The reality is, nothing like that ever exists. But you have to be careful when promising things that are unlimited, permanent, or infinite.
Restaurants may offer free refills, but if you go back the next day they make you buy a drink again. Businesses need to make money, and if they don’t make money, they stop existing. Of course, that’s just the way business is. So of course YoYo would amend a previously stupidly over-open agreement to close a loophole and provide necessary limitations. It’s almost meaningless to the user, because they have so little say, so little power, that there is little to no benefit to them in understanding the agreement that they supposedly are agreeing to. Very often, users aren’t even aware of the terms, before or after the change.
In the world of click-through license agreements, this happens all the time, and users have little choice but to accept it, or stop using the product. In real contracts, one party cannot change the terms of the agreement on a whim, without the consent of the other party. This is a major reason why I view click-through agreements as false contracts. That’s the thing with these license agreements the vendor can change them at any time, and users have little choice but to go along with it. So Master Collection owners would have to pay for GMS2 when it came out. YYG have already done this - they amended the terms of the GM:S Master Collection license, which originally had a provision entitling users who purchased Master Collection to all new versions and modules that YYG released, without qualification later this was changed to “within the 1.x sequence”. The vendor controls the version numbers, so they can play the game that when they want to break the promise of permanent licensing, all they have to do is release “GMS3” which will be a new product, and thus not bound to the old licensing terms in the way that 2.1 or 2.9 or 2.x would have been.
We could quibble if we wanted, but what I’m getting at is that what YYG call a “permanent license” I will call a “permanent subscription.” The license is activated by virtue of the account authentication, and if this ever breaks or is revoked, the software is not usable. The average consumer doesn’t care or understand enough to make it a matter of “if” any longer. I believe it is more “when” than “if”, at this point. My guess is that probably this will happen a few years from now, once the consumer software market has accepted SaaS - if and when that happens. Moreover, although YYG have been quiet about it, all the groundwork is laid for them to switch to a subscription-based model, at a point when they decide the time is right. GMS1 users had to have a network connection in order to refresh their product license, which needed to happen about once a month.) (To be fair, this had been the case under GMS1.x as well, all along, although previously in GMS1 license activation wasn’t explicitly tied to a user authentication. If that can’t happen any longer, for whatever reason, then I lose access to the software that I paid for. And that’s disturbing! At the very least, it’s subject to YoYoGames continuing to exist, and having their licensing service up and running, and contingent on my software refreshing some authentication token periodically. What it means is this: Despite the label saying so, my product activation isn’t permanent. “OK, so what? What does that all mean, and why should I care?” you might ask.
I’m back in.Īll’s well that ends well, right? Implications I’m still unclear why I was able to authenticate to the YYG website, but not GMS2, using the same known-good credentials, but resetting did the trick.
I eventually got in by doing a password reset. I logged in there, and reviewed my license, and my license duration says “permanent” although at the moment apparently there’s something wrong and my license is “expired” according to the software. Something must be wrong with their authentication backend for the IDE, perhaps? My login credentials allow me access to the website, so I know that my credentials are good. I clicked Retry, and was prompted to log in with my YoYo Account. It started innocently enough… I launched GameMaker Studio 2 today, and got an error message: And since it got my attention, I thought it might be a good time to talk about some specific things, and some far-ranging points as well. Today I had a bit of a reminder, of something that has been gradually coalescing for some time.