Cities: Skylines II Found a Solution for High Rents: Get Rid of Landlords
For months, players have been complaining about the high rents in the city-building sim. This week, developer Colossal Order fixed the problem by doing something real cities can’t: removing landlords.
The rent is too damn high, even in video games. For months, players of Colossal Order’s 2023 city-building sim, Cities: Skylines II, have been battling with exorbitant housing costs. Subreddits filled with users frustrated that the cost of living was too high in their burgeoning metropolises and complained there was no way to fix it. This week, the developer finally announced a solution: tossing the game’s landlords to the curb.
“First of all, we removed the virtual landlord so a building’s upkeep is now paid equally by all renters,” the developer posted in a blog on the game’s Steam page. “Second, we changed the way rent is calculated.” Now, Colossal Order says, it will be based on a household’s income: “Even if they currently don’t have enough money in their balance to pay rent, they won’t complain and will instead spend less money on resource consumption.”
The rent problem in the city sim is almost a little too on the nose. Over the last few years real-world rents have skyrocketed—in some cases, rising faster than wages. In cities like New York, advocates and tenants alike are fighting against the fees making housing less and less affordable; in the UK, rent is almost 10 percent higher than it was a year ago. From Hawaii to Berlin the cost of living is exorbitant. Landlords aren’t always to blame, but for renters they’re often the easiest targets.
From this perspective, perhaps Cities’ simulator is too good. Prior to this week’s fix, players found themselves getting tripped up on some of the same problems government officials and city planners are facing. “For the love of god I can not fix high rent,” wrote one player in April. “Anything I do re-zone, de-zone, more jobs, less jobs, taxes high or low, wait time in game. Increased education, decreased education. City services does nothing. It seems anything I try does nothing.”
On the game’s subreddit, players have also criticised “how the game’s logic around ‘high rent’ contrasts reality,” with one player conceding that centralized locations with amenities will inevitably have higher land values. “But this game makes the assumption of a hyper-capitalist hellscape where all land is owned by speculative rent-seeking landlord classes who automatically make every effort to make people homeless over provisioning housing as it is needed,” the player continued. “In the real world, socialised housing can exist centrally.”
This is true. It exists in Vienna, which the New York Times last year dubbed “a renters’ utopia.” Except, in Vienna the landlord is the city itself (it owns about 220,000 apartments). In Cities: Skylines II, the devs just got rid of landlords completely.
The change in-game will have “a transition period as the simulation adapts to the changes,” and the developer “can’t make any guarantees” with how it will impact games with mods. Although the update aims to fix most of the problems at hand, that doesn’t mean players should never expect to see rent complaints again. When household incomes are too low to pay, tenants will be loud about it. “Only when their income is too low to be able to pay rent will they complain about ‘High Rent’ and look for cheaper housing or move out of the city.” Maybe it’s time players had a few in-game tenant groups of their own.
I mean, personally it just feels like there’s too many games. And consequently too many game studios.
On top of that, the cleft between the production value of a triple-A game and anything not that is gotten so big that the moment you aren’t some Call of Duty or Dragon Age or something, you might as well be a 1-person hobby project that as a result has no need to keep making money as it can trivially just go at whatever pace it wants. Add that it’s not uncommon to make the vast majority of your money via an unfinished game that you can then leave unfinished so you can reduce costs while making most of the money, and you got a recipe for disaster for any A or AA development studios wanting to scrape by.
You basically got to have your own little reliable niche, while also being lean enough so you can make games with extremely little cost per game. Hence everyone turning to mobile, where exactly that MO has become established.
It helps to make games people actually want. I know that seems obvious, but so many game studios just make games that are fine, but are not exactly inspired.
I don’t have numbers on this, but I’ll bet the percentages on mobile studios struggling financially are even worse.
Plus, there may be too many games, but I’ll put an asterisk on there that there are too many long games. When so much of it is designed to keep you coming back to this one particular game over and over again, there’s less room in your life for other games that you otherwise would have been willing to buy. I’ve got a list of 14 games that came out this year or have release dates this year that I’m interested in getting around to still, on top of the 8 games that I’ve already started or finished, plus another 8 that are expected to come out this year but don’t have release dates yet…and I’m still going to spend a few hundred hours across three different fighting games that I’ve been playing for years.
