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GameMaker to be free for non-commercial purposes and have one-time fee license
- geiagal 3y agoThis company changes their licensing terms every three years or so. This is the same deal that Game Maker Studio 1.4 was licensed under, then they brought out a subscription model for GMS 2 with no free tier. It's hard to take them at their word and have faith that there will really be a full-features free version "from now on."
- wilsonnb3 3y agoThey’ve been bought and sold a few times which is probably related to the licensing changes. Currently owned by Opera since 2021.
- rollcat 3y agoI wonder if there's anything like a "rug-pull-proof" licensing/development model. Even AGPL is not a guarantee, if a single entity owns the copyright to the entire project (through CLAs), and decides to switch to BSL, and has enough influence to make forks irrelevant. I think Linux's model is the strongest: individual contributors retain copyright, and there are enough individual copyright holders to make relicensing insanely difficult. Coupled with the project's pace (and the pace at which they change the internal APIs) it basically provides such a guarantee. Most projects however are less successful and the users/downstream developers can't count on momentum as the safeguard.
- iudqnolq 3y agoA project could always be abandoned, there's no way to guarantee perpetual labor on your behalf.
- falcor84 3y agoWhat does this have to do with the preceding argument? Yes, the company could abandon the project, but the concern here is about them taking all the previous work (including volunteer contributions) and proceeding with a more restrictive commercial license; that's what we want to prevent.
- asalahli 3y ago> the concern here is about them taking all the previous work Not unless they retroactively change the license on said previous work, which I'm pretty sure they cannot.
- falcor84 3y agoI haven't looked into GameMaker's license specifically, but many projects require a copyright assignment as part of their contributor license agreement.
- rollcat 3y agoThe concern is not about free labor, the concern is that the product I'm building might get killed by vendor deciding to just fuck me over. Whether the software is free (as in beer or freedom) or not is a secondary concern - I'm merely noting that even a license as strong as AGPL is not a guarantee that I won't get fucked.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoIt is, though? All that is required is that you're allowed to maintain your own fork. Which is guaranteed to you, in perpetuity, by the AGPL.
- josephcsible 3y agoNobody wants to guarantee perpetual future labor. The guarantee we want is that if there's future labor, then we want the fruits of it to remain FOSS.
- EarlKing 3y agoThere is. It's called Pay The Author. If you don't have a bare license conditioned on someone's pinky promise, but rather you pay the author and thereby perfect that promise into an actual, enforceable contract, then when someone attempts a rug-pull you can actually file suit to enforce your legal rights. Simple as.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoThat's the nice thing about a one-time license fee: whether they maintain that license "from now on" is basically irrelevant. There is only "for the version you bought". They can change their license all they want in the future, that one-time fee license will forever be valid for the specific version you were willing to pay for. It's why some folks are still using Photoshop CS6.
- ajdude 3y agoI actively use game maker and as much as I love it, I really got screwed over by this. I bought game maker studio version 1 for mobile and paid a great deal of money for it, it was shortly before they released the new version of 2.0 with the new model and then android dropped support for 32 bit mobile applications. I was unable to build my android apps moving forward because 1.0 never supported 64bit while 2.0 did. It took me a bit to finally come around to using the engine again (I currently pay the monthly fee as I develop my game)
- CodesInChaos 3y agoPixel images are stable enough that they remain usable forever. Windows is a relatively stable platform as well, so not updating your development tools mostly works there. But on mobile there are too many breaking changes and updated store requirements for that to work for long.
- heywhatupboys 3y agocan you get gamemaker 8 legally somehow?
- gjsman-1000 3y agoI’ve wanted to make a game for a while now as a side project; but art styling matters immensely to me - more than the gameplay itself, honestly. I feel like I need to become a good artist first…
- Kye 3y agoI bought this on the strength of the main instructor's concept art course[0]: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/learn-to-create-game-art-in-blender-bundle-2023-software https://www.humblebundle.com/software/learn-to-create-game-a... [0] I'm halfway through and have made more progress in a week than in a lifetime of false starts (complete with Black Friday coupon): https://www.gamedev.tv/courses/1289989?coupon_code=YIPPEE https://www.gamedev.tv/courses/1289989?coupon_code=YIPPEE
- cloudking 3y agoThere are so many generative AI tools for creating game assets now, you don't really need to become a good artist. https://www.scenario.com/ https://www.scenario.com/ https://www.rosebud.ai/ai-game-assets https://www.rosebud.ai/ai-game-assets https://www.layer.ai/ https://www.layer.ai/ Coming soon https://unity.com/products/muse https://unity.com/products/muse
- gjsman-1000 3y agoTrue; but other indie gamers would never forgive me because it’s seen as plagiarism.
- sillysaurusx 3y agoIgnore them.
- tensor 3y agoWhat are some of your favourites?
- warent 3y ago
- rychco 3y agoLike many others, I had (appropriately) written off gamemaker entirely as soon as they changed to a subscription model. It was always a solid choice for making games, so I'm glad to see that it might be worth using again.
