Watch for more products that enable normal people to do great things to become paywalled. Only your gatekeeper masters may direct the market, and the creativity. In their infinite wisdom, they demand the control of gods.
Billionaires are a mistake.
EDIT: and I love the bait-and-switch of charging anyone who ever used Unity, even under different terms. Electric chair for the CEO.
They're going to back off on this and replace it with something bad but not as horrible. This is testing the water, and opens the door to charging everyone money every time you install a game, not just devs.
Have an install saved on your external and want to install it next week? You'll get charged for it as of you didn't already pay for it.
Games you have in your steam/gog backlog? Get charged again for it when you decide to play it.
I guarantee there are investors/publishers/whoever hitting themselves right now screaming "why didn't I think of that?".
That's part of the problem; they aren't charging you for the install, they are remotely tracking that you've done so and then billing the dev for it.
If you grab a cracked version, did the person cracking that game also remove the install telemetry, or did they just make it functional? Can you be sure?
In many cases, the dev would still be billed for you installing the game you didn't even pay for. Unity has no incentive to ensure each install is legitimate, as they profit from failing to catch that.
Sounds like pirating a copy and then trying some network fuckery... Fun!
But also if they make it bad enough I'll just do something else. I love games but if they wanna fuck that up bad enough then there are always other ways to kill time.
Maybe the gaming industry needs another collapse.
AAA needs a shake up, that's for sure, if it's just going to continue on it's current trajectory of "nothing new but costs more".
Most of the AAA's can't even be bothered to include as much content and as many systems as games from decades ago. You can play PlayStation 1 & 2 games that are just as complex or more complex than games releases recently. It's all the same stuff but with more pixels and larger localization folders.
Why is Skyfield 130 GBs when at it's core it has all the same functions as Oblivion or Fallout? Why does Octopath Traveller have a sliver of the in-game content that games like Star Ocean and Final Fantasy 9 had? Sports games and Shooters were lost causes years ago.
Indie devs have been making games that are far more fun and original than most AAA teams of multiple hundreds have been able to do in awhile.
The big guys need to return to focusing on fun. Some AAA's can still do it. BG3 and Zelda are the current obvious examples. Those games are Fun. That's what games are supposed to be.
Also, battle passes and season passes and everything that horse armor spawned can all go in the trash when there is another video game collapse.
No one should base their lively hood in game development through Unity with the poison that fills the C-Suites. Hopefully this is a big enough push to get GODOT to close the gap in marketshare.
The board knew who he was and his history before they hired him. They still hired him. They wanted and supported this but it blew up and he's the fall guy for this change.
Until the board changes, I don't think I care much for Unity at all.
Don't get me wrong, he's a dick, but I cannot imagine he's the only one.
Lately Microsoft has been friendly with Linux. They even released a guide in their website on how to install Linux alongside Windows. If anyone is guilty of actively trying to fight against Linux is Epic. For now, at least.
Until Microsoft opensources Windows, I won't trust them. Maybe not even then. The most dangerous thing they could do is become a linux distro, actually. Make a bunch of proprietary linux kernel modules required to run "Winux"-only applications and any distro unwilling to have proprietary kernel blobs will be killed.
Microsoft is known for Embrace Extend Extinguish. Their greatest feat would be killing linux.
They are pushing Linux hugely and one of its largest contributors.
Before the cloud you were spot on but they've realised windows can't compete in that area and actually costs them more when relating to their cloud services.
.Net is now open source and cross platform for exactly this reason.
WSL was created for exactly this reason as well and is awesome.
They won't create their own distro because, let's be honest, Linux isn't a competitor to windows as a desktop OS.
The article talks more about being able to legally play old games without downloading roms or anything, but that's a different topic from video game preservation. Video game preservation itself is doing just fine though. The vast majority of games are archived online and emulators provide super easy ways to play games that are impossible to find now.
Sure, companies should allow people to play older titles in easier ways, but to say "efforts to preserve gaming's rich history are failing" is just wrong.
I buy everything I can on GoG due to lack of DRM. If something is not on GoG, I buy from Epic simply because they pay a bigger share to developers than Steam. When I buy a game I want that money go to the devs, not middlemen.
GoG also integrates well with Epic, so I can have all my games there.
I support gaben simply because of what he has done for linux gaming. Epic CEO is openly hostile to whole ecosystem and that's why his company wont get a penny from me. And thats the joy of the whole PC gaming industry - we have a choice of who we want to support and how we want to support, and in the end we, as a consumers, will win, because of competition.
Does it though? It clearly backfires on the rank and file employees who had no part in the decision. I'm sure the executives responsible for this whole mess will end up with a nice golden parachute if they don't just get a bonus for making the staff "leaner."
There are more than 7k employees work in Unity. I don't understand why Unity needs so much workforce given that company is struggling to reach profitability.
Hence the layoffs i guess. They just wouldn't want to let a layoff go to waste so they jammed in a terribly greedy unpopular decision to monetize like they did. Kill 2 birds with 1 stone.
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