Wait, but they already launched it without Denuvo. So pirates can easily crack the launch version without it, and only paying customers need to deal with the antipiracy bullshit? Nice, they took a pro-piracy hyperbole and made it actually real.
I’m thinking this too… like what’s even the point of using denuvo if it’s not applied day one? The whole point is to delay piracy so they sell more copies during launch week (in theory), so waiting until after day one completely ruins that since you can just pirate the easily cracked launch version.
The point is that they purposefully left (or created) bugs in the day one version that are fixed in this patch after you install denuvo
It’s not the first time they’ve done something like that, they broke another assassins creed game and leaked it to get people to buy the real copy, this is no different
If non DRM version is given to reviewers, it will leak to crackers, unless you control 100% of reviewers you give a copy. This does not make any sense.
Eh, I only meant hyperbole in terms of antipiracy affecting the pirates that had to figure out how to crack it. As a broad gesture at the fact piracy (consumption) depends on piracy (effort) to work
You’re right, according to Ubi the update on PC was ‘included in the 41.6 GB game files ahead of Oct 5’. It was a prerelease patch, not day 1.
Nice of Epic to start directly exploiting the lack of PC physical media around the same time people are talking about getting rid of disc drives on consoles.
I think the primary method of PC sales for this game is on the Epic Game Store. Yeah I neglected to consider it’s also available from Ubisoft+ or whatever but also does anyone actually use that
Epic Game Store also doesn’t have any preloading, meaning they had all the opportunity to deploy Denuvo pre-launch but post-embargo without having preloads as a loose end.
They need to force their views on others. If anyone believes what they believe, then they are suddenly just like everyone else instead of the bigot they know they are deep down
They aren’t really forcing their views on anyone though, they’re just jacking themselves off. No nonconforming person is going to download this and inflict it on themselves, and they have no reason to use it themselves unless they’re just really closeted and lack the will to not express their own nonconformity. It can literally only exist to rile people up who sought out the mod specifically, which includes only them.
If they weren’t trying to force their views on others they’d just make their character a guy and move on. They go through the trouble of coding this mod to push their agenda on others.
What I’m trying to say though is that most of them just do make their character a guy and move on. They don’t need the mod and the people who they think do need it aren’t going to install it. It’s not just a transparent attempt to ignite culture war arguments online, but it’s a stupid and ineffective one.
The point of the mod is not to change something in game, its to appear in the list of mods and remind some people that they are hated and bigots will never stop hating them.
I have trouble imagining enough people wanting to download a mod to do this to get it to appear on anything but the most recent releases list, and to only be on that list long enough for some other mods to get released.
Well, the type of person that would do this wouldnt be opposed to spoofing the number as well. And they can just keep reuploading the mod so it’s always appearing in the list.
The point is, their ineffective methods still worked a little. Ruining someone’s day, hour or even minute is validation enough
Apparently nexus mods has some sort of ad sharing with mod makers. Could be a grift. Grift is popular among right wingers, possibly because they are on a fundamental level stupid.
Some grifter makes an anti “woke” mod that probably took 5 minutes. A bunch of stupid chuds download it to pwn the libs. Grifter makes money. Chuds feel good about their shitty lives.
Insisting that Nexus Mods should host this bigoted mod is the losers who walk in fear of “woke culture” trying to enforce their bigoted views on the rest of the world. The assholes are still free to install that mod but Nexus Mods is just as free to not host that trash.
Because it's not actually about the pronouns. These people aren't actually angry about pronouns.
They're angry about trans and non-binary people. They're angry that people are growing to accept these people, who they do not think should be accepted. They are angry that a group they don't think is normal, is being accepted as normal.
I don’t think it’s even about that, they’re angry because the want to be angry. The why doesn’t matter, if the current right wing outrage du-jour had been… I dunno, left handed people rather than trans people, you’d see all the same people working themselves into a screaming tantrum if a game or movie had a left handed person in it.
Who the hell are you to say that I hate black and gay people? You’re overgeneralizing a group, how much different are you in this case? Stop with that man, this is why we can’t have actual debates.
