I heard from a friend that, allegedly, Riccitiello sold a load of his shares in Unity last week, almost like he knew those shares would be worth less this week… No idea if there’s any truth to it. You know how rumours can be.
I’m starting a game design degree on Monday, and I know Unity is on the syllabus (though not until later in the year). Guess it’ll be interesting to start the term with a conversation about how useful knowledge of Unity will be long term. Since the majority of graduates from this university go into or start indie studios (due to geography), how Unity treat smaller developers is definitely going to be relevant.
I don't quite get how the changes are so bad for indies. You must have both $200k revenue and 200k installs before the fee starts ticking on the excess installs. Do indies really sell that kind of numbers?
I can see how the flood of ad-based mobile F2P games are hit, but I don't feel sorry for those that run that kind of model.
Some do and can you risk to be one of them if Unity takes that much after the first week?
Terraria, a game that got fresh content for years, meaning people were each update reinstalling the game, installing it on multiple platforms etc.
During its first week of release, the game sold over 200,000 copies. That number increased to 12 million by June 2015. As of the end of 2020, the game has sold over 35 million copies worldwide. Read more: tuko.co.ke/421556-top-20-selling-indie-games-time…
The reality is that it’s a lot of fuss for a game development company to switch engines but for an experienced individual developer it’s not a huge deal to switch engines. If you learn game development and design today using Unity then 100% of the game design knowledge is exactly transferable and 80-99% of the game development knowledge (depending on exactly what you’re doing) will transfer to Unreal or Godot or whatever else you might need to use later.
It’s like a musician switching from one audio production suite to another. The musical theory stays the same and while the exact details of how to make each bit of software do stuff is different, the actual stuff you’re making it do is broadly the same.
Yeah, not surprised. Industry consolidation sucks in general, but Embracer specifically always felt like it was way overextending. Their bizarre acquisition spree was always going to end badly.
Curious what about this new publication makes you label it a tabloid? Based on the description so far it doesn’t sound sensationalist at all.
You’ll find reviews, criticism, and opinion stories, as well as articles about how games are made and marketed. You’ll get investigative reporting on the people who make games in an era when “DEI” is on the wane. You’ll read historical deep dives on the games and creators that paved the way, especially those that didn’t get due credit way back then.
Established by two former tabloid editor. They can prove me wrong, and i will stand corrected, but then it’s such a USA centric site, i’m not holding my breath.
The layoffs also hit Twitch which has had a notorious bot problem for years. So now they’re going to use bots to fight bots?
Honestly the best thing Amazon could do is just shut down twitch completely. It’s become a dumpster fire of its former self. It used to be about people playing games and now it’s about which streamer is sexually assaulting which other streamer and dudes putting shock collars on dogs.
Yep, frankly I am amazed Twitch still exists at this point, given how server demanding it is, and how it is s constsnt clusterfuck of incompetent messaging that regularly produces quite bad PR.
I very much would not be surprised if they went to some kind of ‘yeah you have to pay a monthly subscription to watch more than 5ish hours of streams in a month, and you also watch ads’ kind of model.
With all the news coming out the past couple days about The Veilguard, I’m starting to piece together a suspicion that Bioware is picking things back up where they last had decent ideas: early to mid 2010s.
I think Veilguard will feel like a stuck-in-time successor to Inquisition, stale by that period’s standards and grossly outdated by today’s, especially in the wake of Larian’s enormous success reinvigorating the kind of game Bioware has forgotten how to make.
I’ve been a fan of Dragon Age since Origins and this game looks like another step towards the kind of simplified gameplay that every game has made. It’s disappointing that the series has gone from an RPG to a generic 3rd person action adventure game, but given the gradual evolution of the other games it’s not really surprising.
kind of game Bioware has forgotten how to make.
Such a nice way to sum it up. You would think that the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 would show publishers that there is a (large) market for actual RPGs, but that’s maybe too much to hope for.
That is what their marketing wants you to think, the reality is going to be its just another soulless shallow designed-by-committee AAA rpg. Nothing ive seen so much has led me to believe otherwise and they have quite a streak of bad games to break.
“These charges consist of approximately $50 million to $65 million associated with office space reductions, approximately $40 million to $55 million related to employee severance and employee-related costs, and $35 million to $45 million in costs associated with licensor commitments,” reads the filing.
The severance I get, but why is closing offices costing them so much. And what are “ licensor commitments?”
It is dystopian really the nature of shuffling hundreds or thousands of people to a building, into a cubicle, in front of a computer for 8 hours a day.
cause commercial rental is a commitment, if you can’t find another company to take over your lease, chances are you have to pay the majority of left over amount + penalty + restoration. Licensor commitments are similar but probably on tech/software licensing, ie. server rentals, Maya/Speedtree licensing agreement for the site, whatever cloud service they use for backup and share stuff, etc. Those at bigger scale aren’t paid year to year like your regular indie studio just subscribe to Adobe/Autodesk for app uses per seat.
Every big UK company I have worked for doesn't own its building. They will typically agree to rent a building for 5-20 years at a fixed rate (longer times if its being purpose built for them) .
So I would expect this is paying out the rest of the rental agreements for a building to escape the building lease.
It is to do with financial reporting and the way asset and operational costs are reported.
My favorite example of this is Tribes 1, players found if you tap jump fast while going down a hill, they could “ski” down and gain a lot of momentum. The dev’s hadn’t intended this to be the case, but players loved it, and the dev’s thought it was cool so they left it in. Now skiing is just considered a primary trait of Tribes games.
the CEO of nintendo cut his own pay in half twice so that he wouldn’t have to fire anyone. I think multiple CEOs of nintendo have done that actually…not so sure about the american ones.
Also the nintendo switch is the only console at the moment where you actually own the games you buy.
As if it'd be better run by private interests in the US 😂
The letter was sent on January 22 and suggests the debt-financed $55 billion acquisition, which will purportedly result in PIF holding a 93.4 percent stake in the Battlefield and Apex Legends publisher, will incentive layoffs, offshoring, studio closures, and other cost-cutting measures.
"incentive"
Also, isn't this what yanks have been doing for decades? Don't seppo businesses regularly fire a bunch of employees before the end of the financial year to have "record-breaking fourth quarter" and then hire back a bunch of people? Painting the Saudis as worse capitalists than the USAians is just hilarious
Their concern isn’t that people are getting laid off but that they’ll be laid off here and replaced with people abroad; and the executives benefiting from the cost-cutting are no longer Americans in this case.
I think it's really only the latter: if rich yanks benefit = good, if non-yanks benefit = bad. They don't give two shits about USAians non in the C-suite being laid off. They haven't since the beginning and won't start now.
sauds are worse capitalists, but only in the sense that they regularly waste shitloads of $ on stupid shit in a last dotch effort to diversify themselves for the inevitable drying up of oil.
the US has been intertwining themselves with the UAE for decades as a part of their divide and conquer plan for the ME (which israel is a key part). the West does not want a unified ME, propping up the greedy predictable capitalist Sauds acts as easy source of power projection to keep rest of the area from unifying
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