It essentially allows for special closed source builds. These closed source builds can have the engine support for consoles and still be in keeping with Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo's licenses.
So, basically the console manufacturer gives you the SDK, integration code, etc after you sign their NDAs. After that, you can either use what they gave you to port it yourself to that console, or you can pay someone else for their build.
Hey EU. How about lowering that barrier to entry by pumping a couple of million Euro’s into cold-room reverse engineering the API’s and developing an open source alternative that can be distributed freely.
We’ll invite Sony lawyers, Microsoft lawyers, watch them cope and seethe as their framework is made more open…
…aaaand then realising that a lot more people will take the shot to pay for actual licensing. Go figure.
It's still valuable information for those that would seek to load homebrew (unsigned code) onto their systems.
Console security is one of those things where every additional barrier helps. The goal isn't to outright prevent homebrew or piracy but to limit the scope of breaches and delay them as much as possible. Even modern consoles like the Switch and PS5 are not immune
It would be great if there was a guaranteed way to homebrew your consoles, but yeah security and stability is the real thing we benefit from. I don’t think anyone would advocate for more hackers in console multiplayer games, and I don’t want a homebrew game I’m running to crash or brick my system because of their fly-by-night hardware usage.
So, I didn't bring up Xbox earlier, because Microsoft has an official way to run homebrew on Xbox consoles.
All modern Xboxes have access to something called developer mode. This allows people to put whatever code they like on it, but removes the ability to play retail games. The change isn't permanent, however, and switching between the modes is perfectly safe.
This is a big part of the reason why Xbox 1 never had piracy; pirates couldn't piggyback on the back of homebrewers, who simply opted to use developer mode instead of cracking the console.
Interesting, I didn’t realize this. I assumed a dev kit was always required for that behavior, and that’s why Nintendo offering a cheap switch dev kit was such a big deal. TIL
I am not sure this is something other engines even offered at this level, but my issue is bindings support.
3.X had (3rd-party) production-ready bindings, even for niche languages.
4.X, with hopes of improving support for compiled languages, has a new bindings system meaning that all bindings need to be redone as a new effort. This happened with the language that I'm interested in, the group that made the production-ready 3.X bindings abdicated the crown and there have been splintered efforts by individuals to work on 4.X bindings.
So it (3.X vs 4.X) is language vs engine features. When/if 4.X bindings do come out, it is not known how similar they will be so (aside from non-Godot-specific code) that will likely add complication to it as well.
I don't really care about consoles (needing to jump through hoops to develop for it is one reason) so a different potential issue would web export limitations. Both for different languages and for visual quality (AA). Those were issues in the past, though I'm not actually sure where they're at now (the 4.1 docs do say you can't have C# web exports in 4.X).
I’m all for Godot getting better; that said, has Epic, Open3D, or Crytek made similar moves?
(I know Crytek isn’t much of a player currently, but as someone who’s been following them closer in recent years, it really seems like they got their house back in order)
I think epic made their engine more appealing by waiving some Epic Games Store charges for Unreal games. And had a no fee until 1m earnings thing. Not this kind of shit.
I can hazard a guess as to why. Might be something to do with the fact that I only actually paid for three (heavily discounted) games in my entire Epic Games library. The rest of my library were giveaways. I suspect a lot of customers’ Epic libraries are similar.
When was the last time EA had an idea that made things better for the customers… you know like how companies are supposed to work. Customers pay and in exchange they get something that makes their lives a little better. But it’s always just about extracting value and giving as little as possible back.
“Here take the same reskinned soccer game, now a little bit more expensive, with ads and new bugs, and some micro transactions, because you should pay us more, because fuck you”
Sports fans seem pretty happy to be fucked around though. It happens to them hard when seeing sport in real life and have to pay exorbitantly for food at stadiums/sports channel subscriptions, so EA is fucking them quite gently in comparison.
Developer Intercept Games does indeed seem to be getting shut down :( There’s coverage at Eurogamer and lots of other sites, mostly pointing back to Jason Schreier (paywalled ofc because it’s fucking Bloomberg).
It’s not at all clear what that means for the game. “Safe” seems unlikely.
The Entertainment Software Association serves as the voice and advocate for the video game industry. Our mission is to expand and protect the dynamic worldwide marketplace for video games.
Their membership is almost entirely large games publishers and they only look out for their best interests and the market.
Take a look at their open positions, half of them are legal jobs protecting IP. www.theesa.com/about-esa/
Which leads to less money. I’d prefer a few failed games and the industry learns. Fun games sell, it microtransaction nor half baked shovelware. Some strike it lucky with micro transactions, but only if the game is good.
I know. I’m personally looking forward to WB declaring bankruptcy now that the morons have announced they’re doubling down on shitservice despite Hogwarts and Shiticide Squad showing what the public actually wants.
