The giant BR is likely Fortnite, the Battle Royale part that is the game most people know wasn't supposed to be the big deal, what is now Save The World was supposed to be the game and BR was just going to be tacked on.
Their reboot of Unreal Tournament failed. And so did their moba named Paragon. Arguably, their Fortnite Save the World also failed. Gears of War Judgement had poor sales for a Gears game though that may have been mostly developed by People Can Fly.
Generally if we ignore Fortnite and Infinite Blade(a mobile game), their last successful game was Gears 3, from 12 years ago. They basically only have Fortnite, Unreal Engine and the Epic store.
They cancelled a bunch of games like Paragon and Unreal tournament to feed the Fortnite machine, abandoned the main Fortnite mode they had already sold and then started funneling money at the epic store.
The epic store at this point has been such a huge loss, exclusivity deals alone are worth millions and not even those managed to get them a user base.
A company with Fortnite’s and Unreal’s income should not be struggling to make a profit.
I'd venture a wild guess that the revenue split business model behind Unreal Engine, and the strategy around spending tons of money to bring people over to the Epic Games Store, are not sustainable. They probably have been generally subsidized by the huge amount of cash that Fortnite has brought in.
Maybe the Fortnite well has dried up? 2023 has been a strong year for news game releases, and it's possible that Fortnite has lost some of players' attention?
Hard to say, but it's looking like Unity are not the only ones struggling to keep their business afloat.
I only have played Fortnite because my nephew was big into it for a long time, now that he and his friends are in high school they have quit playing, I don't know if that's a big trend, but he tells me it is just not cool to play anymore.
They keep giving away free games each week (they have to pay to the publishers of the games to give away games) yet nobody spend money in the store (I think the average was each user spend like $10 or $15 per year)
They also keep buying exclusives, a thing that cost money...
And we cannot forget all the studios and company they have bought, the purchase cost money and their maintenance too
I was excited until I realized that the original was replaced with CS2 in my library. If it is different enough to warrant a new title, it should be entirely separate rather than being treated as an update to an existing game.
I’m just a little surprised there’s not more pushback considering that Valve just did with CS:GO and CS2 almost exactly what Blizzard did with Overwatch and Overwatch 2.
CS:GO literally disappeared from my Steam Library and was replaced with CS2. I get that CS:GO’s servers were already down, but it still feels wild to just wholesale remove it from people’s libraries this many years later. I felt similarly about Overwatch 2, but Blizzard caught a lot more heat for that than I’ve seen from the Valve fan community so far.
I know CS:GO has been Free to Play for a long time, but seriously, this is kind of a big fuck you to any archivists who wanted to keep a copy around for history’s sake.
Perhaps Blizzard is generally under more scrutiny than Valve. Not to mention, isn’t it still possible to just download an older steam depot and archive that? Sure, it not being readily available via Steam’s basic library makes it difficult to archive, but releasing this as a new game entirely may have caused more issues than it would have this way.
I agree with all your points. I guess, to me, it’s just a little silly that they’re under less scrutiny for doing the exact same thing. If Blizzard received scrutiny because it was a anti-consumer choice, it doesn’t stand to reason that people should ignore Valve doing the same.
I’ve been a big fan of Valve for twenty years or more, but I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to ignore when they do anti-consumer things.
I can’t really comment on the exact state of the games compared to how they were prior as I never played either of them. While the overall actions were the same, from what I’ve heard, the final state of each game is completely different.
From my understanding, Blizzard promised things and didn’t failed to meet those promises leaving a worse product than what was there. Valve didn’t do that, presumably.
Edit: I should also point out that wouldn’t you have to consider it anti-consumer for a game to do a total overhaul of itself? That prior version will no longer be available? Same with really any update whatsoever. At what point is it no longer the same game? If Valve instead released this updates over the course of a year, is it still the same game then?
Valve just did with CS:GO and CS2 almost exactly what Blizzard did with Overwatch and Overwatch 2.
Except that Overwatch 1 was a paid game replaced with a version with broken promises.
I know CS:GO has been Free to Play for a long time, but seriously, this is kind of a big fuck you to any archivists who wanted to keep a copy around for history’s sake.
You had half a year to archive CSGO. Don’t act as it came as a surprise or something. Steam emulators like gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator exist to play archived copies.
You had half a year to archive CSGO. Don’t act as it came as a surprise or something.
For someone who isn’t huge into CSGO, it actually did come as a surprise for it to disappear from my library today. Sorry not everyone spends their time making sure they know what’s going on with every single game in their library. I’m literally finding this out for the first time today.
In all the reports of CS2 being released, this is the first I’ve heard that the new game would fully replace the old. Once again, I knew about that with Overwatch and I don’t even play Overwatch because people were complaining about this before Overwatch 2 was even released. I was well aware it was getting replaced before release, simply because it was discussed and reported on a lot. There were numerous front page posts on reddit about it, months before release.
The same can’t be said for CS2. It wasn’t talked about a lot by anyone. I only was able to find one specific news article about how it was replacing the old game, after searching today.
