Old licenses off-limits?

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Annoyed Grunt

Guest
I am trying to help a friend set up a GPS 1.4 installation (I explained to him the software is legacy already) but I'very found that it seems impossible to get a free license for his account?
 

RekNepZ

GMC Historian
GMS 1.4 has been discontinued. You cannot get new free licences anymore.
You can't? That really sucks. One of the biggest appeals of GM was that you could get it for relatively cheep (or free if you could deal with the limitations). Now it's $100. That may not seem like much to some of you, but for kids and teens that's a whole lot. I'm really disappointed in YYG.
 

matharoo

manualman
GameMaker Dev.
You can't? That really sucks. One of the biggest appeals of GM was that you could get it for relatively cheep (or free if you could deal with the limitations). Now it's $100. That may not seem like much to some of you, but for kids and teens that's a whole lot. I'm really disappointed in YYG.
That actually is disappointing. You are right. They must have a reason for doing that, though.

If I remember correctly, GMS 1 wasn't free at first too, was it? They made the Standard version free later on. Just keep hoping something similar happens with GMS2.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
That actually is disappointing. You are right. They must have a reason for doing that, though.

If I remember correctly, GMS 1 wasn't free at first too, was it? They made the Standard version free later on. Just keep hoping something similar happens with GMS2.
IIRC they had a Lite version that was free but incredibly limited (~10 of each resource max, watermark in a corner of the screen) originally, then Standard (Windows export, no watermark or limitations) and Professional (could export to other formats, source control features and some other fluff) as paid versions. Standard was eventually made free but requiring registration (account), with some extra limitations added to free Standard versions so paid Standard users could still feel like their purchase was worth it.
 

matharoo

manualman
GameMaker Dev.
IIRC they had a Lite version that was free but incredibly limited (~10 of each resource max, watermark in a corner of the screen) originally, then Standard (Windows export, no watermark or limitations) and Professional (could export to other formats, source control features and some other fluff) as paid versions. Standard was eventually made free but requiring registration (account), with some extra limitations added to free Standard versions so paid Standard users could still feel like their purchase was worth it.
I really hope they do something similar with GMS2 (if they can - I do understand it if there are reasons). Not because I want it, I have already bought it - but just because with a free version, they can reach more people (like they did with GMS1). Many people were able to learn game development and programming easily just because this great software was free.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
I really hope they do something similar with GMS2 (if they can - I do understand it if there are reasons). Not because I want it, I have already bought it - but just because with a free version, they can reach more people (like they did with GMS1). Many people were able to learn game development and programming easily just because this great software was free.
I'm pretty sure GMS2 isn't supposed to be a learning tool anymore, it's supposed to be used to make commercial products. Several of the new official tutorials basically seem like they're made to let people churn out decent-looking asset flip games, the new interface has a lot of cool features that save development time (autotiling, for instance) but takes a while to get used to and offers no real learning benefit...

That doesn't mean GMS1 had to be obsoleted, though... don't get me wrong, I don't see the point of that decision either. <__<
Customers lost access to a really good learning tool, YYG lost *two* potential customer bases. (Schools arranging courses and students that could get hooked at GMS and get it for themselves legally later)
 

Mike

nobody important
GMC Elder
First... your remembering some of GM8.1 and GMS things mixed together. GMS2 has the same restrictions as GMS1.0 had. The watermark was GM8.1

Second, if folk upgraded from "free" to Pro I'm sure we'd have kept a proper free one, but they didn't. We're not a charity I'm afraid we have lots of developers who we have to pay and everyone using a free version doesn't help pay the bills - such is life.

Schools do still have access to 1.x and we include 1.x in GMS2 license so that students can still use it when they need to.

As to not being a learning tool, I totally disagree. We're not a totally free learning tool, sure, but the tool is far better as a learning tool than it's ever been. DnD is MUCH nicer, and the live GML preview is awesome for learning. On top of this the new tutorials with videos alongside also aid learning a lot more.
 
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Rusty

Guest
Second, if folk upgraded from "free" to Pro I'm sure we'd have kept a proper free one, but they didn't. We're not a charity I'm afraid we have lots of developers who we have to pay and everyone using a free version doesn't help pay the bills - such is life.
If you had this policy in 2010 when I discovered you, I would be on Unity. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't have helped your bills either.
 

