OFFICIAL YoYo Games Is Now Part Of Opera

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Deleted member 16767

Guest
Dang I guess I should quit my job then.
You should. And go full time dev. 😂 Make a kickstarter, take a break from your job. ⚽ All jokes aside, I don't want to delve into someone elses private life. But they already said that they want to help new players get into GMS. So they are smarter than you and you know it. ❤
 

matharoo

manualman
GameMaker Dev.
YYG: Opera bought us, pretty exciting. I hope people have some interesting questio-

"I don't want subscription!"
"I don't want GMS3!!!"

YYG: But I never said that 😢

Let's show some respect to YYG and not spoil this thread with fear over mere speculation and imagination.
 
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gnysek

Member
I started to thinking, that maybe Opera wants to slowly quit browsers market, as they have really low market share now (less than 5%?), and totally go into gaming. Maybe buying YYG is just a first step of something bigger (that would mean only good things for us).
 

matharoo

manualman
GameMaker Dev.
I started to thinking, that maybe Opera wants to slowly quit browsers market, as they have really low market share now (less than 5%?), and totally go into gaming. Maybe buying YYG is just a first step of something bigger (that would mean only good things for us).
They don't have to quit the browser market, maybe they have plans to improve browser gaming and make Opera browsers more optimised for HTML5 games, and possibly create an ecosystem with a marketplace for publishing browser games and a backend for various services and online features. That is something I would love to see.
 

Toque

Member
Not all acquisitions are bad. A lot are beneficial for both parties. Some companies are even run by smart people that actually know what they are doing........

Ive been watching the stock the last few days. I might even pick some up. Its a publicly traded company and you can read everything about them if that interests you. Interesting nanobanking operations in interesting markets.

Obviously they are going into gaming browser market. It will be interesting to see how GM fits into that. I dont know much about it.

Just saying there is lots of info on the company. What you read might relieve your stresses or scare you more but at least you know.

How would owning a game engine benefit a game browser company?
 
D

Deleted member 16767

Guest
GML:
How would owning a game engine benefit a game browser company?
Outsourcing private math/code to the parent company and building bridges to eachother would be my guess.

Step 1 would be: "Hey, I'm interested in using your source code for my platform." - This would not mean every single code, unless stated in their contract. We don't know anything.
Step 2: "Can we build a bridge to eachother?"

Think of the Civilization games. Treasure goes on a carriage to the capital city. But they need roads and bridges before they can carry it over to the capital city once they have purchased the city.

We are not required to know everything either. :) Speculations just make us sound like the peasants cheering or going on a riot from the games we play/have played, tbh. 😂

A browser can also be a preparation for a console, looking at it long term. It is not just a game engine, Yoyo games excel at making custom code language. They are extremely knowledgeable about hardware too. And so on and so forth.
 

Chaser

Member
My experience with console browsers are terrible, and i have never considered playing HTML5 games on them. it's quite a thought provoking idea that should 'opera' create a gaming browser for consoles would be a great thing for HTML5 games, or any browser type games to be honest. If i could play HTML5 games happily on my consoles i would do it, and it would be cool if HTML5 games could be targeted to such a browser. Its certainly a 'bridge' linking PC and console games. Exclusive to GM? Not sure how this idea would play into the online sales percentage cut through consoles markets, in essence you technically wouldn't need to be console developer, so not sure companies like Sony would be happy about that, Microsoft though? maybe. then saying that it wouldn't be good for GM's console target sales, but then again HTML5 games could get massive and operas minimal market percentage could be worth a fortune. lol. I'm just thinking out loud here. :) beats thinking about subscriptions. :)
 

