Brother, skyrim has gotten insane. They now have in game vibrators that sync with REAL WORLD versions so you can feel the same thing IRL when it’s being used.
Im happy for this. But between this and the last update with a bunch of mods I have to wonder why – how are dev cycles being approved for these lovely changes? Is there enough money to be made pulling in anyone who hasn’t already bought the game and DLC? Good community PR?
My guess would be that it’s relatively quick for them to do and it allows them to bring the Witcher 3 back into the public eye whilst also getting some good will from the active community. Bet they announce another Witcher game release soon.
They’ve probably been having this conversation for a long time as it’s one major thing that separates it from Skyrim. They both have the longstanding love from the community but Skyrim is alive in a way that Witcher 3 isn’t.
Perhaps it was the switch from RedEngine or new decision makers at CDPR or something that finally brought it about.
Well they ported it to the switch and it’s one of the larger games on the Steam Deck (highly rated, verified, and iirc it was playable not long after the Deck’s release) so they might actually be able to keep extending the life of the game for a while longer and keep making sales.
I’ve actually had it in my library for a while but haven’t gotten into it because my life is too busy for video games right now. But with official mod support… maybe I can find some extra time somewhere lol
All you See Sweets can keep trying to quantify what it is gamers like. The truth is its ephemeral until it is materialized and on our screens. You never know how fun your thing is until milliona of people can access it. So stop trying to codify it, or find a formula. There is none. Make fun shit, take all the risk. Make new shit that no one has ever made before. But for the love of fps fucking please don’t pretend you’ve drilled down on what gamers like. Thats a promise to fail.
Well after their pay-per-download debacle, their latest quarter’s earnings may not be indicative of the shit that is coming down on them. There are dark clouds on the horizon for Unity.
The best programmers there probably see the writing on the wall. The best small game dev studios will also.
I think unity is going to see a big quality drop even if it manages to get out of this death spiral.
And I’m still curious if they’ll get targeted by regulators for the anti-competitive shit that started this (the whole thing was intended to strong arm developers into using their ad platform to get an exemption from the new pricing model and put a rival ad platform out of business).
Exactly. The colossal lost of trust is not easy to regain (if it can ever be regained at all) and that’s will be a specter haunting Unity’s economic performance for the years to come. I’ve seen so much outpouring of support for Godot and other open source / free game engines, and really hope that support continues.
I work at Unity. The brain drain is for real. It started 2 layoffs ago and is picking up speed. My department lost some really valuable workers, because layoffs are imminent they don’t let leads hire many replacements, and the resulting critical work gets dropped on people already doing full work loads. Some of the people my department has lost helped build core systems from scratch years ago so that intimate knowledge of those systems is just gone.
Thanks for commenting, it’s interesting to get an inside perspective instead of just speculating.
Out of curiosity, how are they (executives/management) communicating about this whole thing internally? Like are they trying to downplay the impact of that screw up or are they being genuine in how they present the situation?
I can’t get too specific on that one because people get fired for leaking meeting info (I’m hoping to keep this job for one more year wish me luck lol). But in my opinion the new CEO has been a lot more open about what’s going on. He’s very straightforward and has been engaging with us in a more human way than JR ever did.
Unity tripled in size in like 4 years iirc. It is trying very hard to be a large company. Like the culture has been shifting from small company feel to big corporate feel for a while now (since before I joined). It still is clinging very hard to having small company feel though because that’s the kind of culture almost everyone here was sold on.
As far as the efficiency of our size, I’m honestly not super sure. We’ve been multitasking a lot and have cut things in the past, like Gigaya. My department has always felt understaffed and I get the vibe that a lot of departments feel the same. I haven’t talked to anyone that was like “my team is too big to function well”. So if there is an inefficiency issue it is maybe a broad thing that could be hard to see from any one part of the whole. That said I work in a very specific part of the company and don’t branch out a whole lot to other groups so my interdepartmental knowledge is limited.
