Gee these men-children are going to be awfully sad when there’s no one left to make their games for them anymore and they have nothing left to do but face the shitty reality they’ve created.
All of those are due to the drastic increase in jobs during covid. This is happening in many, many tech related careers. It is not because of inclusivity. Get your head out of your ass.
That’s a factor, but it’s not the only reason, jackass. Look at the games that failed and how they were backed by activists, which led to studio closures.
Ubisoft is mostly subsidized in Quebec by taxpayers, and they have their lowest profits ever because of activists as well.
It’s because of their shitty horrible business practices, nobody wants to pay $100 for a rushed game and nobody wants to invest time into their 500th live service game that they’ll stop supporting in a year.
You would have to jump through a lot of hoops to conclude that activism makes you a bad game developer. If they’re exploiting their customers constantly to try to increase profit margins, they are more than likely exploiting their workers, who they have much more control over.
You’re telling me that a bland and generic Overwatch clone with character designs that were reductive to the groups they were supposed to represent failed because of activists? The games you listed didn’t fail because of activism, they failed because their “activism” was a marketing stunt instead of being actually progressive. There are plenty of games developed by people that care about those issues where they’re represented accurately and appropriately. Those games usually do well and win awards. Making a game where you meaninglessly and inaccurately pander to minority groups is not the result of activism, it’s trying to leech off of actual activism.
Um… Yes? You’re proving my own point based on what you just wrote.
The people that made Dustborn, Concord, etc, all wanted to push a narrative instead of making a good fun game.
Activists, woke people, etc, are more than welcome in the game industry… As long as they keep that shit to themselves. Leave that idiotic nonsense at home.
You get to work, you work to make a good product, and that’s it.
You’re missing the point of what I said. Concord and Dustborn did not try to send a message, they tried to get the profits they thought would come from associating with the message, and implemented it horribly. This is not activism. That would be like saying Instagram changing their logo to rainbow for a month is activism.
As for true activism, video games are both entertainment and an art form. Saying to “leave that shit at home” is missing the point of artistic mediums in their entirety.
Please point out where I implied that corporations got greedy “only now”. Hint: i said “since forever”, the implication is that they were always shit. Then again, can’t expect much from you.
It’s more about the messaging. The mere presence of a POC or trans character isn’t bothersome to most people. But when that character comes with dialogue lines that make the political messaging obvious, then they’re no longer a character that happens to be non-White or trans; they’re a political prop inserted into a game to send a political message, and that can be quite irksome when all you’re trying to do is play a fantasy RPG and escape from the world for a bit, even if you actually agree with the message.
Exactly. Don’t lecture us about being trans or etc.
We honestly don’t care. (Yes, a small percentage of people are actually bigots and hate gays/trans for being who they are). The rest of us just don’t want it shoved down our throats.
It’s like making a game and having the main character proclaiming: “look how straight I am! Wow I sure do love women! I’m so straight and anyone who isn’t should do pushups”.
And yet, from the downvoting here and everywhere else this comes up, it’s clear: some people can’t take nuanced opinions on topics like this. If you object in any capacity, you’re the worst possible objector.
A bad written character is a bad written character, their dialogue could be about candies and is still a bad written character. This argument is bullshit, bad case of confirmatory bias.
There are plenty of record breaking games that have released while the industry has been “filled with activists.” Many of them are even about politics, like Helldivers 2.
Just down vote and move on. She’s just a troll with no facts or figures, she just wants your attention that Daddy never gave her growing up. It was either the pole or the troll for her.
You don’t even want to look. You think games are failing just because or capitalism which is the dumbest, leftist excuse that you always all give when you don’t have the knowledge to see what’s truly happening.
Enjoy living in your angry little leftist bubble echo chamber.
Did you also know that marvel rivals, that somehow idiots think it’s woke earned 130 million in it’s first month. I mean that’s a whole other capitalism conversation but still.
As depressing as it is to ask, I feel I should kick off the brainstorm: Given that this personal information has been doxxed, is there anything that individuals could do to help the affected developers in any way?
