So long and thanks for the early lockdown memories! Warzone was never more enjoyable than in those first few months, when everyone was just messing around, wins meant something and the ‘meta’ wasn’t something that everyone looked up on YouTube after every patch.
I can’t wait to try out part 3 for 2 hours before deciding this still isn’t for me.
I want a good and immersive Jedi game so bad. These games just feel like you’re in an amusement park that’s channelling the game you want but not really trying to deliver it, it’s just a vehicle to get to the next bouncy mushroom or conveniently placed wall jump.
Good! Love the games. I just hope on the third one they actually finish developing the game before release.
Jedi Survivor just finally got finished after releasing 5 months ago. What I mean is they just released an update that makes performance mode run really well. Prior to this update, it ran horribly. So much so that despite buying on day one, I flat out refused to play it until it got fixed. And thank goodness it did because it’s a wonderful game and I’m really enjoying it.
Let’s not forget how the bounty hunter missions were completely broken, to the point that you couldn’t even start the quest line at any point in the game. I beat the whole game wondering “what the fuck is that big area in the pause menu that’s still locked?”
Also, you still can’t unlock the third garden on Pyloon’s roof in some saves (mainly mine).
I couldn’t give less of a shit about performance bugs, but the fact that core content in the game is still locked because of fucking trigger bugs is mind bogglingly embarrassing.
Still loved the game, though - my favorite game of 2023 (not saying it was the best of 2023, I just really liked this one).
Hopefully game developers stick to their guns and start migrating future projects and training to other engines like Godot. They played their hand once I wouldnt trust them to not screw you in the future
Re-Logic (Terraria’s developers) have already gone on record saying, "even if Unity were to recant their policy and statements, the destruction of trust is not so easily repaired.” That’s the stance I think every developer should be taking. Unless you have a Unity game that can be released by the end of the year, all devs need to seriously consider switching engines.
And when the code starts open source if they do a move like that (see Elasticsearch vs Opensearch, or Terraform vs OpenTF) then the community can fork it!
I love the idea of an open source engine becoming the industry standard, even if just for indie titles. Blender is a great success story and shows that FOSS can compete with industry standard creative software.
IIRC Godot’s reduzio mentioned at GDC there was considerable interest from various publishers and developers in building their own engines ontop of Godot.
So they walked back the part where they would’ve been sued anyways because it was already in their contract that they couldn’t retroactively charge you unless you renewed/updated. They of course changed it for this update.
“Oops you caught us doing something illegal and bad so we’ll still do the bad part, but we are sooo sorry you caught us trying to do something against our contracts, so I guess we’ll remove that part. See how sorry and humbled we are? Now give us your money.”
Someone finally calculated the cost of legal challenges, I guess. While this certainly saves in developer costs in legal fees, I don't see why anyone would keep their projects in Unity under the new terms, charging a developer based on a metric disconnected from sales is always going to incur unacceptable risk unless the developer has really deep pockets.
I never understood why they even had that clause in their contract. You’re already not allowed to change the terms of a contract after the contract has been agreed (because otherwise what’s the point), you don’t need to independently include wording to say you won’t do it. Equally removing the wording doesn’t allow you to make those changes.
So effectively they had some wording that didn’t give anybody any additional protections, then removed it, thus not removing any protections. They then acted as if that weirdly allowed them to break the law, and then broke the law. Then when someone pointed out that’s not how it works, they backtracked.
“It was not our intent to nickel-and-dime it, but it came across that way,” he said. […]
"A large part of the problem, Whitten said, was that Unity “didn’t communicate effectively… There were areas where there was some confusion, and we could have done a better job.” […]
“That’s on us,” he continued. “We didn’t do a good enough job… of delivering the information that would help people.”
It shows how dishonest he still is: Of course, they wanted to nickel-and-dime everything. People were not “confused”, they were outraged. No matter how much of a mess Unity’s initial explanations of the details were, the core message was pretty clear: Unity was aiming to get as much money out of developers as it can and it did neither bother to iron out the details of the changes, nor assess the potential damage their plans could do.
Rumours from inside Unity said that their own employees warned management, but managment saw a chance to make money and plowed ahead.
And going by Whitten’s statements, they still want to hide behind meaningless corpo-speak and the same people who got their business into this mess now claim that they have changed their ways.
Exactly. It’s a load of horseshit, and they got caught. Moving forward, there’s no reason to believe they won’t slowly add the policies back piecemeal after all of the outrage has died down.
First and foremost, if Itsuno-san doesn’t have time to be the director of the game, it can’t really get made. So having an opportunity to have him spend the time he needed on the game and being able to bring together the other resources needed, such as a large team to work on a game with this scope, just took some years for that all to really fit together. And then once it did, we got started.
Epic Game Store is focused so hard on making it good for devs but they have also intentionally neutered it for gamers. Does it even run on Linux yet? We all know that’s the direction Valve is taking things and it’s why Microsoft is starting to panic.
It kinda does? You have to use a third party app like lutris/heroic.
You could argue that steam doesn't fully work on linux either (multiple windows like chat, friendslist or library opened on the same workspace regularly crash on Wayland and I havent had the steam overlay working on any non linux native game) but these features arent even part of the epic launcher
Huh, I’ve never used chat, I rarely use the friends list, and I think I’ve intentionally used the overlay maybe a handful of times. So I don’t think that’s a big loss.
However, they did work fine on xorg (I haven’t used any of them since switching a few months ago).
Regardless, the launcher works for the primary use cases: buying, organizing, installing, and playing games. So I think that qualifies as supporting Linux, even if there are some bugs here and there.
It’s (relatively, don’t use the embedded browser) pure Python and runs anywhere. I also use it on my Win7 retro machine because the Epic Launcher sucks. It also supports epic DRM and can log the game in.
Wait… that math does not possibly check out. In the worst case scenario (Steam), they pay 30% of the revenue from the game in platform fees. If they spend less than that for settlement, simple math tells us that there is at least 41% of the revenue basically unaccounted for.
There’s a bit of overhead in every company, like HR, IT and facilities, so maybe these don’t count for “development cost” (which makes no sense tbh, that’s not how project budgets work). Marketing can eat a ton of money, too, but the numbers still seem bafflingly high.
What? It just means that they spend less than 30% on development. That doesn’t sound too far off, as a lot of the money probably goes to marketing, management, administration or (gasp) profits.
Unless I live under a rock I don’t see the point of spending a lot on marketing ads for games. Two big examples of games that sold extremely well that I never saw an ad for were elden ring and boulders gate three. If you just make a good game word of mouth will tell how good the game is not an ad on TV.
It seems like it can make sense. Platform fees aren’t an initial outlay, they’re effectively a cut of profits based on sales.
For the sake of argument using fake numbers, if a studio spends $1m making a game, and then they put it on Steam and it does $10m in sales, then Steam’s cut of that at 30% will be $3m
So, spending more on store fees than development seems possible - especially if your game is selling really well
videogameschronicle.com
Aktywne