I don't think any of their stuff doesn't work now. Even stuff like Halo with anticheat has been allowed to work via proton already.
This doesn't provide any promise that you can use gamepass or windows store games on Linux, and it doesn't provide any promise that they don't use anticheat in a restrictive way on Linux machines. They can trivially provide a bypass in the cloud environment that doesn't get shipped to end users.
Hopefully they don't do that, but this doesn't really mean a lot to individuals buying their games.
Unity well and truly thought everyone would just roll over on this, and oh boy, were they wrong. They didn’t at all learn from the Wizards of the Coast debacle at the beginning of the year.
WoTC, Reddit, Twitter, now unity. All made changes that their user base said they wouldn’t like, made the changes anyway, then lost a bunch of users. There must be some new business Guru telling everybody to piss off their customers
Unfortunately, they all seem to be working from the techno-feudalism playbook. It started when tech companies realized they could make more by making us rent software instead of selling it to us, and it’s spread.
Fucking Adobe was the first one to rent their suit of applications. It has been downhill from there, even smartphone apps want to rent access these days.
Pretty sure Elon was first to the key, and the rest have followed suit.
In seriousness, though, the primary driver is the VC tap slowing down significantly and forcing long term business strategy to lean much harder into its existing opportunities vs. planning for periodic cash infusion from investors. A lot of these businesses never had to set themselves up for success in the absence of that capital, and it’s led to bad practices and product strategies.
They might experiment with ads and subscription tiers, but the real focus is always on getting users. Look at YouTube, AFAIK, it’s still not profitable (or if it is, it’s barely profitable), and not for lack of trying over the past few years. Yeah, sites like Reddit and Twitter are cheaper to run, but there’s still a ton of overhead and ads aren’t as profitable there.
Now investors want to see a return, and it’s just not happening.
Those sites are still dead, given how low the population is. MySpace still exists, but it doesn’t really have an audience. And you can’t sell ads without an audience.
Seriously though, whilst the budget they can give to Godot and FNA is small compared to what other, bigger devs/publishers could give, I find their commitment remarkable and very much in-line with their goal of empowering developers and gamers alike
Considering FNA and Godot, $100K is gonna do wonders to both projects, specially with the additional $1K
They might even better afford to have developers working full-time at the engines, or deal with stuff like infrastructure, licensing, hosting and other costs
True! Considering Godot and FNA’s current size this is indeed going to catapult them to a different league, which I guess is what Re-Logic was setting out to do :P
Epic donated $250,000 in 2020, Kefir donated $120,000 in 2021. Godot Devs started W4 games and raised $8.5m of which their goal is to support Godots growth.
$100,000 is nice and will allow them to continue but it’s not “league changing” money or anything for them.
You‘re forgetting that this doesn‘t only come with money, but also free press, which is sometimes worth more as it would expose more people to Godot‘s existence, any of which may potentially donate :P
While true, I feel like games that work well on the Xbox Series S also work well on Steam Deck and when it comes to porting games to PC, those ones specifically are ported well.
All this power game developers have been getting, while great for creative endevours, has been either a waste of space or require outrageous specs just to perform normally. And some great games are bogged down by this while relying on upscaling methods to fill in the difference.
Either way, we’ve reached a point where more power and space isn’t the solution anymore to better games. Can only hope new tech gets better optimized.
This reminds me of a time when the blender fund was opened and at some point a bunch of companies jumped to donate money (steam, epic, google, AMD…) this was way back when 2.8 was getting in shape. Years later we saw the fruits of that labor with the 3.x series bringing nice improvements and refactors that were done over the course of many months and years
We probably won’t see a huge push in godot’s quality in what’s left of this year, but maybe in 2024 and later
Well, I like playing video games and this will affect the video games I like playing.
I'm not a game developer, but if Unity got everyone to roll over with that TOS change I'm sure that devs would use this as a new justification to increase costs for games or higher subscription fees for services like Gamepass.
It's important to be invested and informed in the things that matter to you.
Yeah, but through like two to three layers of abstraction. I like beer, but I don’t give a shit about the contractual details of malt distribution. Games are still gonna be made, this is just something for people to project their impotent rage at.