And the "replaced white people". And the female leaders. If someone wants a taste, go through the Steam forums for the game. It's a complete deranged mess.
It's not "about trans and non-binary people," it's about the injection of identity politics into video games. The removal of the mod shows that activist fiat is necessary to present the illusion that people buy into gender ideology.
Pronouns, gender, genitals, etc. in player-character customization are just yet another option for someone to tailor their gameplay to whatever experience they want.
The only identity politics comes from the people politicizing it.
The existence of trans and nonbinary people is not an injection of identity politics into video games. The fact that they exist and a video game is acknowledging their existence is not political.
did a bot write this? what are you even trying to say?
Are you one of those people that thinks anything that’s not straight cis white is “identify politics”? That anything that isn’t your world view is “political”? If so, please go fuck yourself. If not, I have no idea what you’re on about.
Not a bot; just a bigot. If you scroll to the very bottom, a good 30% of the total comments are this guy digging a hole trying to prove it’s “woke” society that’s the problem and not him.
The only thing left to fight for is the right to indoctrinate very young school children into gender ideology and show them, graphically, how to be gay.
“Identity politics” always seems to mean “I am upset that different people exist.”
This is a nothing option in a video game. Nobody’s rubbing your nose in it. It doesn’t affect you, at all, but it’s a neat little extra for other people. Do you give a shit about other people? Or does the mere possibility of anyone distinct from you, the protagonist of reality, fill you with emotions you can’t handle? There’s no third option, here. It’s a checkbox for how NPCs choose voice lines, in exactly the same way they’ve done for decades. It’s just separate now.
But of course one glance at your profile shows you’re an unapologetic bigot, and what you mean by “gEnDeR iDeOlOgY” is exactly what every other diet Nazi means by it: you hate queer people, and you want it to be their fault.
Yeah, having that "he/she/they" toggle and calling sex "body type 1 and 2" instead of male/female sure is political. You know when it became political? When people saw them and went "REEEEEEEEEEEEE" because they're bigoted dumbfucks.
The crazy thing is how hysterical they’re being over something you can fail to even notice is there. It gave me male pronouns as I choose the male body type, and the button prompt to change it is hidden way down at the bottom of the screen. It’s literally on screen for a few seconds and then never mentioned again in a game with hundreds of hours gameplay.
Yeah, it took me ages to realise the prompt was at the bottom of the screen, I didn’t even want to change them, I was just wondering why it set off such a wobbler with the bald bloke.
There is zero rationality behind the decision, especially given that it’s retroactive and there’s no language in their decision that handles unique user versus multiple users versus multiple accounts.
I’ve had two gaming PCs over the last ten years. On my last one, I replaced the hard drive twice, and I’m on my second hard drive on the newest one. With each hard drive replacement, I’ve had to reinstall all my games. I’m not paying for all of them again with each install but just getting the same files off Steam and installing again. According to this decision, the devs of these games would have had to pay Unity four extra times just due to my hardware upgrades. How is that on the developer at all, and Lord help us if Unity tries to run some BS where players have to pay for each new installation.
The entire gaming industry, even from the “disc era”, doesn’t work with a cost per install model.
Not to mention that it’s such a sudden announcement. I mean, sure, they gave people 3 months notice in advance, but when you consider the scale of many games probably take longer than 3 months to make the decision AND actually make the switch (or make up for the switch), it’s cause for quite a bit of harm.
Granted, the majority of people may not be affected by it due to needing to meet a requirement of like earning $200,000 and 200,000 installs at a minimum, but I feel like the once you reach that, it’s just downhill from there.
In addition to your example of costing the devs for reinstalling the game, you now have to consider the possibility of a user (or group of users) maliciously reinstalling their games to financially damage the developer. Sure, Unity says they’ll have fraud detection for stuff like that, but then it’s literally up to the people you owe money to decide whether you should pay more or less money to them.
That’s exactly what they’re trying to do because their CEO is a nut job crazy man who’s grasp of business economics is embarrassing even when compared to my cats.
