Today, I’m happy to announce Corona Cloud, our Mobile Backend as a Service is officially available for cross-platform apps everywhere!
A cloud stack for app developers
We see a lot of cloud technologies out there that are great for back-end developers, but they don’t quite bridge the gap with what app developers want to do in the cloud.
What sets Corona Cloud apart is that we designed it with you — the app developers — in mind.
With Corona Cloud, our goal is to enable you to build cloud features into your app faster than you ever thought possible. That way, you can continue to focus on creating greats apps. It’s hard enough to get an app out to the store, so the last thing you want to think about is writing your own custom logic on a server, defining database schemas to store persistent state properly, or figure out how to track all of that in analytics.
Say goodbye to complexity
Our goal with Corona Cloud 1.0 was to eliminate complexity by focusing on higher-level functionality.
For example, if you wanted to write a multiplayer game, you’d have to write a bunch of server-side custom code to handle match and move logic. In practice, this means you’d have to implement various semantics like:
- Match invite (trigger push, manage accept/decline)
- Receive moves (trigger push, enforce gated turns)
- Stale match management (i.e. match sits idle for too long)
- Random opponent (search database for interested opponent, make sure they are using same language)
- et cetera, et cetera, et cetera
We do all that for you. And that’s just multiplayer.
There are also a whole host of other features like managing user profiles, storing persistent application state, creating chat rooms, push notifications and so on. We’ve even added server-side analytics so you can track how your users are exercising cloud features, along with any custom events you send up.
For those of you who want to get down to the metal, rest assured, we plan to offer all the standard goodies like custom cloud logic, free-form databases, etc. In the mean time, you can learn more about all the great features available today in our Cloud API docs.
For all app developers
Corona Cloud is available to all developers – you don’t have to use Corona SDK/Enterprise to take advantage of it. Translation: if you’re a native app developer or you’re a using another cross-platform technology, you can take full advantage of our cloud stack — no strings attached.
All you have to do is make REST-based web API calls, and you’re off to the races!
Seamless integration with Corona SDK/Enterprise
Now, if you are developing your app using Corona SDK/Enterprise, we’re working to make your lives a whole lot better.
We are making Corona the best the end-to-end development experience on the planet, so we’ll be offering up libraries and samples that show you how you can really push the envelope with as few lines as possible. What does that mean?
Corona Cloud makes it easy to create cross-platform leaderboards and achievements, but if you want to show an interface for that inside your app, it would take a lot of work. We are extending the ‘gameNetwork’ library to show you all the standard (re-themeable) interfaces you’re used to when using Apple’s GameCenter today. We’re also working on a nice wrapper library that takes care of handling the network logic around the lower-level REST API calls to our cloud. More on both very soon.
And there will be many other ways in which we will seamlessly integrate both Corona SDK and Corona Cloud in the future.
Intuitive, Indie-friendly pricing
We looked at the pricing in the market and saw two problems: the pricing tiers were not Indie friendly and the pricing was hard to understand.
So we set out to solve these problems in two ways:
First, we’re make pricing very friendly. We have a free tier that offers you a generous amount of web API calls, storage, push notifications, and analytics. The next tier starts at $49/month. That’s less than half of what the typical person spends on coffee in a month! The remaining cloud pricing plans are described on our store page.
Second, we wanted to take hidden taxes out of pricing. Take API calls for example. A lot of times, your app will have to access information on the cloud that is just mechanical, like accessing information about the user. We don’t think there should be a tax for something so basic, so we’re making all API calls related to User Accounts free and unlimited. On top of that, we wanted to make certain game-related features free. So if you’re making web API calls to access/update leaderboards or achievements, it’s the same deal as with managing user accounts: free and unlimited. And this also applies to the free tier.
What’s ahead
We’ve got a lot of great stuff planned for Cloud, like improving the content delivery of in-app purchases. So send us feedback as we’re going to be iterating on cloud non-stop!
We also have some more announcements coming soon for GDC.
And finally, if there’s a critical Corona SDK regression you want us to know about, let us know ASAP by emailing me: walter at coronalabs dot com. We are locking down our daily builds this week for the next public release.
Jann
awesome news! we will start using it just after GDC!
David Rangel
Looking forward to seeing you at GDC Jann.
Justin
Signup link in login screen is broken.
P.J. Snavely
Awesome! Been sitting on the multiplayer concepts for a couple different titles waiting for this one.
Chris Leyton
Congrats everybody involved – look forward to delving into the Cloud.
Chris Leyton
Hey CL – getting a User not found error when trying to sign up to the Free package on api.coronalabs.com
David Rangel
Chris – a small % of users are seeing an auth issue with our database. This will be fixed shortly.
David Rangel
Chris – this should be fixed now. It was an auth/SSO issue with our ID database. Not related at all to cloud. Sorry about that.
Mario Roberti
Confirmed the issue with “User not found” error.
