Corona Labs, the makers of the Corona SDK Lua powered game engine, have been sold to Appodeal, a mobile advertising firm. Back in November of 2015 Corona was acquired by Perk then in September of 2016 it was sold back to the CEO, so it’s been a rocky couple of years over at Corona Labs. Let’s hope this deal provides some stability for the Corona engine.
Details from the announcement:
One of the laurels of Corona SDK is how easy it makes it to build games across platforms without compromising on power and flexibility. For those who need to extend beyond what Corona provides “out of the box” with its many APIs and plugins, the Enterprise version of Corona is perfect.
Appodeal is the functional counterpart to Corona — developers can simply sign up for Appodeal, integrate it with a few lines of code, and connect to multiple demand sources (including AdMob and Facebook Audience Network!). Even though Appodeal connects to dozens of ad networks, developers get the convenience of just one easy payment (with the exception of AdMob and Facebook Audience Network). For developers who want even more power and control over their ad network relationships, Appodeal puts you in the driver’s seat so you can tune as you see fit.
An important note is that the acquisition of Corona Labs by Appodeal does not mean that developers must use Appodeal to monetize their games — Corona Labs will continue to offer and support third-party ad networks into the future, although the integration with Appodeal may get deeper over time with the aim to make it even easier to add monetization to your games.
In addition to a natural fit around building easily and monetizing easily, there’s a shared appreciation around the role Corona plays in the indie developer ecosystem. While many ad networks tend to court developers that already have large audiences, Appodeal recognizes that it’s the smaller developers who make up the vast majority of the ecosystem and that nurturing the relationship with these developers will only promote the possibilities of growth and success.
Appodeal is a global company with offices in San Francisco, Barcelona, and Moscow to name a few. Corona has a large developer community in every nook of the world and Appodeal’s international presence and commitment to serving developers worldwide means higher eCPMs no matter where your users are — and where they can’t deliver, their connectivity to AdMob and Facebook Audience Network solves the problem well.