GameSalad parent company Gendai Games is facing a mass exodus from its developers after announcing changes to their license agreement which no longer allow publishers to have a free lunch in Apple’s App Store.
touchArcade is reporting that GameSalad, the popular online development tool which allows most anyone to create their own games without writing a single line of code, is facing a potentially devastating backlash from their developers following some changes to their license agreements.
Earlier this month, parent company Gendai Games announced at the GDC Online in Austin, Texas that GameSalad would be doing away with its traditional subscription model, which allowed developers to license the SDK for as little as $99 per year or as high as $1,999 annually. That subscription model also allowed the same developers to export binary versions of their games and port them to Apple’s App Store under their own name, either free or paid -- and keep all of the bounty from such sales.
Gendai has now reworked their license agreement to position themselves “as a publisher of sorts,” according to touchArcade. The SDK will now be free for all to download, but all games will be published under the GameSalad name, in keeping with the models used by other publishers such as Chillingo. The change also means that developers now have to share their App Store revenue with Gendai, who clearly feels that the new model will be much more lucrative.
Current GameSalad subscribers won’t have anything to worry about -- that is, until their annual subscription is up. At that time, they’ll be switched to the new revenue-sharing model, which means their games will now be published under the GameSalad name -- no direct connection with Apple, and no control over promo codes for publicity.
Worse yet, current versions of games will essentially reach end of life with no further updates, since “there’s no way to move an existing App Store listing to a different publisher.” Not surprisingly, the new, free GameSalad SDK also strips away the ability to export your own binaries, another possible route to updates for existing customers.
As a result of these changes, GameSalad developers are up in arms, with many of them jumping ship to Ansca Mobile’s Corona, a similar tool. Others have taken to a new blog and forum called I Just Wanna Make Some Games to vent their frustrations. Looks like trouble in paradise, and thus far Gendai isn’t backing down -- we’ll have to wait and see how this one plays out.
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