Also are the examples supposed to be in this format?
curl –user bd62f3256a0ff879595e0aa7c0376e9d21b46590:078e95efd0686725b6b10bd8769bc6f767e0183b -X POST -d “auth_token=4f705899f903950001000016″ https://api.coronacloud.com/matches/512f4465e1271d0624000001.json”
I was hoping for something inetgrated directly into Corona, in a more human readable format….
Mario Roberti
…Oh, guess that’s what this means!
“We’re also working on a nice wrapper library that takes care of handling the network logic around the lower-level REST API calls to our cloud. More on both very soon.”
-Mario
Walter
Yup, that’s what I meant
We have something up on github but we want to polish it up with more consistent naming and error handling.
Tom Bladko
Is it possible to create query for analytic ?
For example: i log event about how far player goes in game. Then i use this result to change difficulty level for next players. If log data would be low then we will decrease difficulty level, if log data would be high we will increase it.
So its simple force feedback system based on users activity.
Tom
Damir
Hope that the leaderboards supports sending lower scores, so it can be used for ELO rating leaderboards (e.g. the current user score can go up but also down)…
Vik
Is there content delivery on this? Ie after an in app purchase we the user download extra levels from the corona cloud?
J. A. Whye
This looks really cool! I can’t wait to dig into it!
E Johnson
Great news and outstanding vision and work that leave any Corona competitor, if there ever were one, behind! Looking forward to delve in.
WideAwakeGames
1. what happens to beta testers that don’t pick a plan? Shouldn’t we all have been defaulted to the free plan to start?
2. There is an error in the free plan. It says 50k api not 500k api calls.
3. Only 7 days of data on the free plan? That’s disappointingly low.
4. Where are the analytics I had previously? The analytics section on the left hand side is gone.
5. All my achievement images previously uploaded are gone. When I click on the placeholder I get XML response with access denied in it.
6. Still not able to delete games
7. Where the full game example project that was promised by Mohamed 3 months ago?
8. No differentiated pricing for Corona subscribers?
Sorry if that comes across as a bit of a negative nelly
David Rangel
WideAwakeGames,
Thanks for the comments/questions. No need to worry about being a negative nelly. Here are some responses:
1. Yes, that is right. Are you not seeing that?
2. Yes, this is a typo on that page and will be fixed soon.
3. Thanks for the feedback on the 7 days. We think it’s reasonable given the other features/limits, but it’s good feedback.
4, 5. In terms of all your existing data, we take that seriously. I am having the guys look into it and we’ll get back to you asap.
6. Same here – I will get you a response soon.
7. We have sample code coming very shortly
8. No, not right now. We believe the pricing is very competitive as it is. But it is something we are definitely considering.
Can you email me if you have any other questions? david AT coronalabs.
WideAwakeGames
@David Thanks for the quick response. I wasn’t out to bash Corona Cloud. I noticed #2 being addressed in the forums.
As for #1 When I go to Billings/Subscriptions it says no active subscription found. I assume I need to choose one but it should have defaulted to something rather than nothing. This is why I asked because it looks like there is a “limbo” status.
As for the missing graphics, of course I have backups, would rather not have to upload them again.
Oh and on the analytics, does 7 days mean you drop data off the table once it’s older than 7 days.
Mohamed Hamedi
Hi WideAwakeGames,
I believe you are working with the team to resolve the missing images issue.
Let me assure you that no data was lost, it seems for some reason links to your data were disconnected.
In regards to the analytics, you are correct, it is a round robin, so freshest is stored.
Thanks
-Mohamed
Alex M
@WideAwakeGames This is just another total failure from corona at it’s best. I bet you till not recover your old data and that they will simply say sorry and expect that to be OK. I can’t imagine the new management scything anything but NO to special pricing.
David Rangel
Alex – I am amazed by your sheer persistence in slamming us on every blog post, not matter what the topic
Mohamed Hamedi
Hi Alex M, you interested in putting a wager on this
WideAwakeGames, I would take him on the bet!
-Mohamed
Mark
…understood that you need people to convert to a paid tier so you can start earning money on these services.
$600 for a year’s worth of cloud services seems fair for a game that is earning money or that has in-app purchases which make cloud service utilization a pass-through cost to consumer.
What appears to be great is that I can “downgrade” a failed game to the FREE tier so continued cloud support for the game’s few users is no cost to me.
Is it possible to do a comparison with something like PubNub to show the value proposition more clearly?
Additionally a comparison of your analytics to show differences in ease-of-use and features? It might be that you should provide a basic analytics package that is always FREE so that people won’t utilize other free/low-cost solutions for the basics. More likely they’ll upgrade to a paid tier if they’re using your toolset…
Mark
Ooops. Just realized that this is not per game, but per account.
And that the analytics is a 7 day rolling history…
David Rangel
Mark – yes, this is all per account. But if I understand what you are getting at, I think you are still able to have “failed”/low performing games in different accounts under the free tier (or all in a single account with the free tier). The benefits of having this be per account is that on the upside, you can use a single account for several games and share a large tier, as opposed to having to go for a paid tier for each game/app. Does that make sense?
