So if I can sum up: the author made some games with Game Maker, made a small profit, then started primarily making libraries for Game Maker. Now he buys GameMakerBlog.com and posts an article about how much money you can make with Game Maker and you should really use it.
I'll bite because I've seen this sentiment generally on HN. Basically, everyone knows the way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell picks and shovels rather than mine for gold. Start as an application, then become a platform.
The cynical view of how this works is: start doing something, find out you can make a little bit of money doing it, decide you can make a lot of money by essentially selling services around doing that something for other people that do that something already or might be interested in getting into it, and then make that your business.
My question is: is this really all that bad in and of itself? Is someone selling picks and shovels in a gold rush necessarily selling something people shouldn't buy? Are they inherently less trustworthy because they get into the picks and shovels business?
The argument is often made that you can get the same information for free elsewhere. Well, that's what I always say about college and why I think it's a horrible investment, but obviously people disagree with me there. But why is college more legitimate? Because it's been around longer? As far as I can tell, colleges are selling picks and shovels in a gold rush that ended 20 years ago. At least the Game Maker racket is just getting started :-)
The best argument of course is that the vendor has the incentive to hype the prospects of their industry, often an industry in which success is faaaaar from assured (like every industry). But I don't know, how does this rule apply here any more than it applies to any other industry where someone is trying to get people excited about the prospects of a future technology/industry/event/whatever?
And for the record, I have no affiliation with the OP, I just don't think it's particularly fair that just because you are offering information products around some potentially dubious business opportunity that it's a valid criticism to essentially say "oh, he's selling picks and shovels, so he must be a douche" (I'm paraphrasing of course...)
> I just don't think it's particularly fair that just because you are offering information products around some potentially dubious business opportunity that it's a valid criticism to essentially say "oh, he's selling picks and shovels, so he must be a douche" (I'm paraphrasing of course...)
No, I said nothing like that.
I often skim the top few comments of an article before I read the article itself, to see if the article is worth my time. I appreciate seeing the kinds of comments I made, because it saves me time when others do it. Judging by the number of up votes I received, I'm not alone on this.
I suspect these articles are often up-voted based on the title alone, since they generally have no real content worth discussing (sometimes interesting discussion does arise despite this).
The long and short of it is that as long as there is no down vote button for articles, you will continue to see skeptical comments from HN users.
There's nothing wrong with selling picks and shovels, but blog posts like this are often exaggerated.
There is no way to confirm he actually made good money using game maker. If he made 80k, no doubt people here would give it a try, but what if the real number was 10k? People probably wouldn't bother.
Because there are so many blog posts that sound like this (I made lots of money doing X and now you can do it too by buying Y I am selling) I tend to have a healthy dose of skepticism.
To clarify, I only sell a single information product, and the reason for publishing it was simply to diversify my online income instead of being solely reliant on HTML5 sponsorships. Overall, it has only made up about 10% of my total revenue, so it's not a big part of the equation.
That said, I'm certainly not against selling picks and shovels.
I don't think there was any intent to say he must be a douche. I suggest you read carefully what was written. He just says that the author is hawking 'make games with gamemaker' but in reality, the author may have gotten some money, but the real moneymaker is in writing libraries and using your platform as a way to sell other games. The way it was written was certainly not passing judgement on anyone.
Uh, not quite. Try this summary: spent years using GameMaker, eventually made enough money from games to live comfortably, used that success to build a platform and audience, leveraged platform to sell a few products (in order to diversify income) while continuing to make games.
I suggest people make a living with OTHER tools than GameMaker.
GameMaker although was a good tool, has a horrible company handling it, they put some terrible DRM there (there are lots of horror stories on internet if you look around), their support suck, and they are outright hostile to people dare to try to contract them directly to complain about something.
Also I learned this the hard way (I was warned, but decided to try, and got burned very hard...)
I don't believe that to be the case, at least not any more. The lead devs are quite active on Twitter, they have a bug reporting system all users can take advantage of, the documentations is growing, and the DRM you speak of is no longer in place and they admitted it was a bad decision (after the skulls incident).
It's becoming a very solid toolset that can produce games for most platforms and does not require a plug-in for web games. The recent roll out of v1.2 has also made it much faster.
Mike Dailly, head of development at YoYo recently did an AMA on Reddit. There's some good information in there on the state of GM and its future.
Beside the skull incident the guy in the other reply mentioned, we had for example:
DRM from Game Maker 6 and 7, made the software refuse to launch entirely sometimes, it was specially worse when other products with the same DRM were installed (interestingly, the other products worked fine... I believe GM implementation of the DRM that was particularly broken).