To be fair, Sweet Baby Inc. censoring shit is a real problem, whereas the “first gamergate” was mad about Baldur’s Gate having transpeople in it when according to the “real gamers”
The game takes place in the Middle Ages and they didn’t have transpeople back then!
Problem
Transpeople have existed since pre-history
Baldur’s Gate does not take place in the middle ages, but rather during modern day in an alternate dimension in a thriving multiverse
If transpeole existing is against the original vision of the game, then explain to me why the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity and Edwin/Edwina exist. Or did you never actually play Baldur’s Gate and just wanted to be part of an outrage machine?
I thought the first gamergate was about gatekeeping women away from games games journalism. Imagine getting mad at trans people existing in a game where shapeshifting monsters and magic exist.
It was, but Baldur’s Gate was the first game they had a beef with, and it was mostly because they made an Interquel to connect the first two games and one of the female characters was written out of character because a new writer NOT INVOLVED WITH THE ORIGINAL GAME OR ITS TEAM thought the old version of her was sexist and degrading…
The also included joke idle lines that referenced Gamergate and poked fun at it. “It’s all about bringing honor back to knighthood!” (ethics and journalism was the original quote)
While I do believe Gamergate did have some legitimate grievances and myself was part of the early movement (I was kicked out of a facebook group connected to it for “Being a fake girl gamer” who “Just pretends to like games to find a boyfriend”, which… kinda legitimized all the criticism flung its way for me)
The rewrite of the BG Character was a legitimate grievance, since it doesn’t matter how much you personally dislike how the character is written, you still need to be faithful to what came before it while working within the same continuity or you create a plot hole and alienate fans of the character.
However these two things were buried, because the introduction of a random NPC who could be asked about her background was a bigger outrage than these two things.
Other times Gamergate had a legitimate grievance -Game Journalists writing articles about liking Postal 2 as a game, but being in their words “being almost ashamed to admitting it” because it’s “Not politically correct enough”
-Kotaku writing articles that legitimately asked if beating a woman in a video game should legally be counted as rape
-Anita Sarkeesian blatantly lying in an effort to make a career out of demonizing video games like Jack Thompson before her (But as a Journalist instead of a Lawyer) (The lies are too numerous to list, but two that I caught her on personally was claiming that an oversexualized ad for Persona 4: Dancin’ All Night had been used as an official con badge for an event she was covering… It turned out to be a flier she attached to her Con ID just for the outrage machine… and there was a time she wrote off the Hitman franchise for being sexist as she claimed it “encouraged violence against women”, when in reality, the game actively penalizes you for doing anything but taking out your target as silently as possible, with as little collateral damage as possible, and the targets… while I’m not 100% comfortable saying they’re exclusively male, I legitimately can’t think of any female targets off the top of my head, and even then Hitman Targets typically have a backstory showing why they deserve a death from Agent 47 usually involving them making a decision that was financially profitable for them but cost the life of another)
Other times they did not have a legitimate grievance
-Lesbians exist! (Outer Worlds)
-Black people exist! (World of Warcraft)
-Fat people exist! (World of Warcraft)
-Visual Novels exist! (Oh don’t get them fucking started on Depression Quest, a game that literally doesn’t cost anything)
-Female Video Game Developers Exist!
-Transpeople exist! (Hogwarts Legacy, Baldur’s Gate, Guilty Gear, and for some reason the unreleased Fable reboot was accused of having, without evidence a trans protagonist… even though it’s a series largely based in customizing your own hero and deciding their moral compass)
-Female Ratchet’s boobs aren’t big enough, and she was designed by a transguy
-The New Fable has a protagonist that isn’t even implied to be trans, but they’re convinced she is
-There’s a trans character in anything
-Gail Simone doesn’t like being mansplained to about comic books she literally fucking wrote.