drandula

Member
Here is some parts of the announcement:
We look forward to further growing Opera GX and to driving the growth of GameMaker, making it more accessible to novice users and developing it into the world’s leading 2D game engine used by commercial studios. We are also thrilled to find future synergies between YoYo Games’ products and Opera GX.”
We have always had big plans for improving GameMaker across all platforms, both from the perspective of improving accessibility and further developing the features available to commercial studios
And now here is some speculation. It sounds they want more users for GMS, making it more accessable. How they are going to approach this is open question. GMS drag and drop is approachable and overall as product I think it's really easy to start with. Making more accessable for novice could be how they can get GMS, which people assume would be subscription model of payment, making cost of using on long run. Now this is one way of thinking and doesn't necessarily this would make it more accessable, as it could also mean 'longer' commitment, which could also make it harder for novice to do. As single payment is large upfront cost, but doesn't have any longer commitment after it. Which one is better is up to people. What I am saying, purchasing model means different levels of commitment, which can make it accessable for others, but can also scare away some others.
Changing to subscription could mean zero-net accessiblity gain, therefore I think they mean something different by "improving accessiblity", though I would like to hear more about it.
As further speculation, maybe accessiblity could mean free browser-based "GMS Lite", where you can create games with light version GMS and 'directly' publish them to online platform as playable HTML5 games. Maybe here comes the synergy with Opera GX, GMS lite could be optimized (or only) for this browser and platform where you could export games would be Opera's own gaming platform. But this could mean lot of work, and making GMS browser (although 'lite') could not be viable.

On other hand, it also states synergies between YYG's products and Opera GX, now what are YYG's products? GMS obviously, but are there some other things which I am not aware of? Also the YYG products can be future products, for example YYG publishing games. Not necessarily HTML5 games, though I think it could be larger portion of it.

In the announcement I also liked the words about further developing considering commercial studios, so they are not only targeting gathering new novices. Though as you can see mention of "leading 2D game engine", I don't think they want expand much the 3D capablities. I would like to hear, what features they want to develop further. Just as a side-thought, maybe they could separate Drag&Drop to my previously mentioned browser based GMS lite and the 'normal' GMS would only be GML based, and have further development. Isn't that currently whatever you make in GML is pretty much doable in Drag&Drop?
So to end my thought, one shaky prediction would be separation of GMS to browser-based "lite" with Drag&Drop and some GML functionality, and further developing 'normal' GMS to appeal professional users.

Edit.
Let's keep the wild speculation low, please.
Whoops sorry :p
 

Alice

Darts addict
Forum Staff
Moderator
They don't have to quit the browser market, maybe they have plans to improve browser gaming and make Opera browsers more optimised for HTML5 games, and possibly create an ecosystem with a marketplace for publishing browser games and a backend for various services and online features. That is something I would love to see.
These direction sure would be desirable.

I wonder if they could fill the void left by Kongregate, which was a good place for amateur developers to showcase their games and get a decent amount of recognition (especially with badges system to highlight some subjectively cool games and before the MMO idlish games became so prominent).

Well, it's quite a wishful thinking on my part, especially since the environment might not be so favourable for new browser gaming service as it was when Kongregate launched, but who knows. I for one would still be checking out new games posted on Kongregate if publishing games wasn't blocked in the first place.

At any rate, I'm curious about what direction Opera will lead GameMaker towards; hopefully they will be more in touch with game development needs than Playtech was. Just having more open communication would be a great change.
 
How it started.....
I want to see the posts from @Nocturne and other YYG staff from back when the Playtech acquisition was announced, heheh. This thread is giving me some deja vu. ;)

I'll be over here hoping for the best while preparing for the worst, as always. Good luck to everyone! =)

Edit: Ah, to be clear, I don't really expect this acquisition will be bad for GM. I imagine things will stay mostly the same under Opera, except a bit better.

Also, to the people going "omg how is Opera even in business they only have a 3% market share:" are you kidding? What kind of question IS that? If you sold your game to 3% of everyone who plays games, you'd be 💩💩💩💩ing RICH, lol. 3% of a market is HUGE. Just because we're all used to monolithic monopolies in the tech space doesn't mean companies can't quietly THRIVE with these smaller market shares. 3% of everyone who uses the internet is...*does math*... A LOT OF PEOPLE. ;P

So don't worry about Opera's future, lol
 
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Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
I want to see the posts from @Nocturne and other YYG staff from back when the Playtech acquisition was announced, heheh. This thread is giving me some deja vu. ;)

I'll be over here hoping for the best while preparing for the worst, as always. Good luck to everyone! =)

Edit: Ah, to be clear, I don't really expect this acquisition will be bad for GM. I imagine things will stay mostly the same under Opera, except a bit better.

