Flash Player premium features for gaming enable developers and publishers to deliver stunning web-based games across browsers to over a billion computers—dramatically expanding the market for a new class of social gaming experiences. In addition, Adobe is opening up the Flash Player to a supported third party ecosystem of specialized gaming middleware and development tools, not just those from Adobe. Adobe’s support of these 3rd party developer solutions targeting the Flash Player is enabled by the new tier of premium features.
- The new tier of premium features provides access to domain memory in combination with hardware-accelerated Stage3D in Flash Player.
- This combination of APIs enables unprecedented gaming experiences across the web. Together, they allow native game engines that power premiere titles on the most advanced modern console hardware to run directly on the web with no install, consistently across browsers, while reaching the largest possible audience.
- All other existing Flash Player capabilities are unaffected by the premium features terms. Developers can continue to use all of the other features of Flash Player—which power many of the most successful games on the web today—royalty-free.
- Developers can use the premium features without charge in apps packaged for iPhone/iPad (iOS), Android, Windows, or Mac OS using Adobe® AIR®.
Who should use premium features?
The premium features tier is intended to benefit game developers interested in creating the most advanced, graphically sophisticated, next-generation games for the web. The combination of hardware-accelerated Stage3D with domain memory enables the use of advanced compiler technologies like the Adobe Alchemy compiler, and other advanced game engines like Unity’s. Check Unity’s technology blog for more information.
The premium features enable these existing C/C++ codebases to run sandboxed across browsers in Flash Player. C/C++ developers, and developers using other languages who build on native middleware/engines, can now join ActionScript developers in benefiting from the ubiquity of Flash Player. And ActionScript developers benefit from now being able to leverage millions of lines of existing optimized C/C++ code in their ActionScript projects.
Games and applications using either hardware accelerated Stage3D or domain memory individually do NOT require a premium features license. For example, Flash game developers can independently leverage high-performance Stage3D hardware acceleration in Flash Player – which delivers full GPU-accelerated experiences to more users than any other web technology – at no charge.
Licensing and pricing
The premium features are available royalty free and without restriction through July 31, 2012. Starting August 1, the premium features will require a license from Adobe. Applications that make less than $50,000 in revenues will remain free of any royalties, as will any use of the premium features in applications packaged with Adobe AIR, including mobile applications for iOS and Android.
There is no charge to use premium features in applications that generate less than $50,000 in application revenue. For each application that has net revenue up to $50,000, the fee to use premium features will be a 9% revenue share on application net revenue above $50,000. Net revenue is calculated as revenue after taxes, payment processing fees, and social network platform fees are subtracted. Revenues subject to the revenue share include application sales, in-app purchases, subscription fees, sponsorship, and advertising fees received for advertising in, or related to the application.
Adobe will introduce a program this summer through which developers will be able to license the tools necessary for their content to access the premium features after July 31. A nominal program fee may be introduced beginning August 1.
To ensure that any existing content and projects currently under development can be exempted from these new revenue sharing requirements, Adobe will provide royalty-free licenses for use of the premium features by any content publicly released prior to August 1, 2012.
Refer: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/premium-features.html