I'm actually surprised to see that many people don't take the time to think that a company an rethink their prie list. As for the weird example that came out here is a small basic overview of GM with the years:
GM4 - Free
GM5 - Pro license to use alpha blending and other graphial functions (25$)
GM6 - Pretty much the same as 5 with a little 3D touch that began (Free with GM5 already baught key)
GM7 - Pretty much the same as 5 but with better 3D funtions (Free if already with GM6)
GM8 - Same as 5 with the 3D functions lots of people know already (Paid with a very good discounted price 25$)
GMS - Pro license and extra money for additionnal modules (50$ Paid with a very good discount price AND possible to pay for additionnal exports)
GMS2 - Desktop, no more pro and you have to rebuy all of what you had before
GM was dirt cheap until 8 because it was being developed by a sole proprietorship. When YYG bought out Mark Overmars, it became the property of a company with multiple employees, and they have improved it by leaps and bounds, adding new features much more quickly than Overmars could. Being a real company, they need a lot more revenue in order to operate.
Nevertheless, people HOWLED when YYG raised the price from $25 to $40. Oh, how they howled! They had to save their birthday money and allowance for almost TWICE as long as before! YoYo was evil and greedy!
Look, GMS2 is INFINITELY more expensive than the FREE 4. Obviously, the value proposition of 4 is infinite, and GMS2 is never going to be anywhere near that, even if they charge a penny for it.
As you can see the evolution was, get new stuff, pay for new stuff. Now YYG does not offer new stuff but a new interface with lots of improvements in creation mode (I'm basic here, no details).
If you don't think it's worth it to buy, stay on GMS1.
Once the whole machine of GM got transfered to someone whelmed in the Microsoft industry, you start having the same Microsoft thinking. Hey we are making a new version, let's get people to pay all over again for this one, like going from Windows 95 to 98 to 2k to XP to Vista.
You REALLY need to check out gnu.org and all the free stuff you can get there. vi + gcc. linux. apache. ALL FREE. SUPER POWERFUL. PRO QUALITY. LIMITLESS POTENTIAL.
I understand there's even FOSS game engines.
MS got tired of supporting the older software and found out that giving people that initially had recent version an upgrade at a very low price, they got to have their customers upgrade their system. That gives less work to MS as with Windows 7,8 or 8.1 to Windows 10 which was totally free. Microsoft changed their way of thinking, well for Windows. Now they got into that infamouse payed subscription hell where softwares last for the time you pay. I just hope YYG won't fall into that in a few years (which I doubt as that would not be clear to me).
Yeah, I hate the idea of software as a service, and paying for a subscription. That would have been a dealbreaker for me.
The reality is, businesses need to continuously produce revenue, and ideally they like to grow revenue over time.
What I'm saying is that, a person that stayed on GM8 get's to pay for a desktop version of GMS2 at a rebate price of 60$ is good and fair enough. BUT I, who has paid for the html5 and android version, I have to pay again full price for those SAME functions???
Wait, do you not realize that you're entitled to the 40-50% upgrade discount on these modules as well? When YoYo release the additional bundles for GMS2, you'll get upgrade pricing on them.
It's just not logical. What happens to those that paid for Master collection? That was a hefty price for GMS, over 500$ if you were lucky and nearing the 900$ on the bad days. They need to shell out another 500$ or more to keep things up??? It's just not logical. That's a heck of a lot of money.
Hi, I'm one of those people who paid for Master Collection, very early, and paid $500. At initial release, this wasn't an option. I paid:
- For GM8.0. $25. Just shortly before 8.1 was released and they raised the price to $40. I could have paid nothing for 8.0, because that was an option, but I wanted to unlock all the features so I could try them out. I did this without worrying about it.
- I got 8.1 for free. They gave me the 8.1 upgrade for no additional cost, as I was entitled to it as a 8.0 Pro user. THANK YOU YOYOGAMES.
- For the GM:HTML5 beta. Yes, I paid for a BETA product. I think it was $99. Maybe $50 introductory pricing discount? I can't remember. It was 6 years ago. I paid it. I have a job. No big deal.
- Then I paid for GM:S when it was released. YYG had a special discounted price for people who bought HTML5, to show appreciation for users who supported the beta and provided feedback to them. HTML5 was then discontinued and rolled into GM:S, as a paid extra. I think at this point I had paid a total of $50 or $100 for the original HTML5 beta + $50 for GMS1.
