Comment by avolcano | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avolcano | Hacker News Reader

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This is not a free engine for HTML5 games. You are required to sign up to release a game on their proprietary * distribution platform* and give them 30% of your net revenue. Very misleading headline.

From the page:

"We supply your team with the Turbulenz HTML5 JS engine and all the Turbulenz APIs, free of charge. You bring a great game that embraces the way the web works; dynamic, social, and connected. We provide engine technical support, payment processing, analytics, game marketing services, and in some cases we may fund or co-fund the development of your game.

"The end result is a direct revenue stream, full control over the marketing of your game, and your game reaching millions of game players on many different devices and web destinations. Developers retain 70% of all net revenues."

Oh, and their platform seems immediately awful too, considering that you need to sign in to even SEE a single game they're offering.

A shame, too. Was hoping for a nice, free alternative to the Impact Engine (http://impactjs.com/).

Deleted comment

This isn't true.

You can use the technology for free and publish the game outside of Turbulenz. You can use other payment options and Turbulenz is not asking for anything from these revenues. This is the free part.

But Turbulenz wants the option to publish the game on turbulenz.com and take a share from the revenues on the site.

You don't have to release it via their distribution platform - you're free to distribute it as you like. They only take the 30% cut if you distribute it via them, which I'd say is pretty reasonable. FYI I'm not in any way associated with Turbulenz - I'm just at a conference where they demoed it.

That's not what the website says...

Games developed with the Turbulenz SDK will also be released and published on turbulenz.com at Turbulenz’ own discretion.

No thanks.

The biz site had been updated:

4. Release your game on any web destination of your choice, including your own website or established online platforms such as Facebook. There are no royalty or license payments due to Turbulenz.

You can release your game anywhere by yourself and it would be free. Alternatively, you can also release it on turbulenz.com and we will get 30% from all the payments we process.

Right. This model effectively caps all game prices to that of an ad-supported game, which can only be a few bucks at most.

If a player can play for free on Turbulenz (with ads), then I'm going to have a hard selling my game elsewhere for $10.

And if I can't sell a $10 game with this platform, then we won't see AAA titles either.

All the games are free to play, supported by in game payments. There are no plans for ads on the site. We want to allow developers to make a game that is compatible with the payment models that are being used successfully on other platforms on the web.

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