It’s always been a race to gobble up the handful of whales that keep the mobile game industry alive. Now add hundreds more desktop and console games to that list. Sure, there are lots of people that will happily spend thousands of dollars on any shitty game, but once you’ve got the entire industry spending billions fighting over those players, the well runs dry eventually.
Underrated comment honestly. That’s nailed on the head, greed drove billions in investments to compete for whales and now it looks like a wasteland…compounded by the fact that the whales were always unsustainable users in the first place. Sometimes rich people were whales but the majority of the time they were users who didn’t have a pot to piss in, in the first place.
“Reducing our office footprint” these ghouls are going to fire people who aren’t following the return to office decree because it will be an easy on paper excuse. Also “revenue came in within guidance” so they expected / planned for revenue to be low enough to justify firing even more people? They’ve already done two other mass firings morale is terrible right now. Lots of the best workers have been quitting to find better work and the drain is noticable. I just need stable insurance for another 6 months then I can leave too, I hope I don’t get fucked
Thank you, I’m honestly terrified. I spent my whole life so far trying to get into this industry, I finally pull it off in my early 30s and now all this. I spent 10 years roughing it and finally have been able to do things in the last two years like go to the doctor ever. I don’t have tech people wealth laying around I’ve spent so much basically doing damage control for having previously been paycheck to paycheck. I’m only just getting the ball rolling and I’m going to be so fucked if I lose this job.
I hate to say it but it might be worth looking for a job outside the games industry. It’s openly known that most gaming companies get away with terrible working conditions and employee treatment. They get away with it because there’s a revolving door of people willing to put up with shit treatment so they can say they got a job in the industry.
It’s fine if that matters to you, but you have to decide how much it matters and stick to your line in the sand. Personally I’d rather work something less interesting and have better pay and reasonable work/life balance.
Unity, as a business, as a stock investment, as a C-suite and board of directors, is rotting in its casket for all I care. I have committed to never buy game built in Unity whose development started after September this year.
This whole debacle wasn’t an engineering problem; it’s not the software development staff’s fault.
I am willing to go through the trouble because it gives the developer more money. Especially if the game is developed with Unreal Engine. Many player don’t give a fuck and don’t know that any game developed with Unreal engine Epic gets some money even if you buy on steam. For anyone that has this “Fuck Epic” mentality and are willing to go to extend to boycott or not buying games from their “favorite” developer, sorry, you also don’t give a fuck about said developer nor their games. You can stand on principle and against that platform exclusivity behavior and I hope you stick to your principle across platforms as well. As in, you never buy games that don’t do simultaneous release due to an exclusivity deal. (Aka, you can’t buy SpiderMan or God of War on PC cause they aren’t released on Xbox platform.)
The reason for my decision is very simple, if your game is developed with UE:
steam takes 30% cut and Unreal Engine has that 5% royalty past liftetime and then quarterly revenue threshold. Once you game go beyond that threshold, all sales on steam you only see 65% back. (steam have special per project deal if your sales volume exceed certain number, and I guess good luck negotiate with them without some big publisher on your back. steam only back down on this cause Epic’s exclusive deals. )
Epic takes 12% cut and waive Unreal Engine royalty, in same case like above, you see “all sales”(before and after UE revenue threshold) gives you 88% back.
Even if you wrote your own engine, Steam vs EGS is 18% revenue difference from the get go, if ANY gamer claim that they loved the games developer, and willing to support them(if they don’t have their own store front), buying on EGS supports them 18% more. I will take the bad store interface anytime, even if it means I have to download update and patch myself.(which we all did before steam is a thing.)
Say, what happen if a game is released by publisher that have their own launcher. How do you “support” developer more.
If they are not using Unreal engine, buy on the publisher launcher.
If they are using Unreal Engine, during launch window buy on the publisher launcher, dev have to pay the 5% royalty.
If they are using Unreal Engine, not direct subsidiary, post launch window( 6 month+ after launch) buy on EGS if you know their revenue split agreement with the publisher. (this is highly NDA stuff so you can only “guess” or if you have some industry hush hush info.) If you are not certain, still buy on the publisher launcher.
There are a couple types of revenue split with publisher if you are not direct subsidiary, this highly depends on the contract negotiated and for independent studios that wish to remain independent and still wants to get publisher money for the push to ship a game it might be one of the following variation.(note this excludes some shady publisher stuff you see on internet from smaller ones.)
If publisher is confident, they will take higher split all the way until all cost is recovered, dev will get enough money to maintain their operation with sale flux. If your sell are better than expected, win/win. (they usually have first say to sequel/derived works to decide if they want to remain the publisher for that IP.)