Its insanity, Unity is a good product. There is a place for it in reality. In any sane world this product would have continued to operate how it was and it would have benefited people. But since profits are attached everything will have to be ruined eventually. Unreal is next to bat.
That’s really well said and an underrated comment here. In a sane world, Unity would “make a living” just fine. Another user commented on where they spent their margins, and my bet is that it’s on bullshit. Executive compensation should be first to get slashed, and if anything they should concentrate on keeping the “golden goose” or core development team alive.
Allowing leaders to use profits however they wish has been a disaster. I don’t know if it was codified into law, but when companies had to invest in R&D, and they had to invest in employees before drinking their own koolaid the world was a better place. Employees were taken care of, average people could thrive. Now its an open feeding trough everyone else is exempt from. The modern world only thrives with checks and balances, its proven that without them the powerful cannot be trusted.
They didn’t earn $544M, they had $544M in revenue. They lost $124M but it’s all due to their decisions. They have a great operating margin in the 60s and spent all the money elsewhere.
Revenue is how much you sold stuff for. Profit is how much did you make after paying for everything to run your business. They got $544M but spent $668M, so they didn’t make a profit.
SteamOS also uses an immutable filesystem and the system updates as a whole. Because of that, there is no risk of something updating separately and breaking compatibility.
It's fairly common for things to update on regular linux distros and break e.g. anticheat support in Proton or some other thing.
Another thing SteamOS does, at least on the Steam Desk, is actually using two partitions. The updates are always installed to the inactive one, so there's always one image that's known to work. Even if an update fails, the device will simply boot into the intact OS image. Regular distros usually don't have much in terms of fail-safes, so if things break, they have to be fixed manually.
Basically, SteamOS is trying to be as reliable and "hands-off" of an OS as possible to provide best console-like experience.
It provides an alternative UI environment built and optimized for gaming. It has a separate windows manager, a complete ui, and a set of menus to simplify customization of whatever is needed for gaming and power saving.
And quick access to steam store.
It is extremely convenient if you like a console-like experience, but, if you are a tinker gamer, it has anyway a lot of nice additional features.
It is inconvenient as general purpose desktop os, because on update you basically lose packages not installed as flatpack
And it is somehow moddable, like people created plugins for the UI. I hope someone ends up adding alternative stores directly there and not just steam. But in any case you can install the respective apps and so on.
yes, it doesn’t run plasma when it’s in big picture, it runs it in github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope along with other tweaks, so it’s lower overhead and game windows tend to behave better
it also handles updates to os as well as to steam so you don’t ever end up with an update that breaks steam, they’re always in sync
Mainly that it’s specifically calibrated for running games on Linux. I’ve tried the Steam Deck and it works pretty damn well out the box, compared to any other distros, so a PC version would be cool.
Aside from native proton, being able to do everything (easily) from the controller. It’s amazing how often you still need a mouse, or just the windows key, in windows :(
What I really appreciate is that it’s geared toward handhelds, but has a decent desktop experience and is powerful enough to be a nice mobile media/piracy box with a remote and a USB-C breakout dongle. You don’t even need to change the read-only filesystem if you use WireGuard VPN (this might take some legwork to generate the .conf files you need, depends on VPN provider) and a streaming/torrenting program that comes in flatpak.
EDIT: Also forgot, you can add a custom shortcut to your Steam Library and have (some) programs launch from the SteamOS frontend rather than desktop.
Mostly just Valve specific software implements to make the experience better. SteamOS has a really good suspend/resume sleep feature where you can just power off the Deck during a game like any other console, then when you hit the power button again it just lights back up to where you were in the game.
The Steam deck is very quick though. I just paused Like a Dragon Gaiden and it took about 2 seconds to go to sleep, left it sitting on the table for an hour or so while I did some errands. Picked it back up and hit thepower button and I was back on the pause menu in about another 2 seconds.
Steam Deck "sleep" is more like locking your phone than it is like putting a Windows PC to sleep
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Aktywne