-One of two Optional Lead characters of an Assassin’s Creed game is female! (Which is even funnier considering it was accused of being an executive mandate… When interviews revealed that they originally wanted the game to ONLY have the female character, and her male rival who can ALSO be chosen as a player character… was the one added by Executive Mandate)
-Mortal Kombat isn’t sexy enough because the women have actual designs instead of just wearing underwear, even though they’re still just wearing underwear… and the original designs are literally unlockable (Even for this group I still don’t get it)
-Homosexuals exist (Mortal Kombat X - This one killed me because Kung Jin has one line that hints at him being gay and it’s so subtle I figured it was talking about a girl, the writer had to clarify… Yet people immediately screamed Kung jin was “rubbing the LGBT Lifestyle in people’s faces!”… This game literally has a scene in which an evil necromancer is being held hostage by the US Military to prevent the return of an Elder God who has threatened revenge on the Guardian Deity of Earth… that itself is interrupted by Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade complaining to each other about their failed marriage… meaning the HETEROSEXUAL UNION IS THE ONE BEING SHOVED IN MY FACE!)
-A black guy doesn’t like slavery (Mortal Kombat 11, no seriously they whined about Jax canonically disagreeing with America’s Institution of Slavery)
-Women with facial hair exist! (Horizon Zero Dawn)
-People called the movement’s founder anti-semetic and homophobic despite him being a gay jew… A gay jew that is constnatly saying homophobic and anti-semetic shit and claims to either be Catholic or Jewish depending on which suits him better, claimed to be married to a black man who is oddly absent from his life, and then “divorced him” and became an “ex-gay”
AND THE LIST GOES ON
Basically, GamerGate had SOME legitimate concerns, but, their bad takes far outnumbered the good takes and were mostly just “MINORITY IS IN A THING, THAT’S BAD!”, which hurt any legitimate cause they may have had, and makes it obvious the real goal was to push gamers to the Far Right
Sidenote: To whom it may concern, I actually hated when they made Bridget a transgirl in Guilty Gear. I mean Transpeople are based, but… given that her backstory is basically “Anime John Money Experience”, it rubs me entirely the wrong way and I liked her “femboi” incarnation a lot better. IT would have been cooler if her unnamed sibling in an ironic twist, turned out to be a transgirl, if they really wanted to appeal to Transgender Bridget fans. Having Bridget herself be trans is very uncomfortable when you remember that she was raised as a girl, told she was a girl, and made to present as such solely to try to fool the concept of fate.
Don’t forget their spectacular Arkham Knight port that was so good, it was delisted from Steam and Rocksteady had to come back and start the port over.
They do a lot of support work, but now and then they get out a project of their own. Rumbleverse was well regarded by its audience, but it was also like the 90th battle royale to come out, and it never stood a chance.
Iron Galaxy was semi-unique in that they basically existed as the company you go to when you need to contract out some support work. Think Bluepoint but the idea is that the end customer never realizes that this wasn’t made by a time traveling Rare from the 00s or whatever. Whereas they basically just stay afloat from a constant stream of low-medium price deals.
The leadership are dipshits and have made it a point to show it many times over the years (and Giant Bomb/Jeff Gerstmann have always done a great job of covering for them…) but it was a solid company that was pretty loved in the area and the industry (leadership aside).
So for IG to be going under is a REALLY bad sign for the health of the industry as a whole. Because this wasn’t “Hey, we have an excellent track record of new IPs and always release our games on time and under budget”. It is “Hey, we have an excellent track record of letting you sell more copies of a sure thing”.
There’s no need for Unity anymore. Godot is excellent for at least 2D games the same way Unity used to be. Unreal is easy to pick up for 3D. GameMaker Studio is going strong.
Unreal Engine 1.5 - yeah, maybe. Definitely not UE5. It’s one of the most complicated, convoluted and heavyweight systems in existence. Just engine itself is 100gb+ download, opening it the first time takes 30m to compile shaders. Just reading briefly through gtlf import dialog took me like 10minutes.
