It’s not about about money: corporate would spend more money when you’re in the office.
It’s not about productivity: shit has been getting done from home and then some, for literally years.
It’s not about team building: productivity requires focus, open space bullshit floor plans hamper that and most everyone is gonna wear headphones and try to block out the background noise and social distractions as much as possible.
It’s about control, power and obedience: butts in chairs are reassuring to managers who have no fucking clue what they’re doing, nor what you’re doing, nor what the company needs done.
Management usually has no idea what anyone is really doing, they’ve never figured how to measure actual productivity, so they equate butts in chairs with productivity.
I don’t work for Ubi, but I’ve been the one remote player of an in-office team for the last 15 years.
Nobody ever cared where the fuck I was working from until after covid, where suddenly some insecure execs fear we might all be wanking all day, probably because they think we’re like them.
I’m perpetually busy at work, mostly because we’re understaffed, but I know what needs to be done and I do it.
I don’t need a babysitter to do that.
Them? They’ve always been useless, but now it shows, because there’s no-one to boss around, shit still gets done, but they’re not around, so they can’t delude themselves into thinking their bullshit is what makes things work.
Since they no longer have anything to do, they fuck around at home all day.
Faced with their uselessness, they pull a Seymour Skinner… it’s everyone else who’s wrong and not them.
They extrapolate and think that if they’re fucking around, surely we’re all doing what they’re doing and thus need reigning in. They fail to realize they’ve never had a productive purpose even before.
It’s all just a symptom that your management is full of old useless farts.
Some manager usually chimes in with some remote lazy bitch they “caught”, as if these people didn’t exist in the office.
Having been the outsider remote guy since way before, I can say the rest of my team fucked around a lot more when they were on-prem than when they’re remote.
If everyone just… didn’t go back at all, what are they gonna do, for everyone and close the whole studio?
I keep telling them the same thing.
Our jobs involve working with people in offices on the other side of France and that’s no problem, surely. Therefore what difference does it make if a remote worker is at home rather than on a different site? None. It’s all bullshit to control people, just like you said.
You should see HR people squirming trying to justify that one…
Doesn't really matter, they don't need the switch to have bleeding edge performance, that isn't why it sells. It has to be affordable and using older processes helps achieve that.
No but it does need enough performance to be capable of running games in low quality modes. The Switch is so anemic that many big budget games are simply not even trying anymore as performant running can't be achieved without complete rewrites of engine code. So a better Switch that is at least a low spec gaming computer will enable more big games to many the effort of trying to support it.
A big issue with modern game developers is bad inefficient code. Compare Nintendo titles file size and performance to every other big game. I don’t think any AAA PC/PS6/XBOX? is going to run on the most powerful switch in 3 years time.
Big time. Their chassis design will dictate performance too. They will get the best chip they can in a cost budget and then thermal/battery limits will dictate where that chip actually lies.
The steam deck is cool and a great device but the Switch 2 will be sleeker and nintendo won’t settle for a 90min battery a whiney fan, and that has trade offs.
Switch 1 had a 720p screen with a 1080p max TV output. That’s approx a 2x increase in throughput.
With Switch 2 it’s expected to be a 1080p screen and a 4k output, that’s a 4x increase in pixel throughput. So a 2x output increase might not be adequate.
However, it is widely expected to have DLSS, which would greatly reduce that requirement.
Cost is going to be a big factor. Nintendo doesn’t want the best possible console. The want a good console, that they can get into as many hands as possible. Even a simple active dock is going to add £10 to the price.
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.
Man I miss destiny but I can’t play it cause Bungie are paranoid blaming the wrong group (Linux users) as hackers so blocked us from using it, and even if I could I wouldn’t play it out of principle because of what they’ve done to it. It still has the best shooting out of any game I’ve played, but the stuff you shoot at isn’t interesting anymore
Looked at the store, man how much do you have to spend to get the content? $100 for light fall and the battle pass, then $30 for Gjallahorn, then another $30 for some other dungeon and new supers and then $100 more for the new expansion. That’s $260, it’s cheaper to pay for Final Fantasy XIV monthly and get a $60 expansion for a year. That’s not including all the past dlc either
Video gaming is basically every other art form combined into a single package, with even more artistic value because of player agency and choice. So yeah… It is the best form of art.
There’s not really a best art form in my opinion (and I adore games). Sometimes you want a single one to be the only one, sometimes you don’t feel like being the agent, you only want to be told a story, etc.
Default Cube is a playable character in Super Tux Kart, although unofficially through a user created addon which can be downloaded through the game’s addon feature.
did it really fail? I was under the impression it just became too much to maintain for a FOSS community, in addition to an already robust 3D modeling software suite. I don’t know how many people actually used it.
it is interesting to see unreal go a different route, they are making 3d modelers and even audio/video editing tools in house to try and make it so you never have to leave the engine.
Maybe failed is a strong word. It wasn’t very popular and support was dropped out of Blender a few years back but it seems to have new life under the fork UPBGE.
It was decided that game engine development was over complicating the goal of Blender. It detracted from actual 3D software development resources and trying to make all blender features seamless with it was nearly doubling potential work.
I believe in the open-source world, this is called “mission creep”. It means when a project gradually expands its scope and mission until it becomes unmaintainably broad.
I’ve considered “what does the download/install look like” before realizing “You’ve had Blender installed and passively updating for months [pacman] without using it. Stop that”
I used to play PD2 with international friends, but latency being what it was I could only really play loud missions. Here’s hoping modern netcode somehow solves the issue of being spotted by guards that are behind a wall from my perspective.
To re-iterate, Ubisoft has done nothing to curb the sexual harassment issues that were reported ages ago and, frankly, simply not requiring return to office would’ve solved that problem along with a boost to employee happiness and workplace attractiveness.
I’ll occasionally poo-poo efforts to unionize programmers, as the wrong level of abstraction. Software development is too broad to lump together sensibly across all industries, and too narrow for generally organizing office workers.
Game devs should’ve unionized twenty fucking years ago. Maybe forty. The horror stories about crunch were already commonplace in forums. Several major 90s releases have turned out to be corporate screw-jobs with no comeuppance. Mindscape straight-up fired the entire Lego Island staff the day before launch, probably to fuck them out of promised royalties.
Christ, third-party console publishing, as a concept, only exists because Atari treated developers like anonymous machines. Warren Robinet’s name appearing anywhere on or in Adventure - a game where he was responsible for every single byte - was a secret act of defiance. A handful of dudes responsible for half of Atari’s profits left to form Activision. Then Activision pulled the same shit and a handful of dudes left to form Accolade. Then Accolade pulled the same shit and a handful of dudes left to form Acclaim, are you seeing a fucking pattern?
It’s not enough to put people who’ve been screwed in charge, to prevent the company from screwing more workers. The incentives are miserable. And that was before the dominant strategy became bottomless money-pits that should be straight-up outlawed.
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