Category: business

The Math: doing business on itch.io vs. GameMaker Marketplace

Following up on my previous post comparing itch.io vs. the GameMaker:Marketplace, here’s some math that explains the difference in costs for selling an asset through each store.

YoYo Marketplace Itchi.io
base price  $1.99  $1.99
store’s cut  $0.60  $0.20
paypal’s cut  $0.36
net income  $1.39  $1.43
net income % of gross 70% 72%

As can be seen, the transaction fees are not included in itch.io’s cut, while they are included in YoYoGame’s cut.

For low-cost assets, this eats up much of the 20% difference between YYG’s 30% cut and itch.io’s 10%, resulting in just a 2% difference after the per-payment transaction fees are factored in on a $1.99 asset. A difference of 2% may not sound like much, but in business that’s actually huge.

The gap only widens with more expensive assets:

YoYo Marketplace Itchi.io
base price $19.99 $19.99
store’s cut  $6.00  $2.00
paypal’s cut  $0.88
net income  $13.99  $17.11
net income % of gross 70% 86%

For assets that are priced higher, the cost of transaction fees will be less of a factor, meaning the advantage of itch’s service model will only grow as the sale price increases.

In the end, it will come down to which marketplace is more effective at generating a volume of sales that makes publishing there worthwhile in the first place. With the current glitch affecting the performance of My Library, causing “large” purchase manifests to take several minutes to display in GM:S, it seems to punish GM:S users for purchasing a lot of assets, and this would seem to concede the edge to itch for now. I keep hoping that YYG will fix this bug, but I’ve been waiting over a year since I first reported it.

But clearly, there’s a need for transaction costs to go lower in order for low-cost items to be worth selling. I’ve been waiting for a viable micropayment system for going on two decades now, though, and nothing seems to be going on in that realm. (PayPal does offer a micropayments option to merchants, at $0.05 + 5% per transaction, but it does not appear that this is an option through either itch.io or the GameMaker Marketplace, and this fee schedule replaces ALL transactions paid to the account in question, not just microtransactions, so it’s not really an ideal solution.)

Of course, you can also adjust the cut that itch.io takes from you to as low as 0% if you want, but it seems fair to allow them to have something for the benefit they provide you, so they can keep operating. Bottom line, a 10% cut for the services that itch provides is a very good deal compared to what you can get elsewhere.

Itch.io also offers greater flexibility with payouts, allowing sellers to have access to their money immediately after every transaction if they wish, or to receive a periodic payout. YoYoGames holds seller’s income until it reaches a minimum amount of $100 before you can get paid, so essentially you get paid in $100 chunks, and YYG may end up holding up to $99.99 of your earnings indefinitely. Two years on, and I’m still waiting to collect my first payday from YYG — I’m a little over 3/4 of the way there now.

A great feature that itch.io offers but the GameMaker Marketplace currently doesn’t is bundle sales. Bundle sales can help by cutting many payment transactions for multiple assets down to one. I offered my four paid assets in a bundle at a 33% discount, and so far all of my sales through itch.io have come this way. Such an option would be a welcome improvement to the GameMaker: Marketplace.

GameMaker: Marketplace vs. itch.io: comparison

After two years of selling assets on the GameMaker: Marketplace, still in public beta after all this time, I am less than impressed with the experience.

Development of the marketplace website, as well as the integrated features in the GameMaker: Studio IDE, have not been forthcoming. Initially the news of the Marketplace excited me, and it seemed that the future of GameMaker was bright and full of promise. But two years later and almost nothing has changed with the way the Marketplace works — and it works poorly, I’m afraid.

Plagued by a terrible bug which causes the IDE’s My Library interface to become unbearably slow to load when a large number of assets are purchased from the marketplace, sales have ground to a halt. Worse, it seems that no one is interested in spending any money in the Marketplace.

In over two years of selling assets at the Marketplace, I have grossed just slightly over $100 in sales, lifetime, of which YYG take a 30% cut, leaving me well under the $100 minimum in order for them to release any proceeds to my account. I’m currently seeing “sales” of my free assets at a rate of 2-5/day, and maybe once a month or so I’ll see a sale of one of my paid assets.

