Last year, I post on the 10 things I hate about Game Maker. I then followed it up 6 months later. Now I’m bringing the topic back up again to see exactly what progress Yoyo Games have made in the past year.

Starting with a positive, Yoyo Games recently held their first Game Maker competition with $1750 in prize money up for grabs. The competition went fairly well with FROZZD coming in first place, followed by Garden Gnome Carnage and Granny and Snowmen finishing up third. However this was met with controversy particularly with with the ratings.

Right from the start the rating system faced problems, with users complaining about there being 6 stars instead of the usual 5. Things quietened down after that, but it received another beating during the competition. What was happening was the users who were submitting poor games were going around and down rating the good games. Mark has said that this won’t be happening in the latest competition, but I beg to differ.

Another (big) flaw with the website is how the games are organised. Browsing the site yesterday, I noticed that the highest rating reviews were placed first, with no weight put placed on how many people reviewed the game. This meant that if I uploaded a game and rated it 6 stars, it would instantly jump to the front of the queue over passing the proper good games.

Yoyo also have added adverts to the site. While there is nothing wrong with this, where Yoyo Games have placed them is. Rather then placing them cleverly inside the page, Yoyo have just slapped them up the side, with almost no thought at all. While placing adverts in, they also took the search box off the main header, something the the CEO and I both disagree with (However, I can no longer find the comment).

Moving on to the Game Maker, and nothings changed. Game Maker for mac is expected to be out before the 2nd Quarter with version 8 not expected until next year. The activation service is still as dodgy as anything, and I’ll never register (or support) Game Maker again because of poor customer service. However, it was recently announced that it might be possible to add adverts to your games, and let you, and yoyo earn money from them. There has been speculation about this, but I think that Game Maker is starting to become a cash cow. A cow that the public will continue to drink from until something better comes out.

My problems started with upgrading to Windows Vista. As Game Maker 6 doesn’t work with Vista, I hd to upgrade. This wasn’t a problem, but activating it was. I only had a v6 key and was yet to update. I tried to via yoyo games, but they rejected my key. I whizzed off an email to them (a month ago), but have yet to recieve a reply.

So, to conclude not much has happened within the past year. Yoyo took a few steps forward (Competitions and Game Maker for Mac) but also took a few steps back (Annoying adverts, lack of GM updates). So it’ll be interesting to see where it goes in the following year.

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