RoketGames Closing Down

Today, Hach-Que announced that RoketGames is closing down due to time availability and financial reasons. This is sad news since RoketGames was a good place to upload games and had a very good instant play. This is what Hach-Que said

I remember when I started RoketGames, back in November 2009. We had no games and very little in terms of both features and users. RoketGames was born with the idea of providing the most feature rich publishing site for Game Maker games out there and while I firmly believe we've given it our best shot, it has unfortunately not been enough to sustain user interest in the site.

As of May 4th, we have 267 game entries and almost 500 members; we've come along way from November 2009. In addition, in the one and a half years RoketGames has been running, we've pioneered in areas such as commercial game support and game integration. 31 games to date have implemented our game integration to some extent, and while commercial game support hasn't been as popular, it's certainly given others an insight into the audience for such a project.

It is therefore very saddening to announce that as of May 7th there will be no further updates to the site, and as of the end of May, the site will be shutdown completely.

The reasons for this is both due to time availability and financial reasons; with a 3 month trip starting in July and ending in September, I'll be unable to perform updates, competitions or anything of that kind during the period. Unfortunately, the web hosting costs begin to pick up around that time and straight off the bat I'd have to fork up $240 USD for the VPS, an amount which I will not have.

In accordance with the original shutdown plan, we will be making our game integration system open source under an MIT license so that people may continue to use the system with their own servers.

It is unfortunate that I have had to make this decision and I thank all of you who have engaged in using our services and supported us over the years. I myself have enjoyed creating services that have helped indie game developers create better games and increase exposure.

Goodbye RoketGames, it's been fun.