GMplanet
All your Game Maker news under one roof!
The free upgrade period for Game Maker 8 officially expires at the end of March. So anyone who PAID for Game Maker 7 at any time in 2009…you need to upgrade by the end of March if you want to get Game Maker 8 for free.
I had a couple of interesting conversation on Twitter recently, the first was from somebody who accused our web hosting company for being unprofessional for taking the site down for less than 60 seconds during some internal switchover. The other was when I (jokingly) suggested it would cost about $700,000 to run YoYo Games this year (actually…. that’s not a ridiculous figure !!).
It prompted me to take a close look at our web host. Below you can see the actual data from our remote server management panel. The data here is a little confusing as the underlying trend is up (Xmas is a quiet time). By the end of this year we are budgeting for about 20TB a month.
Our original web host was charging £1,000 a TB….so you can see our monthly hosting costs (their servers weren’t cheap either) would have been on their way to about £25,000 (about $40,000). With our current web host we are running at less than 20% of this total. So next time somoene wants to complian that the maintenance schedule is “unprofessional” all I can say is without the deal we have with these guys and their generally EXCELLENT service you probably wouldn’t be reading this post…..
As many of you may have noticed the site has been much more reliable since the Rails 2.3 upgrade , but there are still many improvements planned for later this year, including siting servers in North America for the first time.
Good news for Mac users …we’ve contracted with a new developer to support the previous contractor who has also agreed to stay with us and finish the work on GM4Mac. We’ve effectively doubled the effort we had before and work has started on getting the bugs fixed. We should hopefully have a release candidate ready in a month or two. I’ll keep you updated here.
Seems we have bigger issues than usual getting Instant Play to work with FireFox 3.6. We don’t understand what is wrong, it seems as though something quite fundamental has changed and we can’t identify the problem. Please DON’T open any helpdesk tickets on this issue as we already have a bigger backlog than usual due to staff shortages 
After a few false starts I finally managed to get the Wiki to allow me to upload an executable file !! Result is you can find Game Maker 7 ready to download in the “Old Game Maker Versions” page in the YoYo Games Wiki.
For those of you with Game Maker 8 you’ll find that we’ve (finally) updated the tutorials to work along with Game Maker 8. You can find them here.
It was brought to my attention today that the default Avatar for registered users on the site was clearly a male silhouette and that this was naturally seen as unacceptable to some of our female visitors. As of 10 minutes ago, the default Avatar has been changed to the new GM logo ! Thx for the feedback ( I first saw it in Twitter !)
Brought to you from You Tube. I believe this is the work of Matt Scorah (Game Maker Blog) and it only includes games uploaded in 2009 …it’s brilliant, please enjoy.
Happy New Year !
After a long wait it’s time to have a new competition. The theme for the first competition of 2010 will be “Design A HandHeld Game”. We want you to design games using either Game Maker 7 or Game Maker 8 that would be suitable to run on a typical handheld device. That is no keyboard OR MOUSE (edit: sandy, Dec 30th) , a fixed screen size and other fixed hardware limitations.
The rules of the competition are as follows :-
I forgot to mention before the Holidays that we haven’t had time to update the application that creates “Instant Play” versions of your games. If you upload a game created using Game Maker 8, then it will be download only. We don’t have an exact date, but with the devs on vacation now until the New Year it will most likely be mid January before we get this fixed.
Apologies.
I’m pleased to announce the availability of Game Maker 8.0.
It’s almost exactly 10 years since Prof. Mark Overmars first launched Game Maker, so it’s an especially exciting moment for everyone in the community, but especially Mark.
Thank You Mark.
UPDATE You can now report Game Maker 8 bugs at bugs.yoyogames.com
This post is intended to clarify who will receive free upgrades and how the process will work.
1. If you PAID for Game Maker 7 at any time in 2009 you are automatically entitled to a FREE upgrade to Version 8.
2. We will only provide free upgrades until March 31st, 2010
3. If you do NOT qualify, please don’t send messages to us as we will not be able to respond. There is no other upgrade program. If you received a FREE upgrade to Game Maker 7 during 2009, then YOU DO NOT QUALIFY FOR ANOTHER FREE UPGRADE.
4. IF you qualify, then MOST of you should be able to upgrade AUTOMATICALLY.
SCHOOLS who purchased under the Academic program will receive separate instructions on how to upgrade and shoudl contact the Help Desk with their license details. School upgrades will not be available until January. Same rules for qualification and offer period apply to Academic licensees.
