The truth about the premium features for Flash
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012Today was a pretty hectic day in the industry. After Adobe announced a new premium license for Flash Player; the internet, in typical internet fashion, went ballistic over pretty much nothing. If you want to see what all the ruckus is about, you can read the official announcement here. I'm really going to hope that when you're done reading that, you realize there's nothing to get riled up about.
The 9% fee from the premium license applies only to Flash Player-based games that utilize both Stage3D and Alchemy. Furthermore, it only comes into effect if said game manages to pull in $50,000 or more in revenue. Anything packaged with AIR is exempt. This means anything you do for mobile does not require a fee.
I've been developing with Flash for quite a while now and nothing I've ever built has met the requirements for paying the 9% fee. And perhaps more to the point, nothing I plan on building in the future would incur a fee either.
Unless you're a major game developer (think EA) it's pretty safe to assume this announcement does not apply to you or any Flash projects you're planning on building.
As Richard Davey said on Twitter: "All everyone will take-away is the '9%' headline and ignore the fact it applies to not one single game yet"
HTML5 and Apple zealots will likely continue to make a big scene about this, but hopefully now you understand that this is really not a big deal and perhaps cooler heads will prevail. For another voice on the matter, check out Lee Brimelow's recent post in which he explains the situation.