UE is a beast to run (and has incredibly shitty linux support if you want to use the marketplace or any plugins…). But basically everything you listed is a one time cost or just an indicator that you probably shouldn’t be developing medium fidelity 3d games on a potato.
Honestly? For “hobbyist” 3d games, Unity is still the king. Godot is awesome but a lot of the core loops and flows are very much geared with 2D first and the performance of 3D games is a hotly contested issue. I would still say that Godot’s 3D “performance” is better than Unreal’s 2D but… that is an incredibly low bar.
And in terms of workflows? UE is more than a bit convoluted but with stuff like blueprints it is probably the most consistent tool out there (so long as you never try to do a 2D game). Unity is a distant second. And Godot is great but it also reeks of an open source project that is being designed and redesigned in real time (just look at how file IDs are handled…). Not the end of the world if you understand the core concepts but also not something people are generally going to learn without a lot of trips to the forums (or watching youtubes of people who did said trips for them).
Maybe stuff like shaders compiling isn’t a big deal in the long run, but one-time cost in terms of learning may be too much. If you’re going to use 5% of its features, having to go through the rest 95% when learning how to do things is a big distraction and productivity killer. Also, there is a surge of AAA games made in UE5 that have critical performance issues that developers struggle to fix for extended periods of time after release, killing performance even on the most top-notch hardware that most gamers could never afford.
an indicator that you probably shouldn’t be developing medium fidelity 3d games on a potato
Why though? Just use other engine and you’re good.
For “hobbyist” 3d games, Unity is still the king.
I’m doing a hobbyist 3d game and I’m using UPBGE. It’s terrible in a lot of ways, depsgraph kills performance, but it’s very convenient to just hit P and play during 3d modelling of the scene. This is what I would call an engine for “hobbyist”. Unity is a decent engine for professionals, for indies, for AAA, for AA, for a lot of things. At least, technically it’s there. Its management is a big issue though.
but one-time cost in terms of learning may be too much
If a slow startup of the editor the first time you start it is enough to end your career in game dev: you never had one.
And any good tutorial resource will do something like “Okay. Now start up that engine. Yes, do it now. Okay. It might look like it is unresponsive but that is because it is compiling shaders. Just leave that running and let’s start talking about some core concepts…”
If you’re going to use 5% of its features, having to go through the rest 95% when learning how to do things is a big distraction and productivity killer
It is a philosophical difference. But the reason I still suggest folk “learn with” UE is that it is, mostly, consistent between all the different kinds of games you may want to make. Which… is a leading cause of said performance issues when you start pushing things but more on that in…
Also, there is a surge of AAA games made in UE5 that have critical performance issues that developers struggle to fix for extended periods of time after release
Now. First and foremost: That means nothing for a hobbyist learning and making a game with their kids or spending a few hours a week for a few months until they give up.
As for the A-AA space (AAA means something, god damn it): That is not something that an individual developer is going to have any say in. That is going to be a corporate decision and it is almost exclusively going to be that company’s engine (ha, Frostbite) or Unreal because UE is the industry standard and there is a lot of value in being able to rapidly onboard a new hire or a contractor.
As for performance for those corporate games? That is really no concern for the hobbyist scale and is a much more complicated question related to allocating resources and time. But if there being poorly performant games made with an engine disqualified that engine: NO engines would exist.
Why though? Just use other engine and you’re good.
This gets back to the optimization side of things. You should not need to go through and migrate the critical path from gdscript to c# or even c++ just to test out your game. You want your development system to be significantly beefier than your target system so that you can rapidly iterate and debug. Get it working, profile it, and then optimize it. And… get a new respect for all the devs with “Unreal Engine games run like shit” games because you now realize that the optimization step might be months or even years of your life and you ain’t got time for that.
Other engines may or may not be more performant for debugging a specific “level” of fidelity. If you are at the point where your engine’s editor’s system requirements are limiting your ability to develop: You and your users are going to have a very bad time.
