Today I received the go ahead I had been looking for from YoYoGames. Thanks to Clayton at YoYoGames Customer Support my wish to be able to offer a GameMaker Pro licence can now become reality. In case any of you are interested, buying a prize licence is as simple purchasing a normal licence from YoYo. Although of course I don’t know how easy this will be since I upgraded in the 5.0 days when Game Maker was still very much a one-man-band.
I’ll let you know the thinking behind my idea as the audience of gamemakerblog are mostly cynical and know that I wouldn’t do this for nothing. The idea is really three-fold. One to see how easy or hard it would be to get the go ahead from YoYo and run a competition for people who use Game Maker. Two, to see what I can get people to do for a chance to win a cheap ($20) prize, or to put it another way to attempt to exploit the Game Maker Community. And third, and probably my main aim, to try and spread the word about the free Game Maker Affiliation Service which I run.
The basic idea is that members of the GMC will place a promotional graphic advertising the Game Maker Affiliation Service in their signature which will enter them into a draw to win the licence. Obviously our target audience here are people that aren’t using Game Maker Pro or are using cracked earlier versions of the software. Therefore this certainly isn’t the premium clientele, heaven forbid they read this, but I suspect these members will be more willing to sacrifice the majority of their signature space to me – and of course the prize is suitable.
Actually I fear that I may have made the image too big and this may deter some people from entering, but of course I can see how things progress in the early weeks of the competition. The idea is to make the draw on the 1st July to give people at least a month to enter and to hopefully ensure that more people are attracted to enter, viral marketing if you wish.
The image is below – it’s actually a bit wide for the blog template, sorry – and also includes a link back to a page with details of the competition on it.
I’d be interested to know your comments, suggestions or basically whatever you think of the idea. I haven’t promoted the service in any way yet, I’m just looking for a bit of feedback before I go ahead and start trying to spread the word.
Sounds like it is going to be as simple as I anticipated
I think you should have both so people can choose. That way people that use the bigger banner have more chance of winning 😀
Thanks for your comment Liam, that was one of my main concerns. I think you are right – a smaller image would probably encourage more people to participate as they can still have lots of space in their signature to advertise their own sites and games.
The banner is too large and ugly. You would probably get a much better response with a pretty looking user bar sized image, maybe twice as high as a userbar.
It would be fine. I don’t think there is a problem with it given it doesn’t benefit you in terms of it being a free service…
hmmm
It seems fine to me, but you should still clear it with a mod/glob/admin
The line in the GMC rules says “No links that will give you something from a user clicking it. For example, real world money or more troops in a game of some kind.”
My competition would not give anyone anything if the graphic is clicked on.
I’m not that picky.
You’ll have to check that people are keeping it there and not just putting it up at the time that you check.
There would be no link with the users name in, but yes – you could have a point. I believe they also say you can’t offer GM pro on the GMC which could also be an issue.
Ask one of the GMC global mods about this.. last time I checked, putting things that link to sites so that you could benefit isn’t allowed.
Like …?ref=eyas and stuff.