I’m not advertising aggressively, and there are certainly marketplace sellers who are doing better than I am, with more impresive wares than I’ve produced, but I don’t think that quality doesn’t seem to be the problem; I have a number of free assets, and they’ve done comparatively well, with several hundred downloads to date each. The paid assets, on the other hand, have sold in the single or low double digits.

GameMaker has had a long history of being an inexpensive software intended for use primarily by students, and these users as well as hobbyists have howled over the price increases to the main product; even when GM8.x went from $25 to $40, there was much complaining. The lesson seems to be, “Don’t expect to ever make any money from such tightwads.”

Mind you, I don’t think I’m entitled to sales, but it is certainly frustrating to put effort into something for such meager reward, and it’s demoralizing to see how little effort YYG have put into improving the Markteplace experience since they went public with it.

Although YoYo Games have tried to transition into a more professional tool by adding numerous features over the past 6 years, it seems that lately development has stagnated. No one really knows when the long-awaited, so-called “GM:Next” (aka 2.0, currently in non-public beta) will be out. No one’s really talking about what’s going on behind the scenes, and with their roadmap no longer available, it’s been extremely frustrating to wait for months and months with only the occasional minor bugfix patches for 1.4 being released.

I finally decided to check out alternative marketplaces, and have been very favorably impressed with itch.io. Itch.io is easy to sign up for and use, and much more flexible than the YoYo Marketplace. The only downside being that you can’t integrate itch.io assets with My Library (although, with it’s current buggy and awful performance, it’s not much of a loss) but at least My Library notifies you when updates are available for assets you own.

Itch.io allows me to set prices to whatever I want, or whatever the buyer wants, create bundles of assets for sales, and schedule these sales to start and end at defined times. None of these features are to be found in the YoYo Marketplace. Itch.io seems to be more for finished games, but there are also assets for game developers, and other types of things for sale, such as digital books and music. Best of all, itch.io only takes 10% of your gross sales (and they allow you to change that figure if you wish). The diversity of the itch.io store means of course that only a fraction of shoppers there will have any interest in GameMaker extensions, which may prove to be a downside. As well, their store is populated by thousands of great games and other high quality goods, many of them offered for free, so while the barrier to entry is technically low, the expectations of the customers of this marketplace may be high.

Itch.io’s analytics also provide me with better information than YYG. With YoYoGames, they consider you, the publisher, to be a “third party” to sales through their store, and therefore they do not share your customer’s personally identifiable information with you, so you can’t contact your customers. Itch provides the email address, so you can engage your customers, for example notifying them when an update is released, or when a new product is available.

In all, they’re basically eating YoYoGames’ lunch in terms of e-commerce user experience, both as a publisher/seller and as a customer. YYG really need to get it together and catch up with the competition, and soon.

YoYoGames: “No roadmap for GM:S. Our Hands Are Tied!”

For a long time, YoYoGames used to publish a roadmap, showing their plan for the future of GameMaker: Studio. Interested parties could look and see what new features were in the works.

Since PlayTech took them over, they’ve taken this information offline.

In a recent Forum conversation, YoYoGames employees Shaun Spalding and Mike Dailly explained that while they wish they could communicate the future of the product, their hands are tied, and when they can talk about things like upcoming release dates and new features, they will.

This is very disappointing to serious GameMaker Studio users. A roadmap is an important document for developers. Software development is all about maintainability. In order to write software that is maintainable, it’s important to know how the tools you are using will be changing over time. Knowing the future plans of the tools can help developers avoid wasting time using features that will be deprecated and removed in the future, or avoid wasting time writing their own implementation of a feature that is planned in an upcoming version. A roadmap also prevents the repeated asking of the same questions, “when is [X] coming out?” or “I suggest you implement [already planned feature].” A roadmap is part of the conversation that happens between a software developer and the users, and not having one harms both the company and its customers.

Most software engineering projects intended to be consumed by other developers have a roadmap. Other game engine developers such as Unity3D and Godot Engine have public roadmaps.

It is my hope that PlayTech will change their policies surrounding information of their products, and allow their employees to engage in open conversation about their products. In the meantime, concerned GameMaker users should speak out and make their voices heard.

