As a veteran GM Studio 1.4 user, should I get the Studio 2
The only reason to use 1.4 now is if you already know how to use it, so it completely depends on how comfortable you were with 1.4.
Game maker Studio 2 has a hugely different workflow from 1.4, the only thing it's kept the same is the underlying language, GML.
Reasons to move to GMS2
- GM1.4 is no longer supported (you can't even buy it anymore).
- You will need to patch GM1.4 (see step 4
here) when you finally want to make a distributable copy of your product
- If you want to export to any platform other than windows, you will need GMS2
- GMS2 has
way more features
- GMS2 is in development, so if you find a bug you can request it to be fixed.
Reasons to stay with GM1.4
- You've already bought it
- You know how to use it (?) (even if a little rusty)
- It
currently works fine for windows, (big target audience)!
- If at any point ever have a problem you can use the GM2 project converter and work from there.
I am personally passionate about 1.4, but that's only because I've invested so much time into it.
If I hadn't touched it for a while and completely forgot how to use it, of the two choices I'd definitely use GMS2.
The free trial has just been extended indefinitely. You have all the time in the world to explore it.
Oh nice! That's good to know. I guess OP has nothing to lose by trying it.
Publishing on Steam could pose similar issues as GMS is not built to use modern steam API's, and you may need to bodge together your own solution to get it going, whereas GMS2 just does it out of the box (albeit with steamworks 2018), minimal tinkering required.
Steam definitely has backwards compatibility in mind and is unlikely to remove a large percentage of their library by forcing the latest version of their sdk. That would probably lose them quite a lot of money.