You basically got to have your own little reliable niche
I think one big problem is originally. So many indie games are essentially clones of the games that the developers happened to like. Zelda-likes, rogue-likes, greyscale puzzle platformers about depression. There are literally hundreds of examples of the first two of these, and not as many but still weirdly a lot of the third. But without something to make it stand out, casual players will come across the game and think “This looks neat, but basically the same as about 4 other games in my wishlist that are already very well reviewed. Maybe if it starts getting rave reviews, I’ll add it to the queue”.
Not to paint all indie games with one broad stroke, the most novel game ideas out there are also usually from indie studios. I don’t have numbers and I don’t know about longevity, but I bet that games with novel ideas get more initial downloads
I have Dorfromantik and play it occasionally. It is very relaxing, which can be nice. And very, very simple. So simple that I sort of hesitate to call it a game. There is some sort of scoring, depending on the mode you play. But I always pretty much ignored the scoring and didn't even want to try to understand how it worked. It is fun just to make your little town, forest, river, train track, etc. So it is more like model railroading to me than a videogame. But highly structured and guided model railroading.
That’s probably the better way to play that game. I kept worrying about placing the tile in the perfect place and took for ever on my turns and got stressed a lot which is probably exactly the opposite of what the devs intended. But idk my brain just sees achievements and takes the challenge and the achievements are tough and stressful challenges
Don’t buy this, the idea came from the board, Riccitiello has been selling his unity stock to the tune of 50k stocks over the last year, he knew the ship was sinking and was just coasting until the inevitable golden parachute.
The rot has set in deep, the issue isn’t him and firing him won’t fix anything.
Terra Nil is mentioned in the article but I must give it a recommendation, it’s very chill and restoring a wasteland or ruined city to a thriving ecosystem is a great counterpoint to building a bustling city.
I’ve not finished it yet due to limited gaming time but it’s clearly not that long. It feels like it should have some replayability but I don’t think it’s very unreasonably priced. Probably not ideal if you’re looking to squeeze every hour of entertainment out of your dollar though.
I’ve finished the game and yes, it’s price is too steep. I’d buy it half off. There’s some sort of replayability but it’s small and most might not do it. It’s still a fun game and highly recommend, but not for the full price.
I think they will lose some already established studios that can afford to retool and reskill on another engine. But I think the vast vast majority of current unity developers are breathing a sigh of relief that they /dont/ need to reskill or retool on another engine.
Unity is still on shaky ground, but they have been since they went public. They need revenue, and their big ad revenue plan got ruined by dastardly apple protecting users’ privacy. Couple that with an upstart and promising engine following in Blenders footsteps. In five years, they might have lost every hand they had left to play. Irregardless of the missteps of the last week.
Every indie dev I’m following on YouTube has basically made a “My thoughts on the situation”-type videos where they talk about how they’ve “won against Unity” despite Unity basically doing a textbook of the “Door in the face” technique to pass changes that would’ve been unpopular before this whole mess.
As soon as I heard Unity was back pedaling, I thought “there’s part 2 of the plan”
1: release abusive payment scheme to see just how much push back they get. If push back is minimal or losses are acceptable, end here and enjoy the profit.
2: if push back is strong, implement the actual payment policy that is still a significant increase, but less significant than the one above. And wait until the controversy blows over, which it will.
Yes, lots of developers will leave, lots of developers will choose a different engine for their new games, but there are a ton that will decide that it isn’t feasible to switch engines and plenty that will just eat the added cost. The thing that remains to be seen is just how much damage Unity has done in terms of new projects choosing other engines over theirs.
Claiming it’s “door in the face” is a little crazy here. If this is where they wanted to be, the “bait” changes could have been much much less bad than they were, and they still could’ve walked back to this.
Hell, they could have announced a 10% revenue split and it would’ve looked much better than what they pitched. And they could still walk back to 2.5% and looked like heroes. And it wouldn’t have lost them nearly as much trust. Nor made them look as bad.
