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.
There is nothing to "clarify" - Unity is a toxic, predatory company with toxic, predatory leadership and developers and investors need to get out as quickly as possible.
I'm a little out of the loop. How so? Have they always been said way? Edit: I'm an aspiring dev and want to know as much as I can, and if they're shitty, I wanna know.
They are popular because they were permissive and dead easy to use in… 2008 or so. Indie studios adopted Unity, many went on to great success, and it is now a product with a huge userbase, tons of tutorials, and an industry full of experienced Unity developers.
Unity is successful, entrenched, known, and makes money.
And this is the worst possible situation for a product to be in. The term is “enshittification” and basically means the owners are incentivized to sell out, while new owners are more incentivized to add new ways to extract value than to improve the product meaningfully. This is a death spiral that no products recover from.
It’ll just get worse until in several years all that is left are some patents bought by a patent troll who sues the everliving shit out of anyone still using Unity.
Anyway: Look up Godot. It’s a modern version of what Unity was when it was young and pretty.
Unity has been rent seeking for awhile. In my mind, a big issue is the unity asset store, which apparently is where they actually make most of their money. Unity collects a 30% cut of all sales and imposes pretty restrictive licensing terms. This is annoying, but not a huge deal for things like art assets, but it creates a huge perverse incentive when you look at plugins and tools.
The best way for unity to make money in the business model they’ve created is to add a bunch of seemingly simple but not very comprehensive systems to the engine. Then, rather than refine these features they can wait for 3rd party developers to fill in the gaps with plugins that must be sold on the unity asset store. This allows unity to scoop up a bigger revenue stream on top of the licensing income without having to do any additional work.
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.
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.
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
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.
I mean...of course they have a roadmap. They had a roadmap well before the first unit. Their work and investment in Proton wasn't just for desktop Linux users.
There are a lot products from steam that got discontinued like the big predecesor, the steam machine. I think a commitment like that is something good.
True, but they got discontinued because they weren't selling, long after the market itself had given up on the product. It's not exactly like Sega where they came up with a bunch of platforms only to cancel them after a few years.
Steam Machines were more of a collaborative product, not something that Valve really put effort or resources into like Steam Deck. That said, I think a console-PC sold and sponsored primarily by Valve could work.
(After that, I think the initial Steam Machines project - which was imo intelligent - could have some value.)
If you check out The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx, you can see a timeline of all the stuff Valve worked on since they started with hardware. Work on Proton started basically immediately after Steam Machines launched, in response to its library problem. So in a way, this is still that same commitment.
I feel like I’ve heard this “it’s different this time guys, we swear” spiel about every Ubisoft game in the past five years. Hard to believe or care at this point.
The game you’re looking for is Trackmania, although it’s technically developed by the team Nadeo which is now owned and managed by Ubisoft. (they’re now called Ubisoft Nadeo)
Even the UIs of their games look similar, even though they are from different genres (Division looks similar to AC looks similar to Settlers). IMO that alone shows that they are not about making unique games, but about hammering their franchise into the heads of gamers. They don’t foster creativity, they try to apply the same formula to everything.
Watch Dogs and AC feel eerily similar, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are just swapping out assets, a map, and a standardised game story file format at this point.
IMO their game engine, formula and approach to franchises need to change drastically, if they truly want to demonstrate a fresh start to the public. Anything short of all three is going to feel like a half baked Ubisoft Special, regardless of how talented their writers may be
I don't think that's a bad thing. A big part of effective software development is building things in a way they can be re-used, then adapting that re-use to your use case. You don't want to re-invent the wheel every time.
With UX specifically, user expectations also play a bigger role, and you need to be careful with how and when you violate expectations. There's a reason most FPS games have settled on the same control scheme. Unless you have a very good reason for a change, it detracts from the user experience instead of improving it.
There are issues with the fact that the games are done so fast that none really have their own soul, but shared core UX (that's pretty comparable to most other similar games) is reasonable. It's the fact that it's not as good as it should be (mostly by shoe-horning in all the ads for shitty monetization) that's the issue.
I disagree. The UX design is a critical part of the design language of a game. The Settlers has a completely different setting than Assassins Creed or The Division. For The Division a “cold” and technical UI feels fitting, since this matches with the world it plays in. For Assassins Creed it’s a mixed bag, but since the back story in AC is also extremely futuristic and technical, it still fits. It would likely still be better if the UI was more aligned with the main-setting of the game than with the background-setting, IMO. And finally The Settlers doesn’t fit at all into this theme, yet the UI still looks like it.
Re-using the engine and the development tools is completely logical and a good thing. But the UX should be in line with the setting of the game, not the company that it was developed from. Because that breaks immersion.
Unity "Vadering the deal" is enough reason that no business should choose Unity for anything whatsoever going forward. They are now a huge legal and financial risk to any business endeavor at all.
No matter how much they relent, developers should not get complacent and trust that things will stay this way. Unity will go back on the offense once the outrage quiets down a little. Don't do it. Transition now before you end up in a worse situation.
I think companies tend to overvalue support and undervalue software freedom. You get developer lock-in once people are trained on closed software, then they start squeezing you for every dime because they know it’s too expensive to migrate.
I’m 36 now and we’re still at least 6, probably 8, years from Elder Scrolls 6. If there’s going to be an Elder Scrolls 7 I probably won’t live to see it.
The definition of “good” can be adjusted, depending on how desperate you are.
That said, I m against sacrificing my standards when it comes to paid things, I want to get what I paid for, and definitely back the people praising BG3 and want games of that caliber now that Larian has shown everybody that it’s possible.
What’s your jank tolerance like? If “moderate to high”, Mount & Blade or Outward might scratch the itch for you. If you’re up for post apocalyptic ronin shenanigans with more of a strategy feel, Kenshi might be enjoyable. Technically, Noita is an open-world fantasy game. It’s really hard (I’m really bad), but I love it nonetheless.
Going more mainstream there’s shedloads of mods for classics like Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim to update graphics, mechanics, or just new content. Witcher 3 is still really good, too.
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