Still, there are a few things getting in the way of the plaintiffs being successful here. For starters, games and in-game content are often cancelled - an unfortunate reality of the industry. Furthermore, even if refunds weren't granted, Aspyr did offer affected fans a copy of KOTOR 2 on Steam - where the mod can be played for free - or another Star Wars game altogether.
How is this relevant in any way?
I don't think they're legally entitled to a refund for buying a game with content that didn't exist, but neither of those are even sort of substitutes for the content or a refund.
I don’t see how it being software makes it different than any other good.
If I advertised a car with GPS and promised next year it will be updated with live traffic data. Then I just sold a bunch of cars and decided, nah thats expensive, I am just going to leave it as is. You better believe lawsuits would be headed my way, I don’t see how this is much different. In both examples you can still use the product, it’s just not the product that was ultimately promised. Maybe I would have bought a different brand of car that already offers live traffic on their GPS, maybe I was willing to spend more on the game/car because the feature that was promised, never came.
Because they knew it didn't exist when they bought it.
You would win your example lawsuit, too, unless you had a contract explicitly promising future services. Talking about future plans when they're clearly future plans isn't legally false advertising or any kind of legal obligation.
I have no problem with competition, but don’t force me to use your inferior product. If any of the major companies developed an actual competitor with the Steam launcher (in terms of features, not just a lousy storefront), it would likely get some use. If they somehow made it better than Steam, plenty of people would likely jump ship.
Epic is just a failure of a launcher. Nobody uses it over Steam by choice, because it’s lacking in nearly every way. While I’m not big on exclusives, if the launcher was a reasonable Steam alternative, they wouldn’t bother me nearly as much. As things stand, I’m firmly in the “fuck Epic” camp.
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.
It might now win any new developers but people who work many years to build things like custom simulations have no way of switching to other platforms.
It depends on a lot of factors though. Creating your own engine is by far not an easy task. The more feature rich it shall become, the more work it will need. Especially if it should have high 3D graphics quality while also running performant. That alone can cost a good team at least 2 to 5 years.
Switching engines also depends on how portable your work from the old engine is with regard to the new engine. It may not be impossible but can still be a lot of work. The earlier that decision is made, the better.
If the devs are determined enough they can surely do a switch. But they might sweat a lot. And especially for smaller studios, or studios without sufficient funding, this quickly becomes a matter of financial survival.
So it’s not impossible, yes. But don’t take that lightly as well.
Switching engines also depends on how portable your work from the old engine is with regard to the new engine. It may not be impossible but can still be a lot of work. The earlier that decision is made, the better.
Not to mention I’m guessing a good amount of indie devs are not abstracting every detail of interacting with the engine from the getgo in the chance they want to swap engines down the line. I’m sure some more experienced studios due for that just incase measure or to make migrating past breaking changes a bit easier when they crop up. But generally speaking I can’t imagine that’s a common tactic. But even if it did your still going to have to recreate every new implementation for your interfaces and there are bound to be differences here that are gonna take some time.
Honestly, I don't blame them for not wanting to put up with Unity's unreliance. It took Unity 10 days after announcing this awful change to backtrack to a normal revenue cut. That 10 days was filled with justified outrage from a ton of developers to the point of Re-Logic donating $100k to Godot and FNA in protest.
That’s what confused me the most. When your customers are consumers, screwing them over might be no big deal. But when your customers are businesses, how were you planning to get away with something like this where anything involving fees in the 6 to 9 figures is game changing. That’s, “Cheaper to move my business elsewhere” levels of money.
Yup. They were hoping it would fall out of the news cycle and people would forget about it. Once it stretched past a week, they started to panic because people weren’t dropping it, and had to plan an announcement to save face.
The harsh truth is even if they lose half of their current users they will end up making more anyway, even with the amended changes. They planned to lose a large chunk of their user base, regardless. The “seats” model is dead now that AI is changing how game development is done from the ground up. And they needed to do this because they were never profitable (the engine’s development costs hundreds of millions of dollars) and couldn’t really compete with unreal when it came to the type of customers they could actually pay for the engine from
Sure, but if they’d implemented the revised changes they wouldn’t have lost so many users. And despite their messaging, they did already speak to some devs who’d already told them this would be a disaster, but they tried it anyway, and in a retroactive way that completely disregarded prior promises regarding changing EULA agreements, so there’s no faith in this not still changing.
Nah this went really bad for them. Even if they do make more, it will almost certainly be short term. Godot got so much free advertising. It firmly sat itself next to unreal as far as who should be choosing it, but it is definitely the inferior engine if you are making AAA. It's going to get cut from the high by unreal and the low from Godot, defold, and even gamemaker.
I don't get this weird apologist attitude. Let us not forget Unity just spent over $4 billion less than a year ago buying the malware ad service ironsource. They are not profitable because they make bad business decisions. This was one more. And in all likelihood we will see the sale of unity before too long. And it will probably be less than the $20 billion offer they had prior to the ironsource purchase.
They are not profitable because they make bad business decisions.
Exactly this. Just like how reddit very quickly made enough in reddit gold sales to cover their server costs for decades, the only reason it’s operating at a loss is because they’re running it that way.
it’s a known strategy in tech startups and most non inventory based businesses in general (think moviepass) to undercut your competition to try and get as much market share as possible, even operating at a loss, and then slowly turn up the prices on your users once they are locked into your system and make back the lost revenue over time. I don’t agree with it either, but the y-combinator business tech crowd seem to love this model, so I can’t really say if it’s a bad decision or not.
I can however, point to evidence that it’s a popular business model, if you don’t mind accepting hacker news and y-combinator articles, as well as YouTube media of startup CEOs in earnings calls, but I refuse to defend it otherwise. These are often people with lots of money and advanced stem + business degrees however, so Im not going to sit here and act like I easily know better than them. I can say it did work for Google, but this is after they already were dominating with ad revenue and had the means to slowly introduce ads into every platform they owned ( youtube, maps, android). Popular platforms like DoorDash also have yet to become profitable, despite commanding a 70% market share on food delivery.
I can cite an example of it with an inventory based company. KIA sold their cars at damn near a loss in the US for a long time to get a good foothold. And it worked. Iirc they had a bogo on cars at one point even.
80 percent of unity users don’t pay and a large percentage of the 20% remaining don’t pay close to enough to maintain the engine. they did this on purpose, so it’s their fault, but it is the truth. most large studios these days that actually hit the numbers to pay unity are doing more with AI so they are paying less and those who the changes actually were attempting to make up lost revenue from. as I said, either way the “seats” model is dead regardless.
honestly as shitty as the changes were (and of course they were trying to make profit) they were actually attempting to help devs at least financially. For many use cases the install fee would come out as less than a 1% rev share. It was the other shit that made it worse, the install counting malware proposal, and the uncertainty behind the legitimacy of the numbers. (demos, piracy, repeated reinstalls)
if you’re interested in the insight from a tech investor who is familiar with the situation from the inside, but remains unbiased as someone not employed by unity, check this link for a good breakdown of what Unity’s leadership was actually thinking when they cooked this insanity up.
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