Headline really feels like it's trying to imply unity is currently making a profit. They haven't been out of the red in a while. Businesses tend to die when they're bleeding money and there's no VC.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. There are a lot of accounting tricks to be constantly making losses but end up cash flow positive.
I don’t work or invest in Unity so I don’t have a great understanding of their metrics but companies I worked at would constantly capitalize new projects to add expenses in the future. You can structure sales deals so a new feature is added late in the contract. That pushes revenue out, but you can collect more cash early.
If unity didn’t do share buy backs this quarter, they would have a positive cash flow. Which points to they should be a profitable company but instead are using accounting tricks to post losses to lower tax bills.
Man, reading that old 2005 PC Gamer article really brings me back to older, better and happier times of gaming journalism too. It even mentions the bundled DVD with demos, mods and goodies you’d get each month. Those really were the days.
Sure but… I’m subscribed to Humble Monthly. So instead of getting a CD with a magazine containing a bunch of demos, I get a bunch of keys for full games. A lot of them pretty neat indies.
Starfield would be fine if there was a way to get from place to place without constant reloads. This is a limitation of the (ancient) engine the game is on, as I understand it.
The thing is, we already have games like No Man’s Sky which do this very well. Starfield may have been better received if it came out 15 years ago, but against modern space games, it just sucks.
That’s ignoring anything else wrong with the game, of course, and there is plenty. But I could get over a lot if it didn’t feel like I was playing a menu instead of flying a spaceship at every change of scenery.
Freelancer would have been fresher in memory 15 years ago, and that’s one that had seamless intra-system travel. Gameplay in Freelancer even flowed better than NMS for getting from orbit to orbit and having encounters or discoveries along the way. It just didn’t have the on-foot gameplay. I had the same problem with loading screens in Everspace 2. Killed the flow. Whoever tries to do this again is going to have to make sure transitions are minimal.
And that’s what I don’t get about Starfield, conceptually. With this project scope, you’re not competing well with NMS for ship-to-foot or orbit-to-surface transition, you’re not doing better than Freelancer–a 20+ year old game–for all the in-space stuff, and the procgen hamstrings you with all the “Bethesda magic” their worlds are known for. It’s like someone said “let’s do Daggerfall in space” and went rigid top-down design with it, retrofitting whatever they could along the way to make a functional game around the procgen.
I maintain that if they didn’t bother with the space thing, or abstracted it more to a “blip on a screen” type of topdown play like in mass effect, it would be a better game. They could have spent that time on the shooter gameplay loop not being shit.
This is a limitation of the (ancient) engine the game is on, as I understand it.
Old engine isn’t always bad. It is if you do like Todd and just slap more and more plugins and technology on top and call it a new engine, instead of fixing underlying issues or rewriting/updating old parts.
Which is why Starfield NPCs walk onto tables and become owls when the camera zooms into conversations, etc: It is the same code that is used in Skyrim and partly Oblivion. And Todd Howard doesn’t want devs doing silly things like fixing twenty year old code, he wants new and bigger.
Shame on Harvey Randall for platforming executive bullshit:
The problem, he puts it, is inflation. Which is an unerringly boring but also correct answer: “We live in contrasting times, where inflation is real and significant, but people expect games that are ever more ambitious and therefore expensive to develop to cost the same. It’s an impossible equation.”
They’re not responding to the expectations of the people; they’re responding to the expectations of their investors.
We’d get a pretty good game format OS—if the players could agree to come together—and then licence that out. Just like we do with Blu-ray, just like we do with the compact disk—and let people compete on content.
I know this is the most Lemmy comment it’s possible to make, but oh, if only there were an OS that already exists that you could run games on and that didn’t even need licencing out!
And I’m quick to forget that Witcher 3 had some nasty bugs at launch, too. I was stuck with at that damn giant in the ice cave for like a month before they fixed it.
I distinctly remember it taking at least until the first expansion for it to be considered one of the greats. GOTY Awards have never been a true tell for quality of a game in my opinion.
