I suspect that Unreal 5 is going to make Epic so much money in the coming years. Taking 5% after the first million dollars doesn’t seem like a lot until you remember that the next Witcher and Cyberpunk are both Unreal 5 developments.
The next mainline Tomb Raider game is also going to be Unreal 5. That is if Embracer hasn’t bankrupted themselves or sold Edios/Crystal Dynamics before then (although I’d be thrilled if that happened).
Sadly emulation is seemingly non-existent for newer consoles like PS4 and Xbox one (PS3 is pretty emulatable but fairly demanding, Xbox 360 emulation is last I checked still pretty poor) Luckily most of the games on newer consoles are released on PC.
I remember ps3 emulation a few years ago was determined too hardware intensive, nowadays it can be done on mid level hardware. PS4 and Xbox One is going to happen, just depends on when.
Yep. The PS4 and Xbone are both very close to off-the-shelf AMD APU’s as far as I remember; you could buy very similar processors for desktop use. Emulation would require a ton more power than the original chips, and the original chips are so close to desktop processors that it’s more efficient and feasible to reverse-engineer the proprietary API’s those console chips use.
We always hear about shit companies like embracer, but who are the actual people in charge? Who are the people who are very bad at their jobs and should be publically ostracized for damaging not only their ips but the lives of hundreds to thousands of working developers? Like what are their names? Who are these faceless scumbags?
Embracer is just a name to hide behind, the people involved in the decisionmaking here should be known by name, like Bobby “incredible piece of human filth” Kotick
I honestly do believe Lars Wingefors is passionate about games and the industry, he’s been trying to find a place in it his whole career, but I do not think he’s a good business man nor worthy of stewardship for these IPs.
Very well could be. I didn’t research their backgrounds. I just know from first hand experience of people who get jobs who graduated with business degrees who don’t care about the stuff they sell.
they would have done these layoffs regardless for what it’s worth. Apples privacy stance for advertising companies (what unity wanted to be) and the lack of easy access to additional investment this past year meant that it’s not been a sustainable business for a while
While Epic has been pouring money from Fortnite into Unreal Engine and making significant progress in updating the engine.
Unity has been sitting on its ass for years doing absolutely nothing in the way of R&D.
As a result, Unity is now left behind.
Valve has given up on being an Engine developer.
Epic with the Unreal Engine will have a monopoly soon if it doesn't already.
Anyone attempting to make their own modern game engine these days are way behind the ball. All the big players are switching to Unreal.
And it's not only Game Engine, but movie making engine as well.
The only company I could see that would have the $$$ and talent to compete against Epic for a Graphics Engine would be nVidia.
AMD doesn't have the R&D and Scientists specializing in Graphics/Physics/Rendering/Simulation/InformationLoading like nVidia does.
Valve has the $$$ and talent, but they are focused on hardware now, and are even farther behind than Unity.
Having a single Game Engine monopoly will be bad for all of us in the end.
The only Video Game engine that I could see someone develop that could compete against Unreal, is if the engine was built from the ground up 100% focused on anti-cheat. Libraries that are designed from the start to be multiplayer focused with un-necessary data scrubbed properly from the clients so they can't sniff out data. Something designed to be hack proof.
That game engine, even if not graphically intense would be highly sought after in a wide genre range of games.
…which is why Godot now is quickly slipping into the niche that Unity largely used to be for.
And since Godot is FOSS, there is no going back for Unity once Indie game devs have shifted, since - like with Blender being free to use - it destroys the competition by becoming the defacto king when it comes to things like video tutorials on places like YouTube.
Popular tutorial channels on YouTube know their viewer audience is less likely to be large enough to be profitable via ad revenue, premium subscriptions, etc. if they are limited niche of people only willing to pay thousands for a license to an application they don’t yet have any professional reason to pay for.
Being open source in any way also usually then leads to a snowball effect of an application gaining popularity and then people extending its functionality.
This is also what I think will soon happen to Plex with Jellyfin since the Plex bigwigs have decided they want to be Netflix more than people’s personal media server frontend.
All it will take is one big mistake and the ground will fall beneath their feet just like with Unity.
All fascinating and frustrating to watch as I used to work with Unity a ton since its early days.
