234 replies to this topic

[Shadow Link]

Well, this is definitely some interesting news. I had previously assumed that things like the Sony PSP SDK license would've prevented them from making something like this; in a way you avoid having to pay for a it - though I hear now that it's a fairly low price, or even free now? I haven't kept up with it too much.

At any rate, I hope this is enough of an eye-opener to those who once thought GM wasn't for professionals. Just goes to show that once you're given the easy way into the market, anything's "professional".

EDIT: That's not to say they won't have to face advertising/marketing/being accepted into mobile markets or anything else. It's the same as it's always been, just more options now.

Edited by Shadow Link, 22 April 2011 - 06:59 PM.

[NakedPaulToast]

I like the ability to independently publish, especially in combination with all the targets. This might be the catalyst for GameMaker to become a consideration for more serious indie developers.

Having said that, it might very well come into the category of careful what you wish for.

I don't think that many people have a clue about the efforts required to properly market games. They think it's going to be as simple as:

• Export to iPhone.
• Submit to Apple.
• Start counting your money.

I hope YYGs still provides the option to publish through them.

Reading through posts by hpappilon, Mr. Chubigans, rinkuhero, these guys spend an enormous amount of hard work and effort promoting and managing the business side of their publications. They're creating web pages, managing forums, promoting trying to raise the prominence of their games in search engines.

Publishing through YYGs will give creators a prominence that is almost impossible to obtain single handedly. This is time better spent creating more games.

The moment your games is published through YYGs, it's instantly associated with the other YYGs titles, it has presence on 10,000-20,000 ranked Alexa site. You get YYGs support.

What you lose in 50% YYGs fees, you are likely to gain tenfold than had you independently done yourself. You benefit from the knowledge and experience YYGs has derived, instead of going through the costly learning curve yourself. It frees up time for you to develop more games.

This may give you the option, but I think it's a foolish choice to take, especially for inexperienced, unknown developers.

[ugriffin]

This may give you the option, but I think it's a foolish choice to take, especially for inexperienced, unknown developers.

I agree with NPT in some points, the YYG Store is an amazing place to dig yourself a spot in the market.

Yes, I'm a big fan of the YYG Store, and I would probably use it for at least one title, to "see what it's about". However, I disagree about the "foolish choice to take" part, check this little article and this one.

Edited by ugriffin, 22 April 2011 - 07:39 PM.

[paul23]

I like the ability to independently publish, especially in combination with all the targets. This might be the catalyst for GameMaker to become a consideration for more serious indie developers.

Having said that, it might very well come into the category of careful what you wish for.

I don't think that many people have a clue about the efforts required to properly market games. They think it's going to be as simple as:

• Export to iPhone.
• Submit to Apple.
• Start counting your money.

I hope YYGs still provides the option to publish through them.

Reading through posts by hpappilon, Mr. Chubigans, rinkuhero, these guys spend an enormous amount of hard work and effort promoting and managing the business side of their publications. They're creating web pages, managing forums, promoting trying to raise the prominence of their games in search engines.

Publishing through YYGs will give creators a prominence that is almost impossible to obtain single handedly. This is time better spent creating more games.

The moment your games is published through YYGs, it's instantly associated with the other YYGs titles, it has presence on 10,000-20,000 ranked Alexa site. You get YYGs support.

What you lose in 50% YYGs fees, you are likely to gain tenfold than had you independently done yourself. You benefit from the knowledge and experience YYGs has derived, instead of going through the costly learning curve yourself. It frees up time for you to develop more games.

This may give you the option, but I think it's a foolish choice to take, especially for inexperienced, unknown developers.

The main benefit with being able to "export" yourself isn't that you can publish yourself, it's so that you can choose who to use for publishing.. You're no longer forced to use yoyogames and can take someone who benefits you more (has a larger name with your target audience/specialized etc etc).

I personally hope smarty is correct: I fear the "pro" version would else for me be simply paying for hardly anything I use. (Last time I created an executable / brought a creation to somewhere without gamemaker I can't remember anymore). - I'd gladly pay more for having important language features & the ability to have access to the internal executable data from external dlls. But more than €100,- I can't really afford at this moment.

[GameGeisha]

This may give you the option, but I think it's a foolish choice to take, especially for inexperienced, unknown developers.

