Editorial: Closed Source Tools, And Acquisitions

A recent editorial from 'Defenders Quest' developer Lars Doucet has sparked my interest, and it has arisen from the news that GameMaker has been acquired by a gambling company.

For a little background, Lars worked with Flash and Adobe Air, and because of their issues he has moved onto using the open source Haxe project. He also tweets about how awesome it is a lot, and he even contributes code directly to HaxeFlixel.

Let me re-hash the tweet included in the linked editorial to help remind you:

XNA: abandoned.
Flash: neglected.
GameMaker: sold.
Your proprietary tool could be next.
Open Source. For your own protection.

Lars Doucet ن (@larsiusprime) February 16, 2015

I imagine for anyone using GameMaker this would be pretty scary, and who the hell trusts a gambling company? They are the same types of companies that email me every single week to try and sweet talk me into injecting their links into our articles for money (for just one annoying example). Anyway, onto the editorial in question!

GameMaker Studio's company YoYo Games Limited was sold for $16.4 million, but if you don't know what GameMaker is have a look at these games:
- Hotline Miami
- Risk of Rain
- Gunpoint
- Gods Will Be Watching
- Nidhogg
- Spelunky
- Nuclear Throne

All of those were made with GameMaker, and many more too.

The developer who wrote the editorial linked at the top has been stung by closed source platforms before, and that's where the doubts come from. Lars created Defenders Quest using Adobe Air, and Air dropped Linux support some time ago. So, Lars knows all too well that closed platforms can lock people out and force them to re-do their work when they remove support for things they need.

LarsThat said, technology gets old fast without maintenance. Adobe dropped Linux support for AIR a few years back and it has been an enormous pain point of mine in supporting legacy Defender's Quest builds. Yeah, I could always drop the Linux target, but I shouldn't have to.

It's an interesting read, and I agree with Lars on many things.

We don't know what the gambling focused company 'Playtech' will do with GameMaker, but we will keep an eye out if they ever decide to bring GameMaker to Linux. Sadly, what happens with a lot of these deals is a lot of company restructuring, and support for things can get dropped easily (like platform exporters that aren't raking in the big bucks for them: Linux).

Personally, if I was using GameMaker, I would be looking for a more open solution for my next game. While Lars points out there are drawbacks to both open source tools and closed source tools, it's still better to have the option of fixing issues/forking the project completely to keep it alive, rather than see all support for it to disappear which is possible.

There are a few good open source tools like Godot, and maybe a few people will look towards it now. Hell, even the ENIGMA tool which is compatible with GameMaker's "GML" could see more activity now.

It's also worth noting for XNA developers that you could look at FNA. FNA is cross-platform and aims at being an accurate XNA4 runtime for the desktop (Windows, Mac and Linux).

What are your thoughts on this? And what are your favourite open source game creation kits we didn't mention? Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.