Never really thought about the popularity of FOSS starting with youtube-tutorials. But completely reasonable that when everybody starts with Godot (or other FOSS like Blender), even bigger Studios might just use that one since there are just more guys already proficient with it.
Students and amateurs want to learn how to do something. Their choices are either - (sometimes) get an EDU address, fill out a form, apply for a discount or free version, see the watermark or lose a ton of functionality, and only see tutorials via classes or other a-la-carte method (how many folks are doing Houdini lessons online out there - probably not many if I had to guess considering Houdini’s price), or start paying $20/month for a program that they someday hope will allow them to earn money - knowing that if they stop paying, they lose access to files… OR…
They can download a program for free, that anyone can add stuff to, with thousands of really well done tutorials online on free places like YouTube, that studios will love because there’s no licensing fee or if there is - it’s only when they are really profitable or whatever.
The more that people use it, the more there are people doing tutorials, expanding functionality, etc.
Blender used to be garbage in like 2010, but now - you’d be an idiot not to grab a copy and teach yourself if you used to regular in apps like 3DS Max, Maya, or other premium closed application now requiring a bunch of DRM installers, license tiers, and subscriptions…
Same goes for Adobe’s stuff. I imagine there are more and more people sick of Creative Cloud’s garbage and are ready to find and learn and contribute to FOSS services… All that needs to happen is critical stupid event by bigwig, and suddenly a mass exodus begins.
This is also why languages like R and Python are supplanting SPSS and Matlab. Open source is just better in some ways, particularly once it gets over the initial usability barrier, which Jellyfin seems to now be achieving.
Hello I work for Unity (for now lol, we’ll see)! I’d like to just say from my end of things we do actually do a solid amount of R&D. Just that a depressing amount of it either never sees the light of day, takes so long to release it has already been done better by someone else, or is unannounced with little to no documentation on release so it never gets visibility. The other thing to note is that Unity does a lot of non-game things that might not be that noticeable if you’re just looking at it from a game making perspective, like our publicly known contracts we have to help train the military to “totally not kill people you guys”!
this is on-top of all the lost sales from no one buying their first-party games.
Gamepass is not financially viable, it’s funded by microsoft office and azure. It never will be unless they get a huge majority of the market /and/ raise praises massively. Which is of course their goal as soon as they kill the concept of game ownership.
Yup, it’s obvious once you connect everything why Microsoft is doing this. They’re monopolizing the game market - and most gamers couldn’t be more excited. When I was on Reddit I called out how competition was good and this was bad and was always met with the majority of people saying “nuh uh, they’re going to put them all on game pass for only $9 a month!”
Netflix at least didn’t plan to be what it became from the start, they even experimented with releasing some of its originals on Blu-ray for a bit. But when every shitty heavy hitter in the entertainment industry comes after you, you’re gonna learn to be shitty real fast.
Microsoft is a whole different brand of monster. They have a long, long history of terrible anti-competitve practices, fucking over their own consumers, flagrantly ignoring complaints, and making deeply underhanded moves. In many different markets, for decades. The Xbox One release was almost literally a thesis statement. They could not possibly have broadcast any clearer who the fuck they are and what the goal is.
And still, still, people defend them. They downplay everything and fall head over heels for their marketing bullshit.
That’s why we’re truly fucked without regulations. It’s not just because corporations are terrible and will do incredibly underhanded shit at the drop of a hat to raise profits, it’s also because the vast majority of the consumer base is fucking stupid. Incapable of pattern recognition and imagination, and unwilling to change their patterns even slightly. It’s really, really, really easy to see the negative effects of a Microsoft dominated gaming market. And the consumers can’t see it.
I mean, their requirements are still more strict than steam. GabeN basically says as long as you don’t break the law or cause us to lose significant business from bad press (aka “straight up trolling”) with your game, and have $100 cash handy, you are welcome to shill your school project quality, my first Unity game shovelware here
Nintendo: Actively standing against game preservation and ownership in an attempt to rent you their back catalog forever; their outdated hardware exclusivity model also stands in the way of future-proofing preservation. They hate their fans, and don’t forget it. They’ll sue you for playing Super Smash Bros.