Although most of these self-publishing choices are poor choices for inexperienced developers, there are other paths that can be taken.

For example, in my university's job postings list, I'm starting to see a growing number of short-term contracts regarding custom apps and adaptation of existing products into apps (one example being an interactive stress-management manual). If a developer has the experience and skill, being unknown isn't really a factor. Development skills, maturity (emotional and legal, as in 18+ or your jurisdiction's equivalent), some workplace-smarts and proper project management are all that's needed.

But regardless of which path one takes, being able to run and test your own games is still a paramount prerequisite for developing on multiple platforms. NPT has also made a post regarding multi-platform export here. If one can't afford the Studio edition (which I expect to run for about $300, 50% higher than NPT's estimate), I can hardly expect this same person to have access to the hardware required to test and support their products --- a very poor position to be in, if you ask me.

GameGeisha

[round]

If YoYo Games is developing GameMaker Studio, I suggest that:

1. Please also make GameMaker Studio have the exporting function to SWF format. A lot of websites accept good Flash games and give part of the advertisement income to the developers of these Flash games. Many people want to make Flash games. However, learning Actionscript is not easy for them. Learning GameMaker is much more easier than learning Actionscript. I believe that many people will purchase GameMaker Studio if GameMaker Studio can export to SWF format. Actually, Multimedia Fusion 2 and The Games Factory 2 can export to SWF games. Multimedia Fusion and the Games Factory are main competitors of GameMaker. SWF exporting function will help GameMaker Studio to compete with Multimedia Fusion and the Games Factory.

2. Please also fix screen tearing in GM games. If there is no screen tearing, GM games will look more professional.

Thanks a lot.
.....

Edited by round, 22 April 2011 - 10:44 PM.

[Desert Dog]

I'm all for self-publishing. Who cares about how experienced you are in business, or as a dev. Same as when you first started GM, you learn on the job, but you always suck at first.

That being said, there is such a thing as biting off more than you can chew. Being a barely competant gam dev doesn't mean you'd be competent at running your own indie biz, or should worry about that until you become even more competent. YYG's publishing is still very cool, that hasn't changed at all, and I'm looking forward to try publish my next game (at least) with them.

And yes, wouldn't mind .swf exporting, too, but hey, I'm sounding very greedy here.

Edit: And as for price, remember YYG's were concerned about GM getting a bad rep, and getting 'blocked' by Apple and such? I'd love to see it cheap($150-less) but....

Edited by Desert Dog, 22 April 2011 - 11:02 PM.

[Tepi]

Now everyone predict the price.

$200 ?

$300 ?

I assume you mean “price”… $1,000,000,000!! (he says holding pinkie to mouth) MWhaaa ha ha ha!

[mcoot]

Hmm. I'd guess, maybe $200? That would be quite reasonable, not that you wouldn't have people complaining about it.

As for self-publishing: I don't think it's wise to self-publish until you are experienced with GM, and know how to manage business as well. It's not as easy as most newbie users think. Having the official channel for games publishing is a good thing, but this option will allow more experienced users to manage it all themselves.

[scream681]

Yep.
Pretty Legendary announcement!

Now peeps will have the option to work with YoYo *or* go it alone.

I believe that deafening howl of defeat & despair that's echoing throughout the lands is a duet of sorts...
coming from Unity & GameSalad HQ

No idea bout Gamesalad, but I'm pretty sure that Unity developers don't give a damn even if GM will be able export to Amiga.
They got tons more commercial games released with their engine and a lot of companies using their product. They recently signed a multi-year contract with EA who will be using Unity for AA titles. Yoyogames still got lots of work ahead before even hoping competing Unity. And I doubt they plan to do so anyway.

[Robert3DG+]

I'm thinking no more than $160.

Anything more and I'd expect more features to the software as well (Some of which will probably come for the various exports anyways).

[Xardov]

250$ would be a good price, it would stop people from submitting crap games to the Apple store.

[Davve]

It should cost $25*x, where x is the number of formats that copy of Game Maker can export to.

[True Valhalla]

I think $199 is around where I'd price it too. But very exciting news. I can finally decide whether to begin work on an iOS game.

