It will also make the game engine more popular and make a great place to publish games and also features can be integrated into the web page and the game engine so that we can record and use like highscores and other things of the players directly in the game engine. But, it will be really hard for the devs as they are a small team and might not be able to work on two project at once unless it is a community driven project.
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This is possible, there would be a few problems though:
- This is a lot of work, and we would have to invest much time and effort not updating gdevelop to work on that
- This will probably not be profitable and just a money loss
- Who would pay for the server? This requires at least a minimal investment at the beginning. The GDevelop subscriptions? They are meant to be used to improve GDevelop itself, not to construct a profitable ecosystem.
Then, the idea itsel is not that bad, but you would need to find someone to code that and I think it would be unlikely the GDevelop team would focus on that.
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There’s a few organizations that sometimes provide free hosting for open source projects, which might be useful for the initial investment… the issue is that it will likely grow quickly and require more and more resources as it becomes increasingly popular, beyond what most those organizations are able to provide for free.
Personally, I am most amazed and satisfied that GD is able to operate in it’s current format and remain a free project. I’m sure just the build server requires a good amount of resources… It has to take a lot of cpu to ingest and crunch all of the builds from all the users, and a fair amount of band too.
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So I can somewhat understand where you’re coming from on this, however:
- Adding a dedicated hosting site that is integrated means that it’s viewed as the “correct” place to host games made in GDevelop. This leads to newer people not attempting to publish elsewhere, and actually reduces the spread of GDevelop. (If you want examples of this, for many years game developers stuck to Kongregate only. Armor Games didn’t move past Kongregate for years and didn’t see financial success until they did.)
- Indie game marketplaces is already an exceptionally matured market. Itch.io, Gamejolt, and even Lutris basically supply all of the needs here.
- Hosting cost are not cheap. Maintaining a separate codebase for the site is not easy (the contributors are already experiencing issues trying to update the main site here alone).
- How do you deal with server bloat? What is considered fair?
- If the GDevelop project hosts it, and costs raises, how do they decide what to keep?
- Do they keep everything forever and just let costs continually inflate?
- Do they cull off older games even if they’re highly popular? Or just cull off unpopular games?
Now, alllllll of the above in mind, I do think it would be far more beneficial for someone to integrate publishing directly to your Itch.io or Gamejolt account for HTML export as an option. Link up your Itch/Gamejolt account, publish to HTML (or compiled/zip/etc), and have the option to update an existing HTML project or create a new one on your account.
You could then have an “in-editor” method of publishing a game to a store, have an easy way to pre-populate items such as editor/programming language (GDevelop/Javascript), and still have one of the most commonly used storefronts in games.
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I agree with all of you and I already had your points in my mind. Just discussing.
Here some more things I want to say.
Itch.io supports only paypal and pyoneer. No ads.
There are two spheres - mobile and pc. I wish to combine. (Gamejolt doesnt have android app. etc.)
When stablised we can do legal works to accept other engine games.
When seen a popular game people can publish to other places.(Its not restricted)
What I want to say other spaces are broken and most of them have huge content of flash.
I think the only problem is someone to code. And someone to manage it by money.
Even I can give you a perfect formula for this, its not a problem.
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Yes, you are right. It will drive game users to become creators and vice versa.
Yes the strongest point is it will be well integrated and interconnected.
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There are two spheres - mobile and pc. I wish to combine. (Gamejolt doesnt have android app. etc.)
Two problems with this line specifically:
- For Mobile Devices, you cannot host a game store in the official Google Play store or the Apple App Store. In both cases those types of “sub”-stores are against their store TOS. This is why you have to download the android app store directly from Amazon.
- This also means you have to have users enable “Unknown apps” on Android devices, and there is no real way to do it on iOS officially.
Because of these things, for some sort of GDevelop game store to exist, it would be sidestepping the main stores on both devices. That would reduce eyeballs that can actually see the game, and be worse for developers, not better.
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“only” ^^
Jup this two little points are the problems for everything.
I’ve thought about it several times and I remember a couple of similar threats in the last 2-3 years. We also had some users who were willing to pay more than $2 per month for online functions. 4ian said money for (multiplayer)server is not really the problem.
But yes, we cannot pay for professional people who otherwise work for $30+/h with donations.
It would be great if GD gets bigger in the future and some ideas would be really cool but as an itchio or steam clon we don’t have a chance. They are companies with employees or large communitys where every user can also program because their engine requires it.
And the desire… for uploading your assets and games, there are still a lot of good opportunities with many visitors.
