If I install a game I bought on both my desktop and steamdeck, the devs have to pay unity twice. If I uninstall it and re-install it, they have to pay it thrice. Four times if I ever use my laptop to play.
If I share the game with my dad and sister via steam family share, the devs have to pay yet another two times.
But I only paid for the game once.
It’s complete insanity. Do they have to pay again for every update, does that count as a new install? What about games on subscription services?
But drama almost never kills FOSS software. It just causes it to fork. FOSS software can become like an olympic flame that just keeps getting passed from dev to dev. Once there are people actively using something, those same people are motivated to fix any issues they have with it, or add any features they are missing. That then drives improvement of the software, which in turn drives adoption, which drives more improvement…
There was huge drama around Emby going closed source, but FOSS Emby simply got forked, becoming Jellyfin.
There’s an example just within lemmy, the lemmur app apparently stopped development due to some drama, but it got forked and Liftoff picked up right where it left off.
Yes. There can be drama around FOSS projects, and there often is. Loosely organized groups of volunteers putting together serious software don’t work as efficiently as a paid team of devs led by a visionary with final say. But FOSS projects are capable of becoming self-perpetuating in a way proprietary software can never do. Once they reach a high enough level of adoption, they are very hard to kill.
The real threat is Godot. It’s getting better and better. Why pay for a commercial game engine, when you can use one that comes with a literally no strings attached FOSS license? And you have full access to the source code, so you can fiddle with any line of code, if need be.
Ah. Yet another reason for game studios to turn away from commercial dev tools and turn to FOSS software like Blender and Godot.
And since game devs are, you know, developers, they can even contribute to these tools with heir dev time, improving them and accelerating the industry shift away from this commercial bullshit even more.
While I’m no fan of paid sponsorships holding back good games, this is untrue.
Neither nvidia nor amd block their partner devs from supporting competing tech in their games. They just won’t help them get it working, and obviously the other side won’t either, since that dev is sponsored. There are some games out there that support both, some of them even partnered.
So yes, it’s bullshit. But it’s not “literally paid” bullshit. Bethesda could have gone the extra mile, and didn’t.
As for game subscriptions, I’ve not looked into it much, but I know Apple’s service at least is based on hours played, which has resulted in some games on the service attempting to stretch out their playtime using things like mandatory grinding to progress in their games. With this model, developers can literally shoot themselves in the foot financially, by allowing the player to sprint. It’s stupid.
Games can’t be reduced to that simple a value. You can get the same amount of hours out of God of War as you can Binding of Isaac, but their production and purchase costs, are not, and should not, be the same.
But I did want to make the point that there aren’t as many corners to cut as some might think.
And while lossless compression of course exists, better compression is usually also a processing trade-off. You can use more storage and less processing, or use more processing, and less storage.
Compression is not a magic tool that reduces file size for free, its doing math to store some given data using less bits, which then has to be done in reverse to get at the original data.