Thoughts on the GameMaker Marketplace experience so far

GameMaker Marketplace has been available to Early Access users for a little over a month now. I think it’s a good time to talk about the experience.

I first heard about the Marketplace in July 2nd, and was very excited by the prospect.

I got to work on putting an account together and developing my first product. I put my first store asset, mmap mini maps, up on 7/20, priced at $4.99. I wasn’t sure what to price it at, but considering the amount of hours that I put into it, for someone needing a mini map for their game this would save them dozens of hours, and time is money so it seems like a very good value. So far it has sold only one copy, but I’m still happy to have made my first dollar.

It’d be easy to feel disappointed, but I’m not surprised, really. I’ll download anything that looks interesting for free, but the moment you put a price tag on something I hesitate. Unless I have an immediate need, and unless I know for a fact that this asset will work for my need, and I don’t feel like I can build it myself easily, I’m unlikely to pay for something. And I don’t think other developers are too different in that regard.

Winds of change

With the announcement of the Marketplace, one worry I had is that it could have a chilling effect on the GameMaker Community, in that people won’t be as open with sharing their code as they were prior to the Marketplace launch. So far I don’t see that happening, but it’s still early.

It does take quite a bit of effort to take something from a quick example on a forum post to a full-blown product, so I expect the forums will continue to be a place where people share code with each other, and perhaps the best things from the community forums will get developed further into commercial-quality assets for the marketplace. That would be good.

On the other hand, if everyone thinks that their code is valuable and that they can make money from it, maybe they won’t want to share it in the community forums, lest someone else “steal” the code and turn it into an asset before them, and try to make money off of it. Money/greed serves as a disincentive to community cohesion. So rather than put the idea out there at all, and get vital feedback from the community that it’s desired, or how to improve it, the greedy dev builds it in secret, and uploads a product to the marketplace that is inferior to what it could have been had the community collaborated on it openly. That would be bad.

People are very giving and friendly when they see the value of helping each other by sharing what they know, and I generally find this value to be greater than that of money. The $3.50 that I’ve earned by my one sale so far of mmap mini maps isn’t going to make a great difference in my life. But if I think about all the code that has been shared on the GMC forums that I’ve learned from, that has made an amazing difference. The knowledge I’ve gained from hundreds of hours I’ve spent on the forums is a treasure. The $3.50 I gained from perhaps a hundred hours of developing mmap is a pint of beer. The experience I gained from writing it is worth far more than the money I’ve earned from it. Putting a price on some things devalues them.

Nickeled and Dimed

The other worry that I have had about the Marketplace is that these assets will end up costing more and more in the long run. Not in terms of prices going up for individual downloads, but from the aggregate total of all the little things that cost $1-2. The cost of a GameMaker license has always been a good value. GM:S provides a very good basic framework for game development, but now in addition to that cost, there’s all these asset packs that we might “need” to buy in order to have features that a game developer “must have” in order to make a pro-quality game. Don’t such features belong in the core product? Some of them, at least?

And, if YYG does decide to incorporate features that were first implemented in some very popular marketplace asset, what then? I imagine the asset’s developer will feel as though they were effectively working for YYG for very, very cheap, and may not appreciate their revenue maker becoming redundant. YYG will have to take care not to alienate developers, perhaps by licensing/buying the the rights to well-developed assets that they wish to incorporate into the core product.

I really want to see the core GM:S product contain all the features that I need to build a high quality game easily — not to have to buy the core product, and then accessorize it with endless add-ons that individually cost $1-2, but in aggregate end up costing as much or more than Studio itself.

Healthy ecosystems should support a healthy core

Another problem I foresee is that all of these “accessory” assets will be of varying levels of quality, will not be maintained by their developers forever, will not be designed to work with each other, will not offer as fast performance due to being programmed in GML rather than C++, etc. What the marketplace does is multiply the number of developers who are developing (extending) GM:S. By doing so, what we collectively risk is that our efforts will be chaotic, and unmanaged, resulting in a lot of waste, poorer overall quality, and all the other things a lack of good management causes.

I’ve seen this with the WordPress ecosystem, as well. Themes and Plug-ins become abandoned, whether due to unpopularity, developer disinterest, or whatever, and the sites that use them end up stuck on some old, outdated version, looking for a suitable replacement. The WordPress ecosystem overall is healthy, vibrant, successful, due to its large userbase, but there are an awful lot of plug-ins that I’ve had to stop using because the developer quit supporting it. Fortunately, I’ve always been able to find a replacement when I’ve needed to, but it does become a pain to have to select from among a number of popular plugins, which is the best fit for me, and then make sure that it integrates well with everything else on my site.

