Advise: Don't buy

[Elucidator]

How do companies fail?

First a company is succesful, because it wants to create a product and release it. It makes money by coincidence.
Then greed happens, people get interested in the company, and suddenly the company's goal is making money, rather than delivering a product. It uses delivering a product as a means to do so.
Then it starts to optimize towards this goal. Less work and effort, high price, less cost, more income. The consumer is basically being abused. (lies in advertisement, promises that never happen, hype that gets people in hopes and preorder, only leading to harsh disappointment, etc. Shrinkflation, etc. etc.) We all know it.

Once they are done with most of the consumer abuse tactics, they move on to partner abuse, making big promises to other companies so they invest and... never holding on to that. And then the stocks plummet, there is no going back from this reputation damage.


At what stage is Gotcha Gotcha games currently: Well, consumer abuse stage.
We see an inflation in price for no reason. (like, a huuuge inflation of 20% on top of MZ)
They all know our purchasing power dropped, because of electrical bills (war), green measurements, etc.
They give this idea that what they show trailer is the minimum you can do with it, even though it is pretty much the most of what you can do with it, unless you know programming and Unity, but like.. RPG Maker is designed for people who have no patience in learning and just want to create something. So...
uhm...
for 100 euroes. (well, 99.70 euroes), which is a price increase of the 78 for MZ), we get a broken product that crashes the Unity Engine, every now and then.

(some evidence) https://imgur.com/a/VwIHGOQ

Gotcha Gotcha Games, you're diffidently plummetting consumer trust.
I liked the RPG Maker series, but this product is not just way too overpriced, especially for the current consumer market, but it's 'broken'.
You're asking 99.70 euroes, for a leaking can, from consumers who have less purchasing power.

I am disappointed. I recommend fans not to purchase this stuff. RPG Maker VX Ace is an excellent product, RPG Maker MV and RPG Maker MZ have unfortunately NW.JS bloat issues, but they are good too (if you ignore the file size, excellent even).

Unite? ... Good luck getting your patience tried, and remember, it costed you only 100 euroes.

Edit: Buy early for the early bird limited edition bonus content, that... you can get later on as inexpensive (compared to other DLC), if not free DLC anyway...

Oh right, I forgot the whole "DLC on Launch" thingy.
https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/68473
Do I sense greed? They managed to fill in more than a whole page worth of DLC, on launch. Some of them cost 45 euros. This is diffidently milking consumer wallets.


Later edit 2:
MZ and MV already felt a bit overpriced at the time of release. People who paid 80 euroes for MV, noticed there were only effectively minor differenced with MZ, and MZ came with MV's assets + new ones, yet the official price is still 80 euroes, there is just a lot of offers.
Both of them have a ton of DLC that regular consumers, gamers wouldn't buy simply because its too expensive. You have to be a company to even be able to affort it or see somekind of return, not a newbie who just wants to have some fun sandboxing.
As mentioned the early bird DLC became available as buyable DLC, so there was really no need to spend 80 on it eventually; consumers felt betrayed due to these actions.
MV didn't get the same performance boost optimizations (later version of NW.JS, later version of pixi), it's not even that difficult to do that I assume.
(Though really, due to the unnessecary bloat, I think they should have gone for Tauri, and done the same with RPG Maker VX and XP, namely release RTPs, since a lot of people use the same assets.)
Niconico Game Atsumaru is gone so, there really isn't any major MV/MZ web release platform where you can try other people's works.
This is all... as such.. extremely bad timing. 100 euro for a broken product. You can buy a mini pc for that. You can buy a singleboard computer, 5 games, etc. for that, but again, people may not want to because their purchase power dropped heavily.
Food's cost is basically doubled, for a lot of things; that is despite them also containing less. Rent went up, etc.

Because of that, this 100 euro price seems like the product is aimed at companies only. (small indie companies, not a starting point at least), which makes it even weirder since those likely know how to program and develop their own engine, etc.
Use Godot, it's free. Look at Project Kat to see an excellent example of an rpg made in godot.
Or just buy VX / VX ace during a sale or something, not this at least.

Edit 3:
By the way, note: https://steamdb.info/app/1096900/
On January 13, they increased the price of their products for no reason.

[spacefarergames]

We second this, got burned by the purchase and are still (a week later) waiting for a refund. Buy Ace, don't buy Unite.

[Kuehnau]

Frankly I have always thought that the software for any of the RPG Maker titles were lacking, not just in assets but in general quality of life changes. There's a lot of paid plugins out there that I feel like should just be included with the software at this point, instead Gotcha Gotcha would rather over charge for software and leave the community to actually do anything meaningful with it.

I have *NEVER* paid full price for RPG Maker, I think for MV I paid $15.

I've been watching Unite because I was hoping being linked to the Unity store would mean more resources available, but based on what I heard I am probably not going to buy the software as is.

[Bobswag55/Skullguy]

Ace is the best rpg maker imo

[AwesomeCool]

RPG Maker definitely peaked with Ace. I saw the writing on the wall back then and left, I just wish they released a patch to allow it to be run at a higher resolution, but they refuse to do it because of greed.

I use to be really into the scene, I saw the changes happening and knew that it was all downhill from there. I knew that the next rpg maker would be ok, but it would just stagnate at best.

Not just because of the product's stagnation and then decline, but because of the community.

Greed overtook everything and it started trying to be what it isn't.

Yanfly charging for plugins that should be free, the arrogance of higher ups in the community, the diversity, all the DLC, the change to Javascript, etc.

RPG Maker use to focus on hobbyists, it moved away from that. So many cool plugin developers (I was one of them) and it was all so fun.


They should have stuck with Ruby (a language designed to be fun to program with) and focused on being more for hobbyists and children. It is reaching too

[Elucidator]

There is a large difference between vx/vx ace and mv. Not the code base I mean, but... how it was designed for people. You can tell from the help file. VX Ace's help file teaches people Ruby, and how the RGSS system works.
in MV, you get a list of the... things in javascript people won't get unless they know javascript, but it barely has any explanation basically.

I am not sure where gotchagotchagames is going, but it's moving away from hobbyists, seemingly yeah.

also: http://daimonioustails.weebly.com/basic-window-resizer.html

You can use the win32api to zoom on your pixels.
like how that plugin does, and I like pixels, so no worries. ;p

anyway, I was shocked to learn that they raised the price of even rpg maker xp, without even a single modern-windows patch or whatever, so, I just see anticonsumerism going on.