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.
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 said this would happen back when it was just the ISPs having data caps and cell phone companies charging for every text/data caps/ peak hours. Oh, but I was just a raving lunatic then. Fuck the human race. We get what we deserve.
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.
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
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?
An initial solution looked to have been found from an old Fallout 4 VR thread on Steam, where the same problem could be fixed by using a console command to change the player’s sex.
In Starfield, the same command works, but all you need to do to fix the bug is enter the character customisation screen. Using console commands, this can be done by entering ‘showlooksmenu player 2’. If you’re playing Starfield on console, you can visit an Enhance Clinic for 500 credits to get into the character customisation. You don’t actually have to change your appearance, as players have reported that simply entering and exiting customer customisation makes weapons work as intended once again.
This was already true, but is even more so now - Bethesda should make console commands available on Xbox immediately. Besides the fact that there was no reason to restrict them to PC players in the first place, they’re almost certain to be necessary for all sorts of weird troubleshooting that’s likely to come up in any game this big.
Yeah, I didn‘t finish Fallout NV because a bug stopped me from starting a quest and I didn‘t want to start all over. There were all kinds of solutions via console commands on PC but none on Xbox ofc. I hope something like this won‘t happen in Starfield
I’m playing the game pass version and in the early game I softlocked myself by jumping behind something that I shouldn’t have and I wasn’t able to fast travel to my ship because they were enemies nearby. I downloaded the PC version, accessed the console commands, got myself out, saved, then loaded it on my Xbox and the issue was fixed. But I really wish I could have just plugged a keyboard into my Xbox and fixed it in a few seconds rather than waiting on 140GB to download and praying it would work on my 2 year old laptop.
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.
The whole Embracer situation is so weird to me. I hadn’t heard about them until the news broke that they were buying some of the Tolkien licenses and had already been buying a whole bunch of game studios. Cut to a couple months later and Embracer can’t get rid off all these studios fast enough apparently bleeding money left and right.
Where did they suddenly come from? Or was I just out of the loop on them?
Can’t remember the exact details, but I think it was something along the lines of them acquiring all these ips with loaned money, banking on a big merger that eventually fell through.
Until reasonably recently, Embracer was known as Nordic Games. Their plan was simple and quite effective; buy old game IP, release remasters, make reasonably-budgeted sequels aimed at niches of the industry being missed by the increasingly laser-focussed AAA publishers.
It worked for a good few years, and they became a Katamari of game development studios. An increasingly unwieldy Katamari. And like any good Katamari they started picking up bigger and bigger things. Suddenly instead of spending a couple of thousand on a struggling legacy developer, they were paying upwards of a billion at a time, swallowing up things like Gearbox, Asmodee, Dark Horse Comics, Middle Earth Enterprises, Square Enix Europe. They lost focus and just kept buying things, including things they couldn’t afford to buy. Eventually, a planned deal with the Saudis fell through, and that Katamari just slammed directly into a wall.
Thank you for the great comment, that was super informative. I didn’t know Nordic Games became Embracer. That explains it a bit why I thought they came out of nowhere.
Honestly, I'd completely forgotten that Embracer had bought out Gearbox. Curious to see who ends up acquiring them, if anyone actually does. Also have to wonder just how many studios Embracer is going to end up selling off or shutting down by the end of this.
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