I swear I’m old enough to remember this exact same fucking debate when digital tools started becoming popular.
It is, simply put, a new tool.
It’s also not the one and done magic button people who’ve never used shit think it is.
The knee-jerk reaction of hating on every art made with AI, is dangerous.
You’re free to like it or not, but it’s already out of the hat.
Big companies will have the ressources to train their own model.
I for one would rather have it in the public domain rather than only available to big corps.
I’d move the fuck away from Unity even if they did roll back all their latest bullshit.
It’s only a matter of time before they pull another stunt like that.
Remember, their shitstain of a CEO, surrounded by his troupe of yesmen, all thought this was the best idea ever.
It’s not about about money: corporate would spend more money when you’re in the office.
It’s not about productivity: shit has been getting done from home and then some, for literally years.
It’s not about team building: productivity requires focus, open space bullshit floor plans hamper that and most everyone is gonna wear headphones and try to block out the background noise and social distractions as much as possible.
It’s about control, power and obedience: butts in chairs are reassuring to managers who have no fucking clue what they’re doing, nor what you’re doing, nor what the company needs done.
Management usually has no idea what anyone is really doing, they’ve never figured how to measure actual productivity, so they equate butts in chairs with productivity.
I don’t work for Ubi, but I’ve been the one remote player of an in-office team for the last 15 years.
Nobody ever cared where the fuck I was working from until after covid, where suddenly some insecure execs fear we might all be wanking all day, probably because they think we’re like them.
I’m perpetually busy at work, mostly because we’re understaffed, but I know what needs to be done and I do it.
I don’t need a babysitter to do that.
Them? They’ve always been useless, but now it shows, because there’s no-one to boss around, shit still gets done, but they’re not around, so they can’t delude themselves into thinking their bullshit is what makes things work.
Since they no longer have anything to do, they fuck around at home all day.
Faced with their uselessness, they pull a Seymour Skinner… it’s everyone else who’s wrong and not them.
They extrapolate and think that if they’re fucking around, surely we’re all doing what they’re doing and thus need reigning in. They fail to realize they’ve never had a productive purpose even before.
It’s all just a symptom that your management is full of old useless farts.
Some manager usually chimes in with some remote lazy bitch they “caught”, as if these people didn’t exist in the office.
Having been the outsider remote guy since way before, I can say the rest of my team fucked around a lot more when they were on-prem than when they’re remote.
If everyone just… didn’t go back at all, what are they gonna do, for everyone and close the whole studio?
I fail to see how they can guarantee it’s the first install.
I game inside a VM with GPU passthrough and I’m pretty sure it would be trivial to install-bomb any game to rack up install numbers and costs.
Moreover, would anyone even trust any number of times Unity tells you your game was installed?
They could a magical 10% that would be hard to prove/disprove.
Anyone with a half-competent legal team would stay the fuck away from any of this nonsense going forward.
This would harm not only us, but fellow game studios of all budgets and sizes. If this goes through, we’d delay content and features our players actually want to port our game elsewhere (as others are also considering). But many developers won’t have the time or means to do the same.
Stop it. Wtf?
HEY GAMERS!
Today, Unity (the engine we use to make our games) announced that they’ll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold - regardless of how that copy was obtained.
Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in 2024? That’s right, it’s us and a lot of other developers.
That means Another Crab’s Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.
And that’s before we even think about sales on other platforms, or pirated installs of our game, or even multiple installs by the same user!!!
This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles. If these changes aren’t rolled back, we’ll be heavily considering abandoning our wealth of Unity expertise we’ve accumulated over the years and starting from scratch in a new engine. Which is really something we’d rather not do.
On behalf of the dev community, we’re calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product’s actual users.
The first Guildwars was great.
The second one was nice too and I played it a bunch, but there’s something about the first I can’t quite put my finger on, might just be nostalgia.
My GW2 time has been mostly spent helping people with jumping puzzles, which are kinda cut short these days by mesmers making portals for them, which I also do sometimes.
When it was released, Steam was absolute shit, which is something people tend to forget or ignore.
It has certainly come a long way, but it’s still a “Games as a Service” where you don’t really own anything.
Then again, my account is 18 y.o.
I made an account in January 2005, probably for HL2.
I initially resisted making an account and I hated Steam back then.
They’ve since fixed a lot of things and I now have 250+ games on it.
I have to admit, Valve is one of the few big game companies that haven’t gone to absolute shit.
Though I dread the day GabeN steps down or sells out…
Another thing that I didn’t agree with back in the day was WoW, paying a subscription to play was a hard no. Still haven’t played it, which kinda sucks because I was a big fan of the old Warcraft games and of RPGs in general.
Voting with my wallet certainly didn’t change much for them, although it probably was better for me.
I know I’ve finished Dying Light 2, but I don’t remember much about it.
I remember the insane amount of copy paste in the maps. Oh another roof with the half fenced in area with the same backpacks. Or the exact same ramp again.
In Dying Light 1, traveling at night was terrifying.
Being pursued by… whatever those were, looking back with your flashlight, just trying to gtfo.
In the second, it’s mostly just annoying. Shoot the same screaming zombie that’s basically dropped every 150m in a square grid.
There were different endings, which really only hinged on one or two choices that you make way early in the game and pretty much nothing else you did really mattered in the end.
Also, Alyx was there, but she spoke like Ahsoka and didn’t have a crowbar.