Development Blog

Well time to put some money back for a ticket to the states next year.

Time to save money for the next update.....

I see "in my magic glass ball" a 10x increase in price.

lol

 

All good news Josh. Looking forward to gamedev new site.

It's nice to see gamedev was there (looking forward to their new site!). That's where you posted in my thread that I should give Leadwerks a second chance, and I'm very glad I did!

Time to save money for the next update.....

I see "in my magic glass ball" a 10x increase in price.

 

I hope that the price will stay low, this one of the greatest things of this engine

that was a joke of course.

 

I am confident that Josh believes in the indie/Garage development scheme, and not just the pocket book. I fear that investors might change that...(investors want profit) That was the reason for that comment.

I think to maintain a sustainable business, it is necessary to offer some products to professional developers at a professional price. However, I think the PC version of the engine will always have a relatively low price point(s).

Well about price there are two things to conider:

 

With current price you catch up a lot of "newcomers" and people with a small poket or people which know what they do and code a lot of things themselfs. So you maybe sell more but get a few bucks per sale.

 

With a price like 1000$ you will be always compared feature wise with other engines having this price-tag and don't get the clients with a small poket.

 

So it's a small path to walk upon. I dont want to be responsible to decide on that.

 

 

I'm still a big fan of plug-in philosophy. Buy what you need. Decide how much you want to spent.

With a price like 1000$ you will be always compared feature wise with other engines having this price-tag and don't get the clients with a small poket.

I will be very comfortable with this when the next major version comes out.

 

I'm still a big fan of plug-in philosophy. Buy what you need. Decide how much you want to spent.

I like the idea, but is practice it doesn't work. In a 3D engine, various subsystems affect each other in many ways.

I will be very comfortable with this when the next major version comes out.

 

I will stop using LE if it comes to that. The $1k Price tag I mean. Maybe I am reading between the lines here, but thats what I get from that.

Leadwerks 3.0 would be a much bigger product than what you have seen so far, with a lot more people working on it, and existing developers would get a big discount.

 

There's still a lot of improvements to make to 2.x, so I would not worry about a 3.0 too soon.

I would be very careful before jumping into bed with investors unless you KNOW FOR A FACT that you have the EXACT same long term vision in mind. I know that Blade3d, now defunct, and another project I won't name out of respect for what they are doing allowed investment capitol in order to grow the size of their operations and in the short term it was great but a little down the line and it started to hurt them.

 

Blade3d was bought out and then cannibalized by investors. It was one of the best editors out there but the investors just didn't care they said, "Where is the bottom line, TODAY" they didn't like it and they just screwed the founders and did whatever they wanted with the software which was in that particular case, was to bury it.

 

Then the other project got a lot of investment capital which grew their project a lot in the begginning. The investors wanted big picture features, while their customer base wanted the same features but they wanted to the little ones first. Anyway because they are bound to contracts with their big investors they have to priorize what they want. Which means they have, big and difficult to implement features that they have to put in first, while the smaller ones have to wait. As a result you have a strange development process that equals them having lots and lots of delays. That's my take on it, even though not being in the company myself I couldn't speak with 100 percent authority.

 

Anyway, I think one of the coolest things about Leadwerks is the fact that the development team is so small and nimble. You guys are very flexible to do whatever you want even it if means to buck popular conceptions in favor of 'risky' innovation.

 

You guys are sort of like Blender , which I mean as a compliment, and the sculpting program 'Sculptris'. Sculptris avoids handling sculpting the way that Zbrush does, is much much smaller, has a much smaller dev team, and yet somehow it mangages to have all the features that actually matter and it does what it does exceptionally well.

 

Investors don't always understand how to be or how to make a Sculptris or a blender or a Leadwerks but guys like Josh do. So, my only advise is to make sure your investors share the exact exact exact same vision as you do whereever it is that sharing the same vision counts the most.

 

I'm of the belief that game engines are works of art. And goodness knows that money doesn't always respect art the way that it probably should.

 

Go LE

very well put Pancakes..

 

As far as 3.0, yes if the feature set is majorly increased, I wouldn't mind paying for that... I guess it just depends on how it comes out.

 

I support Josh's decision. [not that is matters, since it is his engine ]... I get a little over zealous sometimes. )

I just can't see most of the people who have LE now dishing out $1k for a new version no matter how many features it has. I think he would be trading customers. He would lose the beginners/small indies looking to make their first game to maybe established indies. My wife would kill me if she knew I dropped $1k on a game engine, are you kidding me!

 

Those smaller platforms like iPhone or Android are much easier to develop games on. Most of the time they have gaming in mind and support well defined/diverse graphic API's. It would be cheaper for someone to just use what comes with the device.

 

I think I would feel find of cheated if 2.0 ended support and 3.0 cost $1k. I guess I kind of though as LE as something in my price range and it would kind of suck if it went out of my price range. Anyway, that's in the future. For now I guess I'll have fun with it.