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Fresh controversial gaming news.
If you're not familiar with Unity, it's one of the more popular game engines in use today, especially for Indy developers. It's frequently recommended for it's relative ease of use, and up until now, generous licensing. Even if you're a very casual gamer, you've probably played some games built on this platform like Pokemon Go, Beat Saber, or Monument Valley.
Today, Unity has announced some significant pricing changes. Most controversial seems to be that beyond a certain revenue and install threshold, developers will be paying Unity per install of their game. As in, if you uninstall and reinstall the game, the dev gets charged twice.
This has managed to piss off the usual suspects of game developers, games journalists, and gamers. Many an angry comment written by Dorito stained keyboards are flooding messageboards and twitter about how this is the death of gaming. (Tongue-in-cheek by the way, as a non-game developer I find the pricing model half-baked.)
But what's really interesting is the potential for misuse that I predict will occur for the next controversial game. While Unity has said they'll try to limit malicious behavior, they're providing gamers with the ability to charge developers money by essentially clicking the uninstall/reinstall button.
Any predictions for how quickly we see the first weaponization of this tool?
An important piece of history here is that Unity basically made their entire popularity on being the one engine that, despite being subpar to the likes of Crytech or Unreal, had a very indie friendly business model and was much more user friendly in the first place..
It's both why so many indie games use it, why there's a whole subgenre of shitty slop made in it using asset swaps, and why it's grown so popular despite clear technical issues.
This move is essentially turning against the original customer base once you've got big enough you don't need them anymore, what I believe people call "selling out".
Good news for Godot and other FOSS alternatives. And RMS was right again.
Yeah I donno. I think Unity's business model was always to infantilize the "developers" who want to make games, but are so technically incompetent Unity is basically their only choice. Then turn the screws and begin printing money with their captured audience. Especially devs who became dependent on their asset store.
Unity became popular primarily because it's easy. The business model was unobtrusive/invisible to your average less than 10,000 sales and/or never actually publish indie dev/hobbyist. It was icing on the cake not because it was good, because it wasn't explicitly terrible.
I haven't developed in anything so don't have an educated opinion, but what engine would someone use if they were "technically competent"?
As a rule I hate reinventing the wheel - I suspect you and I may be different in that regard. I have approximately 0 interest in building a game engine from scratch or even some common component support like 2-D menus or whatever.
I donno man. My biases are to hate things more the further away from the metal, and the more layers of abstraction there are. I've never actually finished a game I started making either. Maybe if I were more open to shitty engines I would have.
I will say, I most enjoyed making a game when I was just keeping it simple with C and SDL2.
What OS do you run on your daily driver system?
Always been a gamer first, so I've been stuck on Windows. Win10 currently. But god damned if the enshitification of Windows isn't driving me to Linux when Win10 lapses out of support. I have a spare computer I keep meaning to put Linux on just to start acclimating to trying to game on Linux.
I'm in the same position; but I suspect I'll end up giving WSL a try instead. (I've used Cygwin for decades.)
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Modern Windows pisses me off so much. What the hell, Microsoft.
Has modern Windows really gotten worse? These days I basically use Windows as a boot loader for the ~20% of my video games that won't run on Linux or a console, but during the era when I was giving up on Windows it seemed to me like it was mostly improving, albeit not fast enough for my liking. Vista was a step back from XP but it was still way better than ME or original NT; ME was a step back from 98 but it was still way better than 3.1.
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