Adobe want to charge devs for ‘premium’ Flash features

Adobe have released Flash Player 11.2 today and they have a new plan to make the company some extra money. They want to charge developers for using ‘premium features'.

According to a report on CNET, the plan by Adobe will call upon the developers to share 9 percent of their revenue beyond $50,000, when they use the premium features. Adobe have a webpage online explaining the new concept, which we are sure will go down like a lead balloon.

What are the ‘premium features?'. Stage 3D for hardware accelerated graphics and domain memory for better conversion of games previously written in C or C++.

From their webpage “The premium features enable these existing C/C++ codebases to run sandboxed across browsers in Flash Player. C/C++ developers, and developers using other languages who build on native middleware/engines, can now join ActionScript developers in benefiting from the ubiquity of Flash Player. And ActionScript developers benefit from now being able to leverage millions of lines of existing optimized C/C++ code in their ActionScript projects.

Games and applications using either hardware accelerated Stage3D or domain memory individually do NOT require a premium features license. For example, Flash game developers can independently leverage high-performance Stage3D hardware acceleration in Flash Player – which delivers full GPU-accelerated experiences to more users than any other web technology – at no charge.”

Adobe do grant a royalty free license for any applications using the software that is released before August 1st. Also it is free to use features in AIR 3.2, software available now which makes it possible to package a Flash game as a standalone app for iOs or Android. For those people who use flash in their browsers, Flash Player is still free.

They add “We've designed this pricing to encourage the kind of innovation and experimentation that often helps to spark inspired and inventive games. This also enables us to invest in and support innovation in Flash technologies that will benefit the ecosystem of popular game middleware and development tools, beyond Adobe's first party tools.”

Everyone is asking how innovation will be ‘sparked' by making programmers pay for something which previously was free, but Adobe obviously have strong financial reasons for opting for this solution. It also means they can potentially invest more money into developing Flash.

Flash is still popular, although the demand for ‘flash' based websites has dropped, after the ‘flash boom phase' years ago, when everyone and their mother thought that creating a website based solely on Flash was a great idea.

Kitguru says: A good source of revenue for the company? Or will it force some companies to look elsewhere for alternative options?

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