The problem with that is that it relies on the idea that people are able/willing to pay and aren’t willing to try something else. Game devs are naturally technical people who are okay with trying new things if their current solution stops being an option. Then there are indie devs who must work cheaply or they will not make anything off their games.
Its a bold strategy cotton, let’s see how it plays out for them.
PM: Hey Steve! Yes, you from development! How can the, uh, that runtime of yours, tell if it’s a new install or a reinstall? S: As of right now it can’t, we just have aggregate data. We’d need to update it to support that. We have an item on the backlog already if you – PM: No need! I have all the information I need!
I mean legally. The devs agreed to a contract, it can’t be changed with different economic terms later
If someone published an Unity game 4 years ago, has now abandoned the project, doesn’t release any update, why needs to pay a per install fee “for supporting the runtime”? The version is now ancient. I could understand if it was “from version xx.yy”
I also asked the question, and got an answer. The hypothesis is that they’ll release new versions under a different license, also meaning that if the devs never agree to the new license, they’d avoid the fee. Of course, that would mean that any engine level bugs in their game would become unfixable. This also means that large developers would be exempt, as they likely have contracts in place that supersede the license agreement.
Could also be. I’m not sure about how the legal situation works exactly. My understanding is that you can’t change a contract, such as a license agreement without the other party’s consent. Maybe they have a clause in it allowing them to revoke the existing licenses, meaning the developers would be forced to agree to the new license or be without a license.
Im trying to think like a money hungry, out of touch POS CEO here.
Unity uses a subscription model right? Where each year you have to renew it and agree to new ToS. Well if they just put in their new ToS that companies have to pay retroactive fees and that company “agrees” to those ToS, then that means it’s not illegal since they technically “agreed” to it…
Hope to he’ll it doesn’t hold up in court but if Unity goes through with this who knows.
This feels so wrong to me that I feel like they must be going against some law, or they need to be sued to set precedent. I’m not a lawyer, I just think this smells completely like a giant corporation scamming people.
oh no stop, please, don’t make John riccatello tell us to hold his beer. think of his track record at EA. the out of touch competition isn’t even at full stakes yet. I have a feeling more is coming before the IPO.
Yeah, at least if they’re not free-to-play. Publishers have shown time and time again that you can NOT trust them with your money. Only pay for something if you know exactly what you’re getting.
One reason I’m glad to be a pretty broke parent gamer. I can only afford to spend money on games a couple times a year at best so I have to be really patient and picky about what I do decide to buy. I end up having no choice but to wait a year or more to pick up any games I’m excited about.
I’m happy paying for psplus and enjoying the free monthly games and whatever games get uploaded there. Aside from that, my city has a great library with a huge selection of games you can borrow for 3-6 weeks at a time, plenty of time to finish them.
Still is, my dude. The “All pods launched” sound effect from the first level will be stuck in my head forever, I’ve heard it so many times. If you haven’t played Q2RTX, I highly recommend it. It’s like a fresh coat of paint on an old classic.
I’m a patient gamer so I don’t normally preorder, but I made an exception with CyberPunk as a tribute for paying $5 for Witcher 3 (which was my first game of the series, I went in blind and I couldn’t believe how good it was).
I wasn’t even mad with the shitshow but I decided wasn’t going to play the game in that state.
Fast forward a few years, the game runs almost 3 times as fast (went from 25 to 70 fps on my computer) and they fixed a lot of problems people were complaining about for the DLC release. Now it’s ripe.
Pretty much the same story here. Finally playing it now, and I can barely put it down. It’s story is nearly as good as W3, and my car doesn’t even take random hard lefts off the road for no reason whatsoever in this one. Actually, gameplay is a massive step up in general.
I'm glad to hear the game's gotten much better! I purchased the game on sale but have left it sitting in my Steam library for a little while, knowing that it is playing much better means I'll move it higher on my playlist.
Well, I meant a step up from the overall quality of Witcher 3. But, it is really smooth and solid combat with a real variety of styles/builds. I’m digging katana/guns/mantis blades/sandi. And I know the 2.0 skill revamp made a huge and smart impact on the gameplay.