This makes me think that a better way to have a large scale community of developers contribute to a code ecosystem is the open source model. It’s a very different business model from the one YYG currently develops GM:S under, and YYG has stated many times that they will never open-source GameMaker, but be that as it may, imagine if the IDE, the runner, and the GML language itself were open-sourced so that the community of developers could commit code to the core product, rather than be limited to extending it and creating reusable assets for projects. Granted, the vast majority of GameMaker users probably aren’t competent C++ programmers. So the idea isn’t particularly workable.

But the idea that the best Marketplace assets should somehow make it into the core product is one that has great appeal to me. Perhaps “best of Marketplace” value bundles could be converted to native code, merged and integrated into the core GM:S product, and sold as +$99 add-ons for Professional, or part of the Master Collection suite, the revenue from which would be shared among the contributors. I’d love to see a “Best of Social Media”, “Best of IAP”, “Best of Advertising”, “Best of Analytics”, “Best of Physics”, “Best of 2D Platforming” collection arise in a few months or years. That could be really cool.

The value proposition: saved time vs. lost expertise

You don’t have to buy Marketplace assets, of course, since you can still develop your own projects, but now we have a dilemma to consider: develop from scratch at the cost of your own time, or save time by spending money to buy a ready-made asset? Most of the time, the time saved by buying a reasonably-priced asset from the Marketplace will be more valuable than the money spent for the asset.

But which is truly the more costly option? Buying the asset pack gets you the feature now, so you’re buying time. You can also buy things that are beyond your capability or understanding, which is a great value since it enables you to do things you couldn’t otherwise figure out how to do. And you’re probably buying quality, assuming that the developer of the asset pack has been at it longer than you, and is doing it better than you would have, although this is not guaranteed.

But then you have to spend time to integrate the asset pack into your product, and learn how it works, possibly modify or extend it in order to work how you need it to for your game, maybe even debug it… does it really save you as much time? Maybe not as much as it seems at first.

And on the other hand, by rolling your own features, you gain valuable experience and expertise, you understand the problem and the solution much better than you would if you simply bolted on an asset pack that does it for you without having to engage mentally and solve the problem. In a way, buying an asset from the Marketplace is like paying someone else to go to the gym and work out for you. The weight still gets lifted, and you save the time so you can spend it on other things, but at the end of the workout you don’t have the muscles. And, lacking those muscles, it leaves you less able to lift more weight that you need to lift. This value that is lost from buying assets is the most important value of all.

On the other hand, you may be able to make gains by studying that code that you purchased, particularly code that solves a problem that you had no idea how to solve yourself, or does so in such a way that you might never have thought of yourself.

Above all, you gain unique flavor and style from doing things your way. If everyone uses the same sprites, or tiles, or code, everyone’s games will end up feeling more generic, standardized, commoditized. For works of art, this is not desirable. Hand crafted resources give a project personality, quirks, and uniqueness.

In any case, the Marketplace is come, and with it, whatever consequences will come with it. It’s a new era for GameMaker: Studio users, and one filled with opportunities limited only by what we can imagine.

2 Comments

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  1. Great blog. Your point about the chilling effect on sharing and learning is really valid I think.

    I shudder to think if the forums had not contained some of the advice I have come across, how I would have learned, what will happen now?

    If they are low level extensions I could not otherwise have created in gml, fair enough. If just using gml effectively, this could reduce sharing.

    Also, GM was always meant to be self contained:

    ‘I really want to see the core GM:S product contain all the features that I need to build a high quality game easily, not to have to buy the core product, and then accessorize it with endless add-ons that individually cost $1-2, but in aggregate end up costing as much or more than Studio itself. It’s especially problematic since these “accessory” assets will be of varying levels of quality, will not be maintained by their developers forever, will not be designed to work with each other’

    Still the positives are there for a quick fix I guess… but I’m not convinced l yet. However, for assets, I have no complaints.

      

    1. I definitely think that the Marketplace offers a lot of potential good, and am glad that it’s here, despite my concerns about it. If nothing else, it will serve as a repository where the best extensions will always be available and easy to find. In the pre-marketplace era, people would just develop their project and then upload it to some file host service, and maybe it would remain up or maybe not. Hopefully the incentive to sell assets commercially will spur developers to produce higher quality code with better documentation.

        

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