How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

I don't see how sitelocking would really work with HTML5 games, so I'd assume the revenue primarily came from sponsorships, i.e. a sponsor pays to place ads and links to their site in your game (usually preloaders, inter-stitials) and 'More Games' links), which are then distributed far and wide.

Sound's terrible.

Also, the blog's author sounds just like "I'm earning $10000 a month, click here to learn about it" ads. I suspect he is in collusion with yoyo games.

And crashes all the freaking time. It was so disappointing, because the game is insanely fun, but it was ruined for me by constant glitches.

I agree. He started with a tool, he enjoyed working with it and is making quality software with it. Why change?

Changing tools would probably make his productivity drop and he might not need the added features.

I believe in "finding the right tool for the job" but when one is making stuff "for fun" (as the author started), just go with what you want.

To me, I would code everything I could in Python.

For game development I would choose MOAI. MOAI still has a lacking documentation, official progress is almost nil (but the community is improving it), it's hard for newcomers and begginers, and the lack of good runtimes may scare away some users.

And I suck at it. I really, really suck. After playing with it for a while, I participated in April's Ludum Dare using MOAI. I ended up ditching almost all the physics due to weird glitches and slowdowns, couldn't implement all the features, and the code is a mess of callbacks floating around.

But I love it's philosophy, it's scope, it's ambition. I will continue making games in MOAI for the better or the worst. Because I like it, and because I want to.

I'll bite because I've seen this sentiment generally on HN. Basically, everyone knows the way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell picks and shovels rather than mine for gold. Start as an application, then become a platform.

The cynical view of how this works is: start doing something, find out you can make a little bit of money doing it, decide you can make a lot of money by essentially selling services around doing that something for other people that do that something already or might be interested in getting into it, and then make that your business.

My question is: is this really all that bad in and of itself? Is someone selling picks and shovels in a gold rush necessarily selling something people shouldn't buy? Are they inherently less trustworthy because they get into the picks and shovels business?

The argument is often made that you can get the same information for free elsewhere. Well, that's what I always say about college and why I think it's a horrible investment, but obviously people disagree with me there. But why is college more legitimate? Because it's been around longer? As far as I can tell, colleges are selling picks and shovels in a gold rush that ended 20 years ago. At least the Game Maker racket is just getting started :-)

The best argument of course is that the vendor has the incentive to hype the prospects of their industry, often an industry in which success is faaaaar from assured (like every industry). But I don't know, how does this rule apply here any more than it applies to any other industry where someone is trying to get people excited about the prospects of a future technology/industry/event/whatever?

And for the record, I have no affiliation with the OP, I just don't think it's particularly fair that just because you are offering information products around some potentially dubious business opportunity that it's a valid criticism to essentially say "oh, he's selling picks and shovels, so he must be a douche" (I'm paraphrasing of course...)

Other side anyone?