I used to use GameMaker back in the Mark Overmars 5.0/6.0 days, but dropped it the moment it went to a paid model. This is great news, and I might honestly check it out again.
Nowadays I would generally prefer to use Godot - not a surprise, given where I’m posting. But GM was great for quick prototyping, if nothing else.
Fiiiinally some good news on GameMaker. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking with a subscription just to use the engine, their main audience is indie devs that are just starting out so they just chased them away to engines that are free to use like Godot, Unity, Unreal, etc. You can’t even export web games in Gamemaker for free unless you upload it to Opera’s website.
I briefly used gamemaker 2 and it was a pretty good, polished engine. Shame Opera sabotaged it so much. It was becoming clear that Godot was quickly taking its users, so the timing of this announcement is good.
That makes me think that if it wasn’t for Godot and maybe the Unity fiasco they might never have done this. Competition is good and this is probably a practical example of it.