40 million Windows licenses sold in the first month – is your app in? If you’ve published your Windows 8 game to the Windows Store, tell us about it by December 8 for a chance to win $500. It’s easy to enter, check the details here: http://www.yoyogames.com/competitions/windows-8.

Oh, and, if you’ve published a game to the Windows Store and you are a U.S. resident, take advantage of a $50 rebate on your Windows registration fees by Dec. 31. How to redeem: http://www.yoyogames.com/news/134.

Good luck!

We issued a release of GameMaker: Studio last week which, in a few cases, has resulted in sprites and background resources being overwritten.

To the best of our knowledge, most projects have survived unscathed due to GameMaker's automatic backup. Regardless, we're both humbled and embarrassed by this error.

It is very important  that you update to release (1.1.710) or later which fixes the issue. Please take action to do this if you haven't already.

YoYo Games Team

Get GameMaker: Studio Web Collection (GameMaker: Studio Professional + GameMaker: Studio HTML5) for $49.99 -- marked down from $199.99 -- a remarkable 75% savings from November 21st - 27th!

Take advantage of this ridiculously low price while it lasts, and get started creating cross-platform games with the easiest to use and most powerful games creation technology around!

http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/studio/webcollection

YoYo Games announces that GameMaker: Studio, its powerful cross-platform games creation technology, now offers a Windows Phone 8 export module. GameMaker: Studio for Windows Phone 8 makes publishing newly-created and pre-existing games to Microsoft’s Windows Phone Store a quick and easy process, thanks to its one click exporting capability.

“With the addition of the Windows Phone 8 module to GameMaker: Studio, developers can create high quality games and distribute them across all of the leading platforms simultaneously without all the hassle of porting,” said Sandy Duncan, chief executive officer at YoYo Games. “Windows Phone 8 is a very real opportunity for developers to engage in a flourishing new market and GameMaker: Studio is the development technology to help them expand the revenue potential and exposure for their games.”

For GameMaker: Studio PROFESSIONAL customers, the Windows Phone 8 module is $199. The Windows Phone 8 export module comes as a free update for all new and existing GameMaker: Studio MASTER COLLECTION customers. GameMaker: Studio has been developed with usability and efficiency at its core, allowing developers to create games in a single code base and then export and run them natively on multiple formats including Chrome, Facebook, Google Play, iTunes, the App Store, the Mac App Store, OS X, the Windows Store and the Windows Phone Store.

GameMaker: Studio combines a powerful, yet simple to use drag-and-drop integrated development environment with a built-in games-oriented scripting language that considerably increases games development productivity. GameMaker: Studio caters to entry-level novices and seasoned game development professionals equally.

For more information about how to get started with GameMaker: Studio for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 and to take advantage of special promotions and offers from YoYo Games, please visit www.yoyogames.com.

The winner of the October YoYo Games Steam competition and $1000 is the_dudefather with the game “LaserCat's Halloween Deadventure”! This game was one of the highest rated games by the Steam community and all of the YoYo Games judges enjoyed playing.

Honorable mentions go out to the following games as judging was very close: “Biosweeper,” “Core,” “DEATH RAY MANTA,” “Default Dan,” “Fortify,” “Judgement,” “MagMag,” “MagicOwl,” “Ora,” “Trick or Treat,” “Unlamentia,” “Apprehension” and “Jeep Survival.”

A big thanks to all of the participating developers!

Didn’t win the October contest? Remember that there are always the November and December competitions to enter and possibly win!