Don’t worry, the games industry has you covered on that now. They just release games that are broken or half-finished without the day 1 patch, but then allowing it to update removes all of the licensed content.
u keep everything you bought on rock band it has been that way since rock band 3 shut down. even when metallica was pulled from the stores absolutely nobody lost the metallica songs they had bought
Because who can afford a new gaming rig/system AND games to play on it?
I live in a developing country, I’m not either rich or poor and I have a decent gaming rig (i5-10400 and RX 6600)
For PC stuff you just need to know what to get and where would be the best place to get it (aka where is it cheaper) because here in Costa Rica (where I live) people will try to scam you into getting a 6600 XT for like $900 (US dollars, even though our currency is colones)
As for games you can either hop on the ship and sail or wait until the next major Steam sale. For games I’d recommend Steam but I feel MS Store/Xbox PC is fine as well
people will try to scam you into getting a 6600 XT for like $900
Try to search on every website that sells PC. Amazon, eBay, <I don’t know??>, etc… They sell “gaming” PC for like 1000$ with a old CPU (like Intel 7/8000) and a 1660
You don’t have to exclusively play new big-budget games with high spec requirements, an old laptop will play decades of old PC games as well as plenty of newer indies, or you can just go on eBay and buy someone’s last-generation console along with all their controllers and games for the cost of a brand-new game or two!
Finally an article that goes beyond the drama and misinformation. It is not just about the new fee, which realistically is nothing compared to what you would owe epic for the same level of success.
What sucks is the shadiness and the deceptive nature of it all. I am sure the executives felt really clever and thought it would almost fly under the radar After all, they managed to spin this as not-a-royalty after years of boasting that Unity wouldn’t have any.
The new changes are essentially this :
You’re forced into going with the pro or enterprise license past a certain revenue (which was sort of a thing already).
You’re forced into serving Unity ads, or else you get charged a some royalties, which realistically should still be less than what UE charges.
You’re forced retroactively into it, as they deleted the old TOS behind the scenes.
They’re definitely not being upfront about their intentions, and due to their complete aversion to mentionning the word royalties, they managed to deceptively make up a lie that sounds worst than the actual truth. Even though this is a move targetted at multi-mullion dollars productions, actual students and hobbyist are now worried about being charged per user downloads, which is not happening.
It is sad to see, Unity went from being owned and operated by people who truely cared. I worked there for a number of years and most leaders and employees truely believed they were a force of good in this otherwise shitty world. It is crazy how much the company changed in just a number of years/months. It sucks, and whoever ended up in charge robbed both the employees and the users of something great.
John was a smooth talker, and even as the company was turning corporate and seemingly stepping on old values, he was very good at making sensible arguments and justifying the company transformation. I can’t help but feel deceived now. Ultimately I left the company because I disagreed with so many decisions. Virtually my entire backlog was stuff I disagreed with and I just couldn’t justify waking up in the morning. We’re long past the “Users first” slogan which made Unity so popular with indies.
You’re leaving out what’s really the key problem with the new pricing, which is that it is per install. It’s an unlikely but very possible scenario that a developer could lose money (inexpensive game with an abnormally high number of reinstalls).
The pricing incentivizes “live service” or ad-supported games that constantly extract revenue from users rather than “buy once” games.
Their pricing is based on "trust me bro" currently, since they don't have details on how it will work. They say it was installed i number of times, therefore you owe them j. No need for a bot farm when they can just lie, since we have no way to verify their numbers.
Fair enough, this is an atrocious billing system, but I I firmly believe that this is simply a gimmick to get around charging royalties without calling it so. Maybe I am biased, but the people working at Unity are not monsters, and I believe the employee who posted publicly and stated that the people implementing this system made sure that it would be under-reporting installs is speaking the truth. I think there is this misconception that Unity is simply gonna fire an event for every install and charge you directly for each report, but there is no way that this will be this simple. In all likelihood they will use this to keep a list of the popular games, and the actual fee will be based on heuristics like estimated sales and whatever other analytics and ads generated by the game clients. Sure it is a “trust me bro” system, yes it’s bad, yes it could be abused, I think it is fair to call it out and ask for a more transparent system, but deep down I just don’t believe that Unity is evil and did this to abuse the developers.