Also, to the people going "omg how is Opera even in business they only have a 3% market share:" are you kidding? What kind of question IS that? If you sold your game to 3% of everyone who plays games, you'd be ****ing RICH, lol. 3% of a market is HUGE. Just because we're all used to monolithic monopolies in the tech space doesn't mean companies can't quietly THRIVE with these smaller market shares. 3% of everyone who uses the internet is...*does math*... A LOT OF PEOPLE. :'D

So don't worry about Opera's future, lol
......waiting a while before next update ;)........
 
Here's my take on it: I work in the medical device industry. I took my master's degree in biotechnology - as such I am pretty good at microbiology, chemistry and stuff. I never had any training in programming or anything. I only use GML and Arduino for hobby-projects, and I have become extremely fond of Gamemaker. If I were to follow the "concept" that Gamemaker will turn into a subscription service, I would still be a customer. If Gamemaker were to increase in price, I would still be buying it.

A lot of you guys replied that you may not have the means to follow suit, should the takeover entail in a price increase or a beefy subscription service. I would also be willing to support a model that attempted to rectify this. For instance: I have been on forums for well over 20 years. I have learned that there are forums that I really dislike (such as the Arduino forum) and there are forums I love, such as this one. I am often in great need of programming help, and I have recieved that here countless times - without any degrading attitude toward non-programmers. This is very important for me, and I count it (the forum) as a key feature of Gamemaker. I would be willing to include the forum in the price I pay for Gamemaker. People contributing to helping other people on the forums could be compensated in one way or another.

Greetings from the Kingdom of Denmark.
 
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gnysek

Member
Opera browsers more optimised for HTML5 games
As everything except Firefox is now based on same engine, I'm even not sure that they able to improve rendering engines without sharing their code with others. But... having some agreement with every possible engine, to add a badge "best performance only in Opera" sounds like niche worth to fill.
 

GMWolf

aka fel666
A common misconception here seems to be that OperaGX is a browser designed to run HTML5 games.
All the marketing material suggests that it is a chromium based browser tuned specifically to use low system resources, so that you can run your browser along side your games.

I'm really curious to see what they meant by Opera GX - yoyogames integration, although I suspect it was mostly included in the notes for hype/trust reasons.
 

gnysek

Member
That's why I started to think they want to have something more in common with games, that only browser. Cause all browsers can play HTML5 games, and most in same way as Opera as for now. There must be something more that Opera is planning to, and this doesn't need to connect with HTML5 at all.
 

HalRiyami

Member
I just hope Opera does some work on the marketplace as it's not looking great at the moment. Maybe they'll give us a library or something equivalent to that. Doesn't necessarily need to be maintained by YYG, we have great talents here. I find myself often using the same functions over and over in different projects/systems and would love to be able to simply #include "extended_array_functions" instead of prepending "mycoolsystem_" to these functions just ensure that my implementation of, say, array_find_index() doesn't conflict with some other system's implementation of the same name.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Not all acquisitions are bad. A lot are beneficial for both parties. Some companies are even run by smart people that actually know what they are doing........
It's confirmed: Microsoft are so bad, they've collectively ruined people's impressions of companies in general.

