Prominent Game Maker Community member NakedPaulToast is running a wager at the official Game Maker forum betting that:
“YYGs will release a GM Windows upgrade [public beta or complete] within approximately two months, let’s say on or before April 20, 2011 (GMT).”
The “friendly challenge” was crafted in response to NPT’s frustration at the number of comments in topics stating that YoYo Games has neglected the Windows platform and its users by changing its focus to porting Game Maker games to handheld devices.
In December YoYo Games stated that they hoped “to get [Game Maker 8.1] out as a beta in the first few weeks of 2011”. The Win32 spec, which all games submitted to the YoYo Games store must follow, states that games must be made using Game Maker 8.1 or Game Maker 7 for Mac. On January 24th a Creative Game Challenge newsletter said that game submissions would be allowed “from the beginning of February“.
Although notoriously loose with their release schedules it now looks promising for the April 20th date to be met by YoYo Games. On Saturday from their Dundee offices Mike Dailly tweeted “Wow… some amazing things cooking here at YoYo Games. The future is gonna be AWESOME! I’m drooling just thinking about the possibilities!”. Earlier in February Andrew McCluskey also started testing improvements that had been made to the Game Maker room editor.
When Game Maker 8.1 is released it will be the first ‘minor’ update to Game Maker since 2006 when version 6.1a was released alongside Mark’s Game Maker’s Companion book.
I say it will be earlier 😀