GameMaker: Exodus

I’ve been doing game dev programming in GameMaker since 2010, and lately I’ve been feeling rather frustrated by the pace with which they’ve been improving the tool. Since being bought by PlayTech in February 2015, YoYoGames seem to have hit a brick wall.

Languishing, poor quality betas of (potentially) exciting new features

The GameMaker Marketplace debuted almost two years ago. Today, it is still in Beta. Much worse than that, there has not been any substantial development in the Marketplace website, or the integration with the GM:S IDE, in about the last year-plus.

There’s been a long-standing bug with their marketplace integration, when you have purchased a “large” number of assets from the Marketplace, the interface for managing them bogs down and becomes nearly unusable. I reported this defect, a year ago, and YoYo have acknowledged the problem, but done nothing to address it in a meaningful way, other than to warn users not to buy too many marketplace assets. That’s right: YoYoGames built a store for its users to sell assets they’ve made to each other, and then told them not to buy too many assets.

The interface for My Library is terrible — very basic, and lacking in features to allow you to organize the assets you’ve purchased. The performance problem especially is infuriating, and makes the My Library feature basically useless. I offered some ideas for improving the My Library interface on the GMC Suggestions sub-forum, which is now unavailable — apparently YYG have done more in “archiving” the old forums than simply setting them to readonly. [Internet Archive snapshot of the forum thread.]

YoYo acknowledged the problem, but rather than fixing the performance problem, they recommend a workaround of disabling assets from your purchase manifest, until the number of purchased assets is at a number that GM:S can manage without choking. That is, YoYo recommend that you disable assets that you’ve purchased through the Marketplace store, until you’ve disabled however many assets you may need to get below a number that their terrible interface can manage. We’re talking modern computers with billions of bytes of memory and multi-core gigahertz processors, choking on a list of perhaps 75-125 assets. It’s an embarrassment, and the worst part of it is that it discourages users from purchasing more assets from the marketplace, or using them.

None of this has stopped YYG from taking 30% of sellers’ revenue from Marketplace sales. In many cases, sellers are building assets which provide features and functionality that YYG should have developed themselves. For example, GameMaker 8.x used to have something called Room Transitions, which gave a neat visual transition when switching between one room and other. These were implemented in a way that took advantage of native Windows system calls, and couldn’t be supported on other build targets easily, so rather than re-implementing them in a cross-platform way so that all build platforms could make use of them, the room transition functions were deprecated and removed from GM:S.

Developers were told to write their own room transition code, and not expect the built-in transitions to return in any future updates. A few enterprising GM:S users have done so, and now sell room transitions asset packs through the Marketplace. The result of this is that a feature once included in GM:S now a separate add-on that you have to pay for. Except YYG don’t have to pay the developer anything for the work, and instead take a 30% cut of the developer’s income. This makes the Marketplace a very cheap way to outsource development that should be happening in the core product, not as aftermarket add-ons.

Of course there’s also a lot of assets for sale in the Marketplace that are free, and/or do things that are useful but should not be core engine features. The Marketplace was a great idea, and has a lot of promise, but has languished since the PlayTech acquisition.

Hamstrung by legacy cruft

YYG have been stuck with an old, crufty codebase written in Delphi C for the main IDE, and haven’t gotten off of it in 4 years. They always blame the old codebase for why they can’t deliver new features to the IDE, and promise to consider ideas for new features in “GM: Next”. They had made excellent progress in the first 2-3 years, focusing first on improving the performance of games built with GameMaker by introducing the YoYo compiler and runtime, porting those to modern C++, and incorporating exciting new features like Box2D Physics and Shaders into the old IDE. But since then, we haven’t seen much. GM:S 1.4 was released in late 2014. The PlayTech acquisition was announced a few months later in early 2015. Before the acquisition, we had a major update about once a year: Since the acquisition, YoYo have only released minor bugfix updates to 1.4. The biggest missing deliverable by far is the replacement of the old IDE with something modern and coded in a more maintainable way. The old Delphi codebase has left them hobbled, unable to deliver new features, and having to work harder than they should have to to add simple enhancements and fix bugs in the old.

