Guest midnight Posted March 18, 2004 Report Posted March 18, 2004 We have given some developers until March 31 to finish their games depending on GapiDraw 2.04. If they can release the game before that date we will grant them the use of GapiDraw 2.04. We have lots of plans for 3.0 and really want everyone to use that version (we will release the Palm version of it within hours) Licensing of GapiDraw Multi-platform Version 3.0 For Trial/Evaluation - All users Everyone may download and use the trial version of GapiDraw FREE of charge as long as the application using it is not sold or otherwise utilised for business purposes. For Shareware - Hobbyists Hobbyists may purchase a license at the cost of $100 per application. A hobbyist is a physical person not acting under the name of a legal entity who develops applications in his/her spare time and sells them as shareware on the web. For Commercial Use - Professionals Professionals who develop or distribute applications shall sign an agreement with us before launching their application. A professional is a person or a company that uses GapiDraw in one or the other way in its business operation. The agreement could be reached either on a case-by-case basis for each application or on a general basis covering unlimited number of applications developed by the licensee. Gapidraw homepage
Guest spacemonkey Posted March 18, 2004 Report Posted March 18, 2004 of course if you have a version prior to 2.04 what's that mean? You didn't need a license for gapidraw prior to 2.04 so can the old libraries still be used free of charge?
Guest midnight Posted March 18, 2004 Report Posted March 18, 2004 no, as from march 31st you cannot use 2.04 (or lower) free of charge, basically they want everyone on 3.0, and they will not grant any type of license for 2.04 (free or otherwise)
Guest spacemonkey Posted March 18, 2004 Report Posted March 18, 2004 I guess the only solution is to give them money or develope your own graphics library. There are a couple of freeware open source libraries Pocket Hal - GAPI layer does surfaces but not all useful graphics functions Pocket Frog - Provides a full graphics library including alpha, rotating, scaling Pocket Frog I hear is a little slow, but may form a good basis for a tightened up slim smartphone only library.
Guest Croccy22 Posted March 18, 2004 Report Posted March 18, 2004 I understand that companies like this need to make money, but this company is now changing it's license agreement more than i change my pants!. Think it's time to ditch gapidraw and learn how to program microsoft gapi instead.
Guest Richie M Posted March 18, 2004 Report Posted March 18, 2004 learn how to program microsoft gapi instead. :eek: Midnight have you got a link to that quote? i cant seem to find it on the GD site nor forum :?
Guest muff Posted March 18, 2004 Report Posted March 18, 2004 richie - it was a reply to me asking Johan about the top sticky on his forum mentioning that all licenses should go through him
Guest sbl Posted March 21, 2004 Report Posted March 21, 2004 Hi all, Sorry for all the licensing mess. It has been a tough ride going through the commercialization process, something we unfortunately must do to be able to continue improving on GapiDraw. And it has been difficult, especially considering that there are free alternatives on the Pocket PC platform. We are shortly going fulltime working on GapiDraw, and must find a way to finance our salary. :-| Right now GapiDraw is available for the following platforms: -Pocket PC -Palm -Symbian -Smartphone -Stationary PCs (with accelerated DirectX support) And we have tons of upcoming cool stuff, such as an RLE sprite engine, an audio library (gapisound.com is on its way), resource management systems and much more - all to make cross platform development as simple as possible. If you pay the $100 hobbyist license for one game you can release that game on all platforms listed above! That is how we try to justify charging money for GapiDraw. If you have a registered company and act under that legal entity you have to buy a "Pro" license of GapiDraw. The price is somewhat more expensive, but we already have several "Pro" licensees and believe that the price is ok. I won't list the prices for the Pro license here since that price can discussed as a business agreement. We plan to use the current license agreement for a significant time to come since most current users have found it quite ok. If you have any questions of concerns, please do send them to me at [email protected] . //Johan www.gapidraw.com
Guest Croccy22 Posted March 22, 2004 Report Posted March 22, 2004 I can see why you are charging for the library. It is a brilliant library. The only problem I have is at the moment I am programming for the smarpthone platform. I have no intention whatsoever of realesing my games for any other platforms. I am basically writing the games for myself but will try and make a bit of money out of it at the same time. I feel that maybe a licence should be available for people who want to choose an idvidiual platform to develop for. Maybe something like a £30 licene fee per hobbiest title for a single platform release only. It seems pointless paying for somethig I am never gonna use. Just my opinions, but i think severeal people would agree. Matt Croccy22 http://www.spvsoft.co.uk
Guest Paul [MVP] Posted March 22, 2004 Report Posted March 22, 2004 I have mailed GAPIDRAW with a few questions about costings etc., no reply yet. :) P
Guest spacemonkey Posted March 22, 2004 Report Posted March 22, 2004 I think sbl post really says what it's about. GapiDraw's primary feature is it's cross platform nature. What we need for smartphone is a smartphone only library or a smartphone only gapidraw license at a cost appropriate to a single platform library. I would think single platform licenses would be a smart idea from gapidraw's perspective too since a coder could develop for one platform (the normal behaviour) and pay an appropriate license fee to do so. Then if their program was successful the fact that they were running gapidraw would make it easy for them to choose to expand to other platforms and at that time they could purchase a more expensive cross platform license.
