Game Development

I'm starting to see enshittification as part of the cycle of renewal in capitalism. Don't get me wrong...it's a completely foolish and disasterous way of doing things, and billionaires are a black mark on society as a whole, but innovation happens when you take away the established tools.

Twitter is a good example. Elon seriously accelerated the enshittification, and now it's tanking. Meanwhile, alternatives are springing up at breakneck speeds to replace it. Which one will win the war is anyone's guess, but Twitter will be the loser regardless. Reddit is another one. And Digg before it. As one commits corporate seppuku, others step in to take its place.

While it sucks for anyone caught in the crossfire, and the ones responsible for nuking a corporate landscape often skip away with a golden parachute, it usually leads to a shakeup that can bring amazing innovations. The key is to get in on the next wave, hope you picked the winner, and make sure you get out before shit hits the fans this time.

I'd pirate the fuck out of everything if that happens.

The second Steam charges me for an install... Back to the high seas.

Not even about the money.

I think they might actually get told to fuck off by publishers, strictly because they wouldn't be making any money out of it on top of the bad publicity being passed down to them by consumers.

Yep, had an idea for a game and when I read all this stuff I decided to check out Godot again since the last time I did it wasn't in a great state yet. So far it's looking pretty good now!

Their Twitter is even leaning into the "answering questions" angle. Just frame the backlash as a result of ignorance, rather than people being reasonably upset by a situation they understand perfectly well. Then they dodge inconvenient questions about things like malicious automated downloads. Of course, they're happy to "listen to feedback." Not act on it, of course, but the social media person is happy to scroll past whatever you have to say!

That's what this is about. The CEO said that devs who don't put ads in their games and monetize are "fucking idiots"

Unity isn't a game engine company anymore, they're an advertisement company that owns the rights to a game engine.

This happened to a crafting/cutting machine and its software a while back.

The company wanted to start charging once you hit a miniscule upload threshold, forcing you to pay if you wanted to upload more than, say, 20 images per day.

Folks who already owned the machine were furious that they'd essentially be limited out of their own machine, when there was previously no extra charges for use.

The company rolled back their statement and stated that they'd only start charging people who purchased & registered their machines after a certain date. Older users would not be charged.

Even so, after the shit they pulled, people no longer recommend that specific machine/brand/company anymore because of their nonsense.

I turned down a job offer at a company that relied solely on twitter’s api in order to accomplish their goals. It was a sales lead generation tool that used a scripted approach to warming leads before handing them off to AE’s to bring home.

Within a year Twitter shut down their access and the company went under. That’s the day I learned not to trust another company to allow you to make money with their product permanently.

Developing a good and feature rich game engine which also runs performant is a huge effort. That alone can cost a good team 2 years at least. Even more if we consider todays graphic standards. That's nothing which smaller studios can easily deliver. So yeah, it's an obvious decision to buy a license for a proprietary engine, where a lot of work has already went into. That's just business and nothing crazy about it. Companies using services or products of other companies is pretty ordinary.

Until a few years ago there was barely any alternative afaik

Pretty much every gamedev course will teach either Unity, Unreal or both, so those students end up getting fucked either way.

God dammit, don't give the ideas!

Unity's official response to those questions as of a few hours ago is akin to "we have ways... trust us."

Creators of the Unity engine want to charge developers per game install, the more people that install the game the more you have to pay. This includes games that already exist and never agreed to this. It also causes a lot of safety concerns, how will they confirm how many installs a game has? Are they bundling spyware with Unity games?

From what I've heard, from January 2024, any for-profit game made in Unity that meet a certain profit and download threshold will have to pay a fee to Unity per install of said game, including those released before these changes are being introduced.