It won’t be profitable, but it may not have to be. 99% of GD games are not profitable or cost-covering.
The good thing is, it’s open source, everyone can do what they want and not what is absolutely necessary. Example Introducing GDMod
Maybe one day a dev wakes up and thinks, yey this month i like PHP more than JS and then we have things outside of the editor itself. Also contributions from people who are not the top5 main team, GD has already had several times.
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I am amazed by how youtube only runs by ads and how everything is free and yet creators can profit and the company too.
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That’s not really true. By 2015, Youtube wasn’t making any profit. Since then, Google didn’t communicate about it but I doubt this has changed. Those companies often have many non profitable sub companies because they can afford it. For example amazon, their retail service hasn’t been profitable until 2018, but they could afford it because they had AWS, or google could invest a lot into youtube, or spotify that doesn’t make any profit and relies only on people buying market shares.
Youtube also now has subscriptions to help, and they show more and more ads, which makes it less free than ever.
People use more and more adblock, which make those kind of monetization less and less usable.
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This is just a idea that I really want in gdevelop and I know it is impossible but I thought this might the best place to talk as we are talking about Gdevelop ecosystems. I really always wanted a store for gdevelop where you can get extensions, examples, assets, all sorts of things… What I mean is a place where the community can contribute to the store and also use all the assets and things by other users. You could say like the unity assets store. This might be really stupid but I have always felt a need of something like this because it is hard to find something like assets(especially if you are new to game development) and things like that because there are many fake sites and is hard to find free things. I currently use kenny assets but there selection is small especially 2D and as the community can contribute, there will be a lot more to pick from. I know it is impossible to make as it takes ages to make a site and maintain a server to store the data, but I always wish for it.
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We already have an asset store for assets and objects on the web app 
. User submitted content is planned I think.
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I want to suggest somethings.
- we can give 10 slots to every user. 9 for things less than 50 MB and 1 for upto 200 MB.
(verified users like andrymtv can have more space.) - things can be only liked.
- accounts not logged in for 2 years could be deleted.
- If possible in far future - we monetize our content through ads. Or other means. (like youtube ads cant be blocked)
- Ten broad categories of games on sidebar (If games can be put). three main buttons at top - , Games, Assets, Music.
- Search result could be made by considering no. of downloads (for html game-plays, comments), likes. Put into a formula.
- every user can report one content in a month and then it will come to managers for removing it if it appears inappropriate.
- we can further restrict users based on badges if amount of data is a problem.
- a particular file will be shown at top when first uploaded. after one month on 5th no. after 6 month on 10th no. (for one day).
- for games (if allowed) a new update will be shown on top for a day. update will be allowed once every 7days.
As I said I dont know programming some of the above things may be impossible.
One question is it on trello card?
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then your adblocker is not working.
I never have ads on yt.
imagine the most popular game on the site would be a game from a user not logged in for 2 years? do you remove the accounts only and keep the games?
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I like this kind of “discussing replies” 
on mobile too? anyway people make profit from youtube.
in those special case if someone has an eye on it can make a try to contact him. Then deleted. the rule is rule. (They will be suggested to keep a copy of game with them while upload)Such a game developer .I garantee will have his game on most platforms.. A very potent game will be ultimately sold on steam by its developer.
I provided a glimpse. If worked upon we can have every solution.
I can elaborate more about my most efficient plan if I am asked to.
I basically planned for only html games (as they are handy)
one more thing
I saw “mobile legends” game it starts with 90MB and auto download to 1.5 GB. so thats appr 1500MB. thats 1500-90 = 1410 MB. so divide by 50
28 games of 50 MBs.
(if this doesnt contradicts with tos or terms and conditions or legal agreements for “a app to download games.”)
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maybe
2 years no login && <30 plays per month
or
“could be deleted” != “must be deleted even if it is a top5 game”
But these things are really not the problem.
voting for deleting a game to save 14MB makes no sense…
200GB costs less than $10/month., incl. Domains, DBs, SSL, …
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i didnt said that
then cost and amount of data isnt problem.
Thanks for providing information.
If coding is a problem we can have another team other than “engine team” . Than we start with smallest thing. A website for html games. (if its smallest thing)
I think a regular cost have weight even if its small.
by this i mean if my idea is used then we could/can delete like this.
Its not mb its MB
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serverless can be used to reduce the money. I don’t know alot about serverless but, I do know it can reduce server cost. You can search about it or on YouTube to find more about it.
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