The Appodeal monetization platform has announced the acquisition of Corona Labs, the company that created the Corona cross-platform engine.
This was announced today, March 17, by Appodeal. The amount of the transaction was not disclosed.
After the takeover, the monetization platform will retain the Corona brand. The company also plans to make the engine completely free for developers.
At the moment, only the SDK of the framework is free, but for the use of native libraries, additional plugins, the creation of offline builds and the removal of a splash screen, a paid subscription is required.
“As soon as the deal is closed, we will begin work on translating [the engine] into an open source and completely free format,” she commented on the deal App2Top.ru Yulia Shmyrova, PR Manager of Appodeal Russia.
The deal itself is currently in the process. “The lawyers are finishing the registration, but our employees have already started working together with the Corona team and are communicating closely,” Yulia also added.
When asked what prompted the platform to purchase the engine and make it free, the Appodeal representative replied as follows:
“Firstly, the purchase of Corona will help us work more closely with partners from advertising networks. Secondly, it will sound pathetic, but we and the Corona team largely coincide in values and see the development of the mobile industry in a similar way. Beautiful, fast, easy-to-produce 2D games are created on the Corona engine. Many of them are then monetized through advertising, so we are interested in seeing more of these games. This does not mean that we will force to embed Appodeal — no, developers will have complete freedom in choosing the monetization method, as it is now. But the more good mobile games there are, the better it is for us.”
Corona Labs is being acquired for the third time. In 2014, it was acquired by Fuse Powered monetization company. In 2015, the developers of the engine were outbid by the revard platform for $2.3 million Perk.com .
Recall that Corona Labs was founded in 2007 by people from Adobe. The first version of the Corona SDK appeared in 2009. Since then, more than 10 thousand games have been created on an engine focused on two-dimensional development. One of the most popular is Freeze! The Escape and Major Magnet (on the cover of the material).
Source: App2Top