Mike

nobody important
GMC Elder
In 2010, there were 4 of us, and different economics applied. If folk don't buy, then quite simply the company goes under and that's good for no one. We may well open up more as time goes on, who knows... but I doubt we'll ever give away as much as 1.4 free had because it mean no one had to buy anything.
 

matharoo

manualman
GameMaker Dev.
In 2010, there were 4 of us, and different economics applied. If folk don't buy, then quite simply the company goes under and that's good for no one. We may well open up more as time goes on, who knows... but I doubt we'll ever give away as much as 1.4 free had because it mean no one had to buy anything.
People had to buy to make HTML5, mobile, console games and make PC games without the 'Made with GMS' splash and some pro features. There was plenty to upgrade to and there were many who did. I doubt that those people who used the free version would buy GMS2 anyway.
 
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Rusty

Guest
In 2010, there were 4 of us, and different economics applied. If folk don't buy, then quite simply the company goes under and that's good for no one. We may well open up more as time goes on, who knows... but I doubt we'll ever give away as much as 1.4 free had because it mean no one had to buy anything.
In 2010 your policy was extremely generous (and quite frankly your security was pretty lackluster, there was "freer" versions everywhere". I'm not saying give full access for nothing, but it's the point of me getting to see what everything was and where it was and how it worked (even if I couldn't use it) that swayed me over here from Unity. Now I've purchased GM8 from you and GM:Studio as well as the HTML5 extension, possibly Studio 2 in the future as well.

What was once a free download has became a recurring customer for you.
 

Mike

nobody important
GMC Elder
What was once a free download has became a recurring customer for you.
And this is what we hoped would happen when Standard was made free, but the reality is than you are (far) too few in number. The vast majority of users only want windows, and so "free" was good enough for them.

So now, it's a case of start again, and see where that line lies... it's a hard things to judge, but you have to start with nothing and add, you can't give every thing and slowly take away. Adding is always seen as a positive, while taking away is always a negative. Such is life.....
 
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Rusty

Guest
And this is what we hoped would happen when Standard was made free, but the reality is than you are (far) too few in number. The vast majority of users only want windows, and so "free" was good enough for them.
Honestly, I think you stand to gain a lot more by offering a free version. Not so people can produce games but so that people can see the quality of software that YoYoGames produces. Ban it from making .EXE files all together, have a huge, transparent watermark covering the entire screen and make sure people understand that the free version is solely to get a look at what it can do. Have every game start up begin with a splash screen that states "hey buddy, you wanna get rid of the watermark and publish your game? Let me buy my wife something pretty and everybody wins here".

The free version needs to exist but it needs to be a demonstration of what Studio can do, how it works and how professionally design it is, not a slightly annoying alternative to the real thing.

Even if people manage to work around the restrictions you put on it and somehow develop a full, decent game, they'll still have to pay to publish it with your software, which is both fair and (should be) expected. Otherwise they're just passing it between different people who have Studio 2 installed. Even then you can mark the game files with the origin's identification code and stop it from running on foreign devices until they cough up.
 

Mike

nobody important
GMC Elder
As I said, it's a very fine line between being "just" annoying enough that folk will upgrade, and so annoying that they'll just leave it, but what we had before clearly didn't work for us. It was great for the end user sure, but was terrible for us.

Also, folk don't care about things like splash screens etc.unless they're selling their games - which most people don't. I also doubt very much that these will even care about creating an EXE. I dabble a lot with making things, but I hardly ever make an EXE of them - the fun is in the making.

I know it's tempting to say "I'm sure it would be better if....", but the reality is we've seen the data, you guys haven't. We thought the same a few years back, we were wrong.
 
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jb skaggs

Guest
I will be upgrading from 1.4 soon. but I would definitely be willing to upgrade further if there was a easy drag and drop gui, application, built in. If you could easily bridge between those two worlds I feel you would be able to grab a larger market share as there are a lot of VB / visual studio apps that if GM had the same similar ui for text etc built in. I have been using GM since ver 5, though only seriously here recently.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
I will be upgrading from 1.4 soon. but I would definitely be willing to upgrade further if there was a easy drag and drop gui, application, built in. If you could easily bridge between those two worlds I feel you would be able to grab a larger market share as there are a lot of VB / visual studio apps that if GM had the same similar ui for text etc built in. I have been using GM since ver 5, though only seriously here recently.
You can do pretty easy click GUIs by just using the Mouse Left Pressed events of objects with GUI element sprites. For click-and-drag, combine that with a static/lifted finite state machine (when clicked, start following the mouse until the next time the mouse button is released).
 
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jb skaggs

Guest
You can do pretty easy click GUIs by just using the Mouse Left Pressed events of objects with GUI element sprites. For click-and-drag, combine that with a static/lifted finite state machine (when clicked, start following the mouse until the next time the mouse button is released).
Im not talking about buttons, Im talking about fully functioning text applications with built in editors etc. To be able to create a function rich text boxes, printer interfaces etc with a simple form designer. And yes I have built them from scratch in GM, and I have purchased extensions that promised the same in the past, but they don't function like that.

