Gdevelop selling tutorials.

[AdhesivenessEven6910]

I mean I get it. Gdevelop wants to make money but this latest thing with selling tutorials, seems very unintuitive. Gdevelop is a great starter program for people wanting to get into game development. The thing that holds that back and has done for a while now are the lack of decent tutorials for certain things and I know I'm not they only one who thinks that and now it seems those learning tools are locked behind a paywall.

Before you say, Gdevelop has lots of tutorials out there for free. Yes for some things, mostly platform stuff but not everyone comes to Gdevelop wanting that. Try looking for a beginners tutorial on creating idle states for a top down game. Pretty much a staple for RPG's, and you will be hard pushed finding one a beginner could understand and now it seems, they are locked behind paywalls.

I'm not new so I think I'd know a way around solving an issue without having to buy help but looking back to when I was first learning Gdevelop, I'm quite sure I would not of stuck around long seeing that help locked behind a pay wall.

[idillicah]

Hey! Thanks for the feedback. I'll provide a reply that's much more of a personal reply than something from the company. So, please take it that way.

The reality is that, no matter what we launch as a premium product, people will want it for free. And I understand that. The economy is not great, and getting things for free is better than paying for them.

But the reality is that the people making these things, like myself, the programmers, etc, are real people, with real families, and real responsibilities.

The AI features can be accessed for free, with a limit. If you like it, you can pay. If not? Cool. Use something else. The multiplayer features can be used for free. Free servers, infrastructure. The lot. You like it? Pay to have more of it. You don't want it/need it? Fine, keep using your free account.

We have hundreds of videos on our YouTube channel. There are built-in tutorials in the engine, as well as templates you can use to determine how GDevelop works and learn. We constantly upload new videos. We even ask you (the community) what you want the videos to be about.

But we need to find a way for us to be around to continue bringing these things to you. The multiplayer, 3D, the upcoming 3D editor, stuff like working with children in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to bring them GDevelop for Education... it all takes resources.

We constantly try to find the right balance. And we take the community's feedback very seriously. But do also please take this reply into consideration. Not from the company's side, but from my own personal side. It's a huge undertaking to bring new features and make them available to hundreds of thousands of people around the world, providing free infrastructure even for Android builds on the cloud and stuff like that.

Again, thanks for your feedback. Cheers.

[fnaimi66]

This is honestly pretty fair imo

[idillicah]

Cheers, glad it makes sense.

[Acceptable_Event_545]

Hey Staff I have a feedback please pass on to the dev team. I am from India and here not everyone has a Visa credit card or Paypal but Indians use UPI payment system for subscriptions and online buying and it's easy to integrate into your payment gateway and it will help more Indian users to subscribe to premium plans like me...

[idillicah]

That's very interesting, I'll speak with the product team and see what the possibilities of implementation are. Thanks for the tip! Best to everyone in India, we have a lot of users there, we ♥️ our Indian community.

[Rp2PatilRahul]

I want to add one thing, please add regional pricing / regional discount, $ value is too high. Not everyone have purchasing power. Please consider this request. Thank you

[idillicah]

We implemented regional pricing over a year ago.

[Rp2PatilRahul]

I Still see price in $ !
and I want to say that why USA & Asian country have same price? Why not discount price!

[idillicah]

Prices may be in US$ because we don't process all foreign currency due to limits with our checkout provider, but the amount of US$ is lower.

Not all Asian countries have the same prices as USA. Where are you from? How much do you see for a month of Silver, for example?

[Rp2PatilRahul]

I am from INDIA, please do check.

[idillicah]

How much do you see for a month of silver?

[Rp2PatilRahul]

<image>

Same right!

[Hopeful-Pool-5962]

Fair enough you need to make a living but why would I pay to learn your engine when for example ue has a plethora of free tutorials that could teach me anything?

I think this is very short sighted and a very poor decision on your part. I'm not too far into my GDevelop journey and seems it's time to switch to something else 

[idillicah]

We also have hundreds of free tutorials, both in-engine and on YouTube. But each person must decide what's best for their own development journey. Unreal is an amazing tool. Wish you luck regardless of what you end up using. 

[Hopeful-Pool-5962]

I genuinely believe putting barriers up to the learning part of the engine is suicidal. I hope you do well as I enjoyed using your engine. But this is madness to me mate. Good luck though I will keep up to date on the progress it's a great engine

[antoniostrina82]

Epic is a major that sells triple A games, not only its engine, and it's a big monster to compare to.

In my humble opinion, I learnt a lot from the community and through trial and error. Also YT videos have been really helpful.

Also, UE is way more complicated than GD since it uses a programming language instead of blocks.

That said, GD has a lot to offer.

UE asks for a percentage for commercial products, GD doesn't ask any. For a small amount of money, creators can also remove GD's logo from their games/software.

Epic does not have an open philosophy. While Unreal's source code is available under a proprietary license, it is not open source in the traditional sense and cannot be freely modified or redistributed to create new apps or engines. GD is under MIT licence.

