Just more monopolies coming I’d wager. Disney is supposedly looking at buying EA. Microsoft and Sony have shown they both would rather buy companies and consolidate studios over how it was before.
As others have said it’ll be not good for the gamer/consumer. Nor will it be good for people working in the industry.
This is the correct answer. The same is playing out in so many other industries; the big players don’t bother innovating anymore, it’s easier to make more money by buying out their smaller competitors and essentially killing them by subsuming them.
Consumers have fewer and fewer real options for anything, everything costs more and more (the majority of current inflation is actually driven by execs realizing they can just raise prices and blame it on the “economy”), and the quality of everything is going down because why bother with quality when the goal is to make more money?
“But the free markets will solve this! A company making a better product will win over consumers!”, the market liberal says. “Oh, a competitor! We can’t have that, let’s buy them and make sure they can’t affect our bottom line” says the megacorp, and before you know it the “superior option” will have disappeared because producing it was 15% more expensive than producing shit.
The big players don't bother innovating anymore, which is why they don't see any other option except to sell to someone bigger than them. Meanwhile, publishers that used to be small are getting much larger by offering the breadth of games that the biggest publishers haven't for 20 years. To think that things can only get worse is to ignore what's happening right in front of us.
That assumes Phil Spencer’s daddy wants to spend more cloud-earned cash on toys that nobody will use. While Microsoft is undoubtedly the bigger company, Sony’s revenue is much more dependant on Playstation.
How else do you want to handle a CEO owning stock? From his perspective: He sees hard times coming for Unity so he sells his stock. At the same time he tries to turn the situation around, uncertain if he will succeed.
And AFAIK the trades are public so everyone would know that the CEO is sceptical about the company’s future. There are obviously problems with the ToS changes but is the stock selling really all that relevant in this discussion?
The selling was planned a long time ago right? I think the main problem here is a CEO owning stock in the first place. If he owns stock he will obviously sell it when he no longer thinks it’s a good investment. And if it’s planned some time ahead it’s not exactly inside knowledge. At least I don’t think that this is a bad case of insider trading.
Jeff is ex (old) Gamespot, ex Giantbomb, and the guy who got fired from Gamespot due to external pressure from Eidos after he gave Kane and Lynch a 6 out of 10.
More likely that they know he's probably not going to give it a glowing review, especially after Fallout 4, so he didn't get one. This is something many publishers have historically done. It keeps reviews higher at launch so that people looking at reviews or metacritic scores see more positive information than after the dust settles.
I mean, if you phrase it that way, sure. Just a dude in his spare room. But then again, aside from the fact that he makes probably 20 000 dollar a month alone from his Patreon, almost everyone who is interested in video games knows this man’s name for way over a decade. More like two decades, actually. And while he certainly hasn’t anywhere near the same visibility as he had at Gamespot or Giantbomb, way more of the people who do follow him, actually pay him money directly. Reach alone isn’t what’s important these days. And yet, Jeff still has the potential to influence a lot of people who do not directly give him money. He also has a podcast, he streams and has 170k follower on Twitter. And if he has a very contrarian take on something, it will get noticed. Maybe not as much as 15 years ago but still noticed.
A bit of a ramble, sorry! I guess it triggered some memories of me listening to Giantbomb with him, Ryan, Vinnie, Alex and Brad while going to work or cleaning the house. Bombcast was pretty much the first podcast I regularly listened to.
Yeah, Ive followed Jeff for a long time and he's absolutely not afraid to say a game isn't good, and his tastes can be fickle and particular, if I were a publisher cynically selecting who to send advance codes to to manufacture a good score he would not be one of them.
As a consumer, I love him because he has integrity, likes what he likes, and says what he means, and I even can tell sometimes when he dislikes a game that I'd still like.
DnD 5e had a license for use that allowed 3rd party companies to make stuff for the game following specific rules, and they did so which of course helped with increasing the popularity of the brand. This license existed due to the backlash from players and 3rd party developers who did not like the 4e licensing which was ridiculously restrictive.
Then WotC/Hasbro decided they wanted more control and put out a draconian revision and also tried to invalidate the existing license using questionable legal logic that wouldn't stand up in court, but would be cost prohibitive for the 3rd party companies to fight in court. This revision also included licensing costs that would drive 3rd party companies out of business. Then they did a revision that tried to make creating a virtual tabletop that could be used with DnD a violation to try and corner the market for WotC's completely non-existent virtual tabletop.
Basically they tried to stop doing the thing they had in place for like a decade to milk an unrealistically high amount of money out of companies that were working with them and tried to force this on extremely short notice. So same thing as reddit and now Unity are doing.
Expect the next version of DnD to be a walled garden again like 4e was and most likely fade out of the public view again.
The true irony here is that TSR went bankrupt because they tried to mess with the community content licenses that were basically gentleman’s agreements at the time, allowing WotC to purchase D&D in the first place with 3rd edition. I hope they sell the property to someone that understands how to run that golden goose, without expecting unlimited growth.