In the meantime, a third-party IDE for GameMaker has been offered by at least two different groups. Parakeet and Enigma are the effort of frustrated GameMaker users who got sick of waiting for an official rewrite of the GM:S IDE, and took matters into their own hands and built their own. While it’s good to have alternatives, these are precariously positioned as GameMaker is closed source and any third party efforts such as these are prone to breaking if YYG change the way GameMaker works.

Promises undelivered and unfulfilled

“GM: Next” feels more and more like vaporware as time goes on. There’s no timetable for its release any longer; YYG have actually withdrawn their old roadmap that charted out their plans for the future so you could know what features might be coming and when.

The last straw has been this failure of the migration from the old GameMaker Community Forum software to a replacement running something with better security and features. They put the old forums in readonly mode in early April and promised the new forum in a couple weeks, which was itself a pretty headdesk move on their part, since there’s no reason why there should have been any downtime — archive the old forum only once the new forum is up and running, ready to launch.

But, almost 2 months later, they still have yet to deliver the promised replacement forum. Inexcusably, they’ve been all but silent on the matter. No apology for taking so long, no explanation of why it’s been taking way longer than expected, no revised ETA on the new forums. I’ve seen one tweet from a YYG source saying that they don’t know when it will happen, and they’re sorry but their “hands are tied” — presumably by PlayTech.

Shaun Spalding of YoYoGames commenting on the delinquent GMC forum upgrade.

Acquisition: What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing!

Say it again!

When the PlayTech acquisition happened, I expressed some concern but optimistically said I’d take a wait and see approach before judging whether it was a good thing or not. It’s pretty clear by now that it’s been a very bad thing.

It’s been my experience from watching small companies get gobbled up by large companies again and again that it’s almost always a bad thing for the small company and those who care about what it does. A small, successful company has drive, passion, and vision. A large company wants to secure its position and diversify its risk, and cares more about maintaining the status quo and staying on top than it does about disruption and shaking things up. When a large company buys out a small company, they say the same thing every time: “We’re not going to change a thing. We’re not going to risk disrupting what’s been working so well. We want to get on board and help them succeed to even greater heights.” It’s almost always a bunch of happytalk to put customers at ease and give investors a warm fuzzy feeling.

But what really happens is the small company totally gets disrupted. There’s usually a round of rebranding that happens, and the small company is paralyzed by Find/Replacing $OLDNAME to $NEWNAME, to no actual productive gain. Then there’s another round of aligning the small company’s goals to the greater strategic vision of the big company, at which point anything interesting or cool that the small company was working on gets squashed or distorted. Oftentimes the best people who made the small company great leave, pockets flush with money from the boost in the stock price from the buyout, in order to pursue other opportunities, where they can remain nimble and free to innovate without all the dead weight overhead from the large company. Products and services shift in ways that alienate former customers, the operation hemorrhages money, customers, and employees for a time, and eventually the burning dirigible crashes to the ground. Oh, the humanity.

That’s what usually — almost always — happens. I don’t know that that’s what’s happened with YoYoGames, but I’ve seen it happen time and again with countless small companies in all kinds of fields.

There’s still a lot of things I like about GameMaker: its simplicity, it’s easy learning curve, the speed with which an demo can be built. I still think it has a great deal of potential for a bright future, but I fear that PlayTech have squandered it for much of the last year. The acquisition has caused YoYo to fumble badly, and from what I’ve seen so far, I have little hope for a turnaround.

Unfortunately, for a proprietary tool a fumble like this is generally fatal. Around the time I got into GameMaker, there was another popular tool, called Torque, that was a bit more sophisticated, and went through a similar ownership transition and died shortly thereafter, to be reborn as a MIT licensed open source project. I guess it’s technically still around, but exist today largely as an afterthought. This situation is starting to feel eerily similar. Although… if GameMaker were to be open-sourced, that would be one of the best possible outcomes of the current situation. YoYoGames have stated on many occasions that this will never, ever happen, though.