Reporting the announcement of the game and talking about how it will replace the base game are two different things. Lots of articles about the announcement, very few about how it would replace the base game.
So you live under a rock
I’m an adult with responsibilities and over 300 games in my Steam library. I’ve got way better shit to do than make sure every time there’s a new release that I’m going to lose games I paid for years ago. Jesus Christ man. Reported, you don’t gotta be a dick.
EDIT: Lmao, went and downvoted all my posts after I reported him for being a fucking jackass. Stay classy.
You realize you can be rude and uncivil without directly name-calling, right? The rule is “Be civil” not “no name calling.”
So you live under a rock.
Mischaracterizing what I’m saying and claiming I’m blaming others, etc. Like dude, check yourself. Learn how to speak to others without being an aggressive asshole and maybe you won’t deal with people reporting you.
I was just pointing out that Valve did the same thing as Blizzard, and you jumped down my throat for it because I guess you must be some Valve fanboy. Gimme a break, man.
EDIT: I’m not so much of a pussy that I need to block everyone who has been rude to me.
You calling me a dick and fanboy definitely is more uncivilized that the colloquial term of living under a rock, especially when you yourself agreed that you don’t have motivation to check up on CS news. Fact is they announced it, it’s no surprise, you not getting the memo isn’t anybody’s fault but your own, and yet you’re too sensitive when someone just says that and feel the need to report it. Yeah…
I don’t think this is really a fuck you to archivists any more than a simple update to the game is at any other point. I do agree that it’s similar to what Blizzard did with overwatch only Valve didn’t overpromise and underdeliver
Unless the CEO walks and takes his yes-men with him, I don’t see Unity recovering from this self-inflicted shitshow in the near term. I bet it has motivated a lot of devs to look at the viability of using Godot instead and being free of future shakedowns.
If you switch to Godot and implement a feature you needed but it didn't have, please do us a favor and take that part of the code and put it out there under the MIT license (unless I'm misremembering what license they use) it will help the next person switch easier
It’s almost like the CEO of the company (John Riccitiello) supporting the most Indie game developers holds 53 million dollars in EA shares or something…
Even, and most likely especially, if Unity does poorly does EA benefit… I bet ya Riccitiella knows all the features of Frostbite, but couldn’t tell you if you can do native reliable UDP networking in Unity…
More like the limit will be decreased to $100,00 and the fee will go up to 0.4 (0.35 for pro). You don’t get it, you just was confused and angsty, this is a better proposal!
This was always the plan, by the way. This is the Trump school of negotiation.
Make a horrendous, unrealistic, offensive proposition. Opponent is outraged.
Then, propose the offer you actually want. It now looks better relative to the initial proposition.
I fucking despise this type of action and will never touch unity or suggest it to anyone ever again. It’s the only way to root out this type of bullshit from our society. Scorched earth.
RuneScape 3 recently made an extremely controversial change, and I think they handled the apology perfectly. When they finally made changes and dropped some heavily disliked things, they opened with “we messed up”. Unity needs to do the same thing here if they want a chance to rebuild
Jagex is respectful not the company I’d look to for inspiration in terms of correcting past mistakes 🙂 For the uninitiated, they legally gaslit the community when they made their first major controversial change roughly a decade ago by “removing the feature” then “adding” the same feature with a different coat of paint.
And the only reason they’re decent about mistakes is because of the plethora they’ve accumulated. By no means does that mean they get to it quickly nor fix it adequately all the time. But in the grand scheme of company fuck ups, that’s still one of the best. It says more about everyone else than it does Jagex. Still, I appreciate they can flat out say they fucked up.
The Squeal of Fortune, replaced by Treasure Hunter.
But in the grand scheme of company fuck ups, that’s still one of the best.
I really don’t know about that. They seem to do it so regularly that it’s been a borderline abusive relationship over the years. Back when the Gowers ran the company, things operated much more smoothly and particularly the pay-to-win aspects were completely absent.
There’s no other game I know of with a subscription, pay-to-win loot boxes, cosmetics store, season pass, and bonds. There’s also no other game I’m aware of that has overhauled its combat system to such controversy that it split the game in half (and seemingly most people play the old version) – the closest being Minecraft. There’s also absolutely no game where the developers regularly say “that’s engine work so we can’t do it”, when they own their own engine.
I still like RuneScape, but at this point I’ve completely given up on PvP in the game and anything resembling fairness. I just expect Jagex to do everything they can to try and entice me to give them more and more money for … ultimately … less.
Ahhhh I totally see what you mean. Yeah the whole thing with SoF going away for TH was disgusting. I don’t even consider it a change really, it’s pretty much the same thing. It still doesn’t sit right with me that they had an option to kill Yelps in a quest as effectively a scapegoat while they changed nothing.
Completely agree that MTX is out of control and badly designed. I understand why they need it, but they’re going about it the completely wrong way and monetizing the wrong things. It should only ever provide cosmetics. And Jagex is absolutely trying to get more money out of us in return for providing less.
