Why would I invest time/money into a platform that could change terms and take a % of my revenue at any moment?
Then I suppose you should never use any commercial development platforms because that possibility is there for them all. Stick with open source I suppose.
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 failed to make flash better, and they failed to make AIR better. At this point, they are just shooting a dead horse in the face. This is an inexplicable move, the exodus has already begin. This then is going to be the final warning alarm before the train leaves the station. There will be few who can risk getting left behind now.It's over.
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..
I ranted a bit when this news was first posted on HN late last night, now that I've had more time to mull it over, it just pisses me off even more. It seems like every Adobe press release these days is like a gorgeous chocolate cake...
...with cigarette butts stubbed out in it.
I write games in Actionscript every day, that's my day job and it was going to be my night job too. The state of Flash development has never been worse than it is right now, and it is largely because of Adobe's utter incompetence at building tools for targeting the Flash VM. Their documentation ranges from mediocre to horrendous, their frameworks have sprawled far too much, and the runtime is needlessly fragmented. They threw in the towel on mobile development months ago. Then they killed (more or less) their Linux support. So much for write once run anywhere. And what did they declare as their new strategy? Games. Console quality, AAA dev worthy games. They're betting the whole flash ecosystem farm on people playing GPU accelerated, high quality games in the browser. Not the worst idea they've ever had, but not particularly inventive.
Obviously they were going to have to make some money off of this new initiative, and I naively assumed that they would build a really great toolset for developing these games. For some really ridiculous reason, I actually thought that they would get back in the business of building tools to let people create really great content (they haven't been selling the best tools for making Flash content for the last 4 years or so, so I thought maybe they would change that).
Instead we get this, the chocolate cake with cigarette butts stamped out in it. I fully understand that Adobe have not had the time to actually develop a useful developer's kit for game dev targeted at the Flash runtime. In fact, it might not ever be appropriate for them to do so. But right now they are struggling mightily just to remain relevant, so it seemed natural to me that whatever they did come up with would really give devs an incentive to consider their runtime and workflow as a reasonable, efficient, and cost effective option.
Instead some greedy twit seems to have taken a gander at UDK licensing costs (25% off gross after your first 50 grand in revenue), and thought, "we can charge that!" If they offered a tenth of what UDK actually offers, then they might very well have been able to charge what they're going after--9% off net from pretty much all revenue in excess of 50 grand, virtual items, whatever. How very generous of them. But what are you actually getting for this big chunk of your profit?
You're getting Alchemy, a cross compiler that compiles C/C++ into AS bytecode to be executed by the Flash VM or a binary compiled for iOS. Are you getting an industry leading developer's toolkit like Unreal? An amazing engine? A version of Gears of War 3 or some other equally massive/ambitious game to use as a starting point to base your project around? No, you'll still have to pay Unreal for that (or Unity or write your own game engine) and pay their licensing fees (remember, that's 25% off gross). Alchemy was introduced years ago, and at the time, it was just a one man project (if that, it seemed like it was just a part time project at the time). Cross-compile C and C++ into AS bytecode, sweet. Cost: free. I seriously doubt that this stopgap, bullshit, announcement has been preceded by considerably more development into Alchemy, and even if they have thrown dozens of people at the project for the last 6 months, it can't possibly justify the cost. I would think they would work for longer than 6 months on flagship product announcements that are the lynchpin for their entire damned roadmap, but at Adobe, roadmaps themselves don't seem to last that long. So will any giant game developer actually use this? I can't see how it's viable for them to use it at the public royalty rates. Maybe Zynga can get a better licensing contract than us poor schlubs, but there's no way they're going to throw away 9% of their net after blowing through 55% on Unreal and Facebook's take before even considering their own costs.
So true about the documentation and APIs. In the network stack for example, if you do certain things to a POST, Flash actually stops using HTTP and starts using "XML Sockets" which runs over a different port, and AFAIK is something Abobe just made up one day. This happens silently and can be triggered in a couple different subtle ways. They need to fix nonsense like this before I can take Flash seriously again.