Another door opens

For the last two years, I have also been watching an open-source project, called Godot. Godot is a 2D and 3D game engine with many features comparable to GameMaker, but is all modern and open source, and as of this writing is now at version 2.0. The development environment for Godot runs not only on Windows, but on Mac OS X and Linux as well. It looks really good, and I am planning to use it for my next project.

I’m very excited by this. If it works well, and I like it, I will be able to say goodbye to Microsoft, finally, and after the debacle of Windows UpdateRape, forcing users to upgrade to Windows 10 without their affirmative and informed consent, the timing couldn’t be better for me. GameMaker: Studio was the last proprietary Windows-only application that was keeping me on the Windows desktop platform, and I had been hoping that GM:Next might allow me to run GameMaker on Linux, but with Godot I may not have to wait to see if that day ever comes anymore.

I won’t be surprised in a few weeks time if I am kicking myself for not making the transition sooner.

[Update: be sure to read the follow-up post]

ISP Cox HSI to end unlimited internet service, introduce overflow billing

Today, subscribers to Cox High Speed Internet received the following communication from their ISP:

Dear [Cox Customer],

We spend more time online today than ever before, streaming movies and TV shows, downloading music, sharing photographs and staying connected to friends and family. As Internet and data consumption grows, Cox continues to improve our network to ensure a quality experience for all our customers.

To better support our customers’ expanding online activity, we recently increased the amount of data included in all of our Cox High Speed Internet packages. About 95% of customers are now on a data plan that is well-suited for their household. In the event you use more data than is included in your plan, beginning with bill cycles that start onJune 15th, we will automatically provide additional data for $10 per 50 Gigabyte (GB) block for that usage period. Based on your last 3 months of data usage and our increased data plans, it is unlikely you will need additional data blocks unless your usage increases.

What this means for you
To help our customers get accustomed to this change, we are providing a grace period for 3 consecutive billing cycles. During this period, customers will not pay for additional data blocks for data used above their data plan. Customers who exceed their data plan will see charges and a matching credit on their bill statement. Beginning with bills datedOctober 15th and later, grace period credits will no longer be applied, and customers will be charged for usage above their data plan.

Understanding and managing your data usage
You are currently subscribed to the Preferred package which includes a data plan of 350 GB (Gigabytes) per month. To help you stay informed about data usage, Cox will begin to notify you via email and browser alert if you use 85% of your monthly data plan and again if you use 100% of your monthly data plan. Additional blocks of data will only be provided if you exceed your data plan. This will not change your Internet package and there will be NO change to the speed or quality of your service for data usage above your plan. To better understand your household’s historical and current data usage, you will find your household’s data usage meter and other helpful tools and information here.

Thank you for choosing Cox.

Sincerely,
Cox High Speed Internet Team

What this really means to Cox HSI customers

This is terrible news to users of what has been a reliable, relatively speedy service.

350 GB of data per month might sound like a lot, but if you look at what it is equivalent, it’s clear that Cox intends to screw its customers very badly.

I used Wolfram Alpha to tell me what 350 GB over 30 days amounts to. Here’s what it said:

350 GB/30 days is equivalent to:

  • 11.7 GB/day
  • 1.08 megabits per second

Comparisons:

  • ~0.7 * USB low speed (1536 kb/s)
  • 1.1 * StarLAN speed (1MB/s)
  • 0.8 to 1.8 x typical 3D data download rate

That’s right, for the $60/month preferred package, Cox will cap you to the equivalent of saturating a 3G cellular connection. My current speed with Cox Preferred is ~60 Mb/s, so when they introduce these caps, if I wanted to spread out the usage over my 30 day billing cycle, I’d have to restrict my usage to the equivalent of 1/60th of the speed I’m used to, assuming 24/7 usage.

 

“It is unlikely you will need additional data blocks unless your usage increases.”

News flash, Cox:

In the entire history of the internet, everyone’s data usage has always increased!

I’m a heavy internet user, and I expect that my data needs will only increase as time goes on, because they always have, like everybody’s. Better quality media streaming, more web services and web based applications, increasingly bloated web content, it all contributes. Web 2.0 would be unbearably slow in the 14.4 kbps world of 1993, and the 60 Mb/s that I have today limits and shapes what is conceivable to use that data connection for today. If I had a gigabit connection to my home, it would vastly change how I use the internet, the things that would become possible with such a connection would make 60 Mb/s look as slow as the 14.4 kbps we used during the dialup era seems today.