In all likelihood THEY will be the one forced to under charge, and really they’re doing this to force you into their ecosystem so it is likely that they will reach out the studios individually before incurring the fees. The whole thing is worded in a way that past a certain level of success, they will charge you royalties unless you play ball with them and serve ads and buy in other services. I would not blame anyone for calling it scummy, but I think it is important to understand their motives, they want to force your hand to use whatever they’re selling. The installation fee is just a smoke screen, they have nothing to gain bankrupting studios by making up numbers. Of course, this is just my own take. I think I have a fairly good understanding of how they operate, but I could be wrong.
thank God for their inconvenient way of installing and using of the engine itself, if I didn’t have a hard time back then I wouldn’t have switched to Godot 🙏🙏🙏
The fact that MS spent an entire decade fumbling the ball, and when it finally got it right and released a game people actually liked, immediately shut down the studio and sold the IP, is still highly amusing to me.
You can’t convince me that it wasn’t an inside job from someone who either secretly works for the competition, or who actively hates MS and wants it to fail.
I read that by the time MS acquired Tango and Hi-Fi Rush was released, most of the developers and management had already quit, so MS basically only owned the IP anyway. Tango allegedly had nothing in the pipeline, and the few people who were left were working on nothing, and there were no leads to start the process of developing a new game.
Not sure how true it is, but in that case it would make some sense to just shut down the studio, because the alternative would be essentially starting a studio from scratch.
Of course, this begs the question of why all these developers left. I can speak from experience a bit here. When it was announced that a small company I worked for was acquired by a mega corporation, everyone quit because the company we were being acquired by had a reputation of being a horrible, toxic workplace. This is obviously just speculation, but I could see something similar happening here.
MS usually buys competition to erase it so there’s nothing too surprising about this. And no, Bethesda and Blizzard won’t be treated very differently in the long run. That is after every material of everything the studios have ever worked on is fed into datasets to train AI for who knows what.
x as a service has always been a net negative for the consumer, and a net positive for the seller.
It strips them away from responsibility, because you can sell incomplete dogshit under a promise of future patches, or push something out for a price, and then continue raising the price, as you pump out more stuff into the system.
In the case of games specifically, we’ve all seen the typical outcomes. Low effort slop, with a flood of “micro” transactions at a later date, or complete abandonment
This doesn’t even touch on the fact that nobody gets to own anything anymore. I am guilty of it with Steam myself, but I also recognize the inherent flaw with the model.
Live service is a whole 'nother level above DRM though. You don’t even get to say you purchased a license with a live service game. You can’t install them and run them after the servers shut down. They don’t want us to own things, just keep paying them forever.
This is absolutely mad vendor lock in. I’m doing the maths and if you create the next flappy bird and it goes viral and gets 50 million downloads in a month, you’d owe unity $10 million dollars before you’d even received your first monetization cheque (you did launch with a full monetization plan, right? right? oh.)
edit: i forgot they had moneitzation limits too, so no - this situation wouldn’t quite happen until they earned $200,000 in revenue. Though the potential to go viral and find yourself underwater because of the massive unity bill in comparison to your income is still a possibility
I've been with a company that when things were down, they didn't layoff anyone but just stopped hiring and higher management took pay cuts. I've also been with a company that would do a round of layoffs almost every time they were in the red. Guess which company I enjoyed working for more and had more positive morale overall.
It’s also a saturated market because of the low barrier of entry, without an advertising budget you are taking a gamble no matter how good the gameplay is.
A whale is someone that spends a tremendous amount of money on mobile games. These are the people most games pander to or otherwise design themselves around
Low barrier to entry if you’re not counting visibility. Yeah you can publish to the stores, but nobody will see it unless you are ordained by the gods at Apple and Google, or you buy eyeballs (and have the capital to do so.)
Impossible. Can’t go after an entire firm. (I joke; but Blizzard is so fucking rotten to the core, even if I’d rather they not have been bought out by Microsoft)
It’s not the building that the problem, it’s the transporting the guillotine, the public event permits, hiring security, finding a suitable venue, organising biohazard cleanup, not to mention ticket master fees.
And that’s all before you need to actually pry your chosen billionaire out of their secure vehicles or offices or residences and invite them to participate.
I agree, but he technically was an executive that got what was coming to them, or at least received something close to a just punishment. If they all got what he got we might have less assholes ruining everything for profit
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