Also the forums frequently had people complaining of the thing losing its registration, or ask for the serial over and over and over again, and so on.
My own story: I decided to make my university final project with Game Maker.
I bought 3 copies as needed for the team.
Then one of them stopped working on my own machine, since I was the lead programmer, that was a problem... I started interacting with GM support team over it, they were rude, and not interested at all in fixing it.
Then I complained on the forum, and my posts were deleted.
Then I searched around on internet, and found out the past horror stories about YoyoGames and how much people used cracked GM even after buying it because of all its issues...
I got curious, and downloaded a cracked copy, and YAY! It worked super fine (eventually I delivered my project to the university using the cracked copy, my dispute with Yoyo only finished after I delivered the project, when I was trying to make another game then, and decided in the end to switch to Novashell).
I then told support it was their DRM fault, their reply was: "It is not... And if it is, complain to Softwrap (DRM vendor)"
Then I told them that the cracked copy worked, and asked them for a official no-DRM version.
Their reply was: "You are a filthy pirate asshole" (or something like that) and they closed all my support tickets (even ones that had nothing to do with the DRM issue).
I got extremely upset, and posted the whole story on their forums, screenshots and all...
Then two bizarre things happened:
Although SOME users got outraged too, most of them embarked into a sort of fanatic fanboism and started to spout lots of random crap, trying to offend me (and any other user that was outraged by my story), and throwing weird defenses... Mind you, most of these were users of the free version (some probably used cracked versions themselves, without paying... I paid for 3 copies, remember that).
Then they deleted my post again... That was expected. What I did NOT expected, was that they "stealthbanned" me, instead of banning me (something that would tell all other users I was banned), they just removed all my permissions, and kept doing that to any account I created... As soon I logged in the forums (with any account), I would get "permission denied" and could not see even the front page, or log-off, but when I visited my past posts as a guest, they were there like if nothing happened, like if I was never punished.
Sad with the whole situation, specially hearing that Mark Overmars (GM original creator) was a nice person, I e-mailed him.
His reply (I am copying and pasting from my g-mail)
"I am sorry but I am completely not involved in this process. I can only recommend that you ask nicely and apologize for using a cracked version. Hopefully that helps.
Mark
______________________________________________
prof. dr. Mark H. Overmars
Institute of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University"
Later Yoyo pulled (against other people... I had already left, for obvious reasons) other funny stuff, like their first iOS Gamemaker they did some backtracking on promises and did some unexpected stuff, and charged a "tax" too (I don't remember the exact numbers, but if you sold something for 1 USD at iTunes, you paid 30 cents to apple, and more 30 cents to Yoyo, also the game had to be on their account, so they got all download numbers and whatnot, not benefiting you of cross purchases).
To me it does not matter that the programmers are nice, or that the thing is well programmed, or that they removed (after so much problems) their DRM, what matters is that Yoyo games is a company that has no respect for its costumers.
It upsets me when people and companies react without rational thought. If you've already bought three copies of their software, you've demonstrated a business relationship, and there's no lost revenue from you using a cracked version. It should be viewed as an extremely relevant bug report; your customers are resorting to back-channel distribution (it's not piracy, you've stolen nothing as you are licensed to run the software) or altered versions to get around your software's bugs. Not software problems or $limitations, bugs*.
I suspect if there is a relationship, it's not very nefarious. More of a "Hey, you like us and have some popular games using us. We'll give you X dollars to write more of the same posts you already are." type of thing. I don't see anything particularly wrong with that (the best promoter is someone who believes in your product), but when more control over content is asserted, that's when it becomes fuzzy...
So many cross-platform game building tools available these days... hard to know which one would be worth learning! Personally I see Unity as having the most possibilities; I guess I'll add GameMaker to the list of things to check out.
One general thought I have is how hard it would be to use these for business apps... particularly the reporting/dashboard style where there isn't as much need for standard CRUD input controls. It shouldn't be too hard to access REST interfaces with modern game dev tools!
If you're interested in game-like front ends, have a look at Scaleform[1]. It sits on top of the Flash content pipeline[2], so the toolchain is very mature. It's also included with most serious game engines by default (e.g. Unreal Engine, CryEngine, Unity), and is used for the UI of virtually every AAA game.
