This post is quite interesting, in fact it's something I wanted to know about. I teach games design at college in UK (high school US) and my students learn with Construct 2. Although at this stage they aren't ready to export beyond the arcade on the site they want to know the worth of learning construct over game maker with its vast amount of exports and one off fee.
I will often show them Andrews games to say that a great game can be made in construct just like game maker and I have many of my students that have left and gone on to university (college US) to study games further, will often come back and explain how great a tool construct is but always reply when asked do you still use it with "only to prototype" I asked recently why and they stated " the engine is great and powerful and does everything I need to make a great 2D game and only limited by my creativity" the biggest issue they all state is your game can't be published to wide enough market, Steam and web are great but a serious dev wants console support as an export.
I guess my real question is....
is construct more of a hobbyist and early teaching tool than a full development platform?
Im interested in anyone's thoughts, thank you Andrew for giving me a place to ask