The new pricing system - What does it mean for you? - An answer!

Armelline

GameSalad have introduced a new pricing system.

The application is free to use, completely unlimited in functionality, for 15 days. After that you must pay either $19 a month for a Basic plan, or $29 a month for a Pro plan.

The big difference between the two plans is that Pro can publish games to mobile devices and Basic can only publish to the Arcade.

Who is definitely worse off now?

If you are a casual user who is playing around with making a game, you now only have 15 days to do so. After that, you have to decide if making your game is worth investing money in.

In the old model, you could spend as long as you wanted making your game, but you had to pay $299 for a Pro license as soon as you wanted to publish it, or you'd get ads added to your game by GameSalad, and couldn't monetise your game.

So the people who are worse off now are these two groups:

1. People who would never end up publishing any games.
2. People who would happily publish their game for free, with GameSalad-ads inserted, and no IAP or advertising that would earn you money.

So in essence, people who are worse off are people who would never make a game or never intended to profit from their game in any way.

Who is definitely better off now?

This one is easy. Anyone who every intends to actually publish a game that they want to either make money off, or remove the GameSalad branding from. This will be most Pro users.

You only need to pay for a Pro subscription during months you want to publish or update games. Every month of simple development you can use a Basic account.

So if you spent 11 months of the year working on your game, you now pay $238 instead of the $299 you had to pay before (or $349 if you were paying monthly).

So the people who are better off are these three groups:

1. People who spend most of the year working on their games without publishing or updating them on a regular basis.
2. People who bought Pro but never actually published a game that year.
3. People who don't actually need GameSalad at all for a lot of the year, as they pay someone else to make it. They'll probably be okay with just 1 or 2 months of Pro instead of a whole year.

Who is definitely not going to see any change?

People who are publishing games or updates every month will find they won't see a big difference. Someone like me who burns through a lot of games due to freelance work, or someone like @BigDave who pumps out tons of great games and updates them regularly, will end up needing the Pro account most, if not all months.

So the people who are not going to see a difference are:

1. Power-users who publish very regularly.

 Who is arguably worse off?

There's one more group of people who are arguably worse off. These are the people who spend more than a year making a game. If you work on a game during every month for 13 months, you're going to pay for 13 months of GameSalad instead of 12. If you work on your game during every month for 21 months, you're going to pay for 21 months instead of 12.

That said, not many people fall into this category. Most games that take over a year to develop either take so long as they're massive games - in which case the extra cost probably isn't a huge deal as it'll be a tiny part of the budget - or because they stop and start development, taking breaks. If the second is the case, though, the might end up saving money as they'll only pay for the months they're actually working on the game.

Why would GameSalad do this?

Well, only they know. But I'd assume they hope that they'll have enough non-Pro users subscribe to make up for any loss they incur from the current Pro users dipping in and out of Pro. It's a game, and only time will tell if it pays off. They might increase their revenue, or they might decrease it.

For me it's a welcome change, and I hope it's a big success.

ant_lad

My 2 cents-
Users should have been asked. If they had bothered, they would have gotten, and maybe used, 'better' ways of doing it. Take this: Keep the Pro at month to month with a discount for a year bought at one time.
Keep a 'Free' version that cannot publish, cannot import, etc. A Free version that comes with basic shapes and animations and sounds, etc so that people can use it in an extremely limited way. When they are ready, they 'go Pro' and here is the big kicker- they are literally 2 versions. When you go Pro, you need to download a Pro version, that way limiting what can be done illegally with the limited free version

AngryBoi

I would have liked to keep the 300$ yearly payment

Armelline

@tappwater Games said:
I would have liked to keep the 300$ yearly payment

Out of curiosity, why?

Lovejoy

@tappwater Games said:
I would have liked to keep the 300$ yearly payment

That options is still available.

AngryBoi

Oh I thought people were saying that gamesalad was changing to only monthlys. Nevermind

izam

Good analysis. This is a welcome change. I strongly support this move by Gamesalad.

Icebox

I think these are some of the issues ( just an opinion)

1- many don't mind publishing to arcade or ios for free with gs ads (no profit for gs)
2- small group willing to get pro to remove the gs load screen or to publish for android, while others want gs to offer paid work to others. (less profit for gs)

so gs is not really making the profit they deserve, to get rid of these two issues this was a good move, what else could they do ? even if they allow it for free without publishing to any platform you will still have a lot of people offering paid programming help to others, not that i'm against that, (i'm not against that at all) , but GS deserves more for the work they put into this engine.

I know that paying is not easy for everyone, but you will end up paying sooner or later if your serious about making games, I hope everyone find their way through though!