Guest Paul [MVP] Posted March 22, 2004 Report Posted March 22, 2004 Yeah Spacemonkey, a good idea. What I would like to see is a way for MoDaCo to buy a 'Member Licence'. That way any MoDaCo member who is a 'Bedroom Developer' could write software, and as long as it is only available as shareware from MoDaCo, then there is no charge to pay. If that member then decided at a later date to go commercial on other sites, then they could buy the appropriate licence. Thoughts? P
Guest sbl Posted March 22, 2004 Report Posted March 22, 2004 Paul [MVP]: I'll get back to you in an hour.. I had a bit to catch-up with since the Palm release last Friday. By the way.. Do you guys feel that $100 is too expensive? If you don't think you can make at least that on your game, then why not release it as freeware? You can use GapiDraw and pay $0 if you release games for free...
Guest Croccy22 Posted March 22, 2004 Report Posted March 22, 2004 The only problem I can see with the $100 fee is the same problem that existed with the 2.05 licence. If you write a game for the smartphone as a hobbiest, and then release it one your own site etc, everything is ok. But with your license scheme (forgive me if this has changed) If we release it through a company such as Handango. Then we are no longer a hobbiest because handango take a cut of the profits. I am correct in thinking this? If this is still the case. Then releasing a came suddenly becomes a lot harder. Coz you then have to spend money sorting out a website, an online shop to accept payment. And also getting your product known. If you are not completely cussesfull in achieving this then the chances are you won't sell a thing. At which point $100 is a lot of money to some people. Handango might take a fair bit of the profits, as do the other online vendors. But people go to these sites to look for software and don't necesarily look in other places. So selling software through these companies is an easy option for the hobby programmer. If it was a case of pay the $100 and them do with it whatever you want. Sell it on your own site, Through other online sites etc, Then I think it would be worth taking a chance. What you have to take in mid is that the Smartphone is still a very new platform and doesn't have many users compared to Pocket PC. Therefore it is much harder to recover the costs on this platform. For example over christmas I released an Xmas Edition of the Smartanoid game as a freebie. This has had about 1200 downloads. And that is FREE. If I had of stuck a price tag of say £5 on that I doubt if a quarter of those people would have bought the game. I just don't think the commercial games market has hit the smartphone yet to make expenses like this viable. And I know $100 isn't exactly breaking the bank. But what now if I get someone else to knock up the graphics for us and give them some of the profits, release this game under the SPVSOFT name and sell it on handango so i din't have to set up shop on my site? Are you still going to class me as a hobbiest or does a commercial fee now come into play?? This is when serious money starts to come involved and no other options but to ditch GapiDraw. I'm sorry if I have gone on a bit but I hope you can see some of the points I am making do make sense. Gapidraw is a brilliant library but for us Smartphone only developers it is pricing itself out of the market. Matt Croccy22 http://www.spvsoft.co.uk Matt Croccy22
Guest midnight Posted March 22, 2004 Report Posted March 22, 2004 gotta agree with you there croccy, ms smartphone isnt like symbian, which is backed by stacks of manufacturers, doesnt have 10-15 phones released a week etc. Think about it, a license for a symbian developer is worth it, Nokia, Siemens, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson etc. all release phones at a rapid rate, I know that i can release a game and the potential audience for that game is huge. Microsoft Smartphone however is a different beast, still in its infancy, and only actually about 3 phones on the market at the same time that people are buying (e200, mpx200, mitac mio 8390), the other phones are obsolete. So the MS Smartphone market isnt exactly huge, and wont grow quickly at least until later in the year when moto, samsung and sagem release their new phones. Add to that the fact that the MS SMatphone brand is aimed directly at the Professional market and definitely not the mass-market entertainment market and the potential customer base is tiny. If i was a symbian developer i would consider purchasing a professional license, but we're aiming our games only at windows mobile devices, and so the cost simply cannot be justified ($1000 before you even start to release the game for a single game license, + knock off 30% of all revenue for Handango) i dont blame you for wanting to make money out of your admittedly great library, but i agree with croccy, i think you may have priced yourself out of the market, especially as no big games co's are making ms smartphone games, and even if they did, they'd prolly invest in making their own lib.
Guest ppcstudios Posted March 22, 2004 Report Posted March 22, 2004 There is also the option of partnering with development studios that have licensed the GapiDraw API. Pocket PC Studios (www.ppcstudios.com) is one such development studio, and I would be more than happy to discuss this possibility with any Pocket PC, MS Smartphone, Symbian or Palm OS developer that is currently using or planning to use GapiDraw for their projects.
Guest SpaceRain Posted March 22, 2004 Report Posted March 22, 2004 Can we do that? Can everybody just team up, release the games under the same name and share a license? Surely that can't be what the makers of GapiDraw had in mind, unless they only counted on selling a single license. :)
Guest sbl Posted March 22, 2004 Report Posted March 22, 2004 But with your license scheme (forgive me if this has changed) If we release it through a company such as Handango. Then we are no longer a hobbiest because handango take a cut of the profits. I am correct in thinking this? No. You as a developer sign the license agreement. If you develop the game acting under a legal entity (a company) - then you are a Pro licensee. If you develop the game outside a legal entity (in your spare time and do not earn any salary from doing this) you are a hobbyist. As Becky suggests - if you want to give the complete rights for the game to them to sell in exchange for a percentage of the salary (or a cash-payment upfront) then that's perfectly ok.
Guest ppcstudios Posted March 22, 2004 Report Posted March 22, 2004 As Becky suggests - if you want to give the complete rights for the game to them to sell in exchange for a percentage of the salary (or a cash-payment upfront) then that's perfectly ok. That's right. Pocket PC Studios has several development partners that we co-author titles with. This is advantageous to both parties; we add excelent titles to our product lineup while our partners receive the benefits of a well established publisher and partner: increased market presence and product sales, development assistance, post sales support, etc.
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