GameMaker Studio Pricing in 2026: The Complete Cost Breakdown
GameMaker is free for non-commercial use, charges a one-time $99.99 for the Professional licence that lets you sell your games on desktop, mobile, and web, and asks $79.99 a month ($799.99 a year) for the Enterprise subscription only when you need console export to PlayStation, Xbox, or Nintendo Switch. There are no royalties and no revenue share. This breakdown covers every current tier, what changed in the November 2023 reset that ended the old subscription model, the platform and dev-account costs the price does not include, a three-year total-cost comparison against Godot, Unity, and Construct, and an honest read on when each tier is worth it. No invented market figures — every number is the engine's own current pricing.
GameMaker's current pricing is unusually simple once you know the shape of it. The engine is free for non-commercial use. To sell your games on desktop, mobile, and web you pay $99.99 once for the Professional licence, and keep every dollar afterwards — no royalties, no revenue share. The only recurring cost is the Enterprise subscription at $79.99 a month (or $799.99 a year), and you only need it to export to PlayStation, Xbox, or Nintendo Switch. Everything below unpacks those tiers, the costs the licence does not cover, and how the total compares with Godot, Unity, and Construct.
One naming note before the numbers: the product once called GameMaker Studio 2 was rebranded simply to GameMaker, and it now ships LTS (Long Term Support) releases, the current one being LTS 2026.0. Older "GameMaker Studio 2" tutorials refer to the same engine, and the pricing here is what that engine costs today.
For the full feature evaluation rather than the cost, see our GameMaker Studio review. If price is the reason you are comparing options, our rundown of GameMaker alternatives covers engines that cost less or nothing.
The current tiers at a glance
| Tier | Price | What you get | What you cannot do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Full editor, exports to Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, HTML5, GX.games | Any commercial release; console export |
| Professional | $99.99, one-time | Everything in Free, plus the right to sell your games on all non-console platforms | Console export |
| Enterprise | $79.99/month or $799.99/year | Everything in Professional, plus console export to PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch | — (top tier) |
That is the whole pricing structure. There are no feature tiers hidden between them, no per-platform export modules to buy separately, and no royalty on your sales.
What changed in November 2023
The pricing was not always this clean. Through 2023 GameMaker used a multi-tier subscription — a free Creator tier with limits, an Indie subscription, and a higher Enterprise tier — and console export was split into separate paid modules per platform.
In November 2023, under its owner Opera (which bought YoYo Games from Playtech for about $10 million in January 2021), GameMaker collapsed the model. It made the engine free for all non-commercial use with no feature limits, replaced the commercial subscriptions with the single $99.99 one-time Professional licence, and folded console export into one Enterprise subscription. The stated aim was to remove the cost barrier for learners and hobbyists while keeping a simple commercial path.
That reset matters for two reasons. First, any older guide still quoting an "Indie subscription" or per-platform console modules is out of date. Second, it made GameMaker one of the cheapest commercial paths in the industry for any developer not targeting consoles.
Each tier in detail
Free — learn and build, just not sell
The free tier is the full editor with no time limit and no feature cap. You can build a complete game and export it to every non-console platform, and you can share it freely — you simply cannot charge for it. For a student, a hobbyist, or anyone prototyping, this is genuinely the whole tool at no cost. The only wall is commercial: the moment you want to sell, you need Professional.
Professional — $99.99 once, sell everywhere except consoles
Professional is the licence that turns a free project into a shippable product. It is a single one-time payment of $99.99, it covers commercial release on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, HTML5, and GX.games, and it charges no royalties. The licence is tied to a developer account, so a team needs one per developer — but at $99.99 each, that is a rounding error against most budgets.
The practical workflow this enables is worth stating: build the entire game on the free tier, prove it, then buy Professional only when you are ready to publish. You are never paying to learn.
Enterprise — the only subscription, and only for consoles
Enterprise adds console export — PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch — and is the one recurring cost in the lineup, at $79.99 a month or $799.99 a year. It includes everything in Professional. The reason console export lives behind a subscription rather than a one-time fee is structural: consoles require certified toolchains, platform agreements, and developer hardware, and supporting them costs the engine maker real, ongoing money. Console development is also almost always a funded commercial activity, which makes a subscription a reasonable fit for that audience.
