Construct 3 Breaks your Games Permanently

Construct 3 Breaks your Games Permanently and makes them inaccessible for further updates.

Ashley's Quote

Just a few days ago, Ashley Gullen, founder of Scirra, the owners of the popular game engine Construct 3, posted an alarming entry on their website for all those who develop and use 3rd party addons. This may cause all your live projects to break and become inaccessible for further updates.

Construct 3 was officially announced in 2015 with a promising future, ensuring backward compatibility for its predecessor, Construct 2. Since its official release on December 4, 2017, its architecture came with an SDK that allowed advanced users to develop more complex features, enriching the engine over time and, as a consequence, helping Scirra to leverage the engine's popularity. For the last 6 years, a very active and strong community has formed around Construct 3, collaborating with all its members, who have managed to create multiple plugins that expand Construct 3's capabilities beyond what it natively provides. Popular plugins like Funky Quad, which projects 2D textures in 3D coordinates, Colyseus Multiplayer SDK, Google Analytics for Universal Analytics, ProUI, and many more were created by community members.

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All of these addons were based on SDK V1 and are widely used by Construct 3 developers. They even pushed the company to support features like 3D and Scene Graphs, the latter of which was surprisingly never considered by Construct originally. I've just mentioned a couple, but there are dozens of addons that provide extended capabilities based on SDK V1 that will soon be killed by Scirra's founder, Ashley Gullen. In an attempt to "secure" its engine core, Ashley has decided to retire all support for SDK V1 permanently, to be replaced by the new SDK V2. Scirra clearly has no idea of the impact of their decision. The quantity of projects that will become unusable and even inaccessible is still to be counted, but I can guarantee the crashes will come by the hundreds.

I've been a developer for 20 years and have been using Construct professionally for the last 6 years. It became an important part of my finances, and to make games leaner and faster, I've created multiple private addons that provide functionalities that Construct 3 doesn't have, and that Scirra won't be willing to support natively. I've also purchased addons from other developers that greatly improve the engine. Like many, I use two very popular sets of addons: Aekiro's ProUI (recently open-sourced) and Chadori's Construct Master Collection. The first provides UI capabilities, which Construct really lacks, and the latter is a set with multiple functionalities that integrate PlayFab, Firebase, and Android and iOS native functionalities that are also nonexistent in Construct. If by any means your projects used one of these, you are at high risk that Construct 3 Breaks your Games Permanently.

6 years of work on plugins that use SDK V1 is a lot of work. I've invested countless hours designing, developing, and testing them to improve my delivery timeline, and thus increase my income from making games and selling addons. All of that is at risk now.

Engines like Unreal, Godot, and Phaser are either open source or provide access to their internals to allow developers to create incredible products and experiences. In contrast, Scirra has decided to fully close its engine.

Scirra's Response.

Many of the available popular addons use the engine's internal features, which won't be available in SDK V2. As a result, projects using any of those addons will be unusable and won't even open in Construct because of this restriction. Even addons that are not using any of the engine's internals will be affected just by the new design of V2, creating the need for developers to invest countless hours migrating and testing them. In some cases, developers migrated to more robust engines, leaving those addons without updates (e.g., Game Analytics, Spriter, and more). As you can imagine, the amount of work to fix/migrate them, and number projects impacted is huge. Addons for Spine and Spriter are totally based on SDK V1, and they will be completely trashed after this update.

Scirra's founder, Ashley, argues that this change will benefit the customers, but there are no benefits at all for users. On the contrary, their older projects will never open again just because SDK V2 won't provide any sort of backward compatibility, and Scirra's capability to support multiple versions of Construct is in question. No performance improvements, no additional functionalities, no backward compatibility are benefits from this change. On the contrary, you'll lose what you have now. Engines like Unreal and Unity, the market leaders, provide their older versions in a way where you won't lose access to those projects with tools like Unity Hub. In contrast, this change in Construct will restrict you from ever updating an old project because their core, which is always provided as a service from a server, will change forever.

Community's reaction - Construct 3 Breaks your Games Permanently

As a result, the developer community is in great discomfort because Construct 3 Breaks your Games Permanently, and although they have been actively trying to convince Scirra to provide permanent support for SDK V1, Scirra is completely reluctant to hear them out. In a desperate attempt to keep projects alive, the community is trying to organize to fix as many of the plugins as they can, cleaning up Scirra's mess and reinforcing the fact that Scirra's long-term decisions are questionable and, in my opinion, don't reflect a reliable company that hears and supports its community. We've seen what happened to Unity with their pricing model; they were reluctant to hear their community out until it was too late and their financials were impacted. Eventually, things changed, and I'm afraid Scirra could follow the same path. If the impact is not financial, for sure the reliability and confidence in the company will be jeopardized, and many talented developers will likely migrate to a more serious engine.

It's important that you, a reader and probably a Construct 3 user, are aware of what's happening and what these changes imply. Personally, I'll be greatly affected in terms of work and income, and I have to make a big pause to migrate my plugins because I have revenue committed to my existing games, which will put me in a difficult situation if I just leave. So, I have no options. But I'm sure that if the community organizes and tries to push this decision back, we may have Scirra develop permanent support for SDK V1 and thus keep our projects alive permanently.

Thanks for reading through my whole post. I hope I've explained the situation clearly to you, and if you can manifest against this decision, I hope we can push this decision back.

Pixel Perfect Studio