Recs.
Updated
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Has a Marketplace where you can buy and sell assets
Yoyogames website has a marketplace which opens up an opportunity for people to sell or giveaway created assets and resources (sprites, scripts, sounds, extensions, full source codes, etc.) for use in GameMaker. This benefits people who needs quality assets for their games, and for creative people to provide these assets for extra income. The Marketplace has a rating system so it can eventually increase the quality and competitiveness of the assets submitted.
Pro Easy to find tutorials, examples, and help
GameMaker: Studio has a wealth of options and a long history of community-based tutorials and examples. The GameMaker Community features these for free use. The program also comes with a number of demos and tutorials. There is also a recently-opened Marketplace which offers free and sold assets for jumpstarting your games. And due to recent growth of YoYo Games, the Helpdesk system is greatly improved and will now be able to send you good, helpful replies to any issues you have quickly.
Pro It has an IDE used for loading all of the assets
It is very easy to manage all the resources you want to put in your game, the UI widgets for each assets (sprites, sounds, backgrounds, rooms, objects and shaders) are intuitive enough for when adding or even editing the properties of each your assets. The included editors are also good and easy to use (sprite/image editors, shader editor and room editor).
Pro Assets can easily be found in the official marketplace
Yoyogames website has a marketplace which opens up an opportunity for people to sell or giveaway created assets and resources (sprites, scripts, sounds, extensions, full source codes, etc.) for use in GameMaker. This benefits people who needs quality assets for their games, and for creative people to provide these assets for extra income. The Marketplace has a rating system so it can eventually increase the quality and competitiveness of the assets submitted.
Cons
Con GML scripting language is proprietary
GameMaker: Studio provides a classical text-based scripting language for advanced users, and this can also be a great way to learn general programming concepts. However, the GML language is unique to it, so language-specific skills are not useful anywhere else.
Con Poor level editor
No marquee select, only one undo, glitchy, poor manipulation of scale/rotation, can't manipulate draw order, no grouping, etc.
Con Drag & drop coding is limited
GameMaker's drag & drop language is limited and some things can be done only using code.
Recommendations
Comments
Flagged Pros + Cons
Pro Drag and Drop Coding
Good for starting out, and every drag and drop action can teach you how to do the same thing in actual scripts
Out of Date Pros + Cons
Pro Free for Windows Desktop publication
GameMaker Studio: Standard is available at no cost and publishes Windows games with no license restrictions, though unlike the Pro version, Standard games are bundled with an interpreter rather than compiled to native code.