Arguing about UE5 feels just as bloated and convoluted as using the engine itself! Sorry, I couldn’t resist 😅
If a slow startup of the editor the first time
By “one-time learning cost” I meant that to learn how to do a thing in UE5 you will have to spend 95% of time learning things you won’t ever need to understand that 5% that you actually want. Yes, it’s also a one-time cost, but it’s not one-time cost most developers want to pay unless they really need all that compexity.
It is a philosophical difference.
It’s a personal productivity difference. If you are able to allocate N hours to make a game and you don’t need most of those features, you will be much more likely to finish that game in time in a simpler engine.
By “one-time learning cost” I meant that to learn how to do a thing in UE5 you will have to spend 95% of time learning things you won’t ever need to understand that 5% that you actually want.
That is learning anything that isn’t just “ChatGPT, how do I do X?”. Also, once you learn how to use blueprints you know how to do basically anything a hobbyist game dev would want.
Which is not dissimilar to Unity or Godot. You learn the basic concepts and then it is mostly a matter of experimenting or looking up how to do isometric camera angles or whatever.
But honestly? it sounds like you don’t want a game engine. You want a framework. In that case, RPG Maker is great for making a top down square style JRPG. Unreal is great for an FPS. And so forth.
Don’t underestimate what hobbyists want in their games. It’s actually AAA games that don’t want to risk and do fairly standard stuff while indies/hobbyists like to experiment and implement unorthodox mechanics and visuals. I think that, for example, writing your own 3rd person character controller (with stuff like snappy raw input movement, walljumps and also properly handling moving/rotating platforms) and cartoonish NPR rendering requires going through a lot more irrelevant systems in UE5 than doing the same in many other engines including Unity, Godot, and UPBGE. In Unity there actually is a similar kind of bloat (like URP), but it’s optional and you can just hack “good old” built-in render pipeline (also has tons of ready-to-use snippets and shaders open-sourced by community through years). In other words for me UE5 vs other engines is more like Java EE vs Python (or NodeJS) than Java EE vs Wordpress. UE5’s complexity is more of too many abstraction layers and lengthy workflows rather than being too low-level and flexible. Lightweight and flexible engines are great for hobbyists, game constructors are fine too for those who really want something very basic.
I am a big supporter of godot but… it is incredibly tacky to run into a thread about layoffs and basically say “Good, they shouldn’t have jobs. Use this instead”
I was part of the first big wave and they hard warned us maybe potentially there might perhaps be restructing and “resizing”. We agonized for months waiting to know if it was our teams or no, if we had to look (this was before Unity nosedived and buddy quit).
I’ve somehow survived all the firings and restructurings so far. It’s a shit show over here. I’m trying to get through a few more months then I’m off to another country to go back to school
The agonizing hasn’t stopped for me I’ve just gotten used to it as a part of my day to day. It’s wild what they’ve been putting us through we need to unionize
It’s very sad. We’re going lose a lot of great employees with tons of experience. This is going to cost to taxpayers in the form of poor services and contractors down the road filling in for more money and with less experience.
These buffoons understand very little, and neither do they understand the value of hard work and what it’s like needing to earn a living. This grandstanding is reckless.
Bevy is damn impressive. I can understand why it’s not suitable for large projects yet but for anyone tinkering or projects willing to adapt to a rapidly iterate ecosystem is well worth a look.
I’m very sorry man, I’ve been through that, and I have friends that have been cut at unity before. They treat their workers terribly.
Focus on getting better first, just process it for a bit. When you’re ready to start looking, the market is warm right now. I’m more than happy to help review resumes.
Ah I think my comment made in haste was ambiguous. Fortunately I was not cut this time around, I’ve somehow skated by all the firings. I’m actually just clinging on for a few more months then I’m off to Sweden to go back to school. Hoping to actually finish my game dev degree this time around! I do have some school application stuff I would love to have people see though I’ll keep you in mind for that if you are up for it (for a work sample primarily, to get into higher rates schools)
Good then, glad you’ve made it through, but obviously stay frosty. Those execs will cut every engineer as long as they still look good. Be ready for anything
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