Unlike apparently every other user of GM, I have welcomed the addition of YoYo Games from day one.

It's the best place for playing GM games

Many people complain about YoYo Games being full of rubbish games, but it couldn't be easier to find the brilliant ones. Including featured games, on the front page alone there are 16 games that you can guarantee are fun to play, if you manage to play all those the staffs pick section has over 200 more great games. I do not believe that anyone can go onto YoYo Games and not find a game worth playing.

It's a professional outlet, where people can direct other's to so they play their games quickly without faffing around with zips

18 months ago, if someone had made a game they wanted to show off to friends they'd have to direct them to a download link, wait for it to download, open it, extract the contents, and then finally hunt down the .exe file to play it. Now though, a link to the YoYo Games page (a one time install of Instant Play), and then one click of Play Now and they're away.

GM will become more advanced than Mark ever could make on his own, with multimillion dollar investments confirmed

Sandy has said that $5,000,000 are being invested in YoYo Games and Game Maker. This is an unprecedented amount and no one would have ever imagined this probably even 12 months ago.

A Mac version AND C++ rewrite is in the works

Game Maker for Mac will open up a whole new market front, with few ways for Mac users to make games cheaply (or even for free) this is really a whole new frontier for GM. Then once the C++ rewrite has been done, we can probably expect Linux versions and even the possibility of other ports to more platforms such as consoles.

Seamless online highscores soon to come

Currently knowledge of DLL's and servers are needed to generate an online highscore, but soon this will be able to be done with no more than basic GML knowledge. It's also likely that the higscores will be viewable without having to enter the game itself.

Proper review and rating system

A way to rate games in many genres and in different categories. The system is without a doubt abused, I won't say it's not, but there's very few other places that allow such structured, detailed reviews. There are in fact some indepth reviews that I'm sure the makers find useful. Having only small comment boxes encourages.

Sandy keeps everyone more up-to-date than Mark did

Mark rarely released development updates or any new things that were happening. In fact this is because not much used to happen!

Massive prizes in competitions to help amateur game makers

All other contests offer rather minimal prizes (pen drives, computer games etc), but YoYo's have unprecedented amount of up to $1000! The deserving winner of any of the prizes would become much better off, so they are supporting developers so much.

A better server for the GMC than Mark could have afforded

YoYo Games took a long time fixing the GMC errors, but how long would Mark by himself taken? The servers they have now are fantastic and there is the new software with more features and more secure than ever before. It took the efforts of a full-time YYG employer many days to upgrade the GMC, how long would have taken the volunteer admins? (no offense to the admins, they do a great job).

The sites completely free! I don't have to pay a penny to use it!

Don't like the website? Don't use it. It's something extra that wasn't there before and therefore we're lucky to have it. I'll say it again, no one is forcing you to use it!

I think the reason many people still don't like them is because Yoyo haven't done much in the short-term, but I admire the way they've instead invested instead in GM's long-term future. They could have easily released many new GM versions, with more features, but they've gone with the difficult (and sensible) option of making sure GM can adapt to more platforms and is easier to improve in the future. Game Maker will now certainly still exist in 5, 10, even 20 years time, whereas Mark would have given up on it eventually.

Many seem to have the attitude that using the GMC or Yoyo games is a right, when in fact it's a privilege. When you pay for Game Maker, that's all you're paying for, the use of that piece of software, anything else is an extra.

YYG are not going away, and therefore neither is Game Maker. If you ever start to not like YYG, just think, where we would be without them?