Today, I stream a lot of video, mostly YouTube, and I am on the internet pretty much all day long when I’m at home. I’m online most days from around 6pm until 1-2 am. Let’s assume 6 hours of internet use/day, which over 30 days amounts to 7.5 days of constant internet use. That would mean the 350 GB ration would afford me 46.7 GB/day, which is equivalent to 4.32 Mb/s, which Wolfram Alpha suggests is comparable to:

  • 0.9 x DVD speed (5 Mb/s)
  • 0.3 – 1.4 x typical 4G data download rate
  • 1.1 x token ring speed (4 Mb/s)

Token ring, for those who don’t know, is an network technology that more or less died in the 1990s. It’s 2015. It’s pathetic that broadband should be this limited.

Let’s say I wanted to actually use my 60 Mb/s connection for all that it’s worth, how much data use would that actually be?

Wolfram Alpha gives a figure of 60 Mb/s * 30 days = 19.44 Terabytes, which compares to:

  • 0.97 x text content of the Library of Congress.
  • ~5 x 4 TB hard drives

19.44 TB is a HUGE amount of data for most people, yet it would fill just one SOHO-class Network Attached Storage box populated with 4TB hard drives in a RAID5 configuration, which could cost around $1500-2000 today. So it’s a lot, but not a lot.

But what would that cost under Cox’s new billing?

The first 350 GB would be $60. The rest (19.09 TB) would be billed at $10 per 50 GB… 19.09 TB/50 GB = 381.8 * $10.00. So, my theoretical maximum monthly bill would amount to a grand total of: 382 * 10 + 60 = $3880.00

$3880.00 for 1 month of maximum internet use under the new billing structure.

But surely I’d never use that much data, you’re probably thinking. Well, what if you’re wifi isn’t as secure as you thought, and one of your neighbors is leaching? Or, what if you leave a computer up and running all day, and it gets infected with malware, and starts saturating your network connection with traffic without your knowledge or consent? And suppose the notifications Cox sends you don’t make it into your inbox due to improper spam filtering? Imagine the shock of opening your next bill and seeing charges for almost $4000!

The point is, Cox is trying to sell me internet service, but crippling it to an effective average speed of about 1/60th the speed at which I am currently able to use it — a speed which compares with the throughput of a USB 1.1 device or a 3G cellular data connection. This is not broadband service in any meaningful sense of the word.

Fight back

I urge Cox customers to fight back against this. And for internet users who are not customers of Cox, get ready. Other ISPs may be planning to do the same thing to you. We need to stand together and demand that our internet use

  1. Contact Cox Customer Service and complain!

  2. File a Consumer Complaint with the Federal Communications Commission!

  3. Write to your Congressman!

  4. Write to your Senator!

  5. Find another ISP!

Mods for sale

Valve recently announced and then swiftly retracted that they would be allowing developers of mods for Skyrim to charge for their wares on Steam.

I don’t know a lot about the details of this story — I don’t play Skyrim, and I’m not familiar with the online gaming and modding communities that surround it, but apparently Valve went about it the wrong way and made a lot of people upset. I’d like to know more detail about this before I have an opinion on it, but I can say a few things about the idea of modding in general, and modding for commercial gain.

Update: based on this Forbes article, it does seem that there were a few things that I would agree were objectionable about the particulars of the way Valve and Bethesda went about, in particular the cut they wanted to take from the revenue generated by sales of mods, as well as concerns over modders who appropriated resources in other free mods and repackage them for sale, and so forth.

I’m pretty familiar with the concept and history of modding, and have done some modding of some games, going back to the 1990s, when I dabbled in making maps and physics models for Marathon (Bungie), and modded ships and weapons for Escape Velocity (Ambrosia). I never distributed my mods beyond sharing them with people I knew personally, but I got into the hobby because the tools were free and there was a sense of openness. There were no barriers to entry, and people authored good docs that explained how to use the tools and create good mods. Generally, the spirit of the modding movement has been that it’s something you do out of love and enthusiasm for a game. Licensing and copyright issues that might otherwise be more of a big deal are glossed over because the work is intended as amateur/homage, and not motivated by profit.

