Paying for development tools is so 2014.
Corona Labs has announced that its 2D mobile game development platform is ditching its paid model and will instead become free. The Pro subscription used to cost $600 a year. This follows a trend for game-making tools in 2015: Unreal Engine 4 also became free this week, and Unity revealed today that its newest engine will have a free option for smaller developers.
“We are passionate about enabling all developers to build the best mobile games quickly and easily,” said Walter Luh, Corona owner Fuse’s vice president of technology and founder of Corona Labs. “Developing games doesn’t have to be expensive. Our goal is to empower the entire community, from small indies to large publishers, to launch successful games and grow their companies without having to pay for our development platform.”
Corona supports iOS, Android, Kindle, and Windows Phone 8. It will eventually also cover Windows and Mac desktop apps. More than 300,000 developers worldwide use Corona. It has been used on mobile games like Major Magent and RGB Express.