The Game Maker User And Game Maker.

Based on a survey taken by visitors of this site 2006-2007.

Background: This survey was started in fall 2006 and ended spring 2007. My intention then was to create statistics to answer common questions that people repetedly think about and repetedly ask about at the GMC. Users are from GMC mainly, and rather than being general and claim that it is a survey covering Game Maker users, we will come closer to the truth by limiting us to the GMC users. That's where most of the participants came.


Country statistics: This specific question asked the participant to choose the country they inhabit from a list, or simply not choose anything at all. Not very surprising that USA, the biggest country, got the most entries and thereafter Australia, UK, Sweden (I hope I did not have any impact on this, I did not give it extra attention), Canada, Netherlands and so on. Top three is English-speaking countries, and I think none of them have their own communities; Sweden has a very small national community and Canada has none. This is where it is important to remember that the survey was taken mostly by members at GMC. Those who know English do, of course, have an advantage in learning Game Maker as they know the language of the manual fluently, however, this is not the main reason for our result. We have for an example Spain, a great game making nation, that's not even on the list. But they also do have a spanish version of the manual and their own community. The same for Netherlands, another really great game maker nation, which is probaby lower than it deserves due to a very succesfull national community. With this said, however, we here have a pretty neat list of countries all existing on the GMC and using Game Maker.


Age: This is also kind of easy to predict; Game Maker, after all, is the perfect way to begin programming and we should expect that people after a while moves on onto other projects and languages, and do not pay as much visits to the GMC. It looks like it's following a normal distribution, gaussian curve, in the interval 1986 to 1996. This is to expect for most kind of statistics, what's intresting is, however, where the curve has stablized and is as large as possible. This is at the year of 1992 which in this case means an age of fourteen years. But statistics also prove that you are capable of enjoying the forum and Game Maker at a much earlier age than that!


I started to use Game Maker... So what does this really give an indication of? Most of all it's a good measure on how the number of users increase. Is it at steady pace or exponentially? one would hope and assume exponentially. And it is, kinda, but not entierly. I guess that there are certain things that plays an important role: I know for an example that the year of 2003 was a good year with a new version of Game Maker and a new forum and things like that, in 2004 it didn't really happen very much, so that's maybe why the number of new users went back a little. However, the number of new users each year is increasing and I believe it will continue to increase. Especially with YoYoGames, it'll proably cause a big jump in the graph. Unfortunately the graph ends in a not so logical way, something which I can think of two explanations to; 1) noone wants to say 2006, especially if taking the survey 2006, since some believes it is a shame to be a beginner. Secondly (2) it might take a while for people to get activated on the forum. You don't know anything about anyone and you can't really take part in discussions in a good way so maybe your not really intrested in community-matters and stuff and so you don't check the forumet and thus do not get information about stuff like a survey. And I can understand that. And maybe there is other explanations too, there's lot of potential reasons to why it happened.

And some fun facts...

Calle Ekdahl
15 September 2007