Now that you’ve voted in favour of using Softrwap again with Game Maker 8 we thought it would be useful to talk about why we use Softwrap and what we think of poeple who want to use the Pro version of Game Maker but don’t think they should have to pay for the privilege.
In the Two and a Half years that www.yoyogames.com has been live we have had more than 30Million visits to the website and you’ve uploaded almost 75,000 games including beta and work in progress. EVERY DAY Game Maker is downloaded between 3,000 and 5,000 times. We deliver something more than 15 Terrabytes of data every month to people in more than 100 countries round the world. None of this is done for free, this is a big website and costs a LOT of money to run. 90% of our income comes from selling the Pro version of Game Maker. So, basically…Game Maker pays the bills.
We use Softwrap because they give us a well priced package that makes it reasonably easy for those of you who want to use the extra features and capabilities of Game Maker Pro to do so. Their technology allows you to automatically unlock the extra features 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Sure, there are occasional issues when the tech doesn’t work, and we ALL hate that as it costs time and money both for YOU AND FOR US to fix problems. Hopefully the recent decision to increase the number of installs without requesting a reset to 5 should make it easier for even more of us to use Game Maker 8 without issues. For 99%+ of you it’s a simple and easy way to get what you want from Game Maker quickly and easily and for us it means we can collect the money easily. Before we used Softwrap Mark personally processed every order, this is not something we could consider today as the community has grown significantly in the last 3 years.
The money we earn from selling Game Maker does NOTHING other than pay for your website and future releases of Game Maker. No Director of YoYo Games has ever earned a cent in salary or any other payments.
In short the DRM is not the most important part of the equation. We DO like the idea that it stands as a reminder that we’d like to be paid and that we don’t think it’s fair that you should copy our software that we have worked hard to create and maintain , but we have no burning ideology about cutting out unfair use through technology.
We also don’t like talk of “Software Theft” and “Piracy” as the people who are motivated to use unauthorised copies of Game Maker Pro have many reasons for doing so. More often than not they are people who will not pay for software under any circumstances, so it’s a pointless act appealing to a hard core not do it. Whatever their reasons for doing so we think the main issue is this is UNFAIR to the other people who ARE willing to make an occasional contribution of $25 to continue to enjoy, not only Game Maker, but also all of the facilities here on the website.
SO, we think it’s a pretty clear decision on YOUR part, if you want to continue to enjoy what we do here now, and in the future, then please go ahead and continue to use your fairly purchased previous versions of Game Maker , buy Game Maker 8 or enjoy what you get in Game Maker Lite without paying. On the other hand, if you want to use the Pro version of the software without paying for it, then that’s your decision, but you are making a CLEAR statement that you do not want to be a member of this community. So PLEASE don’t come here to use the forums, the Glog, upload your games or use any other part of the website. Stay away, we don’t want to share our facilities with you here. You are deciding for yourself that you are not part of this community.
Thx, from Sandy and Mark, on behalf of the community.
Thank you to all of you who voted in the GMC Poll. With 57% of the 800 or so who voted in favour of an early release of Game Maker 8 we’ve begun preparations to get it released as soon as we can. Much work remains to be done, but we’re trying to get this done before the holidays if that’s possible. We’ll make a number of announcement here on the Glog, so please keep checking for news. There’s been plenty of discussion on this topic so far, so I haven’t included any comments on this post.
FredFredrickson has just posted this over at the GMC (Text Below). As you can see we’ve opened a discussion/vote on our options for getting Game Maker 8 released. Discuss the issue here if you prefer, but PLEASE go to the GMC and help us with such an important decision by voting. Sorry if some of the reformatting isn’t working, but I want to know if you are OK with us using Softwrap for GM8 (indefinitely) or if you would rather wait for 3 to 4 months whilst we develop our own distribution platform ?
UPDATE …since most comments (and all of the voting) is happening over at the GMC , I’m going to close comments on this post. If you have something to add, follow the link above.
UPDATE…FINAL VOTE was 57% in Favour of moving ahead. We have begin the COUNTDOWN to Launch. Thank you to all of you who voted, for or against.
The situation is pretty simple. Game Maker 8 is pretty much finished. Mark has taken a few days vacation to do a few small fixes and we’ll be happy that we can release the product. BUT we can only do this quickly if we use Softwrap again.
We will hopefully be able to release before the end of December and Mark is ready to try and get the additional work required to support Softwrap completed during his vacation next week. As this his is NOT something we’ve been planning for, there may be issues we haven’t anticipated, but we’re both optimistic we can get the work required done quickly.