It certainly isn't hard and we've done this previously as a one-off in-joke kind of thing. It just creates a lot of useless energy consumption since there are large parts of those game-engines running that you don't need. It isn't that hard to be proficient enough in both Android and iOS Development to build "good" CRUD Apps, while also becoming proficient in Unity3D. Making money with all three at the same time without focusing on one is hard to sell though.
it's unfortunate that the process doesn't result in games that are particularly enjoyable to play.
Spelunky (the original - the newer, paid version is not made with game maker though was made possible through the popularity of the original) and Gunpoint were both made with game maker and have been very successful monetarily - Gunpoint in particular was the first game the author made, and its success means he is now a full time game developer.
Obviously this route requires a lot more risk for a lot more time, but game maker is capable of a lot more interesting things.
Game Maker is scriptable in a Turing-complete language, so of course you can make anything in it--it's just a matter of blind determination. VBA is also Turing-complete, which means you can write your game in Powerpoint. (It's a lot like Flash, in fact.) But I don't see many people doing that, and for good reason. :)
But I think another, more devious way to phrase "it's unfortunate that the process doesn't result in games that are particularly enjoyable to play", is:
"It's unfortunate that the process doesn't prevent more bad games from getting made."
This seems needlessly cruel at first, but seen another way, it's immediately sensible: languages with strong typing prevent bad code from getting compiled. We prefer compiler errors to something that runs, but buggily. Maybe we could rely on tools, of sufficiently high level, to point out things like: "this finite-state-machine representing a game mechanic has a very high connectedness; this could indicate that your game mechanic requires the player to make repeated choices with too many options, which will induce choice fatigue, making them quickly bored of playing."
I can see your point but I can also see a clash with reality because a lot of successful mobile games are built with lua-based game engines. Maybe the clash is due to the fact bad code has nothing to do with the quality of the gameplay and rather simple game with a top-notch gameplay can be build with duct tape and bubble gum.
From my experience the tools which enable makers to create better gameplay are the tools which enable a very fast iterative development process (think live assets reloading, parameters tweaking without recompilation and ultimately code hotswapping).
Talking about strong typing it does help if you need to scale your simple game into something more complex. It also helps a lot if you are going to build something complex right from the start.
Note that I didn't say anything about the programming quality of the resultant games. Gameplay is a matter of design quality. We can build tools that help us make better games, but they have nothing to do with programming tools (tools that help us make games, better.)
My fault. I skipped the "Maybe we could rely on tools..."
Now I can see your real point.
I tried to read a book on game design which abstracted out the game mechanics into formalized simulation but it was too technical that was taking out the fun from the process so I stopped reading it. The name of the book is Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design.
But yes, maybe there'll be tools advanced enough to help not taking the fun out.
I've made tons of games in Game Maker. GML was my most proficient language up until mid last year.
The tossup with making games in Game Maker is how much you hate the language versus how much you like the standard library. I have encountered absolutely nothing that has the ease of use and breadth of the Game Maker stdlib for making 2d games. Maybe Unity's 2D support will change that, but we'll see.
I think the problem in this case is a tool like Game Maker doesn't teach you design, and creating a game (which is good, fun, with original graphics, etc) takes a lot more talent and time and work than the typical Game Maker user (which is one person) is ready for. So you end up with a million Mario clones and every now and then something decent.
Interesting that people are trying to dissuade the OP from using GameMaker. From reading his post it appears he is doing very well for himself and most importantly he is happy. I don't see much incentive for him to learn a completely new tool at this point.
I agree. He started with a tool, he enjoyed working with it and is making quality software with it. Why change?
Changing tools would probably make his productivity drop and he might not need the added features.
I believe in "finding the right tool for the job" but when one is making stuff "for fun" (as the author started), just go with what you want.
To me, I would code everything I could in Python.
For game development I would choose MOAI. MOAI still has a lacking documentation, official progress is almost nil (but the community is improving it), it's hard for newcomers and begginers, and the lack of good runtimes may scare away some users.
And I suck at it. I really, really suck. After playing with it for a while, I participated in April's Ludum Dare using MOAI. I ended up ditching almost all the physics due to weird glitches and slowdowns, couldn't implement all the features, and the code is a mess of callbacks floating around.
But I love it's philosophy, it's scope, it's ambition. I will continue making games in MOAI for the better or the worst. Because I like it, and because I want to.
As with everything else in life, it depends. If you want to build 3D games, then by all means, use Unity (or equivalent). But if you want to build 2D games, I think that GameMaker does a good job (I know you can do 2D games with Unity, but still).
