GameMaker opens GMRT source to all tiers and makes the runtime free for commercial games in 2027

What GameMaker announced

GameMaker has announced that GMRT, its next-generation runtime, will be free for commercial releases from 1 January 2027. According to a report published on dev.to on 23 October 2026, developers will be able to sell games built on GMRT for desktop, mobile, web and GX Games without buying a Professional licence. Alongside the pricing change, the runtime's source code is being made available to subscribers on every tier, including the free one.

Two runtimes, two sets of rules

A game engine's runtime is the layer that executes a finished game on a player's device, and GameMaker currently maintains two of them. The GMS2 runtime is the older of the pair and powers most GameMaker titles shipped to date. GMRT is its successor, and GameMaker is still deploying it in beta across platforms.

Today the free tier is restricted to non-commercial work, and selling a game requires Professional, a one-off licence priced at US$99.99. From January, that requirement disappears, but only for GMRT. Anyone selling a game built on the GMS2 runtime will still need Professional, and current Professional holders keep their selling rights while also gaining access to the GMS2 runtime's source.

Console publishing is untouched by the announcement. Exporting to console hardware continues to require an Enterprise licence plus approval as a developer with the platform holder. The dev.to report notes that Enterprise was priced at US$799.99 per year after GameMaker's November 2023 pricing change, though the current pricing page lists monthly and yearly billing without publishing a figure.

Source access drops to every tier

Offering the GMRT source is not itself new; GameMaker first provided it earlier in 2026. What changes now is that it reaches every subscriber. GameMaker's stated goal is to let developers study the runtime, adapt it to their own projects and potentially contribute improvements back.

For most solo developers this will not affect day-to-day work, but it matters at the edges: when a bug traces back to the engine itself, or when a project needs platform behaviour the runtime does not expose. Reading how input, audio or rendering are handled turns debugging from guesswork into inspection. The announcement does not specify the licence attached to the source, so anyone planning to fork the runtime or ship a modified build should check the terms that come with the download.

The strategy behind it

Opera, which owns GameMaker, has been shifting toward a free entry point for some time. In November 2023 it made the engine free for non-commercial use and converted the commercial licence into a one-off payment. Russell Kay, GameMaker's head, framed the new change as broadening what the engine offers developers as GMRT reaches users.

There is also a pragmatic motive. Making the new runtime free for commercial work gives developers a strong reason to adopt GMRT and exercise it while it remains in beta, which should produce more bug reports and gradually reduce the burden of supporting the legacy runtime.

GameFromScratch observed a knock-on effect: once GMRT is free to ship commercially, Professional is left selling mainly GMS2 commercial rights and Igor, its command-line tool for automated builds. A new project targeting GMRT may never need the paid tier at all.

What developers should watch

The open question is readiness. GMRT is still in beta, the announcement gives no date for the beta to end, and there is no breakdown of which platforms are stable. Shipping a commercial title on a runtime in flux carries risk: features can shift, updates can introduce bugs, and documentation may lag behind the code.

Existing Professional owners lose nothing in the deal, and their GMS2 games remain sellable. Developers planning a new GMRT project who need only desktop, mobile or web may want to wait until January before paying anything. Console plans are unchanged: Enterprise remains the route, alongside approval from the platform holders, and the report suggests comparing engines such as Defold if console export is the main reason to pay.

One caveat: the pricing page still describes commercial GMRT releases as requiring Professional, so the written terms have not caught up with the announcement. Developers should verify that the published licence matches the blog post before relying on it.

Why it matters

The change removes the US$99.99 entry cost of commercial GameMaker development on the platforms most indie teams target, while opening the engine's internals for study and modification. It brings GameMaker closer to genuinely free engines such as Defold and raises the competitive bar among indie-focused tooling. The real test is not price but maturity: until GMRT exits beta, betting a sellable game on it is a bet on how quickly GameMaker can stabilise its new foundation.