The only game I’ve ever preordered is Animal Crossing New Horizons. I knew it wasn’t gonna be horseshit on release lmao. I wait until games are on sale and have been out for a while. My friends keep harassing me to buy Baldurs Gate and I’m not doing that until it has all dlc released and is on sale lol
I’m the same way but I bought bg3 because of how not asshole they are. It’s a great game and honestly worth the money. This is the first game I’ve bought at full price since games came on cartridges.
My thing is that I wanna wait until Larian comes out with all content for it. I don’t wanna get the game and immediately have to replay it because dlc came out. I’ve done that with games before and replaying just for dlc made the game feel like a chore. I’ve waited since the announce of cyberpunk’s expansion to even consider finishing the game. I plan on playing that one once I get myself a steamdeck later this year. My gaming computer became a total turd since 2020 lol.
I get that, but that game is so big, you’re going to want to play over regardless. You’ll probably start over anyways after at least 40 hours of game play. The game is really insane on how much there is and how much every choice you make matters. You could play this game for the rest of your life and I don’t think you’d have the same game twice.
Gamers have gotten quite lucky so far that the company that has been in the position to turn the screws and establish a monopoly has been content to only make gobs of money, instead of trying to make all the money like pretty much every other entertainment industry.
Yeah, the reason why Valve can do that is that they are not a publicly traded company but a privately owned one. Gabe Newell doesn’t have a fiduciary duty to any shareholders, so they don’t have to squeeze every penny from their users or abuse their quasi monopoly.
The whole idea of investments always going up is an absurd idea that needs to go. At this point I infinitely prefer a private company over a publicly traded one.
It’s a bit of an inherent issue sadly, if your goal is to multiply money why would you invest in a company whose profits stay the same over one whose go up? And you have no reason to care if the company eventually dies as a result, you just move your money into the next one.
And most people investing money will be doing so with the only purpose of multiplying that money, as it’s mostly banks and similar institutions. In theory if the main investors of a company want it to prioritize user experience over profits, the companies’ duty to its shareholders would also be to ensure good user experience. But that’s never going to happen.
Multiplying your investments is the basis of capitalism. To speak to your point of it being an inherent issue - I find the idea of removing the profit motive from capitalist enterprise to hilariously reactionary. Not because I like capitalism, but because so many people that support capitalism want to “reform” it by ripping its heart out (one artery at a time, at least). I want to rip its heart out for the express intent of killing it - what strange allies we make!
If Gabe ever leaves Valve and the powers that be decide to go public I hope it’s done in a way that gives power to the users instead of faceless investment firms. I don’t even know what that would look like but I fear the day that Valve comes under control of an ex-AAA game company CEO or the like.
Perhaps a transition to a not-for-profit organization structure might be what folks would prefer? It seems like a potentially better alternative than going public, but I’m not sure how it might work in practice for something like a digital storefront.
In a weird way, one could almost argue that’s roughly how Valve’s been operating anyway, except I imagine they’ve been lining their pockets more than a not-for-profit organization’s owners/employees do.
I bet they make a shit ton of money but they certainly seem to reinvest enough of it too. There is a interesting concept called purpose companies here in Europe but it’s not especially wide spread or planned by regulators so the transition is extremly complicated and expensive. The search engine Ecosia is a relatively well known one, it’s basically a company in self ownership where no one from outside can become CEO and no one can sell or go public, they are obligated to their chosen purpose and that’s where their profits go (in the case of Ecosia that’s planting trees), not sure how it works exactly or if it’s doable in the USA at all tho.
I said this elsewhere but that’s not true. The idea that publicly traded companies have a duty to maximize shareholder value is a myth, and anyone privileged enough to sit on a board of directors likely knows this. See this article for an explanation. Every time a board squeezes a company for short term profits at the cost of long term good will, long term profits, etc., that is because they chose to do so.
