They used to be the biggest publisher on Stadia as well and they couldn’t have handled Stadia’s shutdown any better than they did:
Even though Stadia refunded all purchases, Ubisoft still granted each owner of their titles on Stadia the full, non-plus-ultra-deluxe PC version of each of those game on their launcher. Automatically, for free, and without talking much about it.
Oh! Oh thank you, You make a very good point. It’s very late and I was thinking that people were complaining that there weren’t enough characters in wheelchairs in the last of us for a second or something like that.
Why did your comment remind me of ClapTrap from Borderlands 2? Specifically the scene where you walk along together and suddenly you have to walk stairs and he goes like STAIRS?! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! How did you know stairs were my ONLY weakness?!
You have to be able to convey business value to get approval on anything corporate deems “extra”
At the end of the day, the project manager is going to have to be able to “prove” that color blind settings will translate to $$$ to the people above them, and not only that, but reliably more $$$ than it will cost to implement.
Which means first you need to know how much money it actually is likely to make, and we have actually very little data on what % of gamers that enjoy (genre) are colorblind.
So you’re already off to a pretty dang rough start.
Usually you only actually get these features when the CEO themself has buy in, like, “Oh yeah my cousin is colorblind and told me how much games suck about it, so make sure we include that feature”
Thats pretty much the only way you’ll be seeing that sort of inclusivity, when you have direct buy in to the movement of inclusivity coming from the very top at a company culture level.
These days, I just rebind buttons in SteamInput.
Using a Steamdeck, I actually prefer that than to deal with whatever rebinding UI the game might have.
There’s some things like action layers that I don’t expect game makers to ever implement.
Closer to a week or two, speaking as an actual software dev.
You have to first include the investigation into “how do we do it? What our are best options?” which is a day or two
Then the couple meetings as you go over your findings and get the sign off and approval that you can go ahead with it.
Then a couple days to implement it, write some tests for the code.
Another day for all the documentation to be added to Confluence, detailing all the above.
Another day or two for the code review process back and forth.
Another day or two for the QA testers to validate things are working.
There’s many many steps involved in going from “Idea” to “Implemented, reviewed, and tested”, and the human element in the back and forth stretches it out as you wait for people to take their lunch breaks, join the zoom meeting, the usual “your mic is muted mate” “oh jeez sorry” back and forth, etc etc…
You've never worked in software development, have you? Adding colorblind modes isn't as simple as just adding a filter and calling it a day. UIs have to be redesigned for each colorblind mode you add.
Do you have text in a menu that says "Click the red button"? Gotta change that for each colorblind mode. Also gotta change that for each language you write the game in. Can the user adjust the settings on the UI, themselves? Then you've gotta account for user-adjusted settings, too. Does the UI change itself depending on the context of things happening in the game? Gotta have alternates set up for those, too. Does a voice-acted character refer to the colors of anything that may be impacted by colorblind modes? Gotta record extra dialogue for those, too.
Each of those stack on top of each other, and take a lot more time and effort than you're making it out to be. Not saying it's an impossible task, but it's far from a 10-minute implementation. Very rarely is the solution "just a few lines of code" like people tend to think.
Or, hear me out here, maybe don’t use colors from jump that a lot of folks with colorblindness can’t differentiate. Red-green colorblindness is the most common, but games keep using those colors for puzzles instead of picking different colors.
I mean, you can always just follow reasonable contrast advice from square 1, and colorblindness won’t be an issue. It’s a pretty solved problem in the web world if people are willing to actually give a damn about it. You can have red and green text and buttons all across the screen as long as their contrast is enough that color-blind users can differentiate them.
Adding colorblind mode to a product you’ve already spent years on saying “fuck colorblind people, I don’t care about them”. Yeah, that’s not so easy.
Because half-assing the implementation is the way to go
Let’s deliver a broken version of accessibility in 10 minutes, that’s much better.
No, simply adding “colour filters” isn’t a fix either, and if that was the fix then a game wouldn’t even need to do that, there are plenty of apps that can already do that, a game doesn’t need to do anything for that (similar to how your screen warmth can change when it becomes night), reshade as an example of something that can do just that.
But thinking about the problem is ofcourse too hard, it’s easier to whine about it and act like you know how simple it is. But when we implement accessibly we do think about it, because people with accessibility issues deserve to get something that actually helps rather than the “10 minute solution”
In short, the pathing of units in AoE2 is primitive enough that it seemingly mimics the way ants move, giving them opertunities to test models in the game before trying it on real ants. That’s pretty neat. Someone, please make these guys an ant mod for the game
…small concern though: I currently use the rail planner a lot, usually to map out how I want my outposts to look at long distances. If the rail planner, particularly shift + click, is actively looking for rails to snap to, I hope it won’t greedily try to snap to rails I don’t want it to. I’m sure the devs already have this considered, but I just want to make sure that if I have multi-layer train crossings, and I’m trying to plan them out before I actually build them, that I’m able to path out rails behind an elevated rail without the rail planner assuming I want the rail to connect to the elevated rail. I hope that won’t be an annoying issue.
