I looked through the announcement post and all I can say is that this is beyond absurd. Can they even legally apply these changes retroactively? All these relatively large indie games used Unity. They can’t exactly tear everything down and use another engine. They didn’t even accept such terms at the time, so how can they suddenly be expected to pay for every download they get?
And I was so excited to finally start learning Unity too… damn. I probably should have seen something like this coming way back when they announced their IPO. I was going to learn Unreal at some point as well but I guess I’ll just uninstall Unity and skip right to UE5.
There’s definitely going to be huge action taken from every studio that used Unity in their games. I have a hard time believing that they’ll get away with the retroactive part at least.
It isn’t going into effect until January 2024, and it isn’t retroactive. And I don’t think you need to worry too much about breaking 200k paid installs if you haven’t even learned the language yet, but I admire your drive if you do.
It isn’t retroactive in the sense that it applies to installs before that date, but rather in the sense that it applies to games made with Unity before the announcement.
I feel like we’re seeing the culmination of Apple’s efforts to get devs to use Metal.
When they released their toolkit in June, I thought it would be to get gaming just on Macs. I think now it’s a lot more likely that they wanted devs to convert games to work on their phones and tablets.
A lot more people have iPhones than have Macs or even Xboxs or gaming PCs or PS5s. If you can get people buying console games on Apple Silicon and you have devs converting their games to work with this massive, already-extant market, then you’ve just made a ton of money.
Think about how attractive that is if you’re someone who only wants to play a resident evil here or a warframe there. With crossplay you can play with your friends no matter where they are and now you can play it on your phone that probably makes the game look better than your PS4. Definitely better than your switch. Well maybe you don’t think about getting the new PlayStation because you only buy a couple games each generation, good thing your Apple TV can run those games too so you might as well just save the money and play on that with your PS4 or Xbox controller.
Very cool. I’m all for having my games everywhere and getting to play wherever I choose. And this is all very shrewd decisions on Apple’s part
Not surprising really. They’re just getting rid of all the woke IPs because nobody buys this political crap anymore. It should be telling that they chose to destroy Volition rather than try and sell it off, that’s how bad the market value is for the Soy Saints.
Edit: Pissed off the wokies I see, cry harder into your soy lattes boys, woke is finally going broke.
Well, you’re right there. I did care about the franchise and I’m sad to see it go. But I’m not sad that the assholes who turned it into political propaganda are now without a job. But hey, I bet you’d be equally pissed off if someone turned your favorite piece of franchise into trans hate/deadname simulator featuring Ronald Crump eating hamburgers while telling you that sex before marriage is a sin.
On the exact same boat. I switched to Godot as soon as version 4 came out and have been really happy with it. I still use Unity professionally (at least until Godot 4 fixes some big issues), but most of my projects are now on Godot. God bless open source devs.
Yeah my device struggled to run any major engines so Godot kinda saved my ass when I first got into gamedev many years ago. I was going to start learning the major engines now that I have slightly better hardware, but I guess I’m skipping Unity now.
Ah. Yet another reason for game studios to turn away from commercial dev tools and turn to FOSS software like Blender and Godot.
And since game devs are, you know, developers, they can even contribute to these tools with heir dev time, improving them and accelerating the industry shift away from this commercial bullshit even more.
But drama almost never kills FOSS software. It just causes it to fork. FOSS software can become like an olympic flame that just keeps getting passed from dev to dev. Once there are people actively using something, those same people are motivated to fix any issues they have with it, or add any features they are missing. That then drives improvement of the software, which in turn drives adoption, which drives more improvement…
There was huge drama around Emby going closed source, but FOSS Emby simply got forked, becoming Jellyfin.
There’s an example just within lemmy, the lemmur app apparently stopped development due to some drama, but it got forked and Liftoff picked up right where it left off.
Yes. There can be drama around FOSS projects, and there often is. Loosely organized groups of volunteers putting together serious software don’t work as efficiently as a paid team of devs led by a visionary with final say. But FOSS projects are capable of becoming self-perpetuating in a way proprietary software can never do. Once they reach a high enough level of adoption, they are very hard to kill.
The only “drama” I recall is that one guy, who ran an unofficial forum, went on a weird rant about how Godot is a scam because he thought development was too slow or something. He then shut down his unofficial forum. That’s a long shot from “being destroyed”.
But maybe I missed something?
(Edit: I had misspelled “forum” as “form”. Sorry if that confused anybody)
EDIT: just read the article. i forget that for the PC version they keep using the last gen version of the game lol, how difficult is it to use the current gen version?
I still have that one for 360! I was never very good, but it’s always a ton of fun to play
In my uneducated opinion, it feels like the gaming industry advanced past “quarter-eating” mechanics and have reverse engineered their way back there. The rubber-banding doesn’t feel fun/competitive anymore. Even playing solo just feels like it’s just trying to give you a taste of success in an attempt to get you to spend real money. Those of us who won’t ever “pay-to-win” just see an arbitrarily difficult or awkward game. For example, one of the later ones feels like it changes the player speed drastically based on who IT wants to do better now
EDIT: just read the article. i forget that for the PC version they keep using the last gen version of the game lol, how difficult is it to use the current gen version?
Jesus, really? It's one thing to do that for the Switch, but for PC?
The real threat is Godot. It’s getting better and better. Why pay for a commercial game engine, when you can use one that comes with a literally no strings attached FOSS license? And you have full access to the source code, so you can fiddle with any line of code, if need be.
How could they even enforce this? Couldn’t devs just include a wrapper or small firewall (or settings for Windows firewall) with their games to block Unity’s analytics?
As much as I really don’t care for the games as a service model, I think it could actually work well for a lot of sports games. Maybe releasing a new game yearly like this just makes more money, but relatively minimal year to year changes would seem to fit well with the microtransactions
Just Dance on Switch moved to this with 2023 edition. I honestly love having access to all the versions I bought as DLC rather than launching different versions depending on what songs I want
The fact that the same user reinstalling the game counts as 2 installs makes this doubly absurd. The decision is already baffling by itself but the idea that you could take a financial hit for an install that didn't net you any additional income is... Jesus.
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Aktywne