Well the relation is wrong but it’s a real thing, they have a duty to grow infinitely or the sroxk price will crash and since that’s impossible to achive they essentially have to squeeze their users for short term gains to seem like they still grow sooner or later
“People like me” meaning “People who cite their sources and investigating claims before making them?” Yes, I can understand why you might find it difficult to convince “people like me” to believe something that’s trivially shown to be false.
The idea that publicly traded companies have a duty to maximize shareholder value is a myth, and anyone privileged enough to sit on a board of directors likely knows this. See this article for an explanation. Every time a board squeezes a company for short term profits at the cost of long term good will, long term profits, etc., that is because they chose to do so.
EDIT: See also This NY Times article. And note that I’m not saying that corporations, board members, etc., aren’t pressured or incentivized to maximize shareholder value - I’m saying that they do not have a legal duty to do so.
It’s not a myth, it’s called Fiduciary Duty. The board, officers, and executives of a public company have a legal responsibility to put the financial interests and well-being of the company above other personal interests. The article you linked doesn’t deny this, and it also isn’t discussing the legal definition of it. It’s discussing what you might call “toxic fiduciary duty”, or more or less the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. It’s the idea that profit is the primary motive and should always trump all other considerations.
Fiduciary duty is important to create a concrete stance against corruption and misuse of the company’s assets for personal gain. But when taken to an extreme, it becomes toxic and has negative consequences for the company. Employee wages are probably the most obvious example. There has to be a balance between underpaying and overpaying. If you chronically underpay, the best employees will seek more gainful employment elsewhere and the company will suffer from a poorly qualified workforce. If you overpay, like 100% revenue share with employees, the company will cease to make a profit and will be unable to function. A balance has to be struck to retain the best talent in order to drive success for the company; that is the point of the article you linked.
TL;DR extremism is always bad
(Please don’t mistake this for a pro-capitalism rant, there’s nuance to be had here)
It isn’t. If it were, that would mean that in practice, board members act to maximize shareholder value because they are legally obligated to do so, and that simply isn’t true.
In practice, board members and C-suite employees are incentivized to maximize shareholder value. They are not legally obligated to do so.
Fiduciary duty is a legal requirement, meaning that if you don’t fulfill your fiduciary duty, you’re liable. But nobody has been successfully sued for not maximizing shareholder value when their actions were in line with the business judgment rule (“made (1) in good faith, (2) with the care that a reasonably prudent person would use, and (3) with the reasonable belief that the director is acting in the best interests of the corporation”). Successful lawsuits regarding breach of fiduciary duty (in the context of corporate law) require the defendant to have acted with gross negligence, in bad faith, or to have had an undisclosed conflict of interest.
The closest instance of legal precedent that I know of (aside from “” of course) that eBay v. Newmark (Craigslist), which Max Kennerly took as meaning that corporations . In this case, Craigslist was found to have violated their fiduciary duties to eBay because Craigslist, in Max’s words, “tried to protect the frugal, community-centric corporate culture that was a hallmark for their success.”
Except, if you actually read the case notes, it’s clear that the issue wasn’t that Craigslist wasn’t maximizing their profits, but that they were diluting the percentage of stocked owned and flexibility of selling those stocks of other stockholders. The issue wasn’t that Craigslist wanted to spend half their profits supporting charities or anything like that - no, it was that they were trying to artificially limit, thus directly devaluing, the shares they had already sold. In other words, I agree that this was a case about minority shareholder oppression as opposed to being an edict to maximize profits / shareholder value.