Good luck GS team & everyone.

tatiang

The only concern I have about this pricing model is that it impacts schools. I teach game design using GameSalad and it's handy to have free software for my 25-50 students per year who use it. To pay for that many licenses is going to cost my school $5,700-$11,400 or half of that with the current Studica discount if it still applies. It means that I can no longer use GameSalad as a teaching tool. That's assuming that (a) there isn't a free-for-education license and (b) there isn't a volume discount for schools. I don't know the answer to either of those but I'm interested to find out. I like the idea that I'm sending off a few dozen eighth graders each year who love GameSalad and will probably buy it in the near future...

dgackey

@tatiang

We already have a volume licensing plan in place for schools and we recently discounted it even further based on a lot of feedback from existing and prospective institutional customers. Everyone I've chatted with regarding the new institutional pricing thought it was extremely fair and affordable.

We'll also work with any school who wants to run a pilot or evaluate the efficacy of using GS in a school setting. I've been a huge advocate of GS in education since I got here and definitely appreciate the importance of that market.

PM me anytime for more specifics or if you want to chat more about it.

AlchimiaStudios

@tatiang said:
The only concern I have about this pricing model is that it impacts schools. I teach game design using GameSalad and it's handy to have free software for my 25-50 students per year who use it. To pay for that many licenses is going to cost my school $5,700-$11,400 or half of that with the current Studica discount if it still applies. It means that I can no longer use GameSalad as a teaching tool. That's assuming that (a) there isn't a free-for-education license and (b) there isn't a volume discount for schools. I don't know the answer to either of those but I'm interested to find out. I like the idea that I'm sending off a few dozen eighth graders each year who love GameSalad and will probably buy it in the near future...

I think in one of the other threads from today someone from Gamesalad said they may offer lab licensing discounts or something similar.

A good point about making future customers! Hope they do get something worked out for education.

edit: Haha, well looks like I got beat out by the man himself.

tatiang

@dgackey I was just coming back here to delete my post. It was a knee-jerk reaction and I hadn't even read the original state of GameSalad explanation. It makes a lot of sense and I know from speaking with you that your interest in and support for education is strong. Thanks for the response and I'll get in touch with you before the school year starts.

dgackey

No prob at all! There's a lot to process and we want to hear all the feedback, ESPECIALLY when it's stuff we've got happy, helpful answers for!

ThoPel

I strongly support this change, if GS is continued and not expires after the release of the Graphene SDK. Hopefully Gs is not just getting a cash cow.

BTW: Has somebody ever got a beta access to Graphene?

CaptFinn

This change to me means. I can focus more on doing and not wondering if im gonna get enough done to cover 300$. I own 2 WOW accounts at 14.99$ each a month. Im pretty sure i can cancel them and do just fine focusing on GS Creator. And Might I say. I hope Graphene does something similar to this type of pricing.

Lovejoy

@ThoPel said:
BTW: Has somebody ever got a beta access to Graphene?

There was a small number of people who got selected to beta test graphene, but as of right now, the Graphene project has been put on hold.

aieman

Hmm..im about to go pro but pricing plan suddenly change

so for the new pricing structure, these will happen i guess?

after 15 days trial expired

1st month- go pro, finished project and publish on mobile
2nd month- working on new project, no publishing, go basic (the pro features will still active for already published game, such as API, ads etc).
3rd month- go pro to publish new game
4th month - broke/ take a break. Skip subbing to GS (the pro features in published game will still active)
5th month- apps collect some money, can go pro back or at least basic plan
next month- and so on...

am i correct?

Lovejoy

@aieman said:
Hmm..im about to go pro but pricing plan suddenly change

so for the new pricing structure, these will happen i guess?

after 15 days trial expired

1st month- go pro, finished project and publish on mobile
2nd month- working on new project, no publishing, go basic (the pro features will still active for already published game, such as API, ads etc).
3rd month- go pro to publish new game
4th month - broke/ take a break. Skip subbing to GS (the pro features in published game will still active)
5th month- apps collect some money, can go pro back or at least basic plan
next month- and so on...

am i correct?

You are correct.

aieman

Great! Im in....soon..

RossmanBrothersGames

@Armelline said:

 Who is arguably worse off?

There's one more group of people who are arguably worse off. These are the people who spend more than a year making a game. If you work on a game during every month for 13 months, you're going to pay for 13 months of GameSalad instead of 12. If you work on your game during every month for 21 months, you're going to pay for 21 months instead of 12.

That said, not many people fall into this category. Most games that take over a year to develop either take so long as they're massive games - in which case the extra cost probably isn't a huge deal as it'll be a tiny part of the budget - or because they stop and start development, taking breaks. If the second is the case, though, the might end up saving money as they'll only pay for the months they're actually working on the game.

Yep this one is me! Talked about it in the main thread, glad to see others pointing it out. Hopefully GS staff can brainstorm a way to help us out here.

Armelline

Bumping this for new visitors.

@RossmanBrothersGames - Hope you find a good solution so you can keep on using GameSalad!

RossmanBrothersGames

@Armelline yes. If my first game is somewhat successful it shouldn't be an issue. The problem is I make pretty in depth games, it has been almost 2 years. Working on it a little bit each month. 20 bucks a month for someone using the engine a little bit is a lot different than 20 bucks for someone who uses it many hours that month. For many hobby devs, especially ones making larger games, the new system will be difficult.