[Hopperxx] Director 12 ships

[Roy Crisman]

Adobe just recently scrapped the premium offering with similar 
arrangement for Flash, so I wouldn't be too surprised if this policy is 
similarly scrapped at some point, especially if people made noise about it.

Of course Director back in the 90's (at least) had that crazy policy 
where you were supposed to send them 2 CD's of any completed project 
along with all the packaging, too.  I'm not sure that I ever worked for 
anyone that really went through with the shipping part.

I know on the outside of Adobe I always thought of "Flash" mainly as the 
authoring tool, turns out the "free" part of the actual player runtime 
is where most of the real engineering work goes...I believe we had at 
least 100 QE on Flash Runtimes (all the player plugins and AIR runtimes) 
at the beginning of the year and at least that many engineers.  That's 
also where the real vulnerability to security problems comes from too.

You may consider it 'double-dipping' but it's also a model many other 
businesses are using...pay for the SDK/development account, etc. upfront 
and then pay out royalties as-you-go later.  But, like you, the 
companies that were going to be using the premium Flash Player features 
were also balking at Adobe trying to get in on the action so they pulled 
the plug before any final contracts were signed.  This business model 
was also planned out when Zynga was on top of the world and the 
environment's changed a bit since then.

I'm not even sure that the Director development team really has had time 
to react to the Flash Runtime premium feature change or how close in the 
organization they are.  I know I was shocked that Director 12 existed 
and had a bit of fun telling some of the old guard in the hallways (Jim 
Corbett, John Phiffer, etc.) that 12 just shipped.

roymeo
(Flash Runtimes Automation & Performance QE Manager)

On 2/13/2013 4:36 AM, NoiseCrime wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This just came up on Direct-L, so in case anyone isn't on there, it 
> looks like Adobe's licensing for iOS apps is a right PITA and may well 
> give you second thoughts.
>
> https://www.adobe.com/products/eulas/director_supplemental_terms.html
>
> key points
>
> 1. You have to inform Adobe for every app you make
> 2. You are required to get some encrypted utility from Adobe for each 
> app in order to put the app on the store.
> 3. You must get the encrypted utility every time your app changes.
> 4. Each App must pay 10% royalty on earnings over $20k.
> 5. Supply Adobe Quarterly reports.
>
> Double dipping with a royalty is despicable. Granted from my reading 
> of the license it is only applicable on earnings above $20k PER App, 
> but still, if you are in the business to make money from the App 
> store, over the lifetime of an app you could easily hit that, and 
> indeed might need to in order to make App development viable.
>
> Even ignoring the royalty license you still have to go through all the 
> other jumps and hoops, quarterly revenue reports, getting an encrypted 
> utility from Unity for each app and every time you update an app on 
> the app store. Instead of streamlining the whole process Adobe have 
> just made it even worse at every step.
>
> You'd think they would have learned since they recently dropped the 
> premium license for Flash 3D, but nope, they keep on making the same 
> mistakes over and over.
>
> NoiseCrime 2013
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