If you find the appmanifest file for the game (it’s in the steamapps folder where your games are installed) and set it to read-only, Steam can’t update the game. I think it’s based on the appid so the file should be called appmanifest_1091500.acf. You can open it up like a textfile where it’ll have the name of the game inside if you wanted to make sure.
Regardless of any political machinations, this is Unity being given a choice between making more money and making less money. Unsurprisingly, they claim that they’re choosing to make more money.
Except you’re looking at Unreal from a purely graphical perspective and as if Bethesda’s slowest process was making the engine work. If either of those two points were the issue, we’d have a whole bunch of Bethesda-style games on Unreal already, but we don’t.
Let’s be real here though, Terraria is an unfair comparison considering it’s modloader is integrated into the game itself and holds significantly greater support than most other mods with Steam Workshop support. (Oh and that the modloader is basically a community made mod manager anyways and is akin to using the community mod managers for the games mentioned below)
Stellaris, Rimworld, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Total War: Warhammer 3, Binding of Isaac, Dwarf Fortress, Space Engineers, Cities: Skylines, all of these very popular games with massive modding support are still plagued by the issues I mentioned above. And you know what? It has the issues you mentioned as well. Did you subscribe to an outdated mod? Oh, well, good luck figuring out which one that is. Forgot to download a dependency? Crash. Did a mod update and Steam just didn’t update the mod? Figure out what mod that was and unsubscribe to it and subscribe to it again. Did a mod just update and Steam updated the mod, even though the update breaks save compatibility? Well, unless the mod author uploaded the older version of the mod, good luck trying to have fun.
Mods uploaded to github does really suck for discoverability though. There’s the roguelike Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. The modding scene exists entirely on Github and you’d basically never find them unless you go searching for mods on their Discord channel.
There’s a couple issues with it. I mean, it’s simple for games where you’re not using a bunch of mods, but at some point it just becomes excessive. Not to mention that when a mod updates, the mod will automatically update breaking your game sometimes, or when you’re trying to play a game, a mod just doesn’t update causing it to break the game that way too. There’s just a lack of control that’s often necessary when modding.
I’m not super familiar with the WH40K franchise and what other games are out for it, but what genre of games would you have preferred they do? I suppose a straight up action shooter would work, but isn’t there a Space Marine sequel coming soon that’s for WH40K? Plus there’s also Darktide (the futuristic counterpart to Vermintide).
I think people really overstate Todd Howard lying to compare it Peter Molyneux’s shit. Like we’re looking at Molyneux who said you could plant a tree and have it grow in real time or whatever. The same Molyneux who promised a “life-changing” award for winning a P2W clicker game (the award was royalties and early access to Godus, a game which they abandoned for what was essentially Godus: Subtitle, which was promptly abandoned soon after). And now his most recent game being something that involves “blockchain technology” where you can make money in real life by making money in game.
I think people really overstate Todd Howard lying to compare it Peter Molyneux’s shit. Like we’re looking at Molyneux who said you could plant a tree and have it grow in real time or whatever. The same Molyneux who promised a “life-changing” award for winning a P2W clicker game (the award was royalties and early access to Godus, a game which they abandoned for what was essentially Godus: Subtitle, which was promptly abandoned soon after). And now his most recent game being something that involves “blockchain technology” where you can make money in real life by making money in game.
Those random YouTubers make those ecologies with the explicit purpose of simulating an ecology in a totally closed environment, not as an additional side piece to a game.
Not even to mention how a functioning ecology can never properly exist where a player is involved. Players will just kill things without any rhyme or reason to.
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.