Of course, modding is an art and the quality of some of it is astoundingly good. Modding has been the “gateway drug” for many people who wanted to get into game development, and many talented people learned their craft through modding and went on to work in the industry, and even some modding projects have been turned into commercial products, like Team Fortress 2 and Counterstrike. All of this has been realized by the “remix culture” that embraces sharing and openness while eschewing things like ownership, commercialism, and profit. Everyone has benefitted from this: the original game benefits from added interest and lifespan, the players benefit from having lots of mods to play, the modders benefit by learning how to make mods and getting some recognition for their work if it’s good enough, and by having the freedom to mod, and they pay it forward by distributing the mods for free so that they can get free playtesting, etc.

That said, I don’t have any problem with a commercial market for mods, if certain problems can be avoided. I think that if a modder wants to release a mod for a game and charge money for it, that should be their right and their decision to make. In part, it should also be controlled by the original game’s license, but generally speaking I am in favor of permissive licenses that promote freedom and openness. And yes, that includes the freedom (to try) to make money. Game developers are some of the lowest-paid software developers, working in the most crowded and competitive of markets. Considering the amount of work that must go into a mod in order to make it good enough to be worth charging for, I don’t see it as unreasonable — at all — for creator/developers to try to make some money for their work. If some people don’t like it, they don’t have to buy it. Despite there being some pitfalls and areas prone to abuse, the dividing line between a mod and a full game can often be imaginary, but in any case the work that went into building them is real, and if a developer feels that they deserve some consideration for the time they put into crafting them, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be able to set up shop and attempt to get it.

Lessons learned from the first crowdfunding campaign

One month ago, I was struck with inspiration and needed money to make an idea I had a reality, so I embarked on my first crowdfunding campaign. Today, it reached goal. I’m about to get busy working on turning all that money into a successfully completed project, but I think right now is a good time to reflect on the things I learned along the way so far. (more…)

min.ttf

I have created a font I call min. It’s the first font that I’ve created. I used bitfontmaker. It was easy and fun, and I liked it. I want to do it more. Minimalist pixel art is something I enjoy, and I wanted to try my hand at the glyphs of a typeface, so I created the most minimalist typeface I could that was still legible. I might have been able to go further but I like the size. Most letters are 3×5 px or smaller in their original drawing.

It’s also an asset package in the GameMaker Marketplace. If it does well I’ll probably create a font pack of fonts that I develop over time, and see how that does. So if you’re a GameMaker user, please download it from there so I can get accurate analytics stats.

Update: I’ve added a second font to the collection, submin.ttf.

Download links

  1. Min Font – Free GameMaker Asset Pack
  2. min.ttf
  3. submin.ttf

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.

YoYoGames launches Marketplace (early access)

YoYoGames has opened its new marketplace to early adopters. Now is the best time to get a product up, as there’s not much competition right now.

It seems the going price for most things is $.99-1.99. Some things are free, and larger products cost more. It seems that the marketplace is currently geared toward selling singular assets a la carte, rather than larger bundles and collections. I’d like to see the sellers create bundles for certain types of assets, rather than try to nickel and dime their way to maximized revenue. I’m also curious to see if the marketplace will allow sellers to use a “choose your price” model a la the Humble Store.

All sorts of assets are available, from graphics, sounds, and fonts, to shaders, scripts, and extensions. Not every category offers something yet, but I expect this to blow up quickly as developers rush to market.

I have some mixed feelings about this, but overall it’s a positive development. On the positive side, it enables GameMaker developers to see their work to each other, which should encourage the aspiring professional by providing a way to make money and an incentive to produce. On the negative side, I’m not sure that the community needs such an incentive — there’s a huge amount of freely available stuff that has been openly shared in the GameMaker Community. Creating a marketplace will tend to introduce greed and cause developers to guard their secrets, or at least want to be compensated for sharing them. In the long run, this could prove more detrimental than beneficial.