I think it took a month for it to be polished enough. I remember this because it was when cdpr spun its upcoming patches into a great pr move by calling them “free dlc”. I think it was like 11-12 weeks of continuous “dlc” and Reddit was eating that up and dunking on other devs while praising the game to be the best game of all time. I legitimately remember post on Reddit showing some glitches in the game and comments saying something like “the game is glitchy, but at least it’s just funny glitches and nothing game breaking”. Also, first expansion came out 5 months after the release, so it still tracks that the game was patched up somewhat quick.
I love 2077 but CDPR keeps on ruining my modded excellence with worthless patches. I wish they’d just give up and leave it to the many amazing modders to add content and fixes. 🤷♂️
Clearly you haven’t tried Mankind Divided, but hey there are 2 indie games in development called Peripeteia & DeepState if you don’t mind the retro-graphics
I play the deus ex games over and over and cyberpunk surpases them IMO.
DE does less with more, but 77 offers better combat, exploration, and better relationships. The stuff with megan reed in the first was ineffective, but the characters you meet in 77 jackie, panam, judy hit much more. you not only explore more characters, but yourself more than jenson ever does.
if you watch this small clip you’ll notice how deus ex rarely allows you to enter/exit important buildings via glass windows. in 77, while your cannot enter your apartments that way you can for many gig locations, but you might need the augs, or tech expertise to open a sliding window.
adding mods on PC that add hardcore, realistic hunger and sleep, vr and this clears the modern deus ex games. I do want Adam’s story resolved though
I’d argure each CDPR game improves on the one before including cyberpunk, but since it was a new franchise and perspective it was like creating witcher 1 all over again except… The combat offered more choice that the witcher games, better 3d level design, pretty solid endings (better than deus ex, and mass effect).
No, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Politics are good in games when done right, but they can also be nothing more than a distraction when the narrative has huge errors or lacks and depth in general.
It’s the concept of pushing real world politics in games that is the problem.
Sometimes they can overlap, but they needn’t to. Some things are just obviously pushing the agendas of developers, instead of making it feel like a legit part of the game universe.
Not just in games, but often times the point of the story’s fake politics is to be a parable for real politics. But that’s also the fun of it, even if you disagree with the story’s intended message.
Elves being racist towards dwarves is acceptable in a game, but white humans being racist towards hispanic humans is “pushing agendas”?
I fault Bioware for a lot of things, but failing to invent a fantasy equivalent of the concept of gender is not one of them. Not everything needs to be moved to an otherworldly analogy just to avoid hurting the feelings of bigots.
This isn’t right either. Inserting politics into anything serves that that up for discourse, and getting people discussing and thinking critically about a topic is a fantastic achievement for any medium that delves into the subject.
It’s when partisan messages about politics are inserted into a game that poses problems. Instead, video games should explore as many takes on an issue as capable in service to the story being told. Wow, it’s terrible that the horned people are aholes to the perfectly normal looking people, but how did that come to be? Is there any historical precedent where the shoe was on the other foot? I think of Jews and how 70 years ago they were facing extermination at the hands of Germans find themselves now in the position of the exterminator. How did that happen? That’s great material for exploring politics in games, to me.
if you believe company pr people, sure why not. mick had receipts. and I’ll believe a talking ferret before i give any company pr person any credence. they lie for a living.
The “article” reads like a drama. The dude has all original code and artwork and a different game engine. The screenshots show a very simplistic thing… you would sue someone because their stickfigures look too much like yours. If the game was copied that quickly there wasn’t much substance there to begin with imo.
I feel like it matters that he’s not selling it though… He liked the idea, added features he liked and is sharing what he made. He also mentions that it’s a clone. He sounds like a jerk, but like…
Ok, so imagine that you’re hungry and you come across a sandwich shop that has your favorite sandwich for $15, but the shop next door has the exact same sandwich for free. Which sandwich are you gonna eat?
No, wait, that’s not important. Most people are gonna eat the free sandwich, so even if you eat the $15 sandwich, you’re statistically irrelevant.
