I disagree.... from the very first page of this topic:
In GameMaker Stduo 1.x the console exports were 100% free. It's ridiculous the leap they are taking, and the product hasn't even been improved or changed that drastically in 2.x...
As I then said above - the console exports were
NEVER free, they were paid for - along with support, by the platform holders.
And as to saying we've not been changed anything, or you aren't getting value for money, I'll then point out again this is in relation to the fact that 2.x has introduced lots of new things,performance increases, not to mention a totally new IDE that's been around 3 years in the making. This stuff doesn't come out of thin air.
The number of people
actually using the console export is minimal compared to desktop and mobile - which isn't surprising. But it also means the cost of supporting this module (and it's ongoing support cost) is not shared by tens of thousands of users, meaning the "support" cost which goes into the per-module cost, will be much higher. This is again (obviously), the basic economics of writing and supporting any module. If it were a simple case of write it once, release and never look back, it would be much cheaper. If we had 50,000 console developers, then this ongoing cost would me shared over all these developers, and the cost much lower. We don't however have anywhere near that number, and so the cost has to be higher.
While most games will "just run" with deployed to a console, developers need ongoing help in not just moving to console and understanding the new ecosystem, but also understanding and implementing TRC's for each console. This isn't just us guessing, this has been a reality since we released the console version, so we know these costs HAVE to be covered. We have never called our users crybabies, or skinflints - please don't put words into our mouths. But there is a misconception that the console exports are free, and that they are entitled to them. Consoles are an expensive undertaking - go and find some of the bigger devs and see how much effort and cost goes into them (and I mean GM devs, not AAA). The Hyper Light Drifter guys have some good talks on the effort of doing big games that you can watch, and we've helped a lot of these devs get onto console - and continue to do so.
Lastly... for those who claim - I don't need support, then great. But! you do expect APIs to be upgraded and maintained, not to mention more expedited bug fixes which you need to hit your submission slots, something desktop users don't really experience. An API upgrade can be as simple as recompiling, but other times it can be months worth of work. Again, on modules like mobile, this cost is shared, on console - not so much. Console APIs also change much faster, and more radically than all the others combined.
These costs aren't just made up, they are there for a reason. And while we would love the platform holders to shoulder these costs again, this isn't currently the case.