- charcircuit 3y agoOf $100. This is quite steep compared to when the pro version only costed $20. I don't think the lite version prohibited commercial use either, it was just limited in what it could do.
- pipeline_peak 3y agoWho needs game maker when we have godot, etc?
- gjsman-1000 3y agoDifferent strokes for different folks. It’s like asking why we need PowerPoint when we’ve got LibreOffice.
- pipeline_peak 3y agoLibreOffice is a substandard imitation. Godot is more powerful than Gamemaker. It can do anything Gamemaker can do and it’s free.
- nacs 3y agoGodot is definitely far more powerful but it has a higher learning curve. Gamemaker is far easier for beginners who are making that Gamemaker type of game (typically top-down, pixel-art for graphics, etc).
- pipeline_peak 3y agoThat is true. It’s just an unfortunate that GameMaker is the one of the that isn’t open source
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nottorp 3y agoThat is the problem actually. You don't always need powerful.
- wilsonnb3 3y agopeople who want console support without paying a third party company to port their game, for starters
- HumblyTossed 3y agoEvery time I see GameMaker, I think Gary Kitchen's GameMaker. Ahhh... Good times.
- madjam002 3y agoLast time I used Game Maker was just before they got acquired by YoYoGames, it actually inspired me to learn programming along with Roblox (early 2007). It’s cool to see how it’s still going!
- Dudester230602 3y agoA lot of old things from 90s are still going surprisingly strong - Python, JavaScript, Java etc.
- xur17 3y agoAgreed! I'm assuming this is the same gamemaker I used back in highschool (~2004), which is what got me into programming in the first place.
- ruuda 3y agoGame Maker was how I got into programming in the early 2000s! Looking at the website now, it looks very different today, but the core is still there.
- Ajedi32 3y agoWow, I followed that exact same path! First GameMaker, then I moved on to Roblox later, and now programming is part of my job! I think I might still have some of the old .exe files for the games I made back in the day...
- daviddoran 3y agoSame! I created numerous games with early GameMaker as a pre-teen. I even managed to use it for making various useful little programs, like an interactive calculator to show my Dad’s company that the bandwidth required for multiple security cameras would eat up all the bandwidth available on the relatively slow internet connections. It definitely had an enormous positive effect on my career in software.
- SmallDeadGuy 3y agoYup, same here! Used GameMaker extensively before getting into Minecraft modding and Ludum Dare game jams with different engines (LWJGL and XNA/MonoGame). 16+ years later and I'm a Senior Gameplay Programmer
- lxe 3y agoI believe this is the "same" GameMaker I built my first game when I was 13 back in 2001 or 2002.
- matsemann 3y agoFor me I think it was version 5 in 2003 https://gamemaker.fandom.com/wiki/Version_5 https://gamemaker.fandom.com/wiki/Version_5 At least the screenshot tingles something in the brain.
- famahar 3y agoSame. I was so active in the legacy forums before YoYo games deleted it all. I found an archive of the old forums on archive.org and I'm extracting the folder as I write this (process has been taking over an hour so far and it's only halfway). So far it seems to be almost 60GB of information. I thought it would just be text, but I guess it's that plus all the images. I can't wait to see what 10 year old me was up to back then. It's been 20 years.
- heywhatupboys 3y agoare you talking about gmshowcase.dk ? The site YoYo games literally pulled from existence to become their own "half baked" showcase?
- dcastm 3y agoMe too! I started programming because of Game Maker. I lost all the games I did. I wished I had saved them somewhere.
- bossyTeacher 3y agoProbably only doing it because competition. They had the chance to do it +20 years ago
- a1o 3y agoI would be curious if someone with Game Maker experience could try Adventure Game Studio and report what did they think of it what is to like and what isn't, what is good and what is bad.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoHave toyed with both. GM is far more flexible and powerful. Yet if you want a point and click adventure game then AGS will get you quite far without much programming knowledge. Getting AGS games on mobile will probably require a publisher deal with one of the few who work with AGS, like Wadget Eye.
- conorcleary 3y agoMany thanks to Mark Overmars for the development of GM, it was a core part of my toolkit in the early 2000's and introduced me to offline programming.
- mollerhoj 3y agoI made superslimesoccer.io with game maker back in the day, still going strong with 1000s of daily visitors
- sirwhinesalot 3y agoThis is nice but they really need to fix their new UI, it's a mess. The sprite editor is lovely but the multi-window layout is needlessly confusing, it's extremely cumbersome to edit code in drag-and-drop compared to the old studio 1 UI, and it's extremely unstable, with regular "game maker has become unstable, please save your work and restart" messages. I'd sooner pay 50 euros for Game Maker with a stable, simpler UI than 0 for the current one.
- adamrezich 3y agoneat, too bad my Game Maker 5 license won't qualify though. still kinda salty it didn't transfer over when YoYo bought it out.