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Mid-week Community Links

  • Game Maker community site Roket Games is to close at the end of the month. The site didn’t succeed in attracting enough traffic, members and games for the site to be worthwhile to continue running. The Roket Games game integration system will be made open source.
  • YoYo’s Mike Dailly has a blog, titled The life of a Games Programmer, in which he makes regular posts – some of them about the development of Game Maker.
  • The YoYo Games “glog” will be updated to a slightly wider format tomorrow. Mike Dailly has said that the company hope to start posting “more technical stuff” there soon, and the current design doesn’t present source code very well.

What do you think?

8 Comments

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  1. Wow, didn’t expect that…

    To be honest, the ONLY think that stopped me from frequenting RocketGames was the website design. I was hoping for it to be improved, but it just never came together. If it was more accessible, even if only aesthetically, I’m sure it would have attracted a lot more, and constant, traffic.

    Good luck with your future projects, however. You certainly have the potential to make something really outstanding.

  2. You mean version 2’s website design? If you think that was bad, well, I’m not really sure what you are expecting… I thought it was fantastic, especially when compared to other sites.

  3. I’m guessing that your friend also generates (a lot) more than an average of about 50 visits per day, of which 80% is probably me developing the site itself. 😛

  4. Interesting information James. Whatever you decide to do, good luck with your future projects (and have a good time on your trip).

    I’ve always been curious about what kind of reception I would get by putting ads on the Reflect Games website, but I’m holding off on any of that until I get the site updated finished. Based on my experiences with my blog, I don’t expect a heck of a lot of revenue to come in from it, but I’ve worked with a friend who set up a relatively successful blog, and he brings in $50-100 a month – which isn’t phenomenal, but is definitely enough to cover hosting costs. So at the very least, I know it’s possible with a little work.

  5. Shame about Roket Games, but i will be interested to see the open source stuff they’re putting out.

    More posts on the Glog sounds good, especially technical ones :).

  6. From the outset it may have appeared successful, but unfortunatly our revenue streams don’t bring in much – advertising has accumulated $15.81 over the entire period that ads were running on the site (including the previous year; we did have a break in showing ads due to some of the Evony ones getting a little unsuitable). The commercial game support also wasn’t much of a success, and with YYG bringing out their own system in a few weeks, there’s also no possibility of that generating future revenue.

    With that taken into account, I decided that it was very unlikely that either form of income would generate enough revenue for the next hosting period.

    That said, I would like to note that I’m not ruling out bringing the site back in 6 or 12 months time (it all depends on what the circumstances are like), but there’s nothing worse (for users) than operating a website where no-one’s home (and possibly may not come back).

    Also, I’d like to correct Phil and note that it’s is near the end of June (I updated the final shutdown time to give people more time to get their stuff off). Past this date, weblinks and game download URLs will continue operating until the end of the next hosting period as not to break links on the GMC or anywhere else.

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