TomGullen

Maintenance plans is something we considered, but though it wouldn't work well for us. This is because it's infinitely more difficult to maintain software when you have your customer base split into different versions, complete abandonment of lower version customers is a no go when bugs are discovered or a feature breaks due to technology change. This significantly impacts the complexity of our product deployment and maintenance. There's also other complexities around documentation, tutorials etc etc, the list goes on.

It could also reflect badly on us if customers on older versions are demoing the product to other potential users when they are many release cycles behind the latest version. There's a myriad of benefits of just having all customers on the same version. To go down the maintenance plan route for us would be a mistake.

Generally propositions from customers for different or more exotic pricing methods over what we've gone with tend to involve a lot more complexity to ultimately allow people to buy it for less. The model we've got is working well, and we don't see any advantage to changing it right now.

> I never made noises on the forums about it because I was fairly new to Construct 2. I just left quietly.

Which is fine, but we're a much more successful company than we ever were with Construct 2, largely because of the direction we went with pricing. We accept it's not for everyone. I think looking back over our history we've gone from Open Source to Pay Once to SaaS. When you go through these changes you're going to lose customers who were attracted to your original payment model, this is just a reality we have to accept.

Drop us an email at [email protected] and we'll help you out

This is all written from the ground up in house.

Tom here from Construct, spent a lot of time recently working on improving reliability/scalability of website so when I see comments like this always sends a pang of fear through me :)

Site resources looks to be coping just fine which is great (we often get upwards of 20 pageviews per second on our site at peak times) so will put this down as a blip.

Look forward to hearing more about how you get on with Animate, Ashley and Diego have done a stellar job in getting productivity software running in the browser!

Construct 3 and Construct Animate are not Chrome only, it works in all major browser and even mobile/tablet devices. Chromebook support has been a major plus for us in the educational market.

Construct 2 was pay once, but we found after a few years sales really plateaued. Going to SaaS was a difficult transition for us, but it's worked out well and we now see year on year growth which gives us a lot more breathing room.

I think it's important to also recognise that pay once software just doesn't work as a model for a lot of countries around the world. As an example, for Construct 3 we charge the equivalent of ~$12 USD per year in Malawi which makes it a very affordable option, whereas a one of price would have to be roughly quadruple that for it to be economical for us, and would likely put it out of reach of a lot of people who otherwise may of paid annually for it.

SaaS puts more onus on us to cater for our current paying customers, before with pay once our focus was weighted on acquiring new customers. To what extent this actually plays out is kind of tricky to put your finger on especially from where I'm sitting but there is certainly an element of this in our work.

I'm not going to pretend that SaaS is suitable for everyone and every product and I understand why people are adverse, but for us it's worked well and a lot of noisy predictions from some of our customer base about this being our downfall never played out. The transition to pay once to SaaS was a vulnerable time for our business and a very interesting one at that.

Stripe, bank transfers or Wise.com should all be pretty good options.

I'd like to see a total conversion rate once all fees are taken into account - I bet it's not actually that competitive when all is said and done.

Also, you're exposing yourself to a non zero risk of whatever exchanges you're using at the time to process your transaction/withdrawal go bust.

And the miners would all shut down because no one's transacting with it

Temporarily deflationary, when all Bitcoins are mined what happens next?

Some people also log on to live blackjack at 3am and drop a few thousand dollars just for the fun of it as well. You are in a very small minority.

Notably unregulated gambling available without oversight and also readily available to addicts and children. Helpful in smashing down that redundant bureaucratic red tape the gambling industry so desperately is in need of at the small price of destroying, debilitating or general increase in suffering in peoples lives.

The game is hosted on Github here: https://github.com/AshleyScirra/CommandAndConstruct

We have! Construct 2 was a windows program that made HTML5 games, and now we've gone full circle and Construct 3 is an HTML5 program that makes HTML5 games :)

New attack vector for black hat product manufacturers to abuse and compete on, hopefully it won't devolve into this level of competition though!

This is probably a preference thing (and scale is likely an important factor) and can never be definitively answered, but I find that denormalising data such as SSO ID's into a third table comes at the cost of slightly more complex code and more boilerplate if you've got a caching model, I used to denormalise to this level but have now gone back to putting it all into a fairly wide user table as a short string field is also very cheap.

By the end of 2023 majority of the worlds population will be roaming Facebook's MetaVerse on a daily basis. Work In Meta Verse is the new WFH!

> The other lending system collapses and cannot return the coins because of an exploit

And also because the entire business model is completely unsustainable, preying on peoples greed.

Gamer sentiment is generally very anti micro transactions, all the crypto games I’ve seen so far are micro transactions front and centre on steroids

Or make the particles bigger

I loved Koyaanisqatsi, trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PirH8PADDgQ Not your typical documentary.

Anything by Werner Herzog is incredible as well, I find his approach extremely sympathetic and respectful to the subjects but without sacrificing detail (EG Grizzly Man)

Not strictly a documentary, but Threads by the BBC is a researched film depicting life in the UK if every city was hit by a nuke and it was incredibly disturbing and informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film)

Carl Sagan's Cosmos has to be one of the most charming and moving documentaries I've ever watched - arguably a little out of date now but it reached a place the subsequent Cosmos series just couldn't reach.

MayDay! Air crash investigations are all amazing documentaries that manage to balance pretty intense technical information with real life suffering very skilfully and they are incredibly engaging.

Would love to come this this one but am away in Scotland, future ones will be sure to come down if there are more :)

Went to a bunch of the original meetups years ago, good times! Pizza was great :)

Dmitri did a great job organising it all and kindly let me speak about our startup at one of the events. I was completely overshadowed by an amazing talk on quantum computers by a very educated and funny guy afterwards though, 10/10 best talk I've ever seen.

Doesn't have to be cash, but I think it's important to remember when Dropbox was doing it disc space was a lot more valuable - I don't think it would work as well nowadays.

I think Chrome when it first came out was giving $5 per install as well.

You see similar rewards here in UK for referring people to new bank accounts, Chase made a big move over here and was giving £20 to the referrer, and £20 to the referred for minimum commitment. If you got the money it's a fast way to gobble up market share.

A great video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8sjdOjNxIE

Consumers like the idea of chargeback and other legal protections. Crypto advocates say that you can add middle organisations to offer this, but then we've gone full circle and really there is no advantage.