Yeah, maybe some people that weren’t hungry are gonna get a free sandwich, but the people who were hungry are also getting free sandwiches, which means that the guy trying to make a living selling $15 sandwiches is gonna have to close shop unless he starts lacing his sandwiches with cocaine.
Maybe I’m bad at itch.io but it looks like they are both free. Lemme offer another analogy.
Your and your friend have sandwhich parties and one day you compare notes. Your friend’s sandwich is really good, so you make it yourself and add some things. Now you really like the sandwich so you throw a sandwhcih party with the new sandwich and tell everyone it’s based on your friend’s sandwich.
Then your friend asks why you coppied his sandwich and you’re a jerk about.
I didn’t realize he wasn’t trying to sell his game, so I guess we need a different analogy.
Ok, imagine you and your brother are making a website where friends can post about their lives and keep up with each other during and after college. You’re pretty open with your project and then one day the one weird guy in your friend group launches your project without consulting you. The project takes off and makes billions of dollars. You sue the weirdo and he gives you some money, but you’re still pissed about it. Did you get Zucked?
Exactly. It feels more like making a snake clone with fun features. Second guy learned some stuff, but was a dick about it. Ultimately no one was hurt tho and this doesn’t seem like a big deal
I agree that it’s all original code and art, I would even say that he’s well within his right to post his clone since there doesn’t seem to be any copyright-able IP he could be infringing on.
But I wholly disagree with the notion that “if the game was copied that quickly there wasn’t much substance there to begin with”. There are limitless examples of world changing inventions that were trivial to build, but no one had thought to do it, and the same goes for art. The difficulty of making something isn’t what makes it genius, in fact it’s usually the simplicity of a genius idea that makes people go “damn, why didn’t I think of that, it’s so genius!”
It sounds like this guy accomplished little more than burning the few bridges he had, and dragging his own name through the mud. Just…not a smart move.
Not the person you initially asked, but a good one is Eli Whitney’s cotton gin that made separating the cotton fiber from the seeds much easier. It had traditionally been done by hand, which is very time consuming. Whitney’s invention greatly simplified the process and made cotton farming much more economically viable as an industry, ultimately leading to an extreme expansion in chattel slavery in the Southern United States and serving to solidify a planter aristocracy that would eventually seek to split with the United States in order to create its own slaveholding empire, triggering a Civil War that would decimate a large chunk of the country and kill three quarters of a million people.
A lot of stationary: paper clips, staples, pencils, sticky notes
A lot of toys: yoyo, slinky, hula hoop, Play-Doh, crayons
Packaging: cardboard box, plastic bottles, plastic bottles with the lid on the bottom, aluminum cans
You use inventions all the time that you could probably just build from home now that you know what they are. But there’s nothing that says you/we are already aware of every simple invention. Just think about all the simple, yet revolutionary ideas no one has thought of yet…and if you can do that, you’ll be a billionaire.
But games and art aren’t exactly like that. People train by copying great art, and code and games especially are iterative. It’s not like he took a super useful thing and made millions by claiming he invented it. He took a game, made a clone and added features, admitting it was a clone. Like snake and pong and brickbreaker.
No. I work as a game designer, and I can just straight up tell you that you are dead wrong. Ideas have both quality and value, and they interconnect to make the backbone of interactive experiences
Ideas have both quality and value, and they interconnect to make the backbone of interactive experiences
That’s it exactly. The way the ideas interconnect and the way they’re presented to the player is everything. That’s execution, that’s everything - the ideas are just what’s in your head
“It’s been brought to my attention that many people were not mollified by my previous apology, so let’s do it again. I’m sorry you people are too stupid and selfish to understand our first apology, and we want you to know that we will continue to make promises we can’t keep, we will continue to put shareholders above customers, and we will continue to justify our shitty behavior with bullshit semantics because we have learned nothing from this experience. Sincerely, Fuck You.”
pcgamer.com
Ważne