I like coffee, but I prefer to source my beans from places I can trust. People lost trust in Unity so they ain’t gonna use the engine anymore. Blown out of proportion? Yeah maybe, but I agree with the core concept
If the contractual details of malt distribution were going to affect the quality of beers you were getting then you absolutely would care. Unity’s pay scheme will lead to studios shutting down if there isn’t pushback. Studios switching to a different engine like Godot will make their games feel different for better or for worse and efforts to help fund these alternate engines will help tip the scale towards that being “for better”.
But most importantly of all, this is a company using toxic and predatory practices. Regardless of the industry (yes, malt distributors too), if we don’t push back against toxic business practices, then companies in many different industries will see avenues they can take advantage of to make extra money. These ideas don’t hang in isolation. If Unity’s scheme works, other businesses will learn from it. This is the reality of capitalism. Whatever methods can turn a profit without generating negative attention will be employed. It’s in the hands of consumers, competing businesses, and the government to keep those toxic practices in check. I mean, why the fuck are we on Lemmy? Ultimately Reddit’s actions are not going to affect the majority of users on their platform. Most of us came here to protest shitty business practices.
Well shit. Some people actually care about the people who produce whatever it is you consume. It’s crazy, I know. If the people who are growing the malt for my beer, or processing it, or delivering it, or whatever… are getting screwed over I would be equally concerned. But by all means, continue to be a consumer pacman just gobbling up whatever it is that falls in front of your face. That’s what the world is trying to mold you into anyway. Why fight it?
Oh please get over yourself. If you consume games you are already actively supporting the screwing over of people in like five different industries the world over. This price hike in one piece of software is just your “thing” to get righteously mad about this week.
This is not a great comparison tbh. Unity are not distributing a resource, you could rather compare them to a company building the motor for the car you use. Even as the end customer, their product is clearly perceivable and distinguishable from competitors’ products. You don’t need to build cars to have an opinion on Unity motors and the ethics of their business. And if they fuck every contractor over and abuse their power in the market to retroactively charge additional fees for every time someone starts a car with their motor in it, of course you would be directly hit with the consequences as a customer. Therefore, it is justified to not leave this discussion to car manufacturers, but to 1. let unity motors know that they can go fuck themselves and 2. to support more ethical motor manufacturers in the future by buying cars built with them.
Hi. I’m a brewer. You might not care about malt distribution but maybe you can understand that a lot of breweries run on small margins. If we suddenly have to pay a lot more for malt we will either have to raise our prices or go out of business. Raising prices might also drive us out of business because less people will be inclined to buy our beer. So it does affect you as a consumer, whether you care or not.
Except it becomes your problem if beer suddenly starts getting priced higher and higher and higher over time to the point where you can’t afford it anymore?
I read today that about half the games are made with unity, imagine if most of those pulled the games you purchased so it can’t be installed again. That is a huge hit to gaming.
Well they obviously won’t. It’s always the same with these things, they either come to terms, or the producers will pay up, or the reports are overblown or whatever. Just like reddit didn’t lose half its userbase after the API switch, or Youtube doesn’t crumble because everyone throws a fit when they add another commercial slot and swears to move to “pipetube” or whatever (lol). But thank god we’re all really really invested in something that is essentially corporate politics.
It’s not corporate politics if it’s going to have an effect on the end users. You’d be surprised at how big of an impact this will have, if they don’t backpedal this and cancel it entirely, and even if they do it could still an impact.
7 Days to Die, Escape from Tarkov, Wasteland 2, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Cities: Skylines, Dungeons 3, Cult of the Lamb, Endless Space 1 and 2, Outerwilds,
Yeah? Even ignoring how the results of this will determine how companies try this is the future (because they WILL), this shit is like classical Greek drama, watching someone fall because of their hubris.
And another 100k and 1k monthly to the FNA engine. I wasn't aware of that engine until today, but it looks like I have a couple of games that run on it.
A stand-up move from Re-Logic. You love to see it when the people at the helm of a lucrative publisher are industry stakeholders rather than the all-too-common quarterly cash extractor types[^1].
[^1]: Yes, I am all too aware that such seemingly altruistic gestures can be calculated PR moves in disguise. I certainly understand that this move will earn them (as a publisher) brownie points with various indie studios who may just so happen to be seeking publisher funding in the wake of an expensive mid-project engine switch. Such is the way of the world; sometimes a move can be simultaneously altruistic and good business.
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