Unity offers a full C# or JavaScript(-esque) development environment, far more flexible than GameMaker. It also supports 2D or 3D depending on your preference, even allowing you to switch between them if you want. Keep in mind a lot of "2D" games are really just 3D ones with no depth because OpenGL and Direct3D are the only way to do real-time graphics.
Unity "free" is superior to GameMaker in virtually every regard, and the Unity Pro version, which costs three times as much, is a significantly more capable platform.
It probably is superior (I haven't used it, read a few tutorials just to check it out), I'm just saying that there are people who don't need all the stuff Unity provides and are very satisfied with GameMaker.
I remember using GameMaker years ago, and was very pleased when I made my first "game", and all I did was use couple of basic features. For the things I am interested now (simple 2D games), GameMaker seems like the best choice. When Unity 4.3 goes out, I'll check it out and see how it compares to GameMaker based on my requirements.
How else do you get pixels to the screen at reasonable frame rates? You load it into a texture and place it on a 3D polygon that just happens to be sized the same as the screen, making it in effect a 2D canvas with 1:1 texel to pixel mappings. Doing old-school "bitblitting" isn't going to cut it today, the overhead is too huge. GPU texture manipulation and layering is orders of magnitude faster than what you can do in the CPU space.
Windows uses Direct3D for the native UI, and OS X uses OpenGL for the same thing.
Your definition of "reasonable" really needs a qualifier here.
If you're doing AAA games in 2D, yeah you will use the GPU. But an indie game? You probably don't need it. Especially if you're writing the game without Unity (i.e. straight C++). The costs of setting up and working with 2D in OpenGL is high. I've done it. It's not fun, it's not pretty. It's a bitch, plain and simple. Texture atlases, font rendering, UV coords, texture uploading, vertex buffers, shaders. That's a ton of crap you have to worry with. Just to render simple 2D sprites to a screen. Many people can and do skip it and go straight to SDL or somesuch. It works, and modern CPUs are more than adequate.
Most of the popular 2D engines use OpenGL or Direct3D in the back-end, it allows them to do compositing much more easily, and at near zero cost. You don't have to worry about a thing if you're using the right library, it's no harder than the usual canvas calls.
This isn't just about performance. On a phone it's about not burning the battery down by loading down the CPU with expensive tasks that the GPU can do more easily.
Don't forget you can do your font rendering in the classic environment, then ship that texture image over for placement. It's not all that difficult with the right tools, many of which get packaged up for you transparently. You're not stuck in OpenGL by any means.
Most "2D" games are just 3D games rendered in isometric mode, top-down, with the depth information being used for layering.
Yes, but let's not forget you made it about performance.
There are plenty of reasons to choose to use OpenGL. Lots of freebies come with it. But you can still do 2D games without the GPU. That's the point. You can't just keep moving the goal posts however you want.
GameMaker has gotten a LOT better in the last few years. It was pretty stagnant for a while, but now it's multiplatform and has got lots of great features for 2D work.
I think people still associate GM with amateur games, but the lines are blurring now.
GameMaker Studio Master Collection now costs a tidy sum of $799.99, compared to $25 for GameMaker 7 a few years ago. Definitely a shift towards a more professionally orientated market.
Hi all; original content creator here. Both of my websites (gamemakerblog.com and truevalhalla.com) seem to have had a large influx of traffic, and have gone down.
No matter how good the story; GameMaker will always be remembered as the Microsoft Frontpage of game development due its drag-and-drop functionality and (mostly) imature userbase. Sure, you can do cool things with and use all sorts of advanced features but some impressions just stick.
Yes, that makes up the majority of my income. The companies pay for the legal rights to use/distribute the games, or to "sponsor" them as it's known. Sometimes they want some branding or an API integrated, too.
I don't see how sitelocking would really work with HTML5 games, so I'd assume the revenue primarily came from sponsorships, i.e. a sponsor pays to place ads and links to their site in your game (usually preloaders, inter-stitials) and 'More Games' links), which are then distributed far and wide.
I would suggest using Maratis instead, because GameMaker is inferior and Maratis can be coded using Lua instead of that the GameMaker language + you can combine efforts with Blender etc.
You can make 3d games in GameMaker as well though i've always though it was really probably not the best use of it. I haven't seen any 3d GM games which blew me away in any case ... and i've never made any.
Both! HTML5 games are not bought on the App Store, they are played directly in your browser. So you can, for example, open up Safari on your iPhone and play a HTML5 game for free, right in your browser.
You can also play that same game on your desktop PC, by visiting the same web address. Though all of my HTML5 games are specifically optimized for mobile.
