I would love a nice league community in the fediverse, but I'm not that much of a hardcore League nerd, so I'll guess I'll wait until one finally takes off.
Anyone know off the top of their head what the price difference is between Unity and Unreal now? And are there Unity engine alternatives that people can seek?
there is no “price difference” they use a completely different pricing model, unity is SaaS, and moving to pay per install. Unreal is free, if you make more than a million dollars then you have to pay 5% royalties to epic.
Not necessarily. Unity says they’re charging per initial install once you break $1M (they walked-back on the “every” install bit), but Unreal takes a cut of your royalties once you break $1M, so it’s still hard to really compare them properly. If you’re making a free to play game, your install number could be dramatically higher than what a non free-to-play game would need to break $1M, for example.
Unity is planning to charge a flat fee of $0.20 per install over the entire life of a game. A Triple-A developer can release a game for $70 and it earns ten million dollars. Assuming every customer installs the game maybe three separate times on average over their lifespan, Unity’s gonna take maybe about $85,000 in total in runtime fees. If the game had been developed in Unreal, Epic would have taken $450,000.
But let’s say an indie dev makes a great game in Unity, sells it for $5, and it goes viral (like Vampire Survivors). They make ten million dollars, Unity takes 20 cents per install, and assuming the same install rate, the bill comes to $1.2 million, over 14x what the AAA developer is paying. Epic would have still charged $450,000.
With the AAA example, Epic’s 5% may seem steep for games that cost a lot per unit, but at least when a game stops making money, they stop charging money.
For Unity’s runtime fee, though, as people buy new PCs/consoles/phones and install their library of games to them over and over, the developer keeps getting billed with no profit coming in. Effectively, the more games they have out there in the wild, the greater a financial burden a developer has. They’ll be living in fear of some Reddit post sending 10,000 people in /r/gaming down a sudden nostalgia trip and wake up to a $2000 bill the next day with seemingly no explanation.
And this is to say nothing of the problematic nature of how Unity would even accurately assess the install count of a game, or differentiate paid copies from promotional or pirated copies (which I doubt they will). Or if a developer wants to bankrupt a rival developer, how they could just rent a click farm in Malaysia to install a game over and over again and rack up a bill too high to afford.
They’re just different pricing models, not different verticals. Unity is still cheaper, but incurs significant risk now. Whereas Epic will take their 5% after $1M, Unity has no revenue split. However now that they’re charging per install, devs need to be sure their marginal profit clears this bar. No one is sure their pricing model works before launch, so I think this risk is unreasonable.
Godot is great at 2D and would be a great replacement for those games but lacks a lot of 3D stuff Unity users would miss. If someone is doing a 2D game tho… Godot is a fantastic option to go with.
It’s a full engine! It specializes in 2D games but their 3D support is growing rapidly, just not up to what Unity and Unreal offer right now. Here’s a showreal they did for games released using Godot last year: youtu.be/UAS_pUTFA7o?si=QuPq6hByt-lve-vg
Godot is a full engine, I would position it in the market somewhere between Unity and GameMaker Studio. It is capable of making 2D and 3D games, though there’s some things Godot lacks, for example the asset streaming capabilities that allow for large seamless open worlds without loading screens, they’re working on that.
Godot runs on WIndows, Mac, Linux various BSDs, and they’re working on an Android port. Godot games can be exported to Windows, MacOS, Linux (and thus SteamDeck), BSD, Android, iOS and the web. Godot games can be ported to consoles, but Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are really fucky about licensing. The way you would go about publishing your Godot game to Playstation, Xbox or Switch is to work with a porting company who specializes in such things.
Fun fact: The Godot IDE is itself a Godot “game.” The Godot editor runs in the Godot engine and is built from UI tools available to end users; this makes it pretty easy to create tools and extensions to customize the editor to your team or project’s needs. It’s also a practical demonstration of how robust Godot’s UI creation tools are; I’ve been toying with the idea of building a woodworking CAD program in Godot.
