Honestly, Immortals: Fenyx Rising was superior to Breath of the Wild in every way (for me at least). The world wasn’t “stretched” in size needlessly, “shrines” integrated directly into the overworld, instead of being seperate, the collectibles were sometimes fun (compared to Koroks, which were always bad), there were far more interesting characters and side quests, the world was more alive, the combat was better (if we ignore BotWs weird physics stuff, which has fuckall to do with an action RPG), exploration had an actual point, because you might actually find something nice that doesn’t break five swings in, the story was superior, and the humor was great (to me).
TL;DR: Ubisoft cancels a sequel to their best game in some time, no suprise here.
Yah. I felt exactly the same. I got it on a massive sale for $10 and didn’t think I’d likenit much but I actually liked it more the BOTW. It solved a lot of the problems that BOTW had. I’m bummed they canceled it.
Disappointing. Obviously, there's no way to tell whether the game would have actually been good or not, but stepping away from the Ubisoft formula and taking some inspiration from Elden Ring would have been a step in the right direction.
This is a truly pathetic attempt to save face. Fuck Unity, its now proven definitively that they cannot be trusted for current and future projects. The only thing they’ll learn from this is to not be so loud about these sorts of changes.
NEW - I got a major update from Unity about their new fees
Unity “regrouped” and now says ONLY the initial installation of a game triggers a fee
Demos mostly won’t trigger fees
Devs not on the hook for Game Pass
This is a truly pathetic attempt to save face. Fuck Unity, its now proven definitively that they cannot be trusted for current and future projects. The only thing they’ll learn from this is to not be so loud about these sorts of changes.
Once people know where that is they will remove it and continue install-bombing.
This opens Pandora's box... how do you prove a person installed a game on a device at least once? Fresh windows install, is that a new device? In a Virtual Machine, is that a new device? How do you identify a user as the same person? It goes on and on...
Also on Android theoretically it’s not possible to distinguish new installs from reinstalls unless you’re using some kind of exploit like dummy images with tracking data saved in Pictures like taobao/AliExpress is doing
Apps and games that force a login with a Google account get an immediate uninstall/refund/1-star rating from me
I really feel their first idea was “devs will pay for installs and reinstalls because our bottom line is most priority” then now they are in damage control and try to deny that. Unless they have an agreement with Google/apple that tell them the real numbers of downloads from the store and not just the generic range “50-100k downloads” tag
As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft.
In which case, Microsoft and other distributors will not release Unity games on their subscription services. This will harm game developers either way.
Geez, the internet and the tech industry as a whole is collapsing. Twitter, Reddit, Unity… What the fuck is going on in the last few years?
Capitalism defines success as profits increasing at an ever-increasing rate. During the height of the pandemic, tech companies tended to fare better than other industries because they were better able to handle the switch to remote work (among other things). This wasn’t lost on investors, who smelled money in the water, and went all in on tech. Like, seriously, colossal amounts of money, and they expect returns on those investments. Problem is, we’ve hit the point where the easy profit sources for these companies have more or less dried up, and now they’re having to squeeze whatever they can out. This is why we’ve seen massive layoffs, quick money making schemes, and things like this that will be disastrous in the long run, but stand to make some short-term profits.
It’s a boneheaded move, but when all you care about is pleasing the investors right now, it’s the logical way to operate.
This sums up every industry poisoned by big money parasites. Look around, over 30% of the inflation of the last few years is literally attributed to just straight greed. fortune.com/…/end-of-capitalism-inflation-greedfl… for those who want to read about where I’m getting that figure from.
We’re living in the Robber Baron Era: Volume 2. When governments fail to properly regulate massive corpos and protect consumers–mostly due to regulatory capture–this is what happens. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture if you want to read up on the topic and get angry about how pervasive regulatory capture is, especially in the US (like, really, really pervasive in the US…).
It’s the incessant want and need for more, more more. If they made $2 billion in profit last year it needs to be $3 billion this year, it can’t just be a continued $2 billion (which is still an amazing amount of profit). It’s just a never ending scheme of incurable human greed.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank caused a bit of a stir in the venture capital world. Things used to be able to be horrifically unprofitable for a reasonably long time before vulture capital would swoop down and tighten the thumbscrews.
Now that “normal” banks are the ones dealing with the finance side of VC, they seem to care about profits, and that if you’re not squeezing every cent you can out of your investment, then it’s a failure.
Or, like, whatever. Just kinda how I feel about it…
This isn’t it. The svb run was a symptom, not a cause. You’ll note this is not something limited to the tech world.
