Unity has an in-house advertising/monetization system called LevelPlay. It’s their system for putting ads/analytics/etc. in games. But not a lot of people use it; a lot of people use a direct competitor called AppLovin, which is just outright better.
Several developers have reported Unity quietly reaching out to them and saying “Hey, we see you’re using AppLovin…if you switch over to our LevelPlay service instead, we might just waive some or all of our new Fuck You Fee.”
So apparently this is being done to kill a competitor.
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.
2014: “You guys should be careful building your industry around proprietary tools, you really should think about open source-” “Blah blah blah stop your moralizing, open source software isn’t 100% ready to go right now so we absolutely can’t use it, instead we’re just going to pay money for this turnkey solution.”
2023: “Help! The proprietary turnkey solution we’ve been paying for this whole time is enshitifying! Subscription models, mandatory cloud services, more and steeper fees!” “Open source tools are still a thing, you know.” “Yeah but we’ve spent a decade telling an entire generation of talent to learn the proprietary stuff so it’s hard to migrate, and we didn’t contribute any code or money to FOSS projects this whole time so it still isn’t up to snuff.”
Well I guess you can slide over to Unreal and kick that can down the road a bit waiting for Epic Games to enshitify their product as well, you can use and contribute to Godot, you can develop your own in-house engine, or you can keep taking it up the ass from Unity.
Just let me ask this: If even a few smaller games, something like Unrailed or Papers Please, used Godot and contributed what they paid to Unity to the Godot team…where would the engine be today?
Godot has a dedicated workflow for 2D games, so I’d rather make one of those color sorting puzzle games that’s all people play on mobile these days in Godot than Unity or Unreal.
No, that’s why I think Valve is so supportive of the mod scene. Team Fortress and Counter Strike among others started out as mods that the studio hired.
That’s the one, lonelygirl15. What a wild story. My internet destroyed brain immediately jumped to “Wow that was before the Youtube partner program, and it was presented as an authentic teen’s vlog at least at first…I wonder what the monetization strategy was?” And it turns out there kinda wasn’t one. They went into $50,000 worth of credit card debt to fund the series, according to Wikipedia. Like remember that episode of South Park (remember that show?) where they had the waiting room full of viral video people waiting to get their non-existent internet fame money?
Hell I think you could make a massive improvement to the site if it could realize “Hey, I’ve been suggesting the same exact video to this user 500 times in a row, and he’s never clicked it. Maybe this user likes this creator/series, but not this specific video.”
I remember one of the early Youtube sensations was this teen chick’s vlog that turned out to be a fictional soap opera basically. Because it hadn’t occurred to anyone to do that yet.
This was BACK IN THE DAY, around the same time Boxxy became a sensation, or that one chick who just sat still in front of the camera because the Japanese liked her huge eyes.
An increasing number of states are banning billboards along highways. Travelers do need a low tech method for finding certain services though, such as food, lodging, fuel and restrooms. So you’ll see those blue signs that says “FOOD NEXT EXIT” with a Waffle House and Burger King logo. In order to put the logo on that sign, the business has to meet certain criteria (which vary from state to state like all highway laws), for example a restaurant must be within 3 miles of the highway, be open for at least 12 hours a day and feature public restrooms and telephones. The sign itself may include a distinctive logo and the name of the business in legible font but no slogans or ad copy. “This burger restaurant is nearby.”
This I see as an appropriate amount of advertising.