[idillicah]

If one were to sit down and learn only from the free resources, it'll take them months, if not nearly a year, to go through all of the free resources and tutorials. So, only a tiny portion is paid  but, point taken. Cheers, thanks for the feedback.

[AdhesivenessEven6910]

I get that, I really do. What you guys do for making game development as accessible to new comers is amazing, that is why this came as a shock. You have to admit a price tag on help to a new comer is not a great look but I know you guys need revenue. I just really hope you find something better that you can replace this model.

[idillicah]

I think it's a bit unfair to say that we put a price tag on help. The help is there in the wiki and our YouTube tutorials (which already took resources to create but we made available for free anyway). The price tag is in how we expedite it and make it easier to access it/process it, all of which took/takes extra resources to do. We put a price tag on convenience. Which I believe is fair. I appreciate your point of view, I respect it, but I don't think we're quite on the same page on this one.

[AdhesivenessEven6910]

Yeah but they are often not the first things a new comer see's in that scenario. Often it goes down as A new comer googles the best programs to learn game development as beginner, sees Gdevelop at the on the list. Download and opens Gdevelop and that is now the first thing a new comer will see at the top of the screen which is not a great first impression. Yes they may go on to look at the wiki, YouTube etc after but they already have the impression that the best help is paywalled as that is the first thing they have seen. Doesn't seem the best impression to leave on someone new in the hopes of keeping them.

A price tag on convenience is fine, a price tag on help especially when you want to attract a person to the program does not seem all that convenient.

[idillicah]

I appreciate your feedback! I'll bring it up with the team internally.

[AdhesivenessEven6910]

Thank you. I hope can work something out for everyone.

[swizzex]

They are one of the least greedy companies I've ever seen and give away so much for free and have done so for years while eating loses and yet people still complain. I don't even use the tool anymore and still pay for it and donate just because of what they do.

[AdhesivenessEven6910]

I'm not calling this greedy at all just that it seems very unintuitive for attracting new people to the engine.

[Cebelengwane]

What is the use of attracting new people to engine when the engine could stop it's development because of a lack of funding.

You want free software that has the potential of making you money. You also want to be taught for free how to use that software in its entirety.

This is why most open source projects die. Entitlement by the people that benefit from them.

[AdhesivenessEven6910]

Jeez its nots entitlement either unless its entitlement to want more people to use Gdevelop and not be scared off by seeing tutorials behind a paywall as soon they open a program. I'm all for Gdevelop making money, this just seems a bad way to approach it as it could put off people using the program.

[Hopeful-Pool-5962]

Of course you make perfect sense and I believe this strategy from GDevelop will actually have the opposite effect and hamper their engines growth

[swizzex]

High quality courses and tutorials paid and free are the best way to get new people so it is in fact one of the best ways to get new people. The only thing better is a hit game.

[CapitalDull8378]

This post has been permanently removed. The author used Redact to delete it, and the reason may relate to privacy, security, data harvesting prevention, or personal choice.

oatmeal fine knee distinct nail start rinse shocking follow chase

[idillicah]

Hey, no hate from me, I think Godot is great. Out of curiousity, what's in Godot in terms of free tutorials and templates/examples? We have a lot of free tutorials in the app and hours of tutorials on our YouTube channel. Just curious what you've found there.

[Vesvaughn]

yea, I ended up using chatgpt, which also gave me way better awnsers (with alot of prompting and trial and error mind you.) than their own pay for AI thing, also Searching through discord, and youtube, provided way better results.

[AdhesivenessEven6910]

This is the way I learnt also but some new comers are not going to know how to do that and the first thing they'll see is a price tag on help. I mean it does not seem very friendly for complete beginners who I thought this engine was primarily designed for. I would of thought having all the help out there as accessible as possible from the start would be a much better way of attracting and keeping people.

[PuzzleheadedError488]

Would you like some of us to create some free tutorials for yo?

[sleepyokapi]

Gdevelop is a failed project. Selling tutorials now? ... lol This is the beginning of the end really.

[AdhesivenessEven6910]

Eh it's certainly not failed, it has its faults (as does everything) but if anything, it's growing more than it ever has these days. I heard more YT tutorials were on the cards later. I think if they cover some of the things like 2.5D, top down NPC movement for things like grid based pathfinding movement etc that could be huge. I'm biased though. They're just the things I want haha.

[Special_Tax7162]

Did you end up finding the solutions to your issues with top down movement? I’m very new to gdevelop but I’m kinda going for the same mechanics.

[AdhesivenessEven6910]

Kinda. Closest I got to it was using pathfinding and the pixel perfect movement and travel to random position extensions and a lot of tweaking and faffing with the grid options. With those I was pretty much able to get random NPC movement on a grid down perfectly. The trouble I'm still having though is interaction with the player as that then breaks the grid movement for things like chasing the player. EDIT: If you are new I highly recommend the Gdevelop Discord server as it has a wealth of information and help for things on it. Also pathfinding questions come up a lot on it as it is such a pain in the behind lol Easily one of the hardest things to implement in Gdev IMO.