I don't think Adobe understands the concept of "substitution"--namely, that for most things, HTML5 seems to far outweigh Adobe's inferior Flash. So charging for Flash may prove to be a bone-headed move.
This being said, what better way to force a spin-off than to totally wreck that side of the business' pricing?
Given that there's a grace period until August 1, I suspect we're going to see a lot of barely-working applications and games released before then, just so they can get grandfathered in before they're made to function properly.
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.
$50K isn't really that much. This will basically affect anyone trying to make a serious commercial 3D flash game with Unity, UDK or a custom engine. This includes small indie developers that might want to target flash as a platform as well. The 9% would also apply to UDK games like QUBE or Antichamber, if they decided to release a web versions.
You've obviously never worked in the business world. It's all built on trust. You either have it, or you don't. When you sign a contract with these companies, you give them the right to, if they so choose, ask for all your records to review at any given point in time.
I'm not at liberty to go into specifics, but for example one company we deal with charges a flat royalty off of every product that includes their tech. At the end of the month, we send them exactly 2 statistics along with a check: how many items sold, and what we now owe them. (This is a huge company and we're talking on the scale of hundreds of thousands of dollars.)
When you're a company, you don't take stupid risks like cheating out your licensors over something less than half of what you're making. It's nowhere near being worth the risk, as even aside from any legal issues, fees, and compensations, if you get caught you can kiss that licensing agreement goodbye and then you have to start over from scratch with a different platform, a different provider, and different tech.
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?
[+] [-] chanon|14 years ago|reply
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.domainMemory is required when using the Alchemy compiler which allows compiling and running C/C++ code in Flash Player. (Hmmm.. seems like a competitor to Google's NaCl)
While Stage3D.request3DContext is required for using Stage3D which enables hardware acceleration in Flash Player. Angry Birds on Facebook already uses this.
Most games coded natively in Flash/AS3 won't require both. However, I'm not sure whether Unity's export to Flash and Unreal's export to Flash require Alchemy.
In any case, the revenue share is only required when both features are used. However, again the media aren't communicating the whole deal and again it's Adobe's fault for coming up with such weird/complex terms.
Edit:
After some quick research, it seems both Unity and Unreal's export to Flash Player feature require both Alchemy and Stage3D to work. So it looks like what Adobe are trying to do here is to generate some revenue from their 'platform' as otherwise they wouldn't receive a dime from all those Unity devs who would have easily exported their project to run on Flash Player which has a ton more penetration than Unity Web Player.
I think it is unfortunate though that they chose a 'revenue share' model.
It would have been a lot better for the end developers if Adobe just charged Unity and Epic a licensing fee for targeting Flash Player.
[+] [-] user2459|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corysama|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] king_magic|14 years ago|reply
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 winning proposition to me!
[+] [-] Mansyn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] talmand|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asto|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|14 years ago|reply
The fact that this is a pretty big incentive to change the situation of "some people [having] no choice but to use flash".
[+] [-] JonoW|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlapiduz|14 years ago|reply
Adobe seems pretty desperate here.
[+] [-] joezydeco|14 years ago|reply
In the meantime, it seems like a lot of unity devs are trying to figure out ways to get Facebook users to install the player through sneaky methods.
[+] [-] overshard|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Karunamon|14 years ago|reply
"What th... seriously? It's almost like they WANT flash to lose to HTML5.."
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smacktoward|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pcestrada|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SaulOfTheJungle|14 years ago|reply
Adobe sells a Flash authoring app for $700, wouldn't that be considered monetizing it?
[+] [-] ihateatmfees|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] talmand|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] khalidmbajwa|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brico|14 years ago|reply
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..
[+] [-] 9999|14 years ago|reply
...with cigarette butts stubbed out in it.