I find myself often using the same functions over and over in different projects/systems and would love to be able to simply #include "extended_array_functions" instead of prepending "mycoolsystem_" to these functions just ensure that my implementation of, say, array_find_index() doesn't conflict with some other system's implementation of the same name.
After the angle_difference canonization incident I've started intentionally naming my functions nonstandard things to avoid collisions, like "model_addify" and "model_ditch" instead of "model_create" and "model_destroy". I use per-module prefixes too, but that's mostly to have autocomplete benefits, so it's never felt like an issue. (I usually keep my prefixes short and mnemonical rather than complete... e.g. "k_" for key inputs, because "k" is pronounced "key"... this also helps stopping them from taking up too much space)

Ross, any chance that some of the questions asked here (not regarding GMS3 or a switch to sub model only) regarding the acquisition can be answered?
It could also help get back to the topic and elevate the discussion.
To summarize some of the topic questions that were drowned out by the subscription spam for Ross' convenience:
(I went through every page and tried to be unbiased in what I included)
  • Will Yoyo<--->GM user communication be more transparent now?
  • Any chance the GM IDE could get support for user-made plugins / extensions?
  • Is the GM development going to focus on professional users or lowering the barrier of entry for newbies?
  • Will there be a new poll to check what new features users wants?
  • When can we expect the next roadmap update?
  • Will YYG get more staff / more resources?
  • Any chance the marketplace could be updated? (Tech issues / low visibility / low access to cool assets lead to a vicious cycle of creators and users both avoiding it) okay Ross already confirmed this on page 1, never mind
  • When will the official tutorials that were broken because of GMS2.3 script format differences be fixed / removed from the startup screen?
  • Any chance Yoyo could start an official asset line as an alternate income source?
  • Any chance there'll be support for new real-time sound effects (since the sound engine is one of the big Opera selling points)?
  • Any chance we could get paid support subscriptions now when Playtech (who denied it) is out of the way?
(I made these the maximal font size to block out as big of a chunk of payment model discussions as possible, hopefully it's enough to make people forget they existed when they're through to the other side)
 

JeffJ

Member
To summarize some of the topic questions that were drowned out by the subscription spam for Ross' convenience:
(I went through every page and tried to be unbiased in what I included)
Thank you, Yal! Much appreciated! Let's hope this can be seen before this topic starts to drown once again.
 

gnysek

Member
Good work @Yal . That should be official open letter by community to new owner :p

Edit: ok, as Ross answered just one second before me, it's really good to know that our questions may get answered, that's first good sign under new owner :)

Edit 2: oh, and please bring back public read-only access to bugtracker (except console/specific projects bugs, which need to remain private).
 
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Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
I want to see the posts from @Nocturne and other YYG staff from back when the Playtech acquisition was announced, heheh. This thread is giving me some deja vu. ;)
LoL! I'm pretty sure that none of us were quite so enthusiastic for the future, and I'm certain we stressed that nothing would change (unlike this time, where I'm certain things will change - over time - and for the better :) ). I'm also pretty sure there was a lot of discussion about the EULA getting a new section about not being able to make gambling games with GMS unless you had a "special" licence (which was a stupid amount of money!).

So, yeah, I may be wrong, but I feel that things are a little different his time. Also note that I don't work for YYG anymore, so I no longer have to "toe the company line" (not that I was ever really asked to!!!!), and so if I say I'm optimistic, I am genuinely optimistic. :bunny:
 

gnysek

Member
I'm pretty sure that none of us were quite so enthusiastic for the future, and I'm certain we stressed that nothing would change
Yeah, about 2-3 years after GMS 1 was released and development started to looks slow (in fact some exporters were made in background, or even 2.0 was written from scratch), there were lot of mumbling. After 2.0 release there was hope that now things will change, but there was also moment, where things were really slow and features were small (compared to 2.3). In fact, knowing that 2.3 came just few months before YYG was sold, I must say that Playtech wasn't that bad, as they didn't stopped development and allowed to push one of biggest updates ever. Of course things could be better many times, but... let's hope that Opera will learn on their predecessors steps :)
 

XanthorXIII

Member
I think Opera needs to step in and start talking with the community about what the plans are instead of all this speculation that is driving folks crazy here. The question I have is where does Opera/YoYo want to go with this. If we continue with a flat fee, I would be seriously concerned about expansion. If you want a good look at what happens with Flat Fee engines, take a good look at AGK. We're still missing features that were promised all the way back with the AGK 2 Kickstarter and they've launched AGK Studio that doesn't address a lot of the problems and features that it offers. They only have a couple of developers and they're split between a bunch of products, not really being focused on one which they should be. Without a steady cash flow you end up with a stagnated product which we do not want to be.