And other than people threatening legal action, the most recent case we have (other than eBay v. NewMark) in favor of shareholder primacy is 124 years old - Dodge v. Ford. But the opposite is true:
Shareholder primacy is clearly unenforceable on its own term because the business judgment rule would defeat any claims based on a failure to maximize profit. 40 Corporate managers formulate business strategy. A rule‒sanction is antithetical to the core concept of the business judgment rule. In over one hundred years of corporate law, there is not a case where a state supreme court imposed liability for breach of fiduciary duty on the specific ground that the board, in managing operational matters, failed to maximize shareholder profit, though it made the decision informedly, disinterestedly, and in good faith.41 That case does not exist. In fact, many cases show just the opposite. Courts have held that shareholders cannot challenge a board’s decision on the specific grounds that, for example: the company paid its employees too much; 42 it failed to pursue a profit opportunity;43 it did not maximize the settlement amount in a negotiation;44 it failed to lawfully avoid taxes.45 There are classic textbook cases where courts have rejected attempts of shareholders to interfere with the board’s decisions on the argument that their views of business or strategy would have maximized shareholder value.46
The belief that a corporation is legally obligated to maximize shareholder value isn’t just wrong; it also:
Implies that no other model is feasible
Removes accountability for the negative effects of such policy from the people who are responsible for perpetuating them
Reinforces the fallacy that this should be resolved through legislation
One of the big reasons many companies go public is it’s naturally a really nice retirement package for the owners of the company. The owners of the company may have put so much time and money into building the company that they don’t have sufficient retirement savings, so by going public they turn a portion of their ownership into a boatload of cash as well as a boatload of wealth that can be leveraged, then simply elect a new CEO, retain their significant voting power on the board so they aren’t entirely abandoning their baby and then peace out
To confused people exploring from all Communities trying to understand what the hell is going on:
Bethesda is a game studio who does a decent job of giving people choice to do/be whatever they want in their games. Out of the box they included the option to choose your pronouns in a new game called “Starfield”.
They also make it possible to modify their games to make very drastic changes to the player experience.
Nexus is a site that hosts thousands of mods to all sorts of games. People make mods, upload them to Nexus and players download them.
Someone made a mod to remove the option to choose pronouns from Starfield.
Nexus decided they don’t want to host this mod. It’s hurtful to people and goes against their values of inclusivity.
That’s about it. Most of the people whinging about censorship don’t even play the game. They’re just here to whinge about how the world is moving on from old bigoted ways and they want to stay in the past and be jerks to people for merely existing. If they actually cared, they’d just download the mod from some other site. The mod itself is probably not much bigger than this reply.
In undue fairness, a mod to downgrade nudity or vulgarity would kinda make sense, if someone personally didn’t want to see that. (Or if they were concerned about it for streaming. Or they had kids in the room.) For example, there’s some racial slur graffiti in Bioshock Infinite that is used for highly effective shock value and characterization, and I could see someone wanting to tone it down.
The root issue is what’s being removed: the abstract possibility of characters being called “him” or “her” independent of their appearance. To people who won’t use the feature, it is literally nothing. It simply does not exist beyond a checkbox they’ll scroll clean past. The game part of the game will work exactly as they expect, from start to finish.
They’re whining about censorship because the real purpose of this mod is to signal that they’re against anyone else having that option.
They are performatively upset by this trivial separation of character model and branch condition. Because they hate trans people. There is no other possible motivation, because this pointless change is simple and direct.
This removal is a website telling those bigoted trolls: poop in someone else’s yard.
I’ll add that my understanding is that you aren’t even prompted to choose a pronoun in-game – it defaults to one or the other based on your character creation choices, and you can then change it if you want to. It’s literally a non-issue.
Happens all the time IRL to me. I use both he and she pronouns and ignorant people always ask why bother just pick one. Well, I did, they’re my PERSONAL pronouns and I chose both these.
Moderation exists to identify and exclude people who are being absolute cocks.
You don’t need any grand philosophical statement about values. You don’t need to defend the paradox of tolerance against absolutist demands for unrestricted expression. It’s perfectly fine to say: you were doing some diet Nazi shit, that’s awful, fuck off.
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”
People saying Steam doesn’t have a monopoly because other stores exist, is the same as saying Microsoft doesn’t have a monopoly on PC Gaming because Mac and Linux exist. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless because its their market power that determines a monopoly, not whether there are other niche players.
While Valve and Steam have generally been a good player, and currently do offer the best product, they still wield an ungodly amount of influence over the PC gaming market space.
Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.
When people say Valve doesn’t have a monopoly, they usually mean they don’t engage in anti-competitive practices (like making exclusivity a condition for publishing on their store, cough cough).
