Can I buy this?

GDevelop general
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I’ve been looking for a fun 2d game creation software and I stumbled onto Gdevelop which looks ideal for my needs (simple windows retro 2d games)

However I dislike and don’t do “subscriptions”. I like to pay once for my software and own it, not rent it.

is there an option for a one off fee to buy it? (price isn’t a problem)

Thanks

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There is no subscription for GDevelop itself. GDevelop is free, and will compile to a number of platforms, all for free.

You get a limited number of builds per day for free. If you need more, you need pay. This is the subscription. It’s to be able to build more often per day, not to use GDevelop.

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Thanks for your fast and helpful reply.
I think I’d better pass on this and look at other options then.

Thanks anyway :slight_smile:

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To be more precise, you do not even have to pay to build: if you want to pay for a subscription, you get more daily one click builds. Those are a convenience feature. You can playtest your game without building, you can make as many shareable web builds as you want, and you can build locally as much as you want. The build service has to be rate limited as it uses servers that have all the necessary build tools installed and do the build for you, and those servers cost real money.
A one time fee for using the build servers more do not make sense: Servers are not a thing you buy once and forget - you have to keep paying for them, as the internet bandwidth and electricity they use are not free either.

GDevelop is as free an engine as it can get: The whole software is free, you have no feature that is behind a paywall, you get a maybe rate limited but still free access to an extra convenience service that costs the developer real money, and you get all rights to your game with no royalties… You will not find a better offer.

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Was a little concerned when I first saw this: Thought you might depend on the GDevelop website to be able to build your games at all. I would not want such a dependency even if it were free for unlimited use, I’d want the ability to make builds locally without needing external dependencies.

Is there clarification on what remote building of a project is for versus local building? I take it that’s to automatically upload the game in the default service, called Liluo from what I’m seeing? In any case if it’s optional and I can compile my own builds locally with full freedom I’m happy either way.

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The remote cloud build is basically a service that takes an intermediary Export of your game with events already transformed into real code (the same thing that you get by manually exporting) and takes care of running additional tools for packaging the game for you. We used to bundle build tools with GDevelop but that has a few problems:

  • Some tools might have differences depending on the platform it runs on, creating hard to debug user specific issues
  • GDevelop’s size gets very big
  • Locally installed versions of the build tools may conflict with the version used by GDevelop
  • Old versions of the IDE wouldn’t allow to publish games on the play store as it require the latest versions of the android SDK to be used, and the update to the build tools to support that update would come with newer GDevelop versions
  • GDevelop abstracts the building away, not just the game making. As a part of that the signature of the android builds is also abstracted, but if done locally, then changing computers or reinstalling GDevelop will make you lose that digital signature.

Etc.

So an evergreen cloud service has been built: Since it is a cloud environment, it is often faster than most user’s computers, always the same reproducible environment, always using the latest versions of the build tools, etc it solves most of those problems.
Your android digital signature is also stored safely in the cloud behind your user credentials, so that even if you get hacked or something the hackers won’t have access to your digital signature (though you can still request it to be sent to you if you want to move away from GDevelop), and you can make a build signed and ready to submit to the play store from anywhere where you can log into GDevelop.

Liluo is not quite the same as one click builds, it is a web game hosting for GDevelop games. You can use it to make fast builds available as a shareable link to share a build of your game quickly, make a game page that is basically the same but with a stable URL, and you can make your game visible on the homepage for the GDevelop community to play.

If you wish to download and run the build tools yourself, how to do so is explained on the wiki. It shouldn’t be too hard, only like one or two commands on the command line are needed.

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