I’ve basically never seen a free to play title cost less than a paid one (for similar content). Typically free to play has some sort of completely uncapped money-sink as well. Given that Sims 4 already costs $500+ for all content, I can only surmise that Sims 5 will cost thousands for the same amount of content.
Unity had made their plans clear. Whether they backtrack a bit now or not doesn’t matter. We know what direction they are heading: squeeze more money out of indie devs
That's correct. Even with this backtrack, it's a safe bet that they'll likely re-introduce this same policy with different wording once they believe their consumers have calmed down.
The controlling shares of Unity are held by a trifecta of private equity and venture capital organizations. That’s why this is happening. It’s a classical presentation of the (short-term) profit über alles enshitification cycle.
The insider transaction history for Unity Software Inc shows a clear trend: over the past year, there have been 49 insider sells and no insider buys. This could be a red flag for potential investors, as it suggests that those with the most intimate knowledge of the company's operations and prospects are choosing to sell their shares
Or it just means they see it as compensation and are selling for taxes and expenses, not because they are worried about the long term direction of the company.
Ehh, the top folks at Google were all selling their maximum-permitted amount every window they got for a decade and the stock held up.
You typically don’t need to buy shares as an insider, the company just prints more gambling slips – er, I’m sorry, non-transferrable stock options – and hands them out.
Yes, but it doesn’t rise to the level of “insider trading,” which means using internal-only information to make trading decisions. If they sell these stocks regularly, on a schedule, in the same quantity, it’s not insider trading.
And that’s exactly what they’re doing, you can see their trades, and they’re consistent for about the same amount. So they’re not trading because of changes going on internally, they’re trading based on a schedule, probably because they need cash flow for some reason. My guess is taxes for their stock compensation.
I really only want the house building. I had a blast in Sims 2-4 building my dream house and trying out floor plans, optimizing flow of everyday life and just the architecture/design aspects of making it look good. Sadly they always hit limitations which took the fun out of it due to not being able to build like you wanted. Especially roofs were tricky or impossible to get to look good. And slanted roofs wasn’t in any base game and I didn’t buy DLC (and haven’t played 4 in like 5 years+).
If someone could make an house architect game I’d so love it! Build a house for a family of 4 with a budget of X with these bullet point demands. Then get scored on stuff like usable sq footage, how well the bullet points got satisfied etc.
what you’re searching for is a game called house flipper. it’s on steam, and after reading your post I am 100% confident you will love it and should look it up.
Cool game and thanks for the recommendation! But the first one is only focused on renovations and while it’s fun to reimagine a space I’m not at all interested in the nitty gritty of renovations. I have my own house and have done a fair bit of renovation work so doing it in a sim game would be dreadful, I’ve never understood the whole genre of “do menial labour but as a game!” Like Euro Truck Simulator and it’s ilk.
The coming second game however talks about building a house from scratch as well which does sound promising! If the build process isn’t too time consuming and smooth it might be great. So I’ll for sure check that out once it’s out!
There’s no way they can stop install bombings. There’s gonna be something that they rely on that can be changed somehow, and even if they find a way to perfect it, how could any developer trust that it’s flawless?
This is bad even if everything did work and everything was flawless. They’ve wrecked their trust here.
Godot is also an alternative and it's free/open source so no worries about the company completely changing how they charge you in the future and destroying all the work you have done for years.
I love the rage over this. You’ve all clearly never met most of the people playing this game. They already spend hundreds on DLC, it’s the majority of the game.
Yeah, I know a Sims player and Sims 4 is literally the only game she plays. The way you or me would buy a new game, she buys a DLC. It's like it is its own gaming ecosystem for most of its players.
But it’ll be worse now. It won’t be the same as 4, but free. It’ll be a glorified store with constant popups begging for money
It says a lot that it’s “running alongside” the previous game. You must not have a lot of faith in your game if you’re expecting your sequel to not replace the previous game.
They’re still exploiting their customers who’ve been developing products based on a completely different fiscal agreement; you can’t just change engines after years of work.
The worst isn’t even people currently developing things - it’s developers who already have released products. Imagine if you released something like, over the summer, for example. You’ve been paying the current revenue share, and will continue to do so until Jan. 1, then you’ll start paying the per-install fee. So you’re paying twice for the same customers’ purchases.
I really feel like they're going to lose a lawsuit on that.
Unilateral contracts don't have unlimited power and "we can blanket change what we want to charge you on games already made" doesn't seem like it's going to be enforceable.
Thankfully paradox are making a contender. Although paradox overdoes kt with dlc, too, but they’re not a scummy company like ea so it should be better. Plus they’re trying to take marketsharr from es so doing the exact same thing would be counterproductive.
Usually Paradox has some content DLC but the vast majority is cosmetic, so you don’t have to buy it but that money fuels their development of future content. Also with every content DLC they almost always release updates and extra content for free for the base game, I feel that Paradox is one of the only companies that do DLCs right.
Also they always allow mods, and a lot of their cosmetic DLCs can be immigrated by mods, so it’s not like they block people from doing what they want with their game just to shove cosmetics.
For me for a game like Sims I need a big variety of cosmetics to keep me playing, new game mechanics are kind of secondary.(Although, if I trust any company to recognize that and adjust accordingly it’d be paradox) But still, you are completely right, paradox doesn’t abandon players that don’t buy the dlc but release content patches at the same time. Plus if you happen to play with other people only one person needs to own the dlc, which is one of my favourite things paradox does and more companies should do.
Also, I completely forgot about mod support. That makes a huge difference, too.
It’s days like this that remind me I’m not a typical gamer.
When Sims 4 came out, I put Sims 3 away thinking it was time for something bigger and better even though I’d had wishlisted DLC unpurchased. When Sims 4 clearly had basic content locked behind future DLC, I quit and didn’t go back to anything because playing the old version when the new version is out “didn’t make sense”. Went from being a Sims player to not a Sims player, not in protest but because their business model “failed to monetize” me. Obviously, if I were the base case, EA would have backpedaled.
Reminds me of the “mini-outrigger and story collection” thing with fantasy literature. I’ve gone from being a diehard fan to no longer even reading simply because I didn’t have the bandwidth and research hours to take it all in (Dresden and Iron Druid, lookin at you).
With the namedrops in the main stories on things I didn’t recognize and my not being able to keep up with side stories, my interest waned and I moved on. I still haven’t read anything after Peace Talks, and I don’t recall what’s going on in Iron Druid anymore.
I am cautiously hopeful for Life By You. My favorite thing in the Sims was to set up crazy soap opera dramas and see what happens, but Sims 4 sims are so docile and boring, it feels a lot more like just playing with dolls and decorating the house. I'm not judging if that's the part you like, but it's just not for me.
Fair play to those who enjoy gaming on their phone, but it’s not for me even if they have AAA titles. I can’t deal with my fingers covering half the screen, getting alerts for apps and messages while trying to game, and burning half my battery for the day on my commute. Not to mention for the price a top whack iPhone goes for, you could get a ROG Ally or Steam Deck which are actually designed to play games on.
I really want to like playing games on my phone, but I absolutely hate it for similar reasons. I guess some people might pair Bluetooth controllers or something which might make it better for these kinds of games, but still… either way I have yet to find a touchscreen based game that I actually want to play. The closest I’ve gotten is chess and go.
There was a brief period when I first got my iPhone 3GS where I got kind of into them, but it was a novelty I think of going from naff java based games on Symbian to proper games. After a year or so, that wore off and I haven’t gone back since.
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