I think they should really look at Unity's model but say have a Free Version that at least lets you develop small games for Desktop, a $10 a month version that lets you develop Larger Desktop Games, a $20 a month that let's you develop Desktop+Mobile(IOS/Android) and a $50 a month that lets you you do the above but also develop for Consoles provided you have the proper license/tools for them.
 

drandula

Member
I'm eagerly waiting for Q&A or AMA :>

I wonder how long Opera have been making deal with Playtech about Yoyogames? I don't think it has been decision made in one or two days. Also the deal could have been made a while back, and just now the ownership officially changed and could disclose it to public.
So Opera could have had some ideas before deal, had some conversations for couple of weeks, made the deal and wrote contract where deadline for payment and change if ownership. Here again could be some time between deal and change if ownership, where they could have already been planning.
What I am saying, I don't think they are "just now" thinking what to do with YYG, but have had long time for it.
 

gnysek

Member
but have had long time for it
They might have long time to think about, but probably before they officially became new owner they weren't allowed to talk with team, and for several months they were only talking with Playtech about deal. I doubt that team even known who bought them until money was transferred.
 

drandula

Member
....probably before they officially became new owner they weren't allowed to talk with team...
That could be possible. Atleast Opera should have thought well in advance a general strategy, why owning YYG would be good for them and what they should do. So this shouldn't impulsive acqusition for Opera, but they should know what they are doing. Though we don't know how they will implement their new strategy for YYG.
Atleast now Opera and YYG can have real conversations about the future, but I hope they have have talked and planned about it well before public announcement. So I hope that YYG has had good time for preparations for future, mutual understanding about direction company is heading and plans what to do, so this all hasn't been surprise for them and future is 'clear' without bad uncertainity.

edit.
I like to think about strategy as "strategy-as-practice". Strategy isn't just board members deciding what company should do for next 5 years, but it includes how managers and workers interprete strategy for their everyday actions and decision-making. This of course can include conflicting practices of actual work and 'how it should be done', dismissing or -interpreting strategy as it wasn't clearly presented. Strategy is translated to everyday action by people as chain of interpretations.

Because of this, I would like to know how Opera and YYG sees strategy (as concept), what is their written strategy, and how they are going to "implement" strategy. This implementation part can be tricky if you see it as a thing you do once and roll with it. For me, it should consider how it is received and interpreted for work practices.
 
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jonjons

Member
Considering some comments... It might not be playtech's fault, or anything about Opera. Every year GM updates, it always leaves that silent awkward in the air.
I mean...
Instead of having this..

wth hasked for this...
 

Kezarus

Endless Game Maker
@jonjons, mate, I'm sorry and correct me if I'm wrong, but we can pretty much do the same animations on GMS 2.3, can't we?

What do you mean by "silent awkward"? o.Ô? I think that Sequences were a good addition to gms. And we still got Spine support if we need something more extensive.

What bothers me the most are the bugs. GC, arrays, etc. I'm probably one unlucky bastard that step on every one of those bugs. But it's been a month or two that I don't find anything. 😅
 

drandula

Member
Considering some comments... It might not be playtech's fault, or anything about Opera. Every year GM updates, it always leaves that silent awkward in the air.
I mean...
Instead of having this..

wth hasked for this...
Problem I am having here, is that you are comparing full-ledge program (Spine) to 'single' GMS feature. And Spine itself can cost same or more as GMS 🙃
 

gnysek

Member
GMS can support Spine animations, so requirement to have same features in Sequences... yeah they could add it to editor, as they already have it in-engine, but you can achieve it in other way, while they can work on other things too. Don't forget, that's a new feature, and already got some updates, and I'm sure new are coming soon :)