[kburkhart84]

If "serious" developers get into this, and GM starts using the C++ runner(and it is as good as it supposed to be, as far as speed and stability), then I don't see why this couldn't be priced easily at $249 or more. You have to spend money to make money, whether it is now or later. Unity is $1500 last I checked. Of course, it would be much more than GM because it is much more capable than GM as far as graphics go. But that is no reason to believe GM Studio should cost less than $100. Remember, 2D is still a very viable option, especially for all of these platforms(Android, iETC...) and so in no way would GM Studio be so cheap.

I love the idea. Yoyo will then be able to make money both ways. They can still publish(even to owners of GM Studio), and more serious devs can self-publish(or use a different publisher than GM), and yoyo will make money off of that as well with the more expensive GM Studio.

I have a couple questions, which maybe I'll get lucky and Mike(or Stuart) would see this post. How soon is GM8.x going to get(if it is in the works even) better internal sound/music support?? I'm not meaning something too complicated. I mainly want .ogg support and controlled sound instancing(able to easily have instances of the same sound all playing at the same time in 3d, possibly looping). Right now, I'm using a dll/extension I created for this. The reason I'm interested is mainly for the multi-platform support. When GM Studio comes out, I will likely be buying. And since using Windows dll files for things will limit the cross-platform capability of a game, I'm interested especially in knowing when this will upgraded. Everything else I'm using dlls for could be switched easily to use internal GM functions, though it might make load times longer(for example I have a dll(kbzip) that is for extracting and loading resources externally, and I could switch to all internal.)

The other question is, how likely is it that loading will be sped up. I think it would be a good idea to have GM maybe utilize some kind of external archive to hold the files when it extracts then from the executable(or maybe not even force them to be in the executable) and then have a way to easily load things in when you need them(similar to external loading, but usable on all platforms seamlessly). I like the idea of multi-platform games, but I don't want the complexity to have to be too low, atleast not due to load times. GM with windows easily gets around that by externally loading when you need to, but will/do the other platforms have a similar alternative in the works??

[ugriffin]

I'd actually price it closer to 400, 450 dollars. This is a professional tool, the actual people who are seriously interested in self-publishing would pay that.

[Robert3DG+]

You guys are getting silly with these prices.

[True Valhalla]

I'd actually price it closer to 400, 450 dollars. This is a professional tool, the actual people who are seriously interested in self-publishing would pay that.

A jump from $40 to $400 might seem a bit extreme - the products need to be kept in sight of each other.

[kburkhart84]

You guys are getting silly with these prices.

I can't agree with you here.

Honestly, if you had a tool that allowed easy Game Development like GM, but the power to export to these mobile platforms, would YOU really try to sell it at less than $100??? You would be leaving money on the table. Remember, this is a tool that CAN make you money, and not just a little either. And as far as I know, they aren't going for royalties. Game Development is a big business, and if you want to play with the big boys, you have to catch up. Even Epic's Unreal SDK now has an iPhone port. There engines run in the millions of dollars. There version of "catering" to indie development is in the form of a 25% royalty price. Unity is about $1500(but no royalties). Like I said, I don't expect GM's version to cost near that much, but there is no way I see Yoyo charging less than $99, and I'm thinking they COULD charge anywhere from $199 to $499. Now it is more likely to be around $200 from the post Sandy mentioned about html5 export, but then, that may be the only thing you could export for that price.

Reality is, Yoyo has a good piece of software in their hands, bugs or not. They also have learned to listen to the community, and have applied what we have requested to an extent. That is hard to do in the business world, especially when so many of the members of the community complain about the price going from $20 to $25, which isn't really enough as it is. Look at the competition GM has, and look what they charge(except for Construct). Seriously, with what software development costs, a company can't stay afloat, much less profit, if they don't price the software right. Games are one thing, because they don't make you money when you buy them. But GM Studio could very well make you money, so you pretty much should expect to have to pay a fair price for it.

[mcoot]

You guys are getting silly with these prices.

This is designed to be much higher-end than GM Standard. I don't think they plan on the majority of users buying this - only the serious developers with an interest in cross-platform developing.

Although, I do doubt they'd make it higher than $250-$300. I agree that $400 would be -reasonable-, I think it probably might make developers who do want to try cross-platform development, but who aren't 'really' serious about it not go with it.