- Then they started releasing additional stuff. YYC, which was something you had to pay for, then Mac and iOS and Android build targets. They were talking about Symbian OS for a while, it never happened. But then they announced Tizen and Ubuntu build targets, and more and more stuff. Around that time, I didn't relish the prospect of paying $100 each time YYG released a new component, and I realized that for $500 for EVERYTHING plus everything else they released EVER for the life of the 1.x product, it was well worth it, even if I didn't use all of it. It was a lot of money, but I already had $150 in, and they did a sale where you just paid the balance to make $500, so it was only another $350. Which, compared to what I would have had to pay for each of the new modules individually, I was saving money. $350 is a lot of money, but I have a job, and considering the amount of time I spent on playing around with it, it was worth it to me.
- Then for the next 4-5 years, I spent nothing. Just enjoyed all the new features and upgrades.
- When the Marketplace came out, I bought assets that did stuff I didn't know how to do, so I could look at the code and figure out how to do that stuff. Great value there.
- Then when the Humble sale came out, I jumped on that and bought $1800 worth of GMS (which I didn't need another license for, but so what, I can gift it to someone) and ALL THAT DELICIOUS SOURCE CODE from commercial games. I haven't even gone through it all. MAN what a learning reference that is.
- Then I paid $50 for the GMS2 Beta, which means I own Desktop when it comes out of Beta, for JUST $50.
- When GMS2Web is released, I intend to buy it, so I can build for HTML5. That will run me another $75, so $125 total.
- I don't like mobile games much, have never done a build for iOS or Android, and so am not likely to buy Mobile or Console bundles when they're released. If I ever need to, they're there, and maybe someday they'll go on sale and I'll feel like it, but I'm not that worried. $400 + $??? saved for me. So all together, I'll end up spending $125 for all the stuff that I ever used in GMS1MC.
- But if I made Android games and wanted to continue doing so because I expected to make money from it? You bet I'd drop $400 on Mobile, deduct it as a business expense, and make $400 from revenue generated by the games I build with it.
If GMS2 is to be paid at such high prices because it's way out of what GMS was and not the same products, then, call Ultimate Game Creation Studio from YYG and NOT GameMaker Studio 2. I would have understood that much better. But it's GMS2, Not UGCS. I think that shelling out another 60$ to keep me updated and with the same things I paid earlier before is not to much asked and I'm not exagerating.
Naming it something else is irrelevant. It's a new codebase, a sequel to GMS1.x, and will import your old projects from 1.4 and convert them to run in 2.0 in most cases.
If $60 is too much for you, don't buy it. How much have you spent on GM/GMS over the years, and how much does that average out per year?
How many users like you would GMS need in order to generate revenues sufficient to keep YYG operating, providing ongoing support and new features for the product, without which the version you have now would stop being useful as the platforms it builds for are updated, necessitating maintenance?
I'll say that again a different way. Suppose YYG stopped development on GMS entirely, today. Within a fairly short amount of time, say 1-2 years, games built on the last build of GMS would stop working on the latest Android, because of updates to the Android platform that break stuff in GMS. Stuff that YYG continuously have to maintain to keep working with the latest Android. That maintenance is necessary, and not free. If you want that, it's going to take more than $60 every 5-6 years from the subset of GMS users who purchase Mobile.
Again, I can't believe that people try to please YYG with their answers by saying that they are OK with the prices they set for existing long term customers over 50$ AGAIN. It seems that people just LOVE shelling out money just at one place. Would anyone want to pay 60$ for GMS2 for 3 of their existing, already paid, export modules from GMS1? Would that please anyone?
You talk like $60 is a significant proportion of your life savings. How many hours does it take for you to earn $60? How many cups of coffee is that at Starbucks? maybe 12? So you're saying that you'd pay Starbucks for coffee for two weeks, but that's too much to give YYG for sophisticated game development engine and environment that builds to multiple platforms?
I'm not asking to pay less than whats presented on the web, I'm just wandering if I'm the only one that thinks he threw his money away on GMS1 when all of what I accumulated so far will get unsupported in a few months as I understood that GMS1 will have no other new stuff which means it just stopped following technology as of GMS2 Beta's release.
How long ago did you buy GMS1? Wasn't that enough time to get good value out of that purchase? If you bought it recently, for full price, then maybe you have a point. I paid $500 about 6 years ago, which averages to <$100/year, so spending another $125 in the next year is pretty consistent from where I stand. And it's not a big deal. I have a job.
If $60 is too much for you to spend on software, what does that $60 mean to you? What do you have to give up if you choose to spend it on GMS2? Medical care? Food? Your home? Something important for your child? No? If you said no, you don't have money problems. You have income problems.
I'd say you should prioritize figuring out how to earn money FAR ahead of making games. Or figure out how to make money by making games. Or develop skill with really good quality FOSS dev tools used by the best programmers all over the world.
$60 is cheap for what you get. +$240 for Mobile, yeah it's a lot more, but if you're making money on Mobile, shut up and pay it. If you're not, figure out how, or stick to cheaper platforms, or switch to free dev tools.