Feel free to email me with any comments/questions: david AT coronalabs
Pablo Isidro
Thanks for this amazing update! Can’t wait to try all the services in the cloud!
Jack01
Wow $49,- up to $200,- a month. For $100,- a year you have your own VPS and you can run noobhub on it to do this stuff, blazingly fast and with little resources needed. Though you have to code yourself the mentioned functionalities..
Robbie A.
Woohoo!!!
I was so excited about Corona Cloud being released that I re-upped my subscription and can now continue working on my game I put on hold last year due to server-side code being so damn hard for me to figure out on my turn-based multiplayer game… Now there’s a FREAKING RADIO BUTTON that enabled it! Same with Chat and achievement, I’m through the moon. Thanks, guys! Can’t wait for more tutorials to come out for this.
nicholas Golden
I think what Corona is doing here is a good direction to be competitive. I’m not going to break it down here (I already have, and I think you should too) but some highlights are.
Multiple apps under one tier, one user ID. That’s a good thing.
Notifications 1,000,000. Same as pub nub HOWEVER the overage differs. PubNub hits you with one big fat, LARGE charge of $1 for a million messages. I know scary.
Corona charges you .09 cents per 1000 (more scalable) and if you add that up it’s .90 cents per 1,000,000.
Push notifications are great and all, as you can have one server somewhere in the world, and it’s ok. If this is REAL TIME, then you need a global presence.
Ok, let me switch hats. Speaking from my long networking background, I don’t think people realize how much goes into optimizing a back end.
let me just rattle off some things…
QOS (tagging traffic, so it has ‘priority’ over other packets in the network, so you don’t ‘lag out’),
back end connections (writing your own solution to interface with Corona, procuring your own server like amazon cloud services, bandwidth payments, maintaining the server, having a disaster recovery solution in place in case the primary goes down, primary and secondary WAN circuits multiple servers in west coast, midwest and east coast if US based to keep ping down).
customer support for the above, code’s buggy – on you to fix it. Network outage – on you to fix it – server crashes – oh you don’t have a disaster recovery scenario in place? TOO BAD you got to fix it. You have kids, or a wife and they are yelling at you and you are losing customers and getting 1 star on the app store and thought it be a good idea to do it yourself. Guess what….
I could fill up many many pages. I support an enterprise network for a real life job, and let me tell you even if you scale it down and just want one server and want to write your own if you really want to do it right your going to need help. A 1 man show, this isn’t made for you.
Let’s say “but I have a small team” – how many is that 3? Ok, lets use ‘FUN RUN’ as an example on the appstore. It climbed the charts, but look at the reviews. You will see a TON of comments (including my own) about how it disconnects, it runs like crap, it runs terrible, it lags. You can be in first place, yet still lose. You can be in last place, and still win. I play on a 300/100 (that’s 300mb download and 100mb upload) fiber via wifi. My iphone tops out at 40/40 due to wifi. I disconnect all the time. I’m in California, and you are at the mercy of wherever you put your ACS (amazon cloud services).
You want to have an across the board nice latency, better roll out a West coast, and an East coast or at least server in middle america. What about world wide, ok then go ahead and roll out servers there too. Money Money money…..
Why is that? It’s because that team wrote a ‘cloud’ based solution, that uses a homebrew front and back end and they are constantly scrambling around wasting time supporting it when they could just be making games.
Before you truly start bashing, bad mouthing a solution – take the time, I mean some REAL time to “scope” out what’s necessary to do it yourself, vs someone who already has it in place that you can leverage at a price. A lot of times you may find something may be more expensive, but then is offset by you not having to run around at all hours of the day fixing it.
Anyone who supports an enterprise environment, can easily detect the value. If you are not such a person, that’s ok. At least do some basic research and cost analysis and really think about everything, and I mean everything and document that in your requirements documentation (business requirements, scope of effort, scope of work, whatever you want to call it). Then, and only then can you truly know what you are in for!!
-Nick
Mick
NOTE: Global User Names User names created on the Corona Cloud are unique network-wide and not just your game.
Shame… I don’t want to spend good marketing money to acquire customers for the “Corona Community”. Too bad, I love the feature set. I’d even pay a premium for my own namespace.
sahil
Its good to hear about cloud corona. But somebody please tell me how to implement the leaderboard in a simple game. I have access key and secret key and my leadership highscore id with me. Just want to know how to implement the code in my game.
Mohamed Hamedi
Hi Sahil,
Check out the Corona Cloud Guide http://docs.coronalabs.com/guide/cloud/leaderachieve/index.html .
Thanks
-Mohamed
sahil
Hi Mohamed,
Thanks for the link. but this is already explored and I am facing some problem while making a user to login. It gives me some sort of error as “index local response a nil value”
If this works only on a real device or it can be checked from the simulator.