Actually, Valve’s recent moves represent what free market capitalism should be about - when competing stores started to appear, they instead made massive contributions to Linux gaming and appealed to right-to-repair advocates with the Steam Deck. Now both of those demographics are suckling on Gaben’s teats, myself included.
I hate DRM but really like Steam, they put in a shit ton of work to achive that! It’s certainly a monopoly but I think one of the biggest differences is that it’s not a publically tradet company so they don’t have to chase that infinite growth many very influencial idiots don’t see any issue with and there for aren’t willing to destroy everything for short term gains.
Despite not having pressure from shareholders Valve pioneered or at least popularized and normalized many of the worst practices in videogame industry designed to milk players dry: microtransactions, battle passe, loot boxes, real money gambling, you name it, Valve has it
Capitalism and a free economy are good when it's serving customers by making the best product or service possible, while balancing that with paying labour to make that happen.
The problem is that nowadays, there's a third party to this for the megacorps: Shareholders, which is where the enshittification begins.
Valve is a private company, so it is not beholden to any external shareholders, which is why it's been able to chart its own course. Still, I do worry what will happen when Gabe steps down.
I just don’t think that’s the case with Valve, they work on steam and add new features consistently, it’s not like they’re providing no value for the cut they take.
I get where you’re coming from though and way too many companies get away with that kind of situation. Just what capitalism often gives us :/
I’m not talking about Valve giving things back to us. I’m talking about the fact the owners of the company get money simply by owning the company. They take money they didn’t work for. Even if the company isn’t manipulative or scummy, they’re enriching people who don’t deserve it.
Generally companies do provide a service of some sort, the problem is that the higher ups who generally do less actual “work” rake in way way more then the average worker of the company.
That may be so, but that’s not the way that the initial tweet is using the term, and not the commonly understood definition.
I’m not denying that Valve as a whole have been a force for good in the PC gaming market, but it’s pointless to argue semantics and make up definitions to better suit personal bias instead of debating the actual point that’s being made.
they usually mean they don’t engage in anti-competitive practices.
But they do. They forbid devs to sell their games cheaper on other storefronts (outside of timed sales). Basically they enforce anti-competitive pricing on products in a way that makes it impossible for the devs to move the platform costs into consumer prices.
Devs could sell the product on Epic for example for $49 and make the same amount of profit as they do on Steam when priced $59 due to lower cut, but they can’t do it because Valve forbids it. It anti-competitively protects Valve and their 30% cut against competitors who would take lesser cuts, at the expense of end customers.
Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.
Like what Steam did with Greenlight and the plague of early access asset flips that clogged its home page for years?
Greenlight had nothing to do with selling out the end user experience to cash out on providing value and leaving the service near unusable, unless you have some kind of compulsion where you have to buy everything on Steam.
The trading card feature created an ecosystem allowing cheap asset flips to quickly make the threshold. And make their money back, creating a positive feedback loop.
Steam allowed its store to be flooded with these games at the expense of its customers because it got it’s cut.
Steam is a natural monopoly, which although still not entirely good but are a wholly different beast from monopolies made by exploiting flaws in the system
What’s a natural monopoly? Valve currently has the freedom to implement anything they want within an extent because they’re so popular. If they decided they wanted to charge devs 35% would people stop using it? Probably not. Steam’s monopoly is as bad as any other for the same reason any other monopoly is bad.
A natural monopoly is when an industry is difficult to break into, making competition difficult or impossible. This favors incumbents, in fact, a lot of industries are natural monopolies (pharma, aerospace, chip production).
The difficulty of breaking into an industry may be because:
new players cannot compete with established scale
start up costs require a nearly all-or-nothing approach, high risk
Look it up? It’s an actual term, not something I made up for whatever reason you assumed to argue against something I didn’t even say. I already said it’s still not a good thing, it just would have happened regardless of whoever that was able to do it on scale first.
You may want to read up on Ma Bell or Microsoft’s legal issues with Internet Explorer in the 90s to see what specifically was so bad about monopolies like those, and then revisit this idea.