So, rather than just make a decision that I think is the right one, I thought I would repeat the positive part of the logo decision making process and give you, The Community, a chance to vote on the issue.
BEFORE you start getting excitable ….. at least take the following points into account, and then please just give us your vote!
It’s up to you, so please vote YES or NO to Softwrap.
We went ahead with the Rails 2.3 upgrade today.
I’ve already noticed that new games aren’t scanning properly…if you receive a report saying your game has a Virus, then please disregard and re-submit your game, though be warned it will sit in a queue until we fix the problem.
You’ may find that some of your Avatars aren’t online, this is just a case of the Database still copying to the new platform and these should catch up in the next few hours.
I’m trying to get the bug reporting server updated to catch your bug reports, meantime you can post them here.
UPDATE …Instant Play isn’t working with games you haven’t played previously
UPDATE Instant Play AND Virus Scanner are both now working.
Next week (Monday, UK Time) we’re upgrading the website infrastructure. For those of you who know about the technology that runs the site, you probably already know that we use a web framework called Rails. When we launched YoYo Games in April 2007 Rails was still fairly new, despite this it functioned pretty much as promised and the site has worked reasonably well until now. Still, we have had too many outages and performance has been poor when the site is loaded, especially at weekends.
SO, on Monday we will roll out a new version of the site (it won’t look any different) based on Rails 2.3. We’ve done a lot of testing on our private servers, but there’s no way we can be sure it all works as well as we hope until we launch. Just about every single page on the site has required some updating, so we’d really appreciate it if as many of you as possible can visit the site sometime next week (before Thursday)and let us know if you’ve experienced any new issues/problems.
We’ll put up a page on the bug testing server and post a link here for you to report bugs once the site is live.
btw, we’ve fixed quite a few bugs too !… @Trollsplatterer will post a list once we’ve done the release…search should finally work properly as well !
……… can anyone see lots of dots ?…………….
……………….too many of them ?………..
……………………….has Sandy gone crazy ?…….surely NOT another new Game Maker logo ?…………….
…………………more dots and unnecessary punctuation to follow !!!!!!!! ??……………
…….some of you may need to start scrolling down to find out what this is all about ! ……….
………………keep reading ……
…………………………………………………..just a little bit longer ………………………………………
dot dot dot … ……….
…… is this the last set of dots ??
…………………………. NO
If all works well I will go ahead and announce Competition #5 and update you on Game Maker 8 release schedule next week …so thanks, in anticipation of your continued support !!
Well, some of you said didn’t like the new design. :{
However, contrary to some opinions, we DO listen to the YoYo Games and Game Maker communities.
Here is the new revised logo, based on the original design but with no smiley and a few other changes (note….this is an ironic statement on my part) , designed by and voted for by the GMC.
Before I start taking too much credit for a slight change of plan (self mocking irony again) , I want to make sure that full credit for organising this is due to @FredFredrickson.
Your comments (good and bad) are welcome, but I want to be very clear…..we’re NOT redesigning it again….THIS IS IT !
Sorry to bring bad news, but our Mac Developer has resigned this morning with pretty much immediate effect. The existing beta has expired and there is little point in releasing another candidate as there is nobody to deal with bug reports. There are still too many bugs, so until we know how and when we can complete the project, we’ve taken the painful decision to temporarily suspend our plans to produce a Mac version of Game Maker. We’ll keep you updated with developments as soon as we have any news.
Anyone with extensive experience with Lazarus development and a good understanding of OpenGL should feel free to contact us at yoyogames.mojohelpdesk.com.
I’m absolutely delighted to be able to announce the new logo for Game Maker. It took a bit of time before we settled on a final choice but we wanted a logo that was modern, clean and that reflected the fun and excitement that we feel is there for poeple who MAKE as well as PLAY games. It’s a compete break with the theme of teh old logo and is intended to take us forward into what we think will be a very exciting few years for YoYo Games and Game Maker !!
The winning entry was submitted by ALBERT ZAK who wins the $250 first prize.
Albert lives in Vienna, Austria and has been using Game Maker for almost 5 years. Albert is a big technology fan and wants to be a Game Developer when he leaves college. Please join me in congratulating Albert and thanking ALL of you who submitted so many fantastic designs to the competition. We’ll send out messages to the 4 runners up separately who will all win a free copy of Game Maker 7 Pro (and Game Maker 8 Pro when it’s released).
We’ve replaced the main advertising slot with the new logo and here is another version of the logo including the Game Maker Text.
