With the recent long anticipated announcement that YoYo Games will enter into revenue sharing deals with Game Maker users to publish some of their best creations they have positioned themselves against GameSalad.
GameSalad, an iOS only development tool, has been around since 2008 and over 700 created games are currently available in the App Store. They very recently announced that they would be moving from from a pay-up-front model to “GameSalad Direct” which eliminates tiered annual membership fees (previously at $99 and $1,999) and make available for everyone features previously only present in the more expensive version.
Essentially Direct distribution will see GameSalad publish games through a central account on behalf of their creators to the App Store in a revenue share deal. One difference from the YoYo Games model is that developers will also be charged an up-front fee for GameSalad to publish each piece of software.
Existing GameSalad developers don’t seem too pleased at the changes being introduced as it appears that to be able to update existing Apps created with the development tool you will be required to transfer over to the new revenue-sharing licence agreement when your current deal expires.
Full details, including the revenue share proportion, have yet to be announced and the GameSalad team have pretty much kept their members in the dark since the initial post with few of the questions asked by developers being answered.
GameSalad say they are “currently exploring options” to address user concerns.
The Unity development tool does not have a central publishing option. An easy iOS development tool to watch in the future is RocketPack for which costings have not yet been announced.
I checked out Game Salad awhile back and the quality of apps you can make are a joke. Not even close to as flexible and powerful as Game Maker. Easy yes, but primitive and rudimentary too.
all I know is that I want a piece of that.