It’s cool how you can be providing the labor for a company and then that company gets bought by another company and the shareholders who don’t actually make the thing get rich and then you get fired because the other company has a bad year even though the thing you labored for is incredibly successful.
Tangentially, I haven’t played in ages but they should have made it local coop so we can have fun on the courses without having to play through the same few opening courses and deal with lobbies.
Yeah, them deciding that no stage is sacred and not allow for any offline or private play was extremely frustrating and made it so that I just lost the ability to give a shit at all about the game
Custom lobbies (i.e. the exact feature you’re asking for) were launched in December 2020, in beta mode, then March 2021 to everyone. So the feature you wanted has been there for over 2.5 years.
It’s always fascinating to me to see highly rated comments that are pretty out of touch with the actual subject matter.
To me it just shows that they made the change far too late for anyone to even notice. It’s not reasonable to be a subject matter expert in every game one’s ever played.
Exactly this, I see this a lot in the Joe Rogan…“I bet you haven’t watched all his shows, so how can you say you don’t like him” you should’nt need to know everything in detail to form an opinion
Doubling down on what exactly? Man why are you so weird accusing me of editing comments and “doubling down” when all I’m doing is no changing my view based on an irrelevant reply from you.
And I compared the argument that “you can’t have a view on something without having an intimate and indepth knowledge of topic” especially when that view is whether or not you take part in the piece of media.
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.
Riccitiello also came under fire in 2022 for referring to developers who don’t focus on microtransactions as the “biggest f*cking idiots” before apologizing.
Classic CEO brainrot. There’s more to life than just maximizing profit.
Maybe this will be the kick in the rear that gets people to drop them enmasse. I’d definitely explore the other options for any new projects I was starting.
Even if they drop this fee, is it really worth the headache in the future when they try something again?
No, Unity has always been an inferior engine to others such as Unreal Engine, Lumberyard, Blender, etc. In fact, the Unreal Engine 3 UDK became free well over a decade ago, and it’s basically Unity if Unity weren’t the scummy corporate vampires they’ve always been.
I’m sorry but Blender game engine was pretty cumbersome to use. It was officially dropped awhile ago and last I heard it was picked up by the community
I said it in another thread, but Unity has truly fucked the vendor-client relationship.
While it is a nightmare, you can work with a company that changes its prices and terms, but you absolutely can’t work with a company that pulls this level of BS.
It’s just not safe to have your company so dependent on a vendor that could tank it on a whim.
Pretty much the biggest mistake made due to greed is the decision to retroactively apply thr deals to already existing titles. Its one thing to neuter titles in the future, but another to fuck over everyone whose already committed to using it on a different TOS
Not a lawyer, but I feel like basing the fee on their internal guess on how many installs seems questionable. Surely some major jurisdictions would take issue with that and counting installs from before the new TOS towards the new threshold. Also their contradictory TOS terms at the very least would probably get them an expensive trial, even if they win it.
Yep. The insanity of thinking you could apply it retroactively to already licensed games was absurd.
If you tied it to a future main version release with features people wanted, you could absolutely get away with some light pushback that's the usual grumbling on price changes, and a lot of developers would suck it up and move to the up to date engine anyways.
But when you try to pull the rug on people for stuff they've already been developing under previous terms, they're going to seriously reconsider, and on stuff they already published makes it extremely hard to justify working with you again.
Yeah, that’s what burns the business relationship. Because now it’s not just “oh, Unity might screw me, and I’m investing in learning what could become a dead platform”, it’s “even if Unity doesn’t screw me now, they could randomly decide to screw me 10 years from now and retroactively charge me a king’s ransom”. That’s the stuff that has a permanent chilling effect on the whole platform.
The reason why Unity refuses to not make it retro-active is because they want money from Genshin Impact etc which already launched. If they don’t make it retroactive then the whole point of the change on their end is gone.
UPBGE is a fork of original blender game engine. Looks like it’s still being actively developed based on their github. Not sure how it compares to other modern engines though.
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