EOC is something I’ve come to see as a mistake over time. It was way too much scope creep. They should’ve left items and armors and stats the same, and only changed how you dealt damage. Maybe introduce only a couple of abilities to augment combat instead of outright replace it, like bleeds, stuns, freedoms, etc. Plus, OSRS clearly shows that the old combat system could still do interesting and challenging encounters. And yeah PvP on RS3 is laughable and a lost cause, at least as far as the wilderness goes. The popularity of PvP in WE2 makes me think they could do something, but maybe that window has completely passed.
I don’t know that the engine criticism is fair though. The game has tons of spaghetti code that its built on. And the downside of having a custom engine is that you have to train anyone who’s going to work on it. You can’t hire someone experienced in the system.
EOC is something I’ve come to see as a mistake over time. It was way too much scope creep.
Agreed.
The popularity of PvP in WE2 makes me think they could do something, but maybe that window has completely passed.
Yeah, I think the right thing to do would’ve been to make the wilderness a safe PvP faction vs faction area that’s basically a continuous version of one of those events.
I don’t know that the engine criticism is fair though. The game has tons of spaghetti code that its built on. And the downside of having a custom engine is that you have to train anyone who’s going to work on it. You can’t hire someone experienced in the system.
Any code base can be fixed, it’s just a function of time and money. They can yell spaghetti code all they want, but ultimately Jagex is the one that allowed that to happen in the first place. It’s not an excuse to further gaslight your customers. It’s something you should take accountability on, and work to fix. Done right, having your own engine is an opportunity to do new and exciting things.
It’s certainly a very large financial undertaking to change the engine like that, and at that point they’re honestly better off just making a new game entirely.
I love your idea for the wilderness, safe PvP for factions would’ve been a lot of fun.
It’s certainly a very large financial undertaking to change the engine like that, and at that point they’re honestly better off just making a new game entirely.
They might be doing exactly that FWIW. There’s some evidence Jagex is working on a “RuneScape universe” oriented game in Unreal Engine.
Still, that’s not the silver bullet that people often think it is. Rewrites are often far more expensive than originally anticipated and extremely risky as even if you intend to make the exact same game, there are often differences that come down to the underlying engine in how the game plays that can be controversial.
For context, I’ve been on a team that did a full rewrite of a large complicated C# web application in Ruby and I’ve also worked on several C/C++ “desktop” applications that have roots in the late 80s and early 90s. The former is more “fun” in a sense, you can make up for a lot of sins. However, I fundamentally believe that unless the language you’re moving from has serious fundamental issues (e.g. you’re insane and wrote a million line application in Bash), you’re probably better taking a hard look at your application and retrofitting new systems inside of the old application where you most badly need those changes.
Even in the “worst case” it’s in practice true that most of the code doesn’t need touched, it’s just some really intertwined portions that need revamped. You can often get away with making a new system that replaces the guts of the old, thus powering both the existing code, and allowing you to achieve whatever goal you had in rewriting in the first place (working faster, safer, more readably, etc).
Yeah that’s fair. It’s you can nearly cordon off the engine and then upgrade it to keep the same functionality it could work well. I guess it really depends on estimated hours to figure out if it would be more economic to make a new game or new engine.
I just am cynical about Jagex’s willingness to spend money in this space. Ever since they’ve been owned by venture capital, everything is penny pinched; it needs to have an obvious return on investment.
We as players normally only see the content developers in interviews, and they’re often folks that don’t even have proper computer science degrees or training. Jagex internally for years has hired largely unskilled workers into their QA department and then promoted them into “developer” positions that work with RuneScript.
I’m fairly confident the engine team was a skeleton crew (and one split among developing iOS, Android, and Desktop clients) until the last few years when it became apparent at least some investment into the engine on the server side/more broadly was necessary.
I looked into joining their engine team at one point, and then promptly walked away when I saw the payscale.
Basically, I see no reason to give them slack; it’s actually a bit counter productive in my view. The community should be stern that Jagex should address their issues rather than running from them and constantly blaming “yesterday’s Jagex” for why “today’s Jagex” is making bad decisions, can’t do XYZ, etc
I also just wanted to add; if you want to look at what this looks like when the game development company is functioning properly look at Crytek and Hunt Showdown.
Crytek has publicly stated Hunt has a lot of issues internally in its code base. They then responded by committing to fix those issues (i.e. fix their spaghetti), and then they followed up by actually fixing issues (off the top of my head, an advantage when peeking from the left down to how the game handled the player camera was fixed, bugs in the ammo system resulting in a number of issues with reloading were fixed).
They didn’t stop there though. They said in their last roadmap update, they’re working with their internal CryEngine development team to make major changes to CryEngine (and this is reflected by Crytek’s CryEngine team stopping release of CryEngine to make major refactors for CryEngine 7) to do everything they want to do, remove hacks coded into Hunt’s fork of CryEngine, and pay all the tech debt down to get Hunt running on the most recent CryEngine (and hopefully keep it there, with all the tech advances that brings).
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