Sandy’s Rant Blog

We at Scorptek were recently passed a tip saying that Sandy Duncan operates a rant blog. He calls it his RLOG (Rant Log), and it contains vehement posts about all sorts of topics, mainly centered around environmentalism, people he doesn’t like and sports.

The RLOG is infrequently updated and can be found here: http://myduncanspace.com/ (Explicit Language Warning)
Duncan also has two other websites, http://theduncanspace.com/ and http://sandyd.com/.

Please note that this is the last installment of GMRumors. The site will be left open for comments, but no new posts will be made.

YYG Hiring Game Devs?

When YoyoGames first replaced the Game Maker Company in January, 2007, many people complained that is was the beginning of a move to commercialize Game Maker. With Sandy Duncan’s personal blogs and reassuring statements, yoyogames.com’s launch, and the planned improvements to Game Maker, many users were put at ease.

However, there is an interesting rumor that brings back some of the old worries. This concerns some of the games on the YYG site. Several very good games (Pirates Coin?) have recently become popular, but many of the authors were previously unknown, and some say that it’s their first Game Maker game! This has led some members to suspect that Yoyo is hiring developers to make games for the site in order to increase ad revenue and interest in Game Maker.

While there is no proof of this, it is a very interesting theory and, if true, sheds a new light on YoyoGames.

GMTV?

Dan Eggers is eagerly looking towards creating a dedicated GMTV network with a series of shows discussing and reviewing GM Games. The youngster plans to have a similar format to an already existing G4’s “X-play” show where approximately 3-5 games are reviewed in a single episode.

So far the support looks encouraging, and it could (with some work) become a success. However, will the young programmer of only 14 years of age be able to pull off such a feat? That is the question.

YYG: Make profit off user’s games? Why not?

There is evidence to suggest that Yo Yo Games may be looking into selling user’s amateur games on their website in the future. Mark Overmars has let us know that if this does indeed happen, the user will be expected to share the profits with Yo Yo Games.

While this is better than the previously discounted rumor that ‘Yo Yo Games would simply choose games to sell and keep the profits’ that was floating around (most likely as a result of the slightly shocking terms of service draft that was leaked), it still poses a question as to whether it is better to try and sell your game on your own site. Sure, you will not get the traffic you might do on YoYo Games, but you would have complete control over the sale and more importantly, 100% of the profit.

Technical Difficulties

We are currently experiencing technical difficulties with the GMRumours blog. We are working with WordPress to resolve these issues. Please be patient while we restore the sidebar widgets and correct other problems with the site.

Game Maker Trademarked? Unlikely.

According to the YoYo Games website, the name “Game Maker” is a registered trademark, denoted by the (TM) symbol beside it on their website.

I am not one to speak for English or Netherlands’s law system (wherever the company is now said to be located).. however, what I do know is that in most western living style countries (Canada, USA, Australia etc.), it is no longer possible (if ever possible) to register a trademark for a phrase of non-innovative words in regular English that describe a product or service.

For example, you cannot register a trademark for “Food Chiller”, “Wood Carver”, “Screen Cleaner”, “Game Maker”, “Foldable Chair”, “Chocolate Peanuts” etc. because these are all short descriptive phrases using common words that have no special meaning, and no extraordinary significance.

At this point, even if the company was able to find a copyright/trademark or lawyer’s office that would issue a registered trademark certificate for the “Game Maker” name, it would be no use, since it would never stand up in court.

The judge would see that there are many other programs out there called “Gamemaker”, “GameMaker”, “Game Builder”, and probably even “Game Maker” and this would indicate to him or her that the name had no particular innovation if he/she hadn’t realized that already. That is enough grounds to dismiss the claim and trademark.

I speak from experience, a company I was involved in, semi-recently had a legal dispute over a couple of trademarks they owned. Despite having the actual trademark certificates and such, the trademarks were dismissed and seen as irrelevant in court. To give an example, I believe one of them was “Ice Chiller”.

YYG: User suggestion becomes reality?

J-Factor, a well known member of the GMC has made a public suggestion for managing submitted games and determining their level of security / ’safeness’.

Users can upload either safe/secure games or normal games. Safe games would have a special status icon (e.g. a green tick) to show they are safe to play. Normal games would have a question mark icon to show that there may be a risk.

When you attempt to download a normal game it should display a mild warning (that could be disabled in user preferences) and perhaps a checkbox where you agree not to hold YoYo Games responsible. The “unknown risk” status for normal games could be changed by user voting or a moderator. Once a certain number of users have voted the game as “Safe” simply change the status.

Sandy commented to say the YYG team likes the suggestion J-Factor made and has decided to listen to the public on this one and will most likely implement such a system in the near future. Sandy did say however, that this suggestion can’t be implemented in time for the first public beta release of the website.

+1 for YoYo Sounds like a fair compromise to the safe-mode policy they are encouraging

Mark Prefers GMS over 64D?

While the Games Showcase is still a big name in the gaming community… it has become decreasingly popular lately with less and less updates and less and less activity. 64Digits on the other hand is thriving compared to it’s competitors: Games Showcase and Game Maker Games (currently being relocated to a new host and has effectively been dead for month(s)).

Mark recently removed the link to the Game Maker Games website from the official Game Maker page after GMG started experiencing problems with their host. Instead Mark suggested users visit the Games Showcase. It is surprising that there hasn’t been a mention to the 64Digits community, and perhaps there is something we don’t know about, that Mark is holding against them.

Anyone with information on the subject, please feel free to comment.

Alternative GM7 Download

If you haven’t noticed already, the Yo Yo Games site has being missing functionality lately in that there appears to be only one page, a place-holder.

This also means Game Maker 7 can’t be downloaded the traditional way. A user on the GMC however is letting us know that Google’s cached version of the download Game Maker page has kept intact with the official off-site link (on amazon) where you can download Game Maker.

The link works, and for whatever reason if you need to download or re-download Game Maker in the next few days, please see here.

In case you happen to be wondering, Mark has confirmed that the download removal was a mistake. In order to have a smooth transition to the new Yo Yo site, member signups were disabled. Unfortunately, the company managing the site didn’t read the memo right and ended up taking a lot more down than just the signup page. They are working on fixing this problem, but during the weekend this can prove difficult.

64Digits Spam Attack

64Digits has reported various spam and hacking attempts from a user called miller. Despite temporarily disabling account signups, the user managed to bypass this and register new accounts anyway for the purpose of spamming as much as possible.

The report was issued as follows:

I’m sure most of you know about the recent spam attacks. We have disabled new account registering, but Millar seems to be able to make new accounts, and has attacked the site multiple times with spam.

We are not taking this lightly. We are doing everything we can to make sure it stops.

Please do NOT bombard the staff with messages about the spam, because we are aware.