Unity is mad that mobile game companies acquire millions of users in a few months as they transition from soft launch to global, and then sell their companies for millions - if not billions - of dollars.
They want a cut of that pie, and in true unity fashion, they chose the most inept way of doing that.
If you have developers of games like Cult of the Lamb feeling scared, you did it wrong.
You protect your indies, you protect the people making art with your product. The people who invested 3 million and are making billions in the mobile ads game? That’s your target.
How they could be this inept is astounding…
Also, I’ll echo the other commenter’s statement in saying the article is very well written. They just weren’t able to really answer the “why” portion very well. John Riccitiello wasn’t wrong when he said this plan wasn’t designed to affect 90% of their customers - but it also doesn’t mention how that remaining 10% makes more than that 90% combined.
They’re wet go, John Riccitiello! That’s why I recognized that assholes smirk in the thumbnail. He used to be president of EA. No surprise he’s brought those scummy tactics over to unity.
Not me - the moment when buying a game outright is no longer an option is the moment when I stop paying for video games. I already have a large library on Steam (1,700+), GoG (400+), and I’m not planning on buying any Playstation or Xbox products. I’ve never paid for Xbox game pass, or PS plus, nor do I plan to. They can scheme all day long, hike the prices every week, I already buy games only if they’re on a really deep discount or in a bundle. Never paid more than 30 bucks for a game, and I could count on one of my hands how many I paid more than 20 bucks for.
I do, of course, realize that I’m in the minority, but hopefully more people will realize how big of a scam these subscription services are.
I don’t know, I don’t think the PS Plus one is a scam. I subscribed to the mid tier one when it was cheaper for a whole year than to buy a game I wanted to play that was included with it. I’ve played a good half dozen to dozen games in the year I’ve had it. I feel like I’ve definitely got my money’s worth out of it.
I was mostly referring to the last part of the article where the author explains the entire long-term plan behind the subscription services - first they offer a large variety of games for a low price, then they squeeze the customers for every single penny after they’ve cornered the market.
See how Netflix work out their hike etc? I don’t think it would continue to work in their favor to meet the profit/sub count projection to make their stocker holder happy.
the moment when buying a game outright is no longer an option is the moment when I stop paying for video games.
That moment will not come. That would mean that every single indie developer had come under the umbrella of such subscription services and not one bigger actor would want to try to differentiate from the competition.
Gamepass isn’t a scam right now in my view. I’m able to get 50 day passes for 7 bucks right now. Once gamepass starts being more expensive than buying the games I want I’ll just go back to doing that.
Once game pass starts being more expensive than buying the games I want, I'll just go back to doing that
You may not have that option. The business model here is to burn cash, get consumers used to gamepass, then get games onto gamepass exclusively (likely in exchange for higher payouts from the service). Once we are at that point, which may be years away, prices will rise and there won't be another avenue to play most games.
This is the model right now for shows, and some movies, they are produced for streaming services and are only available on those services.
Most games already don't get physical releases. All that needs to happen to eliminate choice is that gamepass makes publishers a better offer than Steam - then there isn't a digital release either.
I think that kind of action is what would get regulators on Microsoft’s back which is why they started selling games on third-party platforms like Steam. Could be wrong though.
They are playing with fire… most games don’t require computer level graphics/cpu power. If they aren’t careful they will lose their shirt to mobile gaming and console gaming will turn into an unpopular niche thing of the past.
There were several deviations from System Shock 2 along the way. And even if this one plays like that, I hope they nail the story stuff they’re going for. Previews have seemed impressed.
I’d hardly count something like a simple Solitaire clone app that could be otherwise played for free as a full game release… In terms of actual games, I’d much rather support mobile ports that can be bought for a one time price tag than those that are locked behind a subscription in perpetuity.
It sounds like they’ve got some plans, though I’m not sure there’s anything I’d actually be interested in:
“And this is an area that we’ve been able to move in quickly in a particular space, which is interactive narrative games. These are easier to build. And we place those in a narrative hub that we call Netflix Stories.”
“I think the idea of being able to take a show and give the superfan a place to be in between seasons and even beyond that, to be able to use the game platform to introduce new characters and new storylines or new plot twist events […] I’m really excited to see where this goes.”
I wish those things were separate subscriptions though. Now you are paying for Netflix being a movie/series streaming platform, a flmstudio, a game developer and publisher in one subscription. I just need a subscription for the first thing.
Yes, i’m sure it’s a lot of work to move game engines but time and time again it’s the same story. Closed source anything is free until the easy money has been sucked up so why even bother with anything closed source?
Sooner society stops feeding the greed, hopefully the sooner we get back to a sustainable society!
Part of the problem are the stockholders who expect the shares to go up in price every time. If it starts dipping down enough a huge portion of them will pull their shares and bankrupt the company. This causes companies to mostly think in the short term cause it’s better to make a bit more money than be bankrupt.
Because it’s a tool, game development is a huge investment, there’s really not many alternatives, and if you think Godot is an alternative, you have zero gamedev experience. You have to be straight up ignorant to believe that completely unrelated game developers are somehow supporting this, and have zero basis in reality to think they can swap engines on the drop of a hat.
