Category: business

Could a build farm be coming to GameMaker Studio?

business, development, games
2 Comments

Interesting.

Earlier today, I posted an idea I had to the GameMaker Community Forums Suggestions board: for YoYo Games to provide a Build Farm service to GameMaker: Studio users who would like to build their games for platforms that they do not own.

Currently, while GameMaker: Studio enables users to build to multiple platforms, certain of those platforms have fairly steep requirements in terms of a physical device to connect to in order to build, and even membership in developer programs. Maintaining all these devices and memberships is prohibitively expensive for anyone who isn’t making a living by doing it.

Providing a Software as a Service model for building to remote cloud-hosted virtual devices that are configured and maintained by YYG themselves would greatly simplify the effort required to build to non-Win32 platforms, making it far easier for GameMaker Studio users to reach all of the platforms that GM:S allows them to reach. Suddenly, it becomes feasible for a solo developer studio to release a game on all platforms without having to own a Mac, an iPad, an Android device, etc.

Further, I suggested that once the build farm was up and running, the next logical step would be to allow developers to submit their newly-built games to various App Stores for whatever target they have built to, enabling GM:S users to bring their games to market far more easily. YoYo Games could have their own store, and GM:S users who have accounts with other app stores could connect their accounts to their YYG Store account, which would enable them to submit their games to the other stores very easily.

Shortly after posting my idea, YYG CTO Russell Kay commented “Squirrel!” — which, apparently, means that I’ve suggested something that YYG has plans to do.

I’m not sure how much of the above ideas they are working on, or how closely what they are working on will resemble what I’ve outlined above, but it’s extremely exciting to think that this may be coming at some point in the indefinite future.

Anything that makes it easier and cheaper for a game developer to bring their products to market — without having to handle all the other aspects of running a business — makes it possible for small studios to compete and do business and make money without having to grow and support a full staff in order to handle these functions internally.

7 Lessons from the Flappy Bird fallout

Best Of, business
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When .GEARS announced that Flappy Bird would be removed from the market, I had a hunch that it wasn’t a solution to any problem, and would result in many unintended consequences. It was a pretty easy call to make.

  1. The attention that Dong Nguyen didn’t want wouldn’t go away. People would switch from talking about how the game was popular to the decision to remove it from the market.
  2. Removing the game from the market wouldn’t remove the game from devices where it was already installed, so (if we believe Nguyen’s stated reason for removing it) the people who were addicted to it would continue to be able to play it.
  3. The game would still generate ad revenue when it was played. So critics who felt the game’s earnings were undeserved wouldn’t be satisfied.
  4. Opportunistic individuals who had the game installed would try to sell their devices at panic prices.
  5. And the evident demand for a game that plays like Flappy Bird, combined with the absence of the official Flappy Bird, would bring a flood of me-too games to the market. It turns out a lot of them are malware vectors.

What can we learn from this?

  1. Small entities who experience phenomenal success are in for a wild ride and probably more problems than they could ever imagine.
  2. Running away from the problem won’t solve the problem, but it will probably create even more problems.
  3. Exiting the market doesn’t un-release a product.
  4. Once a product launches, if it attains “critical inertia”, it will continue to have momentum, even if the vendor stops pushing.
  5. Once the idea of a product is widely known, the sudden removal of the product will create a void that will quickly be filled by others.
  6. Any popular product will automatically generate a satellite industry of leeches who will try to cash in somehow.
  7. Without the vendor’s push steering a product along a particular vector, these external forces can cause the product or brand to break up, fragmenting it in many directions, many of which in hindsight will seem predictable.