GameSalad
Ignoring the author’s rights!
I was working on templates. Trying to the year with some new posts after a not so good end to 2014. A nice holiday season spent offline and a trip to the snow made up for it. It was totally unlike me as I hate the cold and the snow but had a good time nevertheless. Suddenly, a friend points me to the Amazon store.
I have been working on a lot of games over the years. Some of them with friends in the UK and US working with GameSalad. Those were suddenly listed on Amazon for the kindle fire. All of them for free and without the developers’ knowledge.
It turned out that the creators of the game engine at GameSalad decided to put all games (nearly 800 apps) from their online html5 showcase and competitions onto Amazon.
None of the developers I worked with knew about the deal. The fact that the games were on the store for free, while their own version of the game might as well be up with a price tag attached made it even more strange.
I have had art stolen, games ripped and redistributed, publishers leaking beta versions before release and endless deals going south but this one even surprised me. How can a game engine creator abuse trust in such a blunt way? Aren’t they relying on the community to make games and promote their tool by delivering standout applications? Isn’t a game engine only as good as it’s most popular games to promote it?
It’s been put off as a ‘minor mistake’ on the side of GameSalad. Well… they have lost my trust for sure now and I had the pleasure of working on some of the featured games with some of the best GameSalad coders. Shame on you, GameSalad!
Anyway… I wish all of you following my ramblings a happy new year and all the best for 2015!
Wow! Did you get any comment from them regarding this?
Yes… on their forum… "You've probably noticed for a while now that we've been doing a lot more promotions with Amazon, and have heard us mention that we are working with them to feature more GS-created content on their store and their devices.
This is a great thing for GS developers, as we are working on things like Fire TV and other new platforms that will bring more options to GS users. Amazon is really excited about promoting the GS community, and we think that's a huge opportunity.
One of the challenges with this is that partners like Amazon love to see a lot of new content at once, so we need to be able to deploy a bunch of content to them in an efficient package. We learned from the Tizen project we did that it's difficult to coordinate a lot of developers via email and wanted to make the process easier for all parties involved, so we've been working on ways to streamline that.
What you're seeing here are some less-than-perfect results of our first attempt at that. It's still a work in progress and it looks like some games we didn't want to be included accidentally were. We're working on getting those removed.
Our apologies for the growing pains here."
I love the "some less-than-perfect results" way to describe a major stuff up. :)
Wow this is really .. well, crappy. NOT a good way to build and continue to build a business.
Have you looked at any other SDKs? I tried GameSalad a few years ago and it felt slow and clunky at the time. I've been playing with Construct 2 and kind of love that.
@Tadd – I am not dabbling with code these days… I prefer to work with coders that know what they are doing and a good friend happened to use GameSalad for a couple of his projects and I got involved in the community for a while.
Me – artist… I leave the coding to the smart people ;)
HAH – I can understand that. I'm a kind of coder – but I like the ease of a good user interface so I can don't have to rely on hard core developers to get what I want.
I'm more of the story teller who dabbles in art and code with the hopes that some day lightening will strike and enable me to do this for a living.
BUT that's kind of everyone's dream, right? To make the next Flappy Bird or Angry Birds or some other crazy game that takes the world by storm.
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I left Gamesalad in favor of Unity. be a man, learn to code! it's not that hard…
I did code games in the old days in C in the 90s and later in Actionscript in Flash but there are a lot of guys better suited for the job – so I prefer to team up and do what I enjoy most and do best and let others fight with code.
Unity is great – even just using it for the level creation at the moment as a 3d tool (and leaving the 'fun part' of coding to others).
This seems really unfortunate :(
Hi Chris,
I’m one of the folks over at GameSalad. Our developers’ trust and respect is of paramount importance to us. So when I saw this reaction to the issue with Amazon, I wanted to reach out to you personally and let you know that it was a genuine oversight on our part. We’re taking this seriously and are actively working with Amazon to remove any games that should not have been published.
We have always been committed to the heart and soul of GameSalad, our community of game developers. Their hard work, dedication, creativity, and collaboration are what has made GameSalad so popular to date, and if they’re not happy, we’re not happy.
I wanted to let you know that we’ve posted a thread on our forums explaining the issue, how it happened and clearly outlining the steps that can be taken to remove any games that were not intended for this promotion. Hopefully that information resolves your issues. If not, you can let me know personally.
GameSalad is not some corporate giant. We’re a pretty small group of dedicated gamers and developers who believe in what we do and take pride in helping our developer community create great games. We make our share of mistakes along the way but we try to correct them as soon as they are brought to our attention.
Sorry about the issues you had with this and hope you accept our sincere apology. We’ll get this resolved ASAP.
open source and free, no b.s.
https://www.godotengine.org/wp/
This was linked on Godot's Facebook. It's a great engine, making big progress all the time, too, and the MIT-license means – as the previous poster pointed out – no B.S. It's free, so it's at least worth checking out before forking out $1500 for a Unity license with no Linux editor (despite it being the #1 requested feature).
Krita?
Krita is a great painting tool. It's not an illustrative one, like InkScape. I love Krita for texture painting.
This is horrible. I will not be using them for any future projects. We were looking for something like them but not anymore. Its not worth losing revenue just to make them look good.
Hi Chris,
I'm really sorry for what happens to you but I would also seize the opportunity to thank you for all your tutorials. It helps me a lot.
If you don't mind, I would also suggest you to consider options like : GDevelop (https://www.en.compilgames.net/index.php?lang=en) it's free and open source. That's the engine my team and I are currently using together with all other opensource softwares (inkscape, krita, mypaint, etc)
Visit Monkey-x.com
Great language/engine – beats GameSalad and Construct2 easily! And the best part? Free for HTML5/Desktop – if you want iOS/Android, just a one time fee.
(I'm not affiliated with them or anything – just believe in a good product!)
Hi Chris … I can do both design and coding … and I totally agree with your opinion. We should do what we do best bcoz I don't believe in Superman or Ultraman … super human can do everything perfectly? Naahh. God create us as human to have left and right hand. Why? because by working together (team up) we can make wonders.