Another type is publisher takes all the sales until the cost is recovered, but they have to sustain your core operation during this period(this is also cost). After that it’s the split agreed upon.
The above are the “templates”, all details are in fine print. So as you can see, the decision to buy after lunch window highly depends on the “split” method and how much the publisher charge the dev for their store front. Before EGS, the publisher can simply charge the developers 30% cause everyone else(Steam/Google/Apple) is doing the same. It is rare but there are some devs once they are out of their contract they become their own publisher on steam/egs. Or, they are their own publisher on non-exclusive platform. example would be say a game is PlayStation exclusive for 6m/1y, allowed simultaneous release on PC, more than likely the publisher on PC is the dev themselves. (sony allows that type of deals)
So why don’t publisher just work with Steam and not Epic or why do the publisher/developer take the Epic exclusive deals even though they know the “angry fuck epic exclusive” gamer will be all over them on [insert social media platform]?
BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE THE NUMBERS, YOU ARE PART OF THE NUMBERS.
Everything is market statistics, they are in the business to make money, for every party involved. They are not there to make you and only you happy. They want to make enough in sales to cover their bills, pay the stock holders, make some banks if they are lucky and there are decision making with different risk factors. They make the best decision to keep going and not flopping and lose their hard work up for the chopping block sales. The internet noise are just noise on the statistics.
Destiny’s onboarding for new players is literally the worst. If you don’t have a veteran guiding you into the game it’s literally impossible to pick up. You want more interest in the game, then make it easier to actually pick it up instead of flat replacing the starter content.
100%! This was exactly my experience when trying to guide a new (to Destiny) friend through the story and get him geared up. He ended up quitting in frustration in less than a month because nothing made sense.
As a gamer who grew up in the 80’s, lots of games that have any significant online component at all feel like this now. If you don’t pick it up in the first couple months, forget it. It’ll be full of people who play 9 hours a day and it’ll have so many layers of systems and currencies it feels like an absurdist satire. Seasons and prestige and lore and so much baggage. I get so tired of asking “wait, can I earn the blue triangles by playing, do they cost real money, do I trade orange circles for them…?”
I started a game that had been out for only hours (the Finals) and people already had advanced builds and insane map knowledge. These guys are preordering and then no lifeing the closed beta. Its crazy man.
Gotta love dropping $100 on a free game before it’s even out, then drip-feeding it thousands more over time when the game intrinsically provides nothing more than a highly engineered dopamine drip. No story, no meaningful progression, no value or benefit to you as a human, just obsessively learning and mastering a skill that has literally only one purpose on the planet: playing that game.
I’m glad I learned this lesson back in the N64 days when I used cheat codes on Turok to get all the guns and infinite ammo. It was fun for a little while but ended up ruining the game for me. There was one weapon that had a piece hidden in each level and then you only get three shots with it. With the cheats, I just went around spamming it until bored, but then I found I wasn’t really motivated to play the game properly. Going out and finding the stuff was as much the game as using it.
So when MTX came along, I remember thinking “holy shit, that’s going to make money” after seeing Blizzard failing to stop people from giving money to gold farmers even though they’d sometimes remove items or ban accounts they’d catch doing it. But I also never had much temptation to buy them myself because I knew that I would just be spending money to get bored of the game quicker after a brief time of feeling like I was awesome (which would also be false because putting money into a machine isn’t awesome).
Yeah, I’ve become much more of a believer in the craft of a tight, solid experience. That’s so much harder to find than a repeatedly gratifying but ultimately meaningless interaction.
It’s by Nexon anyway. If you don’t play it you probably dodged a bullet. Their games are extremely P2W and they literally pioneered the earn in-game currency that you can only use to trial weapons and characters method of wealth extraction. It’s been so long since I’ve played one of their games, but that form of microtransaction has always stuck with me as a “if I see it, I’m immediately deleting your game” approach to gaming.
The very first time a game tells me I have to pay for something with real currency in game that isn’t purely cosmetic, it gets dropped. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I let a game tell me that the blue triangles are mtx only.
Generally agreed. But it shocks me just how many games out there are making crazy amounts of money just selling cosmetics. I still remember horse armor! It was a scandal!
Yeah a game engine saving a studio hundreds of thousands of dollars or more per episode on lighting, comp, rendering, and set building or travel costs to shoot on location is not representative of the license fee paid
As someone who has played the game from day 1, and almost every day since, it’s a shame that this game that already is on auto drive will be crippled even further. If you have a bunch of friends who just wanna chat and don’t wanna play something competitive it fills all those roles.
I guess we should expect even less changes and content going forward… I know the level creation was just created to allow the community to provide free content so I wonder what else they can do to continue this or if the game will just die off.
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