I spent a ton of time in Kingdom of Loathing. I kept an old laptop that still had a flash enabled browser for a few months to play Bloons Tower Defense 4.
There was this game, I forget the name of it, but you had to build and drive little vehicles to overcome challenges. It was technically amazing for a Flash game, and I’d love to have it back.
My favorite thing about Illusion of Gaia has to be the fact that the manual contained a complete walkthrough of the game, at least in the North American release. Unless it was the same energy as “the dumb Americans (who invented the genre and introduced it to the East) don’t understand RPGs, so we’ll make Mystic Quest really simple and dumbed down for them” I don’t know why they did that.
Also, I was like 13 when I got my used copy of Soul Blazer…is there a more melancholy game on the SNES?
Yeah as another Firefox + Ublock Origin user, I came in here to say I’ve noticed a lot of game wikis announcing they’re migrating off of Fandom, and I’m curious as to why. I’m OoTL.
And some of them realistically can’t. Every other commercial game engine is developed for the studio first; Cry, Source, Unreal etc. These engines were made for, well, Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament. The studio saw returns for engine development in the sales of games, then they said “We could probably further monetize the work we’ve already done if we license the engine and SDK out to third parties.”
Unity on the other hand is trying to have the Autodesk/Adobe business model of “We have a free student or hobbyist tier, and then a commercial license that’s $100,000 per minute per seat.” The thing is, Autodesk and Adobe really don’t have realistic competitors in their market sectors. Unity very much does. Unity competes directly with GameMaker Studio, Godot, Unreal, Source 2 among others, the development of which are either directly supported by the sales of first party titles (or are outright FOSS projects in the case of Godot). So Unity has to set their prices to compete in that market, without the support of first party game sales.
It’s been my understanding that the general populace has been asking the developers of GIMP for years now to overhaul the UI and make it much friendlier to use, and the answer came back, “No, stop asking.”
Godot should definitely be adopted more by the indie and small studio scene. I think there’s going to be some folks who slide over to Unreal because Godot’s 3D capabilities don’t even match Unity’s yet, but there’s some stuff it can do, and it’s in active development.
Unreal has been in a different league basically since its inception. Compare the original Unreal engine to its contemporaries like Quake or Half Life and it’s amazing what they could do, if you had a box that could run it.
The difference between Unreal and Unity is Unreal has a sustainable viable business model (I think I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no “sustainable” business models under capitalism, what with demanding infinite growth and lal that). Epic Games develops their own games; the development of Unreal Engine has pulled its weight as a component of Fortnite and such. Same thing with Valve; I don’t think they ever bothered to charge for developing a game in the Source engine because they made their money for engine development through Half Life 2, Portal, TF2, Left 4 Dead etc.
Unity on the other hand doesn’t make and sell games, so they have to either directly charge developers (which they both do and don’t) or they operate their own adware nonsense. And neither of those revenue streams are enough. Which means they don’t have a viable business model. So they pull a stunt like this to hasten their inevitable bankruptcy.
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.