I don’t think anybody claimed they could do it “at the drop of a hat”. They’re saying it would be financially beneficial for these game developers to take the financial hit to jump ship from Unity because people will be less likely to buy Unity games
That’s not any less detached from reality. Like I said, you have no familiarity with these tools if you think it’s a simple choice to just not go with Unity. It’s also rarely obvious what engine a game is actually made in unless it’s a smaller indie game that still has the Unity stuff left in. Also if you think gamers actually have the ability to boycott games, then lol.
I’m not going to give any personal information about myself, but you are WAY off with your assumption about my knowledge regarding both the development side and business side of these kind of choices. It’s what I do
I don’t need to ask your personal info, I just need to ask how many actual medium+ budget (100k+) projects do you seen being worked on/ported into Godot?
This is precisely my point, and why the OC resorted to ad hominem almost out of the gate is beyond me. That said, I do have a bit of experience in game development, and I think the short term gains from Unity would be outweighed by the losses incurred through negative PR and Unity’s stunts.
Uh huh, Godot doesn’t have any texture/mesh/animation/audio streaming, has no access to low level rendering structures, lacks significant optimizations, lacks swarm logic, complete lack of mature tools, no paid asset/extension store, miles behind shader editing and vfx effects. Which part of these are wrong, and do you understand why these things are required for big games?
I didn’t say it was feature parity with Unity, 90% of Unity games don’t require most of the features Unity has that Godot lacks.
Streaming is not the only solution to efficiently loading assets
The VFX is not lacking from Unity in anyway other than not having Unity’s specific tools for organizing them, the Shader and VFX graph. It lacks access to the stencil buffer right now, but not much else. You can still make any shader in Godot that you can make in Unity.
W4 is opening a dedicated paid store.
Godot can run native C++, making it more optimized than Unity in several areas. DOTS can out do it in some areas, but again native C++ is still faster.
You have direct access to Godot’s render pipeline code so no idea what you mean by ‘low level’, no idea how’d you get lower level than direct access to the render pipeline itself.
Streaming is required for a lot of use cases, it’s probably the most important of everything I listed. Godot is miles behind even Unity in fidelity still. “Opening a paid store” still means it currently does not exist and also means there’s zero assets for actual purchase. Running native c++ has literally nothing to do with Engine optimization lol. That’s also just false, you don’t have access to the rendering server even from gdextension.
This isn’t coming from me btw, this is coming from the literal creator of Godot, so you’re disagreeing with him here. Really shows you how deep into the circlejerk we are here lol. godotengine.org/…/whats-missing-in-godot-for-aaa/
edit: nice the guy who calls me cringe blocks me after replying so he can’t be called out for being wrong. Maybe don’t be so argumentative when you reply and don’t know what you’re talking about. How toxic.
Edit, I didn’t block him, he’s being a troll I guess.
Firstly, I can tell you only skimmed that and haven’t actually read it because it contradicts multiple points you made in this and the previous comment. Like, actually read it before trying to use it as a source.
“Everyone who disagrees with me is circle jerking”
Lol, okay buddy. You’re a tad bit cringe
Like, “As such, this means that low level access to all the rendering server structures needs to be exposed via GDExtension.” Says it right there, in the page you linked. “Often developers need to implement rendering techniques, post processing effects, etc. that don’t come bundled with the engine.” You have to do some of it yourself, which means ITS VIABLE. Again, not on parity, but viable. Again, not feature complete, not as polished, but viable.
And on streaming “Of the above, most are relatively straightforward to implement”, meaning that users can already do this, the article even mentions how much of the ground work is just handed to you. I’m not arguing the point on if this should be fully implemented by the dev team to come fully prepackaged, im simply telling you that you’re wrong about godot not being viable. It should come by default, but it’s still easy to do. Again, if your point is it should come default, I agree with that.
I can tell you’re just being argumentive for the sake of it, so I’m just going to ignore you from here on out. You aren’t adding anything constructive and you’re not capable of reading something YOU linked, so you’re not worth the time or effort.
I remember when I first started using Unity years and years ago and people like you would just talk shit about it non stop. I remember when I started using blender in middle school and people like you should just talk shit about it.
As someone who’s using Godot and giting gud at it, I hope you enjoy it. For programming, you can go with either its GDScript (python) or C#, so Unity veterans shouldn’t have much trouble.
ZP ran for a very long time. At this point I am not even mad that it ends.
someone go check what are some longest running web series and where does ZP stand on that list
Generates e-waste as controllers are bricked for no reason.
Kills costly custom built accessibility controllers. No consideration for marginalized users whatsoever.
Retroactively screws all customers over.
Goes as far as breaking peripheral compatibility with a discontinued console.
Is it to kill cheating devices used on competitive titles? Is it a money grab? It probably won’t achieve either. From a customer protection standpoint I’m wondering if this position can be attacked legally.
Nevertheless it reminds me that other time when Spencer was daydreaming about buying Nintendo and it feels like Microsoft is being a little unhinged as of late.
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