Israel RN :

Philip Gamble :
“the original purpose of Game Maker was to introduce children to programming.”

That’s right, but that was 11 years ago…

…and now all the children are dead

Seriously. What?

Philip Gamble :
“the original purpose of Game Maker was to introduce children to programming.”

That’s right, but that was 11 years ago… Now, the free version does this more than well. You can still use GM lite to teach programming to children, and you can also use it to make terrific games. I think that most of the Pro users like us purchase GM mainly for the following reasons (in this order):

1.To support the development of such a great software.
2.To be able to use some of the pro features.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I do believe, just like Sondar said, that supporting the development is one of the main reasons to pay for it, and thus, we wouldn’t mind a price increase at all.

Teaching children how to program is good, but if they really want GM to evolve and to get the recognition it deserves, they have to change a lot of what they’re doing.

Pushing so much into the concept of “The YouTube of Videogames” is just following the “social web rush” stupidly… Most of the YouTube’s videos are either crap, silly, or superfluous because only a few people have the experience, time and willingness to produce good video content. The VERY SAME is happening to YoYoGames site… they are also completely missing the 90-9-1 principle here.

I’m not saying they should delete crappy or poorly produced games at all… But they should certainly promote the best games made by the users to a much greater extent, they should follow how many games made with GM are entering to competitions and winning prizes.

I’m older than most of GM users, and I’ve known GM since 8 years ago. And after YoYo Games came into the game, I expected a much more professional promotion of GM and its power. I still can’t believe that the best coverage GM games have is in this blog and not in the YoYoGames website, if I were “Zandy”, I would hire this blog’s staff to write reviews, articles and news for the official website.

They should also support the development of well-made extensions and promote them in the website so the new visitors can see “Hey, this program has a free version, and also there are lots of extensions made by the users that can help you make better games with few to none programming knowledge!”. Joomla’s porpularity is due greatly to the huge ammount of all-sorts of extensions available: Drupal is better in many fields, but Joomla is easier, and you can install lots of extensions and have a website with forums, chats, tags, and all sorts of functionalities.

All this being said, I find really dissapointing and even annoying to see that they keep making GM play the “software for kids” role… specially when those brats even complain about everything YoYoGames does: They want GM to be able to create games for the iPod and PSP and DSi, and XBox Live, and Wii Ware, and Macs and Linux and every single device, they want it 3D and shiny, they want it to make the games by itself… and yet, they won’t pay a single penny more, because mommy wouldn’t let them spend more that 25 bucks for their birthdays.

How sad truth is, ain’t it?

1. With GM 9, lets have a major update to Game maker and the yoyo games website. GM 8 had few new major features especially considering a proper company is running it now, not Mr Overmars.

2. Increase the price of GM. It will better fund Yoyo games and with increased features the vast majority of GM users will pay more for it. Currently the price is $25 (which from what I remember when i upgraded was about £20). Increase this to £30 or $35. This is the price of a brand new game, and for that you get unlimited access to a fantastic game making toolkit. Any game you want to make you can! Unlimited access! It’s still a fantastic deal!

Sondar

You make a good point about the ads though – if 90% of their income is from Game Maker upgrades surely it would be worth pushing this more on the site. If you go to download Game Maker the website hardly pushes the pro version at all.

Like if paying $99 or $1,999 bucks (Game Salad licenses) is nothing. I think there’s actually a good thing to have a GM 4 Mac. Your estimation on how many people have macs and don’t know how to run Windows on it makes no sense.

Most of the people using a Mac is people that won’t install windows on it. They have already paid more money for a mac, why on earth would they want to install windows?

It’s clear that you are not a Mac user, and thus know nothing about mac users.

An inexpensive game development tool for Mac seems like a great idea for me… although I do agree with you about adding a little bit more and charging more than $25 for Game Maker.

Game Maker is poweful, but at $25 there are too many children using it, and most of them will produce nothing but childish and poorly produced games, 99% of GM users make no justice to its capabilities.

I’d add to the list that is just stupid to have most of the visible space devoted to ads. Why do they waste the space so mindlessly?

They should fire the web designer responsible for so many mistakes. If yoyogames is not making enough money is greatly due to it’s poorly designed website. This very blog has more interesting news and coverage on GOOD GM GAMES than the yoyogames site!

How is this possible?