I find interesting that people dont seem to grasp what I am saying, that GM could easily be more of a true visual programming language that could compete against Visual Studio and do so much more than games (it already can, but I mean with an easier interface.)
 

FrostyCat

Redemption Seeker
Im not talking about buttons, Im talking about fully functioning text applications with built in editors etc. To be able to create a function rich text boxes, printer interfaces etc with a simple form designer. And yes I have built them from scratch in GM, and I have purchased extensions that promised the same in the past, but they don't function like that.

I find interesting that people dont seem to grasp what I am saying, that GM could easily be more of a true visual programming language that could compete against Visual Studio and do so much more than games (it already can, but I mean with an easier interface.)
I'd surmise that the upcoming GMS 2 UI plugin system will allow people to create resource builders and custom editors like what you described.
 

RekNepZ

GMC Historian
I must say, I'm really disappointed by the news I'm seeing here. GM and YYG have strayed far from their original mission and I fear I may end up moving someplace else (which is hard to say coming from an 11-year user). The availability of this program has always been it's biggest appeal to me. If I had friends interested in learning to make games, I could show them Game Maker and they could easily install it and make something with it for free (even if it's plastered with logos and restrictions). It was really cool to see all the stuff made by kids and adults alike! Sure much of the stuff on the old Sandbox was crap, but many of those people have since grown and gone on to become big successes in the indi-game market. These people may have never gotten into the hobby if there wasn't a cheep version of Game Maker, and the thought that aspiring causal developers will soon have no place to start is very saddening to me

I understand that YYG exists to make money, but I hate to see the money taking over like this.
 
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Rusty

Guest
I dabble a lot with making things, but I hardly ever make an EXE of them - the fun is in the making.
Mike, I must say, you are a very rare breed indeed.

I doubt that you're going to make much of an improvement by removing your taster course. What I'm betting you'd find when you look at your data is that a lot of your license sales came from people who were already using a free version of Game Maker and upgraded, this is often the case in such business plans. If you don't supply a taster course then nobody is going to get a taste for the course, you just have to hope that they somehow have knowledge that they love your product enough based off of external sources instead of personal experience.

You're in a very competitive market selling digitally on the internet. There is very little wiggle room between you and your competitors. Unfortunately, your competitors are offering those sampling courses (Unity Personal is, of course as you already know, free) and they're the ones who are going to be benefitting from the Rusty's of 2017 who you simply can't make those sales to because they refuse to take the word of paid advertisers and stuck in users compared to their own personal experience with a product.
 
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Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
I find interesting that people dont seem to grasp what I am saying, that GM could easily be more of a true visual programming language that could compete against Visual Studio and do so much more than games (it already can, but I mean with an easier interface.)
I think maybe you are missing the point here... It's not called GAMEMaker for nothing. The focus of the product is on making games, not UI and applications, and when making games it would be very difficult to have a "one size fits all" solution to making input GUI's etc...

I could show them Game Maker and they could easily install it and make something with it for free (even if it's plastered with logos and restrictions)
When I hear people talk like this I can't help but think this is nostalgia and selective memory at play... I mean, I remember when the version of GM came out with restrictions and with splash screens and there was an UPROAR! Everybody said how terrible it was etc...

@Rusty: I don't get your argument? The Trial version gives you enough to play with and see what the program does and how it works...? Sure the limits could be made less restrictive, but even now it's more than enough to know if you can use it and create something with it. I also find it incredible that you can say:

The hard reality is that you got most of your current userbase from your taster course.
Especially when Mike has said previously:

...the reality is we've seen the data, you guys haven't. We thought the same a few years back, we were wrong.
What data do you have to back up your claims? Do you work at YYG? Last time I was in the office I don't think I saw you...

Look, the hard fact is that what YYG had before obviously wasn't working financially for them and they've had to change to new strategies. It's either that or give up on GameMaker, and then where will we all be? This way of doing things may or may not work out better (who knows, maybe subscription model would be better, etc...), but what's clear is that giving everything for free wasn't working and would have ended up killing the software and the company. I have no doubt that the current limits and restrictions will be changed, and maybe even drastically, but it's early days to say and, to remind you, you don't have even a minimum of hard data on sales and so anything you say is purely speculation and assumption based on an incomplete picture. Please don't talk like it's fact.
 
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Rusty

Guest
What data do you have to back up your claims? Do you work at YYG? Last time I was in the office I don't think I saw you...
I wasn't paying full attention to my post and worded it so poorly that when I read it back to myself I couldn't even understand my point. I've fixed it now.

