If I want a lot of performance, I can write modules in C++ with GDNative. I can make editor-integrated plugins, interfaces, tools that we don't have in GMS. I started Godot with c# and now I continue with gdscript. Even its own GdScript language is far more professional than GML and conforms to developer paradigms. Although it is open source, it has a lot of features that you can show as a plus against GMS and it is very stable. I use Godot even though I have web, mobile, desktop licenses of GMS2. If you are going to make a 2D game, today there are open source and more advantageous game engines. Other engines are now more well-known when it comes to entry-level game programming, and they're also free. Nonetheless, I still associate it with its clunky restrictions of old, and I think the same is true for a lot of people.
I believe that a lot (if not all) of these specific issues have been ironed out since I last used it around a decade ago.
This meant that it was extremely easy for anybody to "de-compile" it and steal the source code, and that game performance was also pretty horrendous.
What happened instead of compilation was that there was a pre-compiled "runner" that would be attached to the source code and it would run the code at runtime. In fact, compilation wasn't something GM did. Quite simply, other engines have caught up in their accessibility whilst remaining lightyears ahead in their flexibility and performance.īack in the day (I speak as someone who started years before even YoYo bought it, when it was just called GameMaker), it was a fantastic tool for getting to grips with game programming, but it always lagged behind everything else when it came to performance, the development workflow itself (all source code was kept in a single file so version control for team development was pretty much impossible), platform diversity (its programs used to only run on Windows and even then there were compatibility issues with Vista when it came out), and even compilation.