GameMaker throws shade at Unity, makes its 2D engine free or $100 for most

Enlarge / Risk of Rain was the work of two college students and GameMaker. (credit: Gearbox Publishing)

Up until this year, game engines were not something most gamers had to give much thought to beyond the one or two seconds their logos might appear while a game was loading.

That changed this fall when popular pick Unity went from a remarkable anybody-can-make-a-game tool to a developer-enraging, threat-generating, CEO-resignation mess. CD Projekt Red, maker of The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077, made a point of stating that its next games would be built with the Unreal Engine, not its in-house REDengine. After Cities: Skylines 2 launched with notably rough performance, deep decompilation analysis found a bunch of seemingly Unity-related, or at least Unity-adjacent, issues.

That's why this news about another big change in a popular game engine is so striking: it's generally good. GameMaker (formerly Game Maker Studio), a 2D engine that was acquired by browser firm Opera in 2021, has simplified its licensing structure, declaring it "Free for Non-Commercial Use."