I’ve been saying GaaS is horrible forever. (well okay I’ve been saying Anything as a Service sucks and I’ve been dying on this hill. The only GaaS shit I “own” I got for free). Now that I’ve got that hipster shit out of my system, can the games industry go back to releasing finished games please? I said please this time dammit.
The only time games were finished was back in the days when you couldnt patch bugs. And that was back when games were designed to be such a pain in the ass to play that you couldnt beat them during one rental period so youd have to rent them more than once to beat them. Or the arcade machines being coin operated.
Seems like a fair move to me. If Hollywood studios like Disney are able to use it for free right now to save time and money producing shows and movies why shouldn’t Epic get a fair fee for the product that enables those savings?
cool, then it’s 20% of your “games” revenue if you want to do that.
Epic generally let companies self report, when using the engine you have to agree to allowing them to audit if they think your self-reporting is incorrect but that’s not a very usual situation
Yup. That seems to be a part of their business model (doing anything Steam won’t do). The problem is when those calls by Valve are for issues that touch on ethics.
It’s why I won’t even install their launcher. I don’t care how many games are free on Epic. I can’t support that kind thing.
This year’s Unity story sums up my discontent with tech nicely. Impressive tech made by extremely talented people, botched by incompetent corporate parasites who care only about securing their millions.
Yeah a game engine saving a studio hundreds of thousands of dollars or more per episode on lighting, comp, rendering, and set building or travel costs to shoot on location is not representative of the license fee paid
Definitely not, they’re huge. They even purchased Weta digital recently (lord of the rings animation company). The’re going nowhere fast. They’re just eeking every little cent they can out of every little crevice of their offerings.
I know bevy and I know that it is certainly far behind Godot. It’s written in Rust though, so that gives it a lot of future potential, compared to Godot especially.
I can't wait to have steam charge me $1 every time I re-download a unity5 game. MS should follow suit and force you to pay $1 a pop for each directx install. Which would actually be more like $80 because it loads every patch and version in order on every install.
Fee per download for a game framework that packaged into the download that they have no part of distributing? I hope this is the most recent example of a successful tech company commiting suicide, it really is the best theme this year.
Evidently, all of Epic Games’ business had been “heavily funded by Fortnite” in the last six years, and different parts of the company became “disconnected” from their revenue streams.
Wait, so youre really telling me me Epic giving away a ton of free games on EGS every single month and free unreal engine marketplace assets to devs as well as regular epic megagrants was never a financially sustainable move?
Psssh. In other news, salt is salty. 🤭
I honestly believe Tim is not going to f–k this one up though, as a former one he clearly cares about the game dev community and as majority shareholder he isn’t needing to be driven by profits as much as publicly traded Unity head John Riccatello is.
Plus, fortnite is still a goddamn cash printer, just not printing as fast as they expected.
Western game dev certainly seems to be in a bad place. I think there are probably a few factors explaining what is happening now:
1: Overhiring during the pandemic. There was a lot of money flowing into tech during the earlier days of the pandemic, and companies were hiring and expanding like crazy. The economy settled, and now companies are laying people off left and right. Not even limited to game dev, as we saw this occur for Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and pretty much everywhere else in tech.
2: The knock-on effect. When big developers start to lay off staff in bulk, other companies may be incentivized to copy that behavior. It’s easier to justify firing a bunch of employees when everyone else is doing it, and then when you have a surplus of people in the market for a new job, you can selectively hire new talent for cheaper.
3: More attention in reporting. If it wasn’t a trend, a studio laying off 30 employees might not otherwise be newsworthy. A lot of studios actually make it an unfortunate common practice to lay off their contractors/temps right at the end of dev cycles so that they don’t get any sales bonuses. But there’s a lot of layoffs happening, so even smaller ones are generating buzz, and with a lot of workers’ rights/pro-union sentiments going around following the successful strikes in Hollywood and the automotive industry, people are starting to pay more attention when workers are being treated unfairly or being taken advantage of elsewhere.
Its also typical in game development, you dont need the ‘full team’ all the time, if your in preproduction you hardly need 100 programmers sitting around twiddling their thumbs
High interest rates make investing in risky projects like game development uninteresting. Why take risk if interest rates bring in high returns by themselves.
A lot of the games industry is backed by a constant flow of investment. Which has totally dried up. This company got 80 million in investment last year, this year can’t find more to keep paying the bills. Same is true for most of the announcements.
Then there is large companies like Microsoft, those layoffs are purely about paying shareholders extea money.
gamedeveloper.com
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