That works for consumers because they don’t have nothing to lose. Smaller devs will still gravitate towards Unity because the various fees don’t apply to them, but any big studio won’t touch it with a ten feet pole. Immagine putting the salaries of a full studio in the hands of a company that might decide out of the blue to ruin your business model, it’s a nightmare scenario for any CEO! More so when there are viable alternatives
This seems like a natural evolution of the market: a period of expansion followed by saturation and contraction. And there can be no doubt that we have hit a saturation point. There has been an absolute explosion in the number of games available, largely because platforms like Steam have simplified the logistics of distribution tremendously.
On the positive side for small developers, if you look at which games are rated “overwhelmingly positive” on Steam, the vast majority are not high-end graphic-intensive AAA games. There is a huge market for lighter, innovative games that can run on a cheap laptop. For every massive Cyberpunk type games in my collection, I have three Stardew Valley, Caves of Qud, and Undertale type games.
As I get older I find I just don’t even have the time for AAA games. Other than Elden Ring, I haven’t played a AAA game in goodness knows how long. 80-100 hours of playtime is basically a year-long commitment.
I love that there are so many indie games that offer a more compact experience and seem easier to put down and pick back up. Much more my speed these days.
I agree though that we’re at a point of oversaturation. Steam is full of shovelware and barely discernable clones of crafting-survival games. But I hope the studios doing interesting work are able to survive this period so we can continue to benefit from their creativity.
I play Rimworld and Factorio. Those are 200 hours per playthrough each and I do about 2 a year for them. My Steam Deck helps a lot with the latter though. The UI for the former unfortunately does not lend itself to the smaller screen even though the game plays well.
My local gamedev scene is already extremely cautious of any future development using Unity. This whole play really showed Unity can and will fuck with their users.
For clarity, my understanding is that landlords in the game basically live rent free. Some of the buildings spawn with low numbers of apartments, so if you had a building with two apartments, 1 would be a landlord and the other tenet would pay x2 the rent.
So effectively they’re changing from having local landlords to instead paying rent to a distant landlord.
He was already retiring. He planned on taking the fall for this obviously unpopular change, is getting his golden parachute for doing so - that way all the ire and hate will leave with him, and Unity manages to successfully move the overton window into bad changes, that somehow everyone is HAPPY about because they got the worse-changes first and they feel like “justice” has been had.
Reddit did the same fucking thing with Ellen Pao.
Introduced a whole bunch of bullshit, everyone got pissed at Ellen (an interim CEO) and then she took off and everyone was happy while being fed horse-shit because “justice” had been served…she was out of her…job that she was already intending on leaving. God, I hate that everyone are such suckers…
Honestly, does anyone really know about the CEO? I feel like she’s got a free ride. No one is going to say she tanked Twitter when Elon publicly announces everything stupid thing he wants done and says he picked it and he’s the brains behind it. If Twitter fails, it’s because Elon is a self absorbed moron, not because the CEO made a mistake. Which is kinda “doing it wrong” from the “we’ll hire some lady as CEO and blame her for the drop in revenue and engagement and then fire her for some cheap good will” idea that boards tend to go with.
Honestly I feel like if the CEO of Twitter made a mistake, it’d be an improvement over Elon’s changes.
If the changes were launched this way, being tied to a new version in 2024 then this would have been a perfectly fair approach, you could stick with 2022 / 23 LTS for your projects and only if you want ‘new’ features would you pick up 2024 LTS and agree to the new terms.
I’ve honestly not seen much difference between major versions e.g. 2021 - 2022 LTS, so unless these new versions come out with amazing new features, devs can still stick to these old reliable versions.
It’s much better overall but the way they’ve handled this has been shithouse
Part of me feels like it ended up similar to the situation Ark is in now where the player base is split. I’ve honestly not heard anything much about CS2 recently which is curious. It was a shame it was such a let down on release after how much love CS got.
That could mean that the already content players are still happy with their game, and the vocal haters don’t have enough to hate on that doesn’t sound petty.
I say that as someone who has not played CS2 and plays 1 heavily modded… So the fuck do I know
I do enjoy builders and management games, so I was hoping it had improved.
I’ve got my fingers crossed that they pull a No Man’s Sky and actually strive to make a playable game, but the longer it takes, the less likely it seems.
No, generative ai is a blanket term that covers them both. Lots of people are both forcefully opinionated about this topic, and clueless. Like the person you’re responding to
It’s times like this I wish we did things more like china. The one person who is actually responsible for this change is going to get a huge payout, but the same can’t be said for everyone else at the company whose lives are going to be completely thrown off from the incoming layoffs.
They have over 7,000 employees they need to lay people off anyway. The reason they’re not profitable is because they’ve massively overextended themselves. Why did they buy Wetter, utterly bizarre purchase choice.
If they had a sensible number of employees and didn’t buy random companies every 5 minutes they’d be profitable.
wired.com
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