At the end of last week, the GameMaker team celebrated the engine’s 25th birthday: its first version was released on November 15, 1999.

In November 2023, the creators of GameMaker made the engine completely free for non-commercial use on all platforms except consoles. This decision led to an increase in young developers.

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 authors of GameMaker have announced plans to integrate a neural network into the engine. It will help developers with writing code, creating placeholders, restoring images, and other tasks.

This conclusion was reached by Rune Skovbo Johansen, who analyzed the statistics of the GMTK Game Jam game development marathon.

The GameMaker Studio game engine can now again be used for free for longer than 30 days. YoYo Games studio has provided free access to the engine, but with the condition that it can be done only for familiarization.

Rumors have been confirmed that it was Opera that acquired the GameMaker company YoYo Games from Playtech for $ 10 million. At the same time, the browser developers launched a gaming division — Opera Gaming.

In early July, the GMTK Game Jam was held, where 5,400 teams competed in creating games. According to the survey results, most of the participants used the Unity engine. But there is a caveat – two-thirds of the best games are made on GameMaker.