IPhone Licensing Model Discussion

Hey guys,

I thought a long time about doing this, but I've decided that I want some some early feedback from those of you interested in licensing Torque for the iPhone before we set up a licensing model to roll with permanently. Building an effective, fair licensing model is a tricky thing to do. To give you some perspective, the costs for getting TGE and TGB ported are pretty considerable. We're talking about 3 full-time devs for nearly 3 months. If you do the math, it's a significant investment, but one we're proud to have nearly done at this point. We expected interest in the product would be high, but it's outpaced even our most optimistic assumptions. Many of the inquiries have been from you, our core users who take game development seriously, but aren't making millions at it yet. It's always been our mission to enable you to reach the next level, and making games for the iPhone could be a really great chance to do that at a minimal cost. In the past, getting games on a phone required huge hurdles, so "hitting the big time" usually meant making a great PC game and getting picked up to put your game on a console or two. With the iPhone, this could be much easier. There's no dev kit to buy except the iPhone or iPod Touch as a "dev kit" and of course you have to work on a Mac (unless you're really crafty...more on that later) which some people already do. Pretty nice!

So while it's important for us to be able to recoup the investment in porting TGE and TGB and to be able to continue funding improvements to the SDK, it's even more important that we don't close the door on any of you who are serious about making iPhone games with Torque. Originally we had planned to roll out a licensing model very similar to what we have for consoles (Wii and 360), but we're not absolutely glued to that. What I want to do here is open a discussion about what you all would like to see in terms of licensing Torque for iPhone development. I promise I'll take your feedback into account and in the end, we'll try to make the best decision we can for you.

As a frame of reference, here are some possible models we considered:

$15k unlimited titles, no royalty
Pros: Clean, simple, actually much less expensive than our console licensing of Torque
Cons: A bit high for many Indies

$5k / title, no royalty
Pros: Clean, simple, still a fraction of our console pricing
Cons: Still a bit high for Indies

$2-3k / title, 10% royalty
Pros: A bit more affordable for serious developers
Cons: Royalties can be a pain to track and Apple's already taking 30%

$500 / title, 30% royalty
Pros: Definitely affordable for anyone shipping games
Cons: Royalties for the same reasons as above

Obviously the latter choices would allow us to license Torque for the iPhone to more of you, so that's appealing, but we can get creative with this if we want too. Let us know what you think. Nothing's written in stone here. Again, goal #1 is be able to pay for the work and continue to fund improvements to the SDK. Goal #2 is to get this in as many people's hands as possible.

Please share your thoughts in a constructive way. The floor is now open for discussion. Thanks in advance guys.