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Discussion Paying for GM:S by Marketplace money?

gnysek

Member
As everyone who have marketplace items know, GM:S marketplace isn't a place where you earn millions of $$ in a week. Also, you cannot get money until you reach 100$, so this money is in fact on YoYoGames bank account, and their even getting some small percentage from it every month if it's put on investment account (or at least I would do such).
So, my idea is, that generally YYG can keep this money forever, making a discount of same amount to buy GM:S, and we don't need to wait for pay out :) Discount doesn't need to be 100% of GM:S2 price, but would be nice if I can use my marketplace cut to pay at least part of it, if I cannot use this money in any other way :)
Also, in this case, new users won't get discount, as they didn't sell yet anything on marketplace. It will be only for those who knows and use GameMaker in more advanced way.
 
A

Aura

Guest
...what? ^^'

Seriously though, I don't see YoYo doing that. A better way to spend your time would be to do a bit of promotion, sell a number of copies of your assets, then get paid by YoYo and use that money to buy GMS 2.
 

csanyk

Member
Sadly almost no one is buying assets from the Marketplace unless they're free. Especially now with 2.0 on the horizon, people will be more reluctant than ever to part with money for assets that may or may not work well in 2.0. I average about one cash sale per month or two. I've been on the Marketplace since the beginning, and in that time I've gotten my publisher's share total to just under $85. I expect in another 2-3 years to hit the magic $100 needed to collect my first payout.
 

Hyomoto

Member
To be fair, a lot of assets are things people can make themselves. I mean, I could put my popcnt script up, but anyone familiar with MEMHACK could easily replicate it. Some tools are pretty impressive and I'm guessing those ones see more sales, the reason free assets get downloads is obvious. This is a little off-topic but if you want your assets to sell, you should probably use them in a practical way and sell them that way, "Hey, look at this cool game I made using this asset, and here's all the stuff it can do!" A demo might look neat but sometimes what people need to click the buy button is the belief that it will solve their problems, and a small tech demo usually won't. I mean, people know Havok because of all the games it's been in, not for it's tech demos.

If tech demos could sell us stuff we'd all have G-sync monitors :p
 

csanyk

Member
I'm tempted to address the reasons why assets don't sell for money, and what to do about it, but it's not really the purpose of this thread.

I think the real point of the thread is, for sellers who never reach $100 in seller's cut worth of sales, is YYG willing to do something for us?

I put dozens of hours into designing, implementing, testing, debugging, and documenting my assets. It was well worth it for me, just for the experience and practice it gave me in coding to a standard that was good enough that other people could make use of it.

That said, I was hoping that I might make a little money... and, lol, I sure did! It'd be nice if we could get our meager earnings at some point.

By comparison, I put my assets on itch.io and did a sale bundle for them, and ended up getting about $25 that way, and itch allowed me to deposit that money without having to hit a minimum amount.

It'd be nice if YYG worked the same way, or did a payout on a quarterly basis, regardless of how much you've sold. Failing that, if we could convert our earnings into "store credit" which could be used to purchase other paid assets, or as a discount on the GMS2 upgrade, it'd be a great gesture.
 
Sadly almost no one is buying assets from the Marketplace unless they're free. Especially now with 2.0 on the horizon, people will be more reluctant than ever to part with money for assets that may or may not work well in 2.0. I average about one cash sale per month or two. I've been on the Marketplace since the beginning, and in that time I've gotten my publisher's share total to just under $85. I expect in another 2-3 years to hit the magic $100 needed to collect my first payout.
I think that's probably the case with 95% of the developers on the marketplace, haha! I wonder how much "free" money Yoyo has tied up in these accounts?
 

Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
How many products do you guys even have? 3-4?
See for yourself. :)

Of all those, 3 or 4 are what constantly sell well (you can probably guess which ones - sadly one of them will soon be obsolete with GMS2 :().

@csanyk: If you have had zero sales in that period you should have been paid. If you have had even one sale then the 8 months counter gets reset. If you haven't had any sales then contact the helpdesk.
 

Hyomoto

Member
@csanyk - I know you didn't want to get into this but: while I'm sure quantity helps, do I really need to point out that free assets are more widely downloaded because they are free? How many paid mods do you have? How many paid apps do you have on your phone? Probably fewer than the number that are free! Besides, is it -at all- possible the reason your assets don't sell well is because they either are a really niche item, are exceedingly precise in function or are easy to replicate by fairly low skill levels? Is it possible that Nocturne's are more successful because they are more general in nature and items that users of many skill levels might find useful? Maybe even that the presentation of his objects is of a higher, more professional quality?

I'm not trying to pick on you, but if there were every a case for the phrase, "missing the forest for the trees", this has to be it. Anyways, I digress. Back to the track. If you haven't been paid under the user agreement it's probably time to contact YoYo support rather than dancing around it in the GM2 Beta forum.
 

csanyk

Member
See for yourself. :)

Of all those, 3 or 4 are what constantly sell well (you can probably guess which ones - sadly one of them will soon be obsolete with GMS2 :().

