The GameMaker team announced that developers who are not going to make money on their games can now not pay for the engine. The only limitation is that the free version of GameMaker cannot be used for console projects.
The GameMaker team also introduced a one-time payment of $99.99 for a commercial license for indie and amateur developers. Previously, they had to pay for a subscription.
If developers want to port games to the console, they will have to pay $79.99 per month ($799.99 per year) for an Enterprise subscription.
As the creators of the engine explained, they revised the pricing model of GameMaker as a sign of gratitude to the developer community. After Opera bought YoYo Games for $10 million in 2021, the number of active users of the engine tripled. More than 6 thousand games are now published on the GX.games platform.
"We have seen how other platforms make ambiguous decisions related to pricing and terms of use. So we thought, what if we do the opposite and do something really useful for developers? Our success is measured by the number of people creating games!", the authors of GameMaker said.