There has been a lot talked about, or rather written about, the recent addition of an Instant Play to YoYoGames. Most of the comments are positive however there have been some complaining that their games do not appear to be compatible with instant play, and of course there have been those moaning that they want to download the game rather than use Instant Play to load the game.
This may be stating the obvious but Instant Play could be extremely beneficial to YoYo as they hope it will mean people return to their website each time they want to play one of the 10,000 odd games hosted with them. They therefore should be able to look forward to a huge increase in traffic, and thus increasing their advertising revenues.
Mark outlines the criteria for using Instant Play very clearly on his glog blog. Either a single .exe file or a .exe file contained within the route of a .zip are acceptable – installers are out of the question (hurray!). Surprisingly Instant Play is compatible with GameMaker 6 as well as the more recent Game Maker 7 – I would have thought it would be in YoYo’s interest to make this as a feature only available in the more recent version of the software so as to increase the number of registrations – however on the flip side by including GameMaker 6 games there is now a much greater number of games compatible which should make the YoYo site even more popular than it already is.
Instant play is something I haven’t seen anywhere else, so it remains a bit of a mystery to me, but if it works out as YoYo wish and people are prepared to use it then I sure others will copy.
I also find Instant Play to be more practical. For example, there are a couple of games I like to play in GM. Before Instant Play, I only had one game: Coaster Rider – and only cause I saved it in an obvious place, and I tend to clear my downloads folder every once in a while.
But for Instant Play, all that one has to do is navigate to the game page and click play — seems better.
I am, however, concerned about the recent restrictions on instant Play — like full screen for example. Though I hate fullscreen games, especially ones changing the resolution — I’m not into the idea of so much restriction. Let’s hope it doesn’t escalate any more, cause to this extent – its tolerable.
Good job for YYG on instant play, anyways.