@csanyk: If you have had zero sales in that period you should have been paid. If you have had even one sale then the 8 months counter gets reset. If you haven't had any sales then contact the helpdesk.
Ah, that would explain it. I haven't had an 8-month drought yet, so my income remains in limbo :S

That's... not such a good way for the system to work. Does that include free "sales"? I think someone at YYG should revise this so that people will eventually get paid out at least once/year, or better upon request.

@csanyk - I know you didn't want to get into this but: while I'm sure quantity helps, do I really need to point out that free assets are more widely downloaded because they are free? How many paid mods do you have? How many paid apps do you have on your phone? Probably fewer than the number that are free! Besides, is it -at all- possible the reason your assets don't sell well is because they either are a really niche item, are exceedingly precise in function or are easy to replicate by fairly low skill levels? Is it possible that Nocturne's are more successful because they are more general in nature and items that users of many skill levels might find useful? Maybe even that the presentation of his objects is of a higher, more professional quality?

I'm not trying to pick on you, but if there were every a case for the phrase, "missing the forest for the trees", this has to be it. Anyways, I digress. Back to the track. If you haven't been paid under the user agreement it's probably time to contact YoYo support rather than dancing around it in the GM2 Beta forum.
Of course it's obvious that free assets get downloaded much more frequently than paid assets.

Offhand, I think I have about 8 or 9 assets on the MP, and of those about half are free.

Nocturne's assets are much better than mine, no doubt. But it's still far faster to buy my paid assets and import them into your project than it is to build the feature from scratch. There's no way anyone could build any of them in $0.99 or $2.99 worth of their time.

I'm disappointed that sales haven't been better, but not terribly surprised, given how much people complain that GMS itself isn't completely free, or how they think it should cost like $15-30.
 
L

Lotias

Guest
Lol! Don't get your hopes up... I was talking about this. ;)
I wouldn't think that's obsolete just yet - autotiling dynamically generated objects is an application I see for it, and I think GMS2's autotiling is limited to the room editor.
 

rIKmAN

Member
@csanyk: If you have had zero sales in that period you should have been paid. If you have had even one sale then the 8 months counter gets reset.
Does it state that elsewhere in the agreement?
The part that @Lonewolff quoted says that if your earning are <$100 for 8 consecutive months you will be paid - it doesn't say you have to have zero sales in that time or else the counter gets reset.
 

Roa

Member
Ah, I remember when I made an auto tile script.....twice! lol. I really need to start sharing my work, cause I surely dont ever make anything :p

I could probably be making chump change to buy some sprites right now lol.
 

gnysek

Member
Does it state that elsewhere in the agreement?
The part that @Lonewolff quoted says that if your earning are <$100 for 8 consecutive months you will be paid - it doesn't say you have to have zero sales in that time or else the counter gets reset.
That's true, otherwise I would already get my money.

I don't see why we cannot transfer this money to buy GMS2 in that case, when If i only set all my resources to "free" 8 months ago, or delete them, then they will pay me already and I would use this money to get GMS:2 when it's beta will be available in about month. I wish to make this way shorter, cause it have no sense to transfer this money twice (and pay fees to paypal twice, once when YYG will transfer money to me, and then when I pay them, so we both pay some small fee).

---
Edit: I wrote to support, so they either need to fix author terms, or give us money. Probably they will fix terms, cause that's easier :)
 
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GMWolf

aka fel666
I just broke the $100 mark. So looks like I will be buying GMS2 after all.

I still don't know how you guys get 30 a week. Perhaps I need more assets...
 

gnysek

Member
Ok, here's the answer:

"If you have less than 100$ for more than 8 consecutive months, we can pay you out ON YOUR REQUEST."
So, if anybody have this issue - contact with them, maybe you will get money right on GM:S2 release and have to pay nothing for it :)
 
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NPT

Guest
Sadly almost no one is buying assets from the Marketplace unless they're free.
I have to disagree... I'm making between $10 and $30 a week from my marketplace assets. Not a wage, but it's a lovely bit of pocket money. :)
You (and lonewolff) having some success does not invalidate csanyk's statement. His statement could still be very much true.

I'm guessing you, lonewolff are the exception and certainly not the rule. I can't help but think there is a whole lot of people with a few bucks in their accounts, a heck of a lot more than are collecting regularly.
 
R

renex

Guest
I have a lot of things I have been lining up to put on the 1.X marketplace... but never bothered to clean them up to asset-tier.

Maybe this is a good time to start polishing them for the 2.X marketplace. So many things to do, so little time.

I mean, at least it looks like there's demand for some of the things I'm holding on to. Like the 3D room editor...

Would be nice if we could use marketplace money to buy GM stuff, because that'd basically nullify the exchange taxes for me. My coin is worthless.
 

Roa

Member
Honestly, anything that takes tedium out would sell. People are lazy. Convenience sells.

Anything requireing know how outside gamemaker directly would sell, DLLs and shaders and "hard maths" concepts. Features that are not native....like Mike making us buy keyboard call extensions for android instead of that being built in, even though its probably literally 3 lines lol.~ never forgetty Mike
 
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