The costs the licence does not cover
The GameMaker price is the engine price. Publishing still brings costs that belong to the platforms, not the engine, and a realistic budget includes them:
| Cost | Typical amount | Who you pay |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Developer account | $99/year | Apple (required for iOS and macOS App Store) |
| Google Play registration | $25, one-time | Google (required for Android) |
| Console developer program | Varies; dev hardware is a separate expense | Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo (each requires approval) |
| Marketplace assets | $0–hundreds | GameMaker Marketplace (optional art, audio, extensions) |
| Extra Professional seats | $99.99 per developer | GameMaker (only for teams) |
Two points worth pulling out. The platform accounts are not optional — you cannot publish to iOS without the Apple account or to Android without Google Play, regardless of which engine you use. And the console programs each require their own approval and agreements, so console publishing is gated by the platform as much as by the Enterprise subscription.
Three-year total cost, compared
To make the comparison concrete, here is a rough three-year total cost of the engine itself (excluding platform accounts) for a solo developer.
| Engine | Solo, three-year engine cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Godot | $0 | Free and open-source (MIT). No licence fee, no royalties |
| GameMaker (non-console) | $99.99 | One Professional payment, then nothing |
| GameMaker (console) | ≈$2,399.97 | Three years of Enterprise at $799.99/year |
| Construct 3 Personal | ≈$360 | ~€119.99/year, individuals only; Business tier ~€428.99/seat/year |
| Unity Pro | ≈$6,600–$6,930 | ~$2,200–$2,310/seat/year; Personal is free under $200K revenue |
Read the table one way and GameMaker is almost free next to Unity for non-console work; read it another and console export makes it comparable to a subscription engine. Both readings are correct, which is exactly why the non-console/console split is the decision that matters.
When each tier is worth it
| Your situation | The right tier | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Learning, prototyping, hobby project | Free | Full editor, no reason to pay until you ship |
| Selling a PC, mobile, or web game | Professional ($99.99) | Cheapest commercial licence in the class; no royalties |
| Small team shipping commercially | Professional per dev | $99.99 each; still far below seat-based engines |
| Approved for PlayStation, Xbox, or Switch | Enterprise ($79.99/mo) | The only path to console export |
| Unsure about consoles | Start Professional, add Enterprise if approved | You can upgrade; you do not pay for console access you never use |
It ships real games
Pricing is only worth discussing if the engine can deliver a commercial product, and GameMaker's catalogue answers that directly: Undertale (Toby Fox), Hotline Miami, Nuclear Throne, Hyper Light Drifter, Katana ZERO, and Forager were built with it. These are not hobby projects — they are commercially successful games that began on the same free tier anyone can download today. (A common misattribution to watch for: Stardew Valley and Shovel Knight are not GameMaker games — the former is XNA/MonoGame, the latter a custom engine.)
Where Egmatic fits
GameMaker's pricing is hard to beat for a solo 2D developer, and this article is not an argument against it. The reason to look elsewhere is rarely the price — it is the trade-offs the price does not fix.
The first is language lock-in. GameMaker's GML is purpose-built and does not transfer to other engines. The second is no real 3D — GameMaker is a 2D engine, full stop. The third is that console export carries a recurring cost and depends on platform approval you may not have yet.
If those trade-offs matter to you, Egmatic is the alternative this blog is built around: a visual, node-based 2D editor on a MonoGame foundation, which means the project is real C# and .NET (no proprietary language lock-in), with no per-title royalties, running on the platforms MonoGame supports. The same fast, visual workflow that makes GameMaker appealing for iteration is the workflow Egmatic is designed around — just without GML as the price of entry. For a wider comparison, see our list of the best game engines for indie developers.
Conclusion
GameMaker's 2026 pricing is one of the most developer-friendly in the industry for 2D: free to learn, $99.99 once to sell on every non-console platform, and a subscription reserved for the one case — consoles — that genuinely costs money to support. The decision that shapes your cost is not which tier to pick at the start, because you start free. It is whether and when you need console export. Build on the free tier, buy Professional the day you are ready to ship, and add Enterprise only if a console platform has approved you. Almost no one pays more than that.
Sources
- GameMaker is free for non-commercial use; Professional is $99.99 one-time; Enterprise is $79.99/month — GameMaker — Export Licences (official)
- The November 2023 pricing reset and the move to a flat one-time commercial fee — GameMaker — November 2023 Pricing/Terms Change FAQ
- "A one-off charge of $99.99 for the commercial licence… this is the only charge" — GameMaker FAQ (official)
- Opera acquired YoYo Games (GameMaker) for roughly $10 million in January 2021 — PCGamesInsider
- Apple Developer Program ($99/year) and Google Play registration ($25, one-time) — Apple Developer, Google Play Console