Oh wow that looks a lot like the From Software game Dark Souls. That game sold really well and was a lot of fun, so it was smart of this company to make a similar game! They also added a funny to it because that makes it unique and creative.
They're very specifically influenced by From Soft's game Bloodborne more than Dark Souls. It's interesting to see them use Pinocchio as an anchor point for the world. The game looks quite polished and as derivative as it seems it looks like it'll be pretty fun.
Okay, so every time I decide I'm going to play a retro game through emulation, a remaster is announced, giving me access and an opportunity to enjoy a better version of the game instead. It happened with Metroid Prime, Link's Awakening, Baten Kaitos, Trails from Zero/to Azure, FF pixel remasters, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, and now this I guess... So for the sake of everyone else, what retro games are worth adding to my list?
Look I'm just saying if you have the ability to conjure into our reality remasters and remakes of old games, I'm going to suck your fucking dick if we can get an Illusion of Gaia (snes) remaster sometime soon.
I’ve been playing the hell out of this game. It’s so addicting. Some levels are actually pretty challenging, I probably would have raged hard as a kid.
Played about an hour so far, first impressions are that the game is pretty great. The movement and gameplay is much more modern and dynamic compared to JSR. I love the soundtrack, but you only start with a few songs so try to unlock more quick.
Price is a little steep at 40. But I love the dev team (Lethal League is amazing if you like fighting games) so I’m happy to support them.
I have only played an hour but this does really feel like a JSR successor.
Yeah, it’s one of those images you can’t make head or tails of it.
The white character is easy to understand, but the blue and red character? The only thing I can understand about it is that it seems to be grabbing a spray can, so at least one of the appendages is an arm, I assume.
Edit: nvm, after 5 minutes I finally understood what I’m looking at. The blue character is sorta facing the camera and the long polygonal red thing is it’s head, with the bottom-right corner of the red thing being it’s face. Man, the weird head and being partially obscured by the title really makes it hard to understand the image.
This game is fascinating to me because of the range of reactions I’ve seen from players. Those who like it love it so much they call it a masterpiece, while those who don’t like it really hate it.
It’s also one of the only games I can think of which message (or at least what I personally interpret its message to be) gets less and less impactful the more people praise it. I feel like it only works if you go in blind and only expect a standard shooter, and really suffers from its reputation as a consequence. Expecting a fun shooter and getting this whole thing was a unique experience to me, while a friend of mine that played it expecting to find the experience he read about was super disappointed and hated it.
I think it does what it sets out to do really well. The only thing I view as a shortcoming is that it left me with very little desire to replay it, though I’ve heard that there are lots of different branching story options at different points, mostly based on if your character chooses not to do something that the game implies you’re supposed to do.
It’s not a “fun” game, but it’s engaging and short enough that I think anyone could get through it without getting bored, and I think the metacommentary that you experience from playing it is worth it.
Going in blind is the best. Unfortunately, it’s probably pretty difficult to do, since spoilers are extremely rampant. I don’t even know how I managed to do it. But it really is magical if you go in blind.
This guys videos are like crack to me, but this one was kind of boring compared to his other stuff. I don’t know why though. Fear of the cold was so much better and it’s essentially the same kind of storytelling.
You will defiantly love his other videos then. They’re all very in depth and entertaining
Then if you haven’t yet check out supereyepatchwolf - who takes similar deep dives into media but does it on a more personal level with really good storytelling. Like, really good.
You’d probably like Gaming’s Harshest Architecture. That may be the video that got me into the channel, he’s so good at creating this feeling of significance. And then you look back at the actual topic and wonder how you got so invested.
(I think the champ of that feeling in general is Kevin Perjurer of Defunctland. I have no idea how I get so invested in videos about… anything he’s made a video about.)
My takeaway is that if I don’t go broke on groceries this year I sure as hell will go broke buying some phenomenally promising games (or at least supporting the devs anyway).
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