Markets, in general, are risk adverse because of the whole global economic shutdown thing. Executives are driving shareholder growth, not through investment like a giant ponzi scheme, or through competition, but through whatever hairbrained scheme they can come up with that will raise stock prices in the short term.
It's global warming. All the natural disasters, insurance and repairs are extreme and accelerating, and those funds need/want more money and are collecting in every way they can.
I can't believe it either - our inability to prepare for global warming has caused Unity to charge per install.
Unity saying that Microsoft is on the hook for game pass installs is the quickest way to get your ass destroyed in court by Microsoft lawyers. Microsoft has dumped so much money into game pass to beat Sony off the block that any threat to that business model will be seen as an act of fucking war.
Honestly, thats probably a better alternative to the current CEO, formerly from EA, who sold 2000 shares just prior to this announcement and has never purchased any additional shares in Unity.
After all of the drama over the Activision acquisition, I doubt MS is trying to make any more bold gaming moves for a second. Buying an entire non-proprietary engine would be an easy target for anti-trust lawsuits.
I give about a year until Unreal does the same, except that they’ll at least have the good graces to waive the fee if games are sold on Epic Contractually Timed Exclusive Games Store.
Looking forward to Godot finally getting the love and recognition it deserves after this, at least.
Yeah, I think it’s pretty likely that the only reason Unreals terms are sustainable at all at this point is that they are funded by vertical integration using Epics infinite Fortnite coffers. Unity has no such safety harness, and has to squeeze everyone for as much money as possible to be profitable. The moment all of Epics deranged fake consumer rights activist PR starts working and devs and customers actually get locked into their ecosystem at scale they will start tightening the screws on everyone.
There's just no way this was ever going to go well, no matter how they clarify. Oh, you can inform Unity of upcoming charity bundles to be exempt from fees? You know what's better than that? Not having a fee for something that stupid. No need to inform anyone of anything.
This honestly sounds like a lot of overhead in development. How does Unity track my installs? Do I have to do anything to my games? Do I have to warn users about privacy related to Unity’s tracking? Does it have to be in my TOS? These are just privacy questions.
Of course your feelings are going to be biased. Anyone being told they’re about to get royally screwed is going to be biased because it’s personal to them
I meant specifically how I feel about making 2D in UE since I am used to Unity. But yeah sudden ass-fucking policy changes are bound to piss people off
Yup, no information on how they actually get that information. The only assumption I can make is that it’s some sort of telemetry in the installer or the engine
The fucked up part is charging devs who used their products under the idea that they would be charged certain fees, and now the company they built their business model around is turning around and saying “now you owe us more of a cut if you continue to offer the thing you built”.
Imagine buying a fleet of delivery vans and suddenly Ford wants 5% of your revenue forever. It’s fucking racketeering.
The people in charge over there at Unity are some pretty stupid people if they think we won’t see right through their bullshit.
There is no solid way for them to track this. Not everything is distributed on an app/game store. And what constitutes an initial install anyway? What if I have ten gaming rigs and I buy direct from a developer and install the game to all ten rigs…is that ten initial installs?
I’m thinking they might addsome engine-side telemetry we don’t know about, but they’re refusing to actually say anything about how they’re tracking this.
Right, and I know this isn’t anything any of us can answer, but what constitutes an initial install? What specific keys are sent in the telemetry to know that I, ulkesh, have already installed this game once? It is literally impossible in so many ways to know this without forcing the user to provide some static key (such as a license code). Technically steam has such license codes, as do most, if not all app/game stores like it. But if the developer decides to publish without using such an app store, does this mean Unity will force them to put in some kind of license code mechanism? What if it’s a simple game that happens to get downloaded and installed over 200,000 times and the game costs the consumer only $0.99? What if the game is distributed for free? What if a user refunds post-installation? How can a developer even trust the data Unity gathers for this?
Perhaps some of this has been addressed, but Unity doesn’t control distribution – this is the WHOLE reason they should stick to their tiers of licensing their platform and not try to get a piece of the distribution pie. If they want to control distribution, then set up their own damn app store and force people who develop on Unity to use it (which will be met with exactly the same resistance). And, we all know it would fail miserably. They’re not the only game engine in town, they’re just one with a low barrier for entry. Why is it so many companies that were once doing good become such greedy pieces of crap? Reddit (fuck Spez), Twitter (well we know whose fault that was), and now Unity. I suspect there are betting pools at casinos on which company will be next to be so stupid as to cause their own demise.
With as many Unity games as there are, saying only 10% of developers will end up having to pay is still quite a large number of developers.
Also, I wonder how against the TOS it would be for game devs of existing titles to sandbox Unity behind a firewall and prevent it from accessing the internet. And they say the change applies to old games, do older builds of Unity have the telemetry already? How long has it been in place?
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