Imagine how much work YYG have every day. We have two versions of IDE, and at least 12 runners (Win, Mac, Linux, HTML5, Android, Fire, iOS, UWP Windows, UWP Xbox, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch) - so adding one feature requires work of at least 14 persons, to make things smoothly developed. Don't forget on time spent on fixing bugs. So it's not like they makes new functionalities and makes them limited, companies which makes tools like Spine also spent years on developing things, the difference is they only made a tool, while runners and interpreters for all platforms were made by others. It's like they had those 14 persons to work on IDE only, and still it took a lot of time.
So I wouldn't complain about Sequences to be limited, especially knowing that YYG made them together with GML changes - that was super fast in my opinion. Of course there's a lot of space for improvements - but nobody said they aren't coming. In fact Roadmap at some point got info about this with mysterious "Sequences Update 2/3/4" titles.
 

matharoo

manualman
GameMaker Dev.
Considering some comments... It might not be playtech's fault, or anything about Opera. Every year GM updates, it always leaves that silent awkward in the air.
I mean...
Instead of having this..

wth hasked for this...
Sequences are much more general-purpose though, and can be used for many more purposes than those a skeletal animation program offers. They probably didn't set out to make a skeletal animation system, but it would be interesting if they had plans for extending Sequences to support that.
 

gnysek

Member
I just noticed, that "GMS2 Future Feature Considerations" article is not available for guest anymore, which is interesting, maybe it's a first trace of Opera changes.

There's a point named "Sprite Attach Points" there, which when used among with sequences would allow to make things close to skeletonal animations. That doesn't mean they gonna add skeletal animations, but having those "attach points" and for example ability to morph sprites so they can have any quad shape instead of only rectangle, would be really, really close and would allow nearly same effect (the only difference would be, that moving one point doesn't move virtual bone). So - who knows what we get in future ? For sure we not gonna get 1:1 functionalities with Spine, but with 2-3 more functions it will be flexible enough to not worry about differences.
 

FoxyOfJungle

Kazan Games
I just noticed, that "GMS2 Future Feature Considerations" article is not available for guest anymore, which is interesting, maybe it's a first trace of Opera changes.
I noticed that it has been like this for a good time, and it was before that YYG was sold to Opera, so I believe it was not for that reason.


There's a point named "Sprite Attach Points" there, which when used among with sequences would allow to make things close to skeletonal animations. That doesn't mean they gonna add skeletal animations, but having those "attach points" and for example ability to morph sprites so they can have any quad shape instead of only rectangle, would be really, really close and would allow nearly same effect (the only difference would be, that moving one point doesn't move virtual bone). So - who knows what we get in future ? For sure we not gonna get 1:1 functionalities with Spine, but with 2-3 more functions it will be flexible enough to not worry about differences.
I may be speculating, but in Construct 3 there is an option that you define several "points" in the sprite, and through them it is possible, for example, to create an instance from these points in the sprite. I don't know if this is it, but it would be cool.
 

gnysek

Member
I believe that lot of features that was considered, was postponed until 2.3 GML update and Sequences addition, as they are easier to achieve now, and doesn't need double work to be adjusted.
 

Kezarus

Endless Game Maker
Hmmm, this is important to me. I'm about to make a lot of GMS animations in the next weeks. Should I wait? Use the current system? Use Spine? Hmmm.
 

gnysek

Member
As per roadmap and other sources, next update will have no new features for Sequences sadly, only 9-slices and library of predefined bezier curves. If they are planning any features for sequences it will be at least 2.3.3+
 

jonjons

Member
Sequences are much more general-purpose though, and can be used for many more purposes than those a skeletal animation program offers. They probably didn't set out to make a skeletal animation system, but it would be interesting if they had plans for extending Sequences to support that.
Its all there !!! just at the current state its not working...
the sprites only move in decimals using the inspector, or else they will move in 1,5678 - 2,5678 - 3,5678 - 4,5678.
add an option to change the sprite index and image index. ( Attach-points ) for mesh deformation. And you will have a better skeleton animator, than Spine.


Attach-points
 
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