I write games in Actionscript every day, that's my day job and it was going to be my night job too. The state of Flash development has never been worse than it is right now, and it is largely because of Adobe's utter incompetence at building tools for targeting the Flash VM. Their documentation ranges from mediocre to horrendous, their frameworks have sprawled far too much, and the runtime is needlessly fragmented. They threw in the towel on mobile development months ago. Then they killed (more or less) their Linux support. So much for write once run anywhere. And what did they declare as their new strategy? Games. Console quality, AAA dev worthy games. They're betting the whole flash ecosystem farm on people playing GPU accelerated, high quality games in the browser. Not the worst idea they've ever had, but not particularly inventive.
Obviously they were going to have to make some money off of this new initiative, and I naively assumed that they would build a really great toolset for developing these games. For some really ridiculous reason, I actually thought that they would get back in the business of building tools to let people create really great content (they haven't been selling the best tools for making Flash content for the last 4 years or so, so I thought maybe they would change that).
Instead we get this, the chocolate cake with cigarette butts stamped out in it. I fully understand that Adobe have not had the time to actually develop a useful developer's kit for game dev targeted at the Flash runtime. In fact, it might not ever be appropriate for them to do so. But right now they are struggling mightily just to remain relevant, so it seemed natural to me that whatever they did come up with would really give devs an incentive to consider their runtime and workflow as a reasonable, efficient, and cost effective option.
Instead some greedy twit seems to have taken a gander at UDK licensing costs (25% off gross after your first 50 grand in revenue), and thought, "we can charge that!" If they offered a tenth of what UDK actually offers, then they might very well have been able to charge what they're going after--9% off net from pretty much all revenue in excess of 50 grand, virtual items, whatever. How very generous of them. But what are you actually getting for this big chunk of your profit?
You're getting Alchemy, a cross compiler that compiles C/C++ into AS bytecode to be executed by the Flash VM or a binary compiled for iOS. Are you getting an industry leading developer's toolkit like Unreal? An amazing engine? A version of Gears of War 3 or some other equally massive/ambitious game to use as a starting point to base your project around? No, you'll still have to pay Unreal for that (or Unity or write your own game engine) and pay their licensing fees (remember, that's 25% off gross). Alchemy was introduced years ago, and at the time, it was just a one man project (if that, it seemed like it was just a part time project at the time). Cross-compile C and C++ into AS bytecode, sweet. Cost: free. I seriously doubt that this stopgap, bullshit, announcement has been preceded by considerably more development into Alchemy, and even if they have thrown dozens of people at the project for the last 6 months, it can't possibly justify the cost. I would think they would work for longer than 6 months on flagship product announcements that are the lynchpin for their entire damned roadmap, but at Adobe, roadmaps themselves don't seem to last that long. So will any giant game developer actually use this? I can't see how it's viable for them to use it at the public royalty rates. Maybe Zynga can get a better licensing contract than us poor schlubs, but there's no way they're going to throw away 9% of their net after blowing through 55% on Unreal and Facebook's take before even considering their own costs.
[+] [-] kj12345|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kinofcain|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomrod|14 years ago|reply
This being said, what better way to force a spin-off than to totally wreck that side of the business' pricing?
[+] [-] marathe|14 years ago|reply
Seems like a pretty ridiculous idea to me.
[+] [-] lazerwalker|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtdominey|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Impossible|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crusso|14 years ago|reply
The sooner Adobe makes Flash go away, the better.
[+] [-] neilmiddleton|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|14 years ago|reply
I'm not at liberty to go into specifics, but for example one company we deal with charges a flat royalty off of every product that includes their tech. At the end of the month, we send them exactly 2 statistics along with a check: how many items sold, and what we now owe them. (This is a huge company and we're talking on the scale of hundreds of thousands of dollars.)
When you're a company, you don't take stupid risks like cheating out your licensors over something less than half of what you're making. It's nowhere near being worth the risk, as even aside from any legal issues, fees, and compensations, if you get caught you can kiss that licensing agreement goodbye and then you have to start over from scratch with a different platform, a different provider, and different tech.
[+] [-] Fargren|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeocool|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] SteveMcQwark|14 years ago|reply
2. Flash sites should die a horrible horrible death.
[+] [-] talmand|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AshleysBrain|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codesuela|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_baker|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitid_name|14 years ago|reply