Pay to play no longer guarantees no microtransactions. There are plenty of modern games that charge 60+ and still contain ingame stores, battle passes, lootboxes, etc
Thing is, there's plenty of Premium games exactly as you describe - it's all I play on mobile or tablet - but they all cost on average between £5-10. Many are ports, some are free to install to play the first couple of levels and then you unlock the game with a one off purchase. The only thing I own good enough to play games on is my tablet and phone so I know this the hard way, but quality is out there, it's just hidden away.
Anyway, £60 is a big step up from the usual £10. I think the Final Fantasy/Ace Attorney ports are about £20. Usually the cheaper price to my mind is that you're playing on a smaller screen and with a touch control system that doesn't always suit the game you're playing (although it can improve certain games - Cultist Simulator, Kingdom Two Crowns and Bad North all feel like they work better with touch controls for me but that's more a genre thing)
Yea, but here, that 60 bucks also gets you the full macOS version of that game.
For sure, it is pretty steep by itself if you only game on mobile, but if you look at it as including a version for your handheld when you buy it for PC… it’s pretty much what Steam already does with the Steamdeck, which makes sense to me.
Now the price itself, yea, I find it a bit expensive, even on PC/Steam and I’ll probably wait to grab it on sale one day.
Yeah, I guess if you own an iPhone and a Mac there's more appeal. I see the prices for things on my son's Switch and he's not old enough to want the really expensive stuff yet, and you don't even get a desktop version there.
I think my original point stands though - that having "you buy it and then you play it" games on mobile is not a new concept.
I would love to see some other genres covered, tho.
RIP Studio Liverpool.
At the same time I get that GoW and Uncharted sell better than WipEout… but come on, I want at least something more than different flavors of the same game type.
I think they will lose some already established studios that can afford to retool and reskill on another engine. But I think the vast vast majority of current unity developers are breathing a sigh of relief that they /dont/ need to reskill or retool on another engine.
Unity is still on shaky ground, but they have been since they went public. They need revenue, and their big ad revenue plan got ruined by dastardly apple protecting users’ privacy. Couple that with an upstart and promising engine following in Blenders footsteps. In five years, they might have lost every hand they had left to play. Irregardless of the missteps of the last week.
Every indie dev I’m following on YouTube has basically made a “My thoughts on the situation”-type videos where they talk about how they’ve “won against Unity” despite Unity basically doing a textbook of the “Door in the face” technique to pass changes that would’ve been unpopular before this whole mess.
As soon as I heard Unity was back pedaling, I thought “there’s part 2 of the plan”
1: release abusive payment scheme to see just how much push back they get. If push back is minimal or losses are acceptable, end here and enjoy the profit.
2: if push back is strong, implement the actual payment policy that is still a significant increase, but less significant than the one above. And wait until the controversy blows over, which it will.
Yes, lots of developers will leave, lots of developers will choose a different engine for their new games, but there are a ton that will decide that it isn’t feasible to switch engines and plenty that will just eat the added cost. The thing that remains to be seen is just how much damage Unity has done in terms of new projects choosing other engines over theirs.
Claiming it’s “door in the face” is a little crazy here. If this is where they wanted to be, the “bait” changes could have been much much less bad than they were, and they still could’ve walked back to this.
Hell, they could have announced a 10% revenue split and it would’ve looked much better than what they pitched. And they could still walk back to 2.5% and looked like heroes. And it wouldn’t have lost them nearly as much trust. Nor made them look as bad.
If this was what they were trying to do, they’d have to have been even dumber to have made it this bad.
I’m more willing to bet they’re just fucking stupid. Or that a few people on the board had this as a fucking moronic idea, and the rest managed to take back control after it went totally sideways.
But claiming that it’s a door in the face requires them to be evil enough to do it, stupid enough to not realize they’re overdoing it, crazy enough to think it’d work, etc. It seems way too contrived.
Agreed, this whole Unity thing seemed more like they were surprised the peasants were revolting. Completely unaware of the danger of putting developer bills directly in to the hands of the end users, and not considering that a "trust me bro I counted how much you owe me" blackbox accounting method was too much to ask.
…which engine is the upstart and promising engine following in Blender’s footsteps? Do you mean what Unity was supposed to be until they ruined it, or did you forget to drop the name of the engine in question?
Yeah, very few studios would retool an existing project. The real question is whether any of them will be picking unity for their next project. And will young people getting into game dev choose Unity over others? I don’t expect to see a sharp decrease in the number of Unity projects in the next year, but rather a slow descent, while Godot picks up steam and Unreal further cements itself as the professional’s tool.
All the tutorials and learning resources are hyper unity focused. That’s why so many game devs pick it up. That’s why they cornered the less than AAA industry. A young person will choose unity over the others for the same reason as they did last year. The endless resources to teach.
It’s likely almost all developers will pick unity for the next project too. All their knowledge is in unity, not Godot or unreal. We have this problem in other software industries too, some languages and frameworks are just better, but you can’t use them in your project because there are only five people in the industry that know how to use it well.
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