When comparing MakeCode Arcade vs pygame, the Slant community recommends MakeCode Arcade for most people. In the question“What are the best tools for children to learn programming?” MakeCode Arcade is ranked 1st while pygame is ranked 3rd.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free
Pro Switch between block and text based coding
Learn programming by quickly creating and modding retro arcade games with Blocks, JavaScript and Python in the online MakeCode editor, the offline app or your own local pxt-arcade server. Play your own or others' games in the online web simulator, or download and play on various handheld or SBC devices. Save your projects for free in the cloud or on GitHub. Open source and free, great community.
Pro Easy Python syntax
Pygame uses Python as its scripting language. Python is widely considered one of the easiest languages to grasp even for beginners.
Pro Very easy to understand
The API is very straightforward.
Pro Good canvas system
Pygame has a drawing system that allows the user to create and draw on an unlimited number of canvases.
Cons
Con Deathly slow
Con Nonexistent community
No good forums, wiki, or other ways to reach other Pygame developers.
Con Very basic
Pretty much just a wrapper for SDL.
Con Pygame is a multimedia framework, not a game engine
Physics, AI and networking are not supported.
Con Messy documentation
The docs are messy, and some basic functions are infuriating to work out. There's even some places in the documentation where it's clearly wrong about how a method is called/what the arguments really do.
Con Outdated
Pygame uses a really old version of SDL and is missing some of the features developed for SDL2.
Con Hasn't been updated in years
Hasn't been updated in years.