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YoYo to invest $5M in Game Maker

Three quick snippets of news from YoYo Games Ltd:

Sandy has quietly mentioned that YoYo plan to invest $5M into the Game Maker software and their website.

“we are planning to spend almost $5M on Game Maker and YoYo Games over the next 2 years. We’ve all been pretty successful in business so far, but not THAT successful to stump up another $5M…so we are selling a stake in YoYo Games to institutional investors. This will make NO major difference to the overall ownership and strategy of YoYo or Game Maker”

YoYo are also “seriously considering the option” of a Linux version. I hope that gets to release stage.

And GameMaker 8 will not come out this year.

What do you think?

8 Comments

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  1. Very well written post however, I would recommend that you turn the No Follow off in your comment section.

    Keep up the good work.

  2. @Ivor Biggun
    Frankly, you’re wrong. GM isn’t aimed at younger people at all. If you look at the YYG website, you’ll find that there are a lot of action games that younger people would be upset by. Some of the dark horror FPS games, for example. Plus, no offense, but older people tend to be better at learning things such as coding. If I were any younger, I wouldn’t know all the GML I know now.
    Plus, the GM games are only ‘inferior’ to those who are closed-minded. Open your mind and you’ll see that these games are on a different level to console games and most other PC games.
    Think about it.

  3. *edit* Though Tuntis I do agree that some artists may have a use of GM, however the point I was making was to try to work out how Yoyo would get back the very large investment it was making in GM……

    The other fact to figure into the equation is how many people actually register GM? They may use it but may not have registered it…yoyo wont make money on those…then add in the costs of piracy to the company (I notice that many torrent sites have a regged GM….however the D/L count is so low, it would suggest the majority of people are not interested in it even if it is free…

    That to me sounds dodgy ground for a 5m investment…who would run the risk with that?

  4. I see what youre saying, but I would suggest that any artist who has to use their own work in GM and are not getting offers (lets face it there’s plenty of freeware coders crying out for spriters/gfx/etc) then they cannot be that good, and its probably best they either develop their skill more or give it up… Go to any scener forum or C++ forum and you will find requests aplenty.

    For any budding artists who want to see their work in something far more pro than GM, could do worse than visit:

    scene.org – there is coders there crying out for you guys..

    Why should an artist put time and effort into something that is going to be displayed on an inferior product (as in my first post) To me great artists deserve a great platform to display their work….Ive seen one guys work on the YOYO forum who has real talent…imo he is wasting himself there and would make a great addition to a scene crew.

  5. “why would anyone really want to spend money on a tool that produces inferior results?”

    Artists. Some might have great drawing (or other skills) yet don’t want to learn programming: GM is pretty much their only choice.

  6. I cant see this working….the main audience for GM is young people, hard fact is that theres not much money to be made with them and at £10 a pop yoyo are going to have to sell alot of copies to make $5m back…Advertising on the yoyosite cant be that lucrative IMO as again young people are the audience and they dont have credit cards or a neverending supply of funds…

    The fact that C++ was used to develop the runtime, isnt for performance issues IMO. It will be for cheep porting options to Linux and Macs, thus increasing the target audience for relatively low costs…

    The Mac, as great a machine as it is, is not going to be a major money spinner…just ask yourself this….how many people do you know who have a Mac? and how many of them do you know that would be interested in using GM….The same with Linux, speaking from personal experience, the people who have got to grips with the real benefits of using Linux are using far more robust and advanced languages/dev tools than GM….

    Its been said before that the yoyo site is trying to be the youtube for games….I can agree with that, as the revenue youtube makes is massive…what Yoyogames doesnt seem to realise is that making a short video for youtube takes alot less time and effort than making a game in ANY language…thats why youtube is so popular, anyone can make a 10 second clip on their mobile and upload it to the site….to get someone to sit down an make a game….thats something else….

    When you look at the quality of alot of freeware games, GM efforts look dated….when you have the likes of OGRE and DARKGDK now free, you can make some really advanced pieces of software…..

    If Yoyo increase the cost of GM (to cover the investment) I can see it being the final nail in the coffin. I currently use DEV-C++ (freeware) and Ogre (freeware) together, niether cost me any money and even the most basic of 3d effects using these, would bring GM to its knees (in terms of performance)….why would anyone really want to spend money on a tool that produces inferior results?

    Sorry for the long post. I just wanted a point to get across instead of the “GM will be number 1” type comments that GM fanboys seem to like to post.

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