What I'm hoping is that gamers take some of the big pocket publishers that use Unity and abuse the absolute fuck out of them so they send their lawyers after Unity for the obviously unenforceable terms.
Unfortunately Unity will probably just settle with them for nothing to avoid them setting precedents.
I got a slightly better (though slightly harder to run on steam deck) version of what I expected after watching the direct. It's exactly what I wanted it to be.
It's just silly how people turn unsubstantiated wild speculation into some kind of unmet feature set.
I really have no idea where anyone got the idea it was a space sim from. They showed a good bit of gameplay that made it very clear that it was a traditional Bethesda game, with much more modern mechanics, set in space.
“Will games made with Unity phone-home to track installs?
We will refine how we collect install data over time with a goal of accurately understanding the number of times the Unity runtime is distributed. Any install data will be collected in accordance with our Privacy Policy and applicable privacy laws.” They already do, and fuck you for asking.
But that's entirely irrelevant. It is literally impossible for any business in any scenario taking a feature away that a customer paid them for to be forgivable, and should unconditionally constitute fraud.
I would think their public statements would significantly hurt the ability to do this, even if developers "agreed" to the terms without that clause.
I straight up don't think they could legally do it either way. But if they made public statements specifically addressing this particular thing, it has to significantly weaken their case.
I really feel like they're going to lose a lawsuit on that.
Unilateral contracts don't have unlimited power and "we can blanket change what we want to charge you on games already made" doesn't seem like it's going to be enforceable.
I think a big part of the problem is just hype cycles. People had expectations that were through the roof. They didn't tell you they had seamless transitions to space, and they didn't tell you they had BG3 caliber branching conversation trees (which we're a long way from being able to realistically do outside of a CRPG). But people seemingly expected that.
I watched the direct and we got basically what I expected (though the gunplay feels better than I expected. I definitely felt like VATS was needed in FO4.) It's Bethesda's game design philosophy of a massive world with a bunch of different play styles and a bunch of different quest lines (and smaller single quests) and locations that don't have to be done in any order. You can easily get sidetracked and go down rabbit holes. They iterated on most of their core features and adapted them to the new setting in a really well done way.
I also love the way the skill system brought back the "get better by doing" philosophy of Skyrim with challenges to unlock higher levels, and the story telling is sci fi in more than just skin.
So I was listening to the WAN show, and Luke said that the DRM was stacked with booby traps that broke the game mechanically in a bunch of ways if the DRM was bypassed without also removing them. The crack did; their version didn't.
The problem is that no one actually really follows the specs (or the specs don't define everything). So you can't just build to the spec and have your game work. You have to know all the ways the different hardware manufacturers cheat and adapt your stuff to their drivers.
If intel still has issues in their drivers and implementation, developing to run correctly on their cards isn't trivial at all. It should still mostly work, but it's hard to catch every edge case without experience with how they do things.