oddbob0

Thanks, yeah. Not trying to break any particular new ground so that's cool

It's as straight down the line as I could make it. You spawn, you shoot stuff, things explode, the end. Although it does get vastly more interesting than the demo suggests hence really, really needing to do something about that.

I gave my first kid crayons.  He ate them.  So with our second kid, I made him pay for them first.

YYG can take whatever lesson they want from that.

I solved this problem by stopping at one. Kid that is. I couldn't possibly eat two kids, that'd be greedy.

Your likening of a software product to crayons is not valid... You PAY for the crayons and so can do what you want with them. You DON'T pay for GM Lite and so can still do what you want with it, but must put up with a watermark. It seems like a fair trade to me.

Dude! My kid doesn't have to pay for his crayons until he wants to buy his own. So as far as he's concerned, they're free crayons.

The analogy isn't important though so by all means, feel free to shoot it down.

I've gone over most of the rest of the stuff so many times now that it's starting to hurt my head and I'm confusing myself with it all but...

and lets be honest, VERY few people will be making games worthy of such a wide audience that the watermark is a hinderance...

...this is where the way we look at things really diverges. You assume that it only becomes a hindrance when someone takes what they've created and puts it out there for wide approval. I'm saying that no, it's a hindrance because it's discouraging to have your personal creation defaced and that -not- having this in place was one of the things that differentiated Gamemaker from the crowd. It's one of many things that made up lots of reasons for GM being a preferable choice over other packages but an important one none the less.

When you're teaching a kid to draw, you don't pass him the crayons then write "made in crayola" over the top until he pays for his own. That's the POV I'm coming from - the one that wants as frictionless an environment for people to learn to make games with. And GM has proven itself repeatedly to be the perfect tool for this.

Yes, this attitude does conflict with the conventional ways we view software trials and methods for upsell but I don't think being disruptive is also necessarily a bad thing when it's for the greater good (THE GREATER GOOD). Especially when GM got such a foothold with (unintentionally?) disruptive business models in the first place.

Sounds to me like you're not THAT far away from agreeing with ugriffin's statements.  You seem to have some mild resistance to the water-mark, and you'd like tiered pricing -- which others have proposed too.

Not sure why we're having such a heated dispute here.

Well, I'm not really that interested in arguing featuresets much beyond the watermark anyway. I just seem to have let myself be drawn into that sort of thing in the chaos, carnage and noise, often because it's entertaining enough to speculate on different approaches and angles and watching the resident bully rant is highly amusing also. So yeah, I'd like to see some changes there to make things more amenable to beginners but the fundamental difference between my stance and ugriffin's comes from the bit I didn't respond to (mainly because I'm bored of reiterating it but hey, here goes!)

YoYo is improving GM 'original', and keeping it at a reasonable price... while they're developing new stuff for the professional studios (GMHTML5 and GM Studio), while keeping the original (improved) program at a price that is still a steal. I'm not quite sure what the problem is, here.

Ignoring the cash value judgement stuff, ugriffin is willing to accept this as "reasonable" and a status quo that's ok. I don't think that it is. So it's something much more fundamental than arguing over featuresets, it's one that's entirely about the direction YYG *appear* to be taking GM in. That's my concern. That GM is being moved from a beginners tool to corporate assist primarily and I believe it should be the other way round. I don't have the answers to how to do reverse this or how to proceed and I'm not some seer that can say for definite this is the way things will always be but I can say that given the data I have at my disposal, given the information I know at this point in time, it's something that concerns me.

Which I am doing! Messily.