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 gamesMany 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 zips18 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 confirmedSandy 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 worksGame 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 comeCurrently 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 systemA 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 didMark 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 makersAll 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 affordedYoYo 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?
I only have one point to argue that nobody else seemed to point out. Their server. I heard about it, really good, to-of-the line right? Well, 8 gigs of ram good and all… For a corporate server. That's way overkill for a webserver, even if they have a massively popular site. A few, lesser servers would have worked just as well, if not better. It's like RAM sticks, 2 sticks of 512 is better than one stick of 1 gig. Four 2 gig servers would have been better than one 8 gig server. Sure, Mark may not have been able to afford either of those, but he wasn't doing too badly.
64Digits is completely biased. The YoYo community is crap, but that doesn't really matter because it's so huge and that's what other sites like 64D are for. At least they have instant play. At least they're improving Game Maker (not that that'll matter anymore soon… >) ). They've not really messed anything up.
I'm not sure yet where I stand in this debate (concerning YYG making money off of other people's games), but either way they must be pretty happy with what I've done for them.
What they could also do is offer money to good games, much like Flash portals. They would get more good games, and can also ask the maker for some changes if they want, before it gets released.Maybe I should just refuse to put up Karoshi 2 unless they pay me $2000. ;)I'm glad they're going to include ad revenue sharing, but I'm still skeptical.Yoyogames is quite good, though I have my criticism :D (not the site, but the company, seem obsessed with themselves "omg yoyogames, yoyogames" all over ur computer when u install GM) but er, yeah! And dedicated servers aren't that expensive, lets see alexa shows that yoyogames.com gets 120m page views a day tops, thats about 3 dedi servers in prime locations, prolly about $800 a month. And er, mark may have been able to afford that, but I don't know if GM was a hobby only to him or a complete business plan. Either way, he would have had to raise the registration cost and that would have been a bit unfair to people who had already registered. But OK, yyg is ok, but we havn't really needed them. Oh and somebody said about GM decompiler, apparently that isnt yyg's fault, GM7 is still largely Mark's work and old code (I think 8 will have ironed out that "problem") anyway, enough complaining about yyg from me, they are ok.. they are of no more benefit to myself than the original gamemaker.nl was, because I don't enjoy playing GM games I just want to get the concepts of programming and game development honed so I can cope better in the future.
Edit/delete-repost:Oh, console ports might not be possible, games must be signed and properly registered before they can run on a console, i think there may be possibilities in the ps3 though, but sony are releaseing a free c++ compiler for it anyway…Online highscores, mreh… of no benefit to me (just make my own :/). and with the decompiler i wouldnt want them yet anyway… Another thing, Mark was probably capable of making the review system, or getting friends who know more about web development to make them for him - its not hard.YYGs simply cannot compare.
They say they're the youtube of games, but they simply aren't, they're the… actually, there's nothing to compare them to.99% of the games on there are crap, and the few good ones are buried because of moronic biased voters.Anyway, 64D's game library isn't just the game library, it's the games that have only ever been released in blogs. Plus we have, like, 99% fewer noobs, partially because we flame them out of the site, as it should be.