YoYo Games hopes to revolutionize the way that game developers make money from their games by making it easy to tap monetization and analytics services from within its cross-platform game development tools.
The integration of new services is part of a plan to promote GameMaker: Studio, the company’s cross-platform development tool which it sells to developers, as a lingua franca for making games. Those tools make it easy to publish games on any system and have them run at native performance speeds as if they were authored specifically to run on that particular platform. On top of this advantage, Dundee, Scotland-based YoYo Games also says it has taken the hassle out of adopting monetization and analytics services.
Now it’s a simple matter for developers to choose different monetization options and publish their games in a variety of app stores. That makes the process of making money from games more accessible, efficient, and scalable than ever before. It effectively lowers the barriers that stand in the way of making money on games.
“The challenge associated with monetizing games is one of the biggest concerns facing developers,” said Sandy Duncan, chief executive officer at YoYo Games. “In GameMaker: Studio, we’ve removed the technical limitations so that games developers can focus on creating great games and selecting the best monetization strategy with no additional resources required. It’s a win-win situation for developers as well as service providers who now have access to GameMaker: Studio’s large and rapidly growing community and the treasure trove of new intellectual properties they are creating.”
YoYo Games launched GameMaker: Studio as a $99 package for professional game developers in May. The tools are based on free versions of the GameMaker, which were originally released in 1999 by game creator Mark Overmars and have been downloaded more than 10 million times. For the past six years, YoYo Games has been working on beefed-up versions of the development tools so that they can be used to make games that can easily run across many different platforms, including Windows, Mac, Facebook, Android, iOS, HTML5, and Chrome. GameMaker has a community of half a million registered users and is offered in more than 5,000 schools.
YoYo Games has around 20 or so employees, including a number of people who previously worked at Realtime Worlds, creator of All Points Bulletin. Duncan said recently that the company would begin a new round of fundraising soon. Rivals include Spaceport.io, Z2Live, and Unity Technologies.
The free services upgrade will be available in GameMaker: Studio’s 1.1 Update coming in September. The company is showing the service at the Game Developers Conference Europe this week in Cologne, Germany.
Services integrated into GameMaker: Studio include AdColony, AdMob, Google Analytics, Google Play Licensing, iAds, MoPub, and SupersonicAds. More services are on the way.
“The integration of MoPub Marketplace into GameMaker: Studio is groundbreaking in that it gives thousands of developers easy access to the critical resources needed to successfully monetize their apps,” said Jim Payne, CEO and co-founder of MoPub. “Our real-time bidding exchange and scalable ad-serving platform are designed to give publishers the ultimate in control and transparency while tapping into new sources of demand which can ultimately result in more ad revenue from games.”