If this was what they were trying to do, they’d have to have been even dumber to have made it this bad.
I’m more willing to bet they’re just fucking stupid. Or that a few people on the board had this as a fucking moronic idea, and the rest managed to take back control after it went totally sideways.
But claiming that it’s a door in the face requires them to be evil enough to do it, stupid enough to not realize they’re overdoing it, crazy enough to think it’d work, etc. It seems way too contrived.
Agreed, this whole Unity thing seemed more like they were surprised the peasants were revolting. Completely unaware of the danger of putting developer bills directly in to the hands of the end users, and not considering that a "trust me bro I counted how much you owe me" blackbox accounting method was too much to ask.
…which engine is the upstart and promising engine following in Blender’s footsteps? Do you mean what Unity was supposed to be until they ruined it, or did you forget to drop the name of the engine in question?
Yeah, very few studios would retool an existing project. The real question is whether any of them will be picking unity for their next project. And will young people getting into game dev choose Unity over others? I don’t expect to see a sharp decrease in the number of Unity projects in the next year, but rather a slow descent, while Godot picks up steam and Unreal further cements itself as the professional’s tool.
All the tutorials and learning resources are hyper unity focused. That’s why so many game devs pick it up. That’s why they cornered the less than AAA industry. A young person will choose unity over the others for the same reason as they did last year. The endless resources to teach.
It’s likely almost all developers will pick unity for the next project too. All their knowledge is in unity, not Godot or unreal. We have this problem in other software industries too, some languages and frameworks are just better, but you can’t use them in your project because there are only five people in the industry that know how to use it well.
Is it just me or does this article just run on and on without actually proving whatsoever that these jobs were lost to AI?
They even acknowledge that these layoffs are mainly due to over-hiring during the pandemic. I see no concrete proof that AI had anything to do with this. Just speculation.
Does anyone else agree? Perhaps I missed something?
They do say straight away that the concept and design departments are getting slashed, now with very few human artists, all who are forced to use AI in their workflow.
The same is happening in VFX and film to some extent, though I know that from personal acquaintances and not the article.
That’s it. The rest is conflated as you say. It is a very loooong article so I didn’t finish it. Perhaps I missed the real horrors at the end of it.
It’s not a good article. I was following along until, 5 minutes in, it suddenly decided to be detailing and describing exactly what AI and LLMs are. Like, long after showing some of the ways it’s hurting the industry, presumably to pad words.
For every shitty article pushing AI hype out there, there’s a shittt article pushing AI hate. Extremism generates clicks.
I thinks there are some nuggets of good information in there. The bits on first-hand accounts from former and current Activision employees, and on how it’s mostly the concept artists that are hurt is interesting. But you really have to wade through a mound of shit to get there, and I genuinely don’t have the patience to wade through the second half and see if there any more truth in this soft mound of turd that Wired called journalism.
But you really have to wade through a mound of shit to get there, and I genuinely don’t have the patience
I’ll ask ChatGPT to pull out the key takeaways for me so I can have an unreliable summary of a tedious article.
For anyone interested, here’s what I got. I vouch for none of it.
Sure, here are the key takeaways from the article:
Workplace Changes Post-Pandemic: Many companies are reevaluating their workplace practices and considering hybrid work models as a permanent option.
Employee Expectations: Workers are increasingly valuing flexibility, remote work options, and better work-life balance, influencing employers to adapt their policies.
Talent Attraction and Retention: Companies are focusing on how to attract and retain talent through flexible work arrangements and enhanced benefits.
Impact on Office Spaces: There’s a shift in how office spaces are used, with a trend towards creating collaborative and social spaces rather than traditional workstations.
Technology Integration: Businesses are investing in technology to support remote and hybrid work environments effectively.
These points highlight the evolving nature of work environments and the adjustments organizations are making to meet new expectations and technological advancements.
I’d recommend timberborn, but the intense droughts can be pretty stressful if you’re not careful. But you can totally turn down the difficulty to make them much less severe
wired.com
Ważne