Wonderland Engine is now free

It’s “the good old days” of the immersive web and there is still a lot of risk involved with daring a venture on it. The web is so advantageous through its accessibility, ease to publish, rapid development mindset, freedom of content and its portability. Yet, there is no easy way to monetize apps targeted at end-consumers yet and WebXR development is still full of difficult challenges.

Today, we are making Wonderland Engine available to everyone for free by switching to a royalty based license model to help you with these challenges.

(Sceenshot of Wonderland Editor using “Issum, The town on Capital Isle” by Olee on Sketchfab.)

Challenges 

Enterprises benefit greatly from advantages of WebXR through faster development (e.g. on Hololens 2) or rapid deployment to a known target group.

So do smaller game developers, who can easily deploy their ideas to an audience without the curation and permission of an app store.

Both enterprises and small developers, though, are facing graphical limitiations, long download times and performance issues; the issues we set out to solve with Wonderland Engine.

Removing the Barrier 

While we all struggle together to overcome the beginnings of the immersive web, we want to empower you to experiment rather than putting more financial risk in your way: Today, we remove the upfront monthly fee to Wonderland Engine and replace it with a 10% royalty on revenue from a released product or game that only applies when you succeed financially.

We strongly believe setting Wonderland Engine free and with it providing a tool that will enable more complex WebXR project scopes, is an important step to make building higher quality applications more accessible to a broad range of developers. By doing so, reducing the cost of development for WebXR applications and thereby increasing the viability for businesses.

Community 

We hope that removing the barrier to entry will also allow the community to thrive such that an exchange of experience, knowledge and prebuilt components can offset the chances of success for everyone.

We are looking forward to the future, proud to be enabling developers to build more and more incredible VR and AR applications on the web.

Feedback & Royalty 

Learning an application always incurs a certain “switching cost”. This is an upfront investment by you, because you believe that the Wonderland Engine will be valuable to you in the future.

Previously, the 30-day free trial was supposed to reduce this upfront cost, but the feedback we got was that 30 days is not enough to learn a new development platform, let alone prove its value. And that the cost of learning the engine together with the cost of the license after those 30 days was too high for many.

Additionally, switching costs often also come in form of porting an existing product from another framework or engine. This enormeous effort is already costly, especially if the product is not yielding any revenue yet.

We are very grateful for the feedback we got over the past 6 months and we agree.

The upfront upfront switching costs imposed by us are now reduced to the minimum. Once the Wonderland Engine has proven valuable to you, the royalty allows the Engine to grow based on your success. The royalty gives back to the ecosystem, to help us improve the development platform such that it proves even more valuable in the future.

Finally, the royalty model ensures the right focus for the company behind Wonderland Engine: enable and empower developers to be successful.

Alternative to Royalty 

We understand that the royalty model is not a fit for everyone. If you are looking for alternatives, feel free to contact us and negotiate custom terms.

Existing License Subscriptions 

If you have an active Wonderland Engine subscription, you will receive a refund for uncompleted months of your subscription. We will contact you shortly.

Get Started 

To get started with Wonderland Engine, create an account and then download from the downloads page.

A good place for first steps with the Engine is the Quick Start Guide.