This business plan isn't unique to YYG though (which was my original point) and marketplace data (from companies and products that use the same business model) suggests it can work very well. Demos and free use licenses are used very successfully for all forms of other products that are in direct or indirect competition with Game Maker and I don't (personally) see how Game Maker is going to benefit from withdrawing from that free use advertising ring.

Nocturne said:
@Rusty: I don't get your argument? The Trial version gives you enough to play with and see what the program does and how it works...? Sure the limits could be made less restrictive, but even now it's more than enough to know if you can use it and create something with it.
Second, if folk upgraded from "free" to Pro I'm sure we'd have kept a proper free one, but they didn't. We're not a charity I'm afraid we have lots of developers who we have to pay and everyone using a free version doesn't help pay the bills - such is life.
I understand 100% what I've done wrong now. Mike's mentioning of removing a "free" version is purely the free licensing of the Standard Edition of Studio 1.4. I assumed "Standard" was Standard and "Free" was the Trial software.

Yes, I agree, take the free Standard Edition away. It was too much program for too little gain on the upgrade. Keep the Trial Edition, the Trial will get you new customers, you were doing that anyway. All my postings in this topic were based on the misunderstanding that the Trial was the "Free Version" and you were removing all Studio 2 demos from distribution (which is just marketing suicide basically).

I'm an idiot, I apologize to @Mike.
 
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matharoo

manualman
GameMaker Dev.
Yep, looks like YYG needs more sales to survive. I really do support them and bought GMS2 as soon as I could, and as an instructor I will do my best to promote the product to my students. You rock YYG!
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
If school licenses still exist nowadays, I can't say I have any real complaints... just wanted to make that clear.

BTW, unrelated but I'll post it here since it appears to be read.... a lot of people seems to have trouble grasping the power of matrix transforms (I did a twitter poll about the new GMS2 3D and 50% of replies thought it was harder to use), is there any chance for a tech blog about what you can use them for? They're definitely a lot less concrete to think about than the old metaphor about setting up a 3D camera. I mostly do 2D stuff myself so I'm not really personally invested, but it seems like there's some interest in the topic.
 

TheWaffle

Member
This story mirrors the development cycles other software engines: Namely Dark Basic (from The Game Creators). They started with a demo version that could not make .exe's and limited to 100 objects. The problem was that users found loop holes and would not upgrade. Many users complained when the demo was "lost" (it can be found on fileplanet) and only a commercial version became available. After a year of complaints, people became happy and newer versions with better features were created. They went on to a "pro" version that sold for 5-10 years and now offer the pro version for free. My point being, they went full circle (free demo - paid - free full). There is no reason not to suspect that yyg will follow that same path and for the same reasons. Demos to raise interest, paid to get money, full free to get more new users. But, this process takes years. Just relax and enjoy the ride. I have had GM7 paid for a long time before upgrading to gms1.4 ... I am enjoying the ride.
 
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P-Star7

Guest
Is there going to be a situation where a kid who wants to make a game using GameMaker (not a sold game, but just a free hobbyist game) and they can't afford to buy the license? For example, using Hello Mario Engine to develop a game (I'm reskinning it to star Tux, the penguin to your left so it doesn't copyright-infringe :p) like those on MFGG.net? I can't imagine being a kid in Egypt, Lithuania or somewhere who wants to use Hello Mario/Tux Engine to make a Mario/Tux game but can't afford to. I don't mean that if someone can afford it and is being stingy, they should get it for free. But what if we limited the GM:S 1.4 free download to people who couldn't afford it like in my example? Making a game would be a constructive hobby, and it couldn't be sold anyways because they wouldn't have Steam support. Not to mention that GM:S 1.4 games run on XP computers, which is older and cheaper hardware for these kids. It would be worthwhile to me to pay $99 for GMS 2 and not make any paid games with it because I come from a well-off family, and GM:S 1.4 being free for me has helped me make that decision - again, I'm not making a dime! But a middle or high schooler shouldn't have to want to make a Mario/Tux game and give up just because they come from a poor family or country - not be allowed to have that excitement of finishing a new game and sharing it with the community. There is nothing greedy about that. I'm sorry to butt in, but I think that Hello Mario Engine and making derivative fangames that earn nothing shouldn't be restricted from an adolescent who is poor. It's healthy for the mind, and I think that the "GM:S 1.4 subsidy" program would be helpful as a creative outlet and homeschooling-type hobby as well as fall under YoYoGames' education program. Also, sorry for being rambly but the text didn't really have a good place to divide it :p Thanks for reading!
 

Mike

nobody important
GMC Elder
I've already told you in the long PM you sent me on this subject, that we have no plans to re-release 1.4 free. There is a trial version of 2.0 that you can do a lot in, that's all we have available at the moment.
 
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