Five years ago, YoYoGames was acquired by PlayTech. Today, I see the news that they have sold the company off for a loss of about $6.4M. Update: It’s come to light that the new owner is Opera.
It was a $16.4M purchase in 2015, and during this time they put a ton of development into GMS 2, released it, and so it’s a bit concerning that this hasn’t resulted in YoYoGames becoming a more valuable property.
On the other hand, I can well understand it. In the past several years, I have never felt comfortable with the new GMS 2.x UI. I find it awkward, unintuitive, ugly, and frustrating to use compared to the GMS 1.4 and earlier versions that I learned first. And at the same time, competing technologies like Unity 3D, Unreal Engine, and Godot been strong competition.
From a coding standpoint, there’s no question that the GML programming language has gotten better and better as YoYoGames continued to develop it.
From a UX standpoint, it’s been a crapshoot. The UI has some nominal improvements, but overall I feel like they changed too much too fast, and I could never get used to it. I spend way more time looking for the feature I want to use, and then wondering why it doesn’t work the way I think it should, and it completely kills my productivity and along with it my desire to work with the tool.
In fact, it’s a big part of why I haven’t done much game development in the last year, and have mostly dropped out of the pursuit.
I hope the new owner does better and continues to make improvements with GameMaker. It was very good at its original intended purpose of making it easy for game developers who are not primarily programmers to create simple 2-D games.
Many amazing games have been built with GameMaker over the last 22 years, which shows clearly the merit of putting simple, usable tools into the hands of creators who wouldn’t know where to begin with tools intended for professional programmers. Hopefully even more will be made in the years go come.
It will be interesting to see what the new owner does with the property. I want to see a product like GameMaker continue to serve the market it has traditionally done well with, while offering features that make it viable for professional game developers as a first rate tool.