Riot: They normalized rootkit anti-cheats, and for something that extreme, it had better render cheating impossible, but it doesn’t. Purveyors of live service games, which also stand in the way of preservation and ownership by putting an expiration date on the game. For the sake of brevity, I won’t expand on the live service concept again in later bullet points.
EA: Making billions of dollars off of legalized gambling for children. Always-online DRM on games that otherwise never even need to touch the internet.
From here, you can put most companies that have reduced their library down to live service games for similar reasons as the above.
These companies piss me off, but…:
Sony: Clinging slightly less to the outdated hardware exclusivity model and pivoted largely to live service games, but the writing is on the wall, so they may abandon one or both of those things in the not-too-distant future. Their new shenanigans with requiring PSN accounts on PC shakes my faith in that though.
Microsoft: Layoffs to rival Embracer, and not even a successful, acclaimed game will save the developer. Purveyors of live service games, not just from classic Microsoft studios but also from Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda, etc. Still, they eventually bent to the whims of the market rejecting their Windows storefront for anything outside of Game Pass, and they did a ton to make PC gaming as good as it is today, including standardizing a good controller for it.
Epic: Exclusivity that’s actively hostile to what customers really want, purveyors of live service games, removing their classic games from sale from other stores and their own for basically no reason. But Tim Sweeney, in pursuing his own self interest to become king of the world, sometimes cries loudly enough to score a win for consumers, and Epic is going to be instrumental in any kind of change, in any country, for destroying walled gardens in tech.
Valve: Making untold amounts of money off of legalized gambling for children, purveyors of live service games, but they’re also basically the only ones creating open ecosystems and allowing them to flourish.
Embracer’s pretty low on the “piss me off, but…” list. They made a horrible gambler’s bet and were surprised to have to pay the bill later, and they do have a few live service games in the bunch too, but outside of that, what they were going for is something I really wanted to see succeed. The big publishers stopped making a lot of types of games that they used to make as they honed in on a select few money makers, and Embracer was picking up old, discarded, forgotten properties or subgenres and trying to show that there can still be a market for those. The fact that the bet has failed could be up to their execution, since as Keighley reminded us at SGF, customers do in fact respond when the right games show up outside of those AAA publishers, and Embracer had a vision. They pursued that vision irresponsibly.
That was a really excellent write up, thank you for elaborating. It’s helpful to know the truth of how these companies are acting, and important for consumers to try not to forget. They will continue to take advantage, if we allow it.
You see, our stock price goes up when we buy other companies and it goes up when we fire people. We’re doing both at the same time, so our stock price will go up double. This is a sustainable business model and not at all a very dead canary in a very deadly coal mine.
‘“You know, we’re a platform where you can play Grand Theft Auto but you can also play Palworld. Where you can play Call of Duty and can also play Pentiment. That doesn’t change,” she said.’ - yeah but now I can’t play HiFi Rush 2 :(
Ha! Can’t cut down on the QA and testing stuff if there is none! Smart thinking, CA!
Damn this sucks though. Happy for Relic that they escaped it, but Sega has been dropping the ball so hard lately, it sucks they take it out on their workers.
You mean the near Paradox levels of DLC for Three Kingdoms and Warhammer? And selling blood as a fucking DLC for every Total War game since Shogun 2? Yeah, I’ve heard about it.
The games are good, but Sega’s forced monetization is atrocious.
Of those three, the one I bought was Three Kingdoms, and I was certainly not forced to buy more than the base game. Paradox’s DLC strategy is a-okay by me. Neither company puts a gun to my head to buy their DLC. Pretty sure blood is a DLC to get away with a lower age rating.
Eh, CA pretty much aced their DLC strategy for warhammer 2. It’s with Warhammer 3 that they fell of a cliff. And three kingdoms barely got any DLC before getting cancelled.
One thing I didn’t like about Shogun 2 and all subsequent sequels was enforcing a limited number of armies by forcing a general to be present. The maximum number of armies you could field is naturally bottlenecked by your economy, so you should have the flexibility to use some non-generaled armies to bolster garrisons in key strategic locations. Instead, you need to use one of your scarce generals to defend it, which prevents them from being used offensively so they just sit around.
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