captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated, rok temu

You know, it seems that several of the games I play has some element of “corporations bad” to it. Subnautica’s Alterra, Satisfactory’s Ficsit…

captain_aggravated, rok temu (edited rok temu)

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.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

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.”

captain_aggravated, rok temu

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.

You can see how that’s working out for them.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

That’s fairly common with open source projects. How do those two people treat contributors? How do they react to pull requests?

captain_aggravated, rok temu

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.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

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.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

Can you cite an example where this has actually worked/led to a stable business model?

captain_aggravated, rok temu

Amazon is a goods-based business though, they ship massive amounts of inventory.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

Godot is a full engine, I would position it in the market somewhere between Unity and GameMaker Studio. It is capable of making 2D and 3D games, though there’s some things Godot lacks, for example the asset streaming capabilities that allow for large seamless open worlds without loading screens, they’re working on that.

Godot runs on WIndows, Mac, Linux various BSDs, and they’re working on an Android port. Godot games can be exported to Windows, MacOS, Linux (and thus SteamDeck), BSD, Android, iOS and the web. Godot games can be ported to consoles, but Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are really fucky about licensing. The way you would go about publishing your Godot game to Playstation, Xbox or Switch is to work with a porting company who specializes in such things.

Fun fact: The Godot IDE is itself a Godot “game.” The Godot editor runs in the Godot engine and is built from UI tools available to end users; this makes it pretty easy to create tools and extensions to customize the editor to your team or project’s needs. It’s also a practical demonstration of how robust Godot’s UI creation tools are; I’ve been toying with the idea of building a woodworking CAD program in Godot.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

Today I learned that Cruelty Squad was made in Godot.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

So, here’s my understanding:

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.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

Cruelty Squad was made in Godot. Don’t know if that’s an endorsement or not as the game is deliberately hideous, but…yeah.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

2014: “You guys should be careful building your industry around proprietary tools, you really should think about open source-” “Blah blah blah stop your moralizing, open source software isn’t 100% ready to go right now so we absolutely can’t use it, instead we’re just going to pay money for this turnkey solution.”

2023: “Help! The proprietary turnkey solution we’ve been paying for this whole time is enshitifying! Subscription models, mandatory cloud services, more and steeper fees!” “Open source tools are still a thing, you know.” “Yeah but we’ve spent a decade telling an entire generation of talent to learn the proprietary stuff so it’s hard to migrate, and we didn’t contribute any code or money to FOSS projects this whole time so it still isn’t up to snuff.”

Well I guess you can slide over to Unreal and kick that can down the road a bit waiting for Epic Games to enshitify their product as well, you can use and contribute to Godot, you can develop your own in-house engine, or you can keep taking it up the ass from Unity.

Just let me ask this: If even a few smaller games, something like Unrailed or Papers Please, used Godot and contributed what they paid to Unity to the Godot team…where would the engine be today?

captain_aggravated, rok temu

I have a hypothesis: People have heard of Unreal but haven’t heard of Godot, they see folks talking about it and go “What’s that” and google it.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

On the upside, you think this will end the epidemic of worthless asset flips?

captain_aggravated, rok temu

It did just occur to me that the amount of time I’ve spent over the last few years tinkering with Godot as a hobby just got more valuable.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

Art assets, sound effects, storylines, that sort of thing transfers pretty easily.

Rigging, animations, scripting, physics…these pretty much don’t and would have to be rewritten from scratch.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

It depends on the game you’re making.

Godot has a dedicated workflow for 2D games, so I’d rather make one of those color sorting puzzle games that’s all people play on mobile these days in Godot than Unity or Unreal.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

No, that’s why I think Valve is so supportive of the mod scene. Team Fortress and Counter Strike among others started out as mods that the studio hired.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

An increasing number of states are banning billboards along highways. Travelers do need a low tech method for finding certain services though, such as food, lodging, fuel and restrooms. So you’ll see those blue signs that says “FOOD NEXT EXIT” with a Waffle House and Burger King logo. In order to put the logo on that sign, the business has to meet certain criteria (which vary from state to state like all highway laws), for example a restaurant must be within 3 miles of the highway, be open for at least 12 hours a day and feature public restrooms and telephones. The sign itself may include a distinctive logo and the name of the business in legible font but no slogans or ad copy. “This burger restaurant is nearby.”

This I see as an appropriate amount of advertising.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

I remember one of the early Youtube sensations was this teen chick’s vlog that turned out to be a fictional soap opera basically. Because it hadn’t occurred to anyone to do that yet.

This was BACK IN THE DAY, around the same time Boxxy became a sensation, or that one chick who just sat still in front of the camera because the Japanese liked her huge eyes.

captain_aggravated, rok temu

Hell I think you could make a massive improvement to the site if it could realize “Hey, I’ve been suggesting the same exact video to this user 500 times in a row, and he’s never clicked it. Maybe this user likes this creator/series, but not this specific video.”

captain_aggravated, rok temu

That’s the one, lonelygirl15. What a wild story. My internet destroyed brain immediately jumped to “Wow that was before the Youtube partner program, and it was presented as an authentic teen’s vlog at least at first…I wonder what the monetization strategy was?” And it turns out there kinda wasn’t one. They went into $50,000 worth of credit card debt to fund the series, according to Wikipedia. Like remember that episode of South Park (remember that show?) where they had the waiting room full of viral video people waiting to get their non-existent internet fame money?

captain_aggravated, rok temu

The wild thing is, people still buy them. “The gameplay is derivative and insipid, it was delivered buggy and unfinished, it’s barely different than the last one they published, and the business model is outright predatory.”

“Yeah, but it’s Star Wars.”

captain_aggravated, rok temu

I’m a bachelor in my 30’s, Roblox wouldn’t have been targeted at me, but my children…which I don’t have. So the first I heard of Roblox was a Youtube video essay titled something to the effect of “I made a video about how exploitative Roblox is, and then it got worse.”

captain_aggravated, 2 lata temu

As someone who bought a physical disc copy of The Orange Box on launch day, it…kinda slays me that TF2 is still running. It’s a very different game than it was in my day, and it is just wild hearing kids younger than the game talking about it. Gaming almost always moves on faster than this.