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#I like video games :]
sniperct · 9 months
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If true we HAVE to make this the biggest flop in gaming history, as in 'destroys the company' levels of gaming flop as in a 'lesson must be taught' gaming flop, as in 'E.T. destroyed atari' gaming flop
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mzcain27 · 10 months
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I think game studios should just release their character creators online. For the times when I don’t wanna play the whole game, just the lil dress up part
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hell0mega · 5 months
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people are drawing Steamboat Willie Mickey doing all this crazy shit and whatnot, but you could always do that. you can do that now, with current Mickey, just fine. it's fanart and it's legally protected. hell you could take Disney-drawn Mickey and put a caption about unions or whatever on it and it would still be protected under free speech and sometimes even parody law.
what is special about public domain is that you can SELL him. you could take a screenshot and sell it on a tshirt. you can use him to advertise your plumbing business. people have already uploaded and monetized the original film.
you could always have Mickey say what you want, but now you can profit off it.
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quibbs · 1 month
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just had SO much fun with the fallout tv show... i love you missus okey dokey
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emptyjunior · 9 months
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Enough random notes that have a written story on them as environmental storytelling, explore the space, get crazier with it.
You move into a house and aw cute, it has the kids height on the walls but you notice there's a three foot difference in height between measurements, you check the date, they're a month apart. The final measurement is on the ceiling. It's dated two days ago.
You're part of a recovery team that have finally found a stranded ship, they were found too late and have all passed a long time ago. They all died of starvation. You enter their storeroom, it's filled with food. In the dining hall you find the tables laden with perfectly fine looking breads, cakes, cured meats, jams, candies. Your medic says all the people sitting at the table didn't eat a Thing.
You wake up in an apocalypse. You can't find anyone at all as you wander the streets but you do hear faint music playing from somewhere. You stumble into a supermarket, to see all the aisles still full, except for the shelf that was full of ear plugs, which look to be the only thing that was looted.
Like there's light, sound, props. Having a street where every house is decimated except for One. Landing on a planet known for having No Water and a plant is growing and you don't know where it could have possibly gotten moisture from but you can't find the citizens Anywhere.
I'm sorry, I'm just kinda over the "graffiti on the wall to show the bad guy is around". That's not environmental storytelling that's just normal story. Show me I'm in the villains territory by the rain suddenly cutting out above me as I'm driving, even though it's meant to be raining all night. I park the car and step out, and realise the constellations are Wrong, until I see they're Not constellations, they're the blinking lights of a massive ship-
I Will stop now because everytime I go to write a sentence it devolves into another prompt but I'm just saying we have a Lot of senses, engage them, show me the Environment in environmental storytelling.
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greelin · 9 months
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i am so fucking bad at video games. but he’s in there. and i have to see him. I Have To
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slime-crafters · 2 months
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The best thing about the new stardew update is you can tell concerned ape got comfortable just being fucking weird. Which is understandable considering most indie devs have to be some level of insane
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setaflow · 6 months
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Gay pride happens in June and gay wrath happens whenever hbomberguy drops a 3+ hour video essay about a specific topic
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pirateprincessjess · 2 months
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Adapting a movie into a pinball machine is a surprisingly difficult task. But the Princess bride pinball machine does it really well!
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ruporas · 3 days
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trigunned the hades or hadesed the trigun (id in alt)
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wombywoo · 1 month
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local cuisine 🤌
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ampleappleamble · 3 months
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haven't seen this on here yet so:
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in case you don't want to slog through the shitscape that is the bird/letter website, take a peek beneath the cut (shamelessly copied from the something awful forums dungeon meshi thread)
- Her first memory of video games was watching her father playing Wizardry on Famicom, also Dragon Quest, Ultima, and Fire Emblem among others.
- She was a difficult child so her parents didn't let her play. Wizardry is a boring game to watch, but the monster illustrations on the walkthrough evoked her imagination and made her keep watching.
- She only started becoming a serious gamer after the serialization of Dungeon Meshi was locked, for research purposes. Before that, she read fantasy novels such as The Neverending Story (Michael Ende) and The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien).
- The international title for Dungeon Meshi: Delicious in Dungeons was decided by her editor.
- D&D popped up a lot when she researched the history of video games, so she read the rule books, replay novels, and games inspired by D&D.
- One of the first games she studied was the Legend of Grimrock (game's 80% off on Steam atm). Originally, she wanted Dungeon Master (FTL Games) which was famous for "RPG with meals" but hunting down the game and machine was too much.
- She didn't like games other than turn-based RPGs at first, but she decided to stop being picky and play anything that piqued her interest.
- She played Zelda: BotW and TotK on a borrowed Switch from her editor due to the console's scarcity at the time.
- She enjoyed Red Dead Redemption 2 and God of War for their stories. RDR2's incredible attention to detail had Kui engrossed so much that she asked her editor and other mangaka to play it so she could discuss it with them.
- Kui praised The Witcher 3 localization as something only possible with full support from the developer. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of her all-time favorites.
- Papers, Please was her first taste of indie games.
- Disco Elysium is the perfect game for her due to the lack of fighting, intriguing story, charming character interaction, and top-down perspective. She tried playing it in English at first due to an unlikely chance for JP loc, but it was out of her ability. Thus she is forever grateful to Spike Chunsoft for localizing it.
- Kui played Baldur's Gate 3 from the time it was in Early Access. Again, she's grateful for Spike Chunsoft's JP loc. She hoped BG3's success would bring the possibility of JP loc for other titles too, such as Pathfinder: wotr
- She likes games with top-down perspective because they have narration text for monologues and scenery description. Even if the graphic is lacking, the texts show the atmosphere and each character's behavior and psyche. Also, characters that react to your choices.
- She praised Unpacking and House Flipper for being able to tell what kind of person lives there only through their belongings, and that there's no right or wrong for the placements; she would make the best arrangement and then enjoy her hard work while sipping tea.
- The biggest inspiration for Dungeon Meshi was the Cosmic Forge pen from Wizardry VI. With improved graphics from its predecessor, now it could show broken farming tools in the background and many more details that made exploration so much fun.
- At the time of the interview (Dec '23) she still hadn't watched DunMeshi anime, but she attended the recording sessions. She's embarrassed that the dialog she wrote now acted passionately by professionals. Marcille's screaming was wonderful but also made her want to flee.
- Kui was anxious about the CP2077 anime adaptation, but she was relieved it was the Night City she knows and loves.
- Other than minor adjustments, she left it to TRIGGER as to how to adapt
- She's happy that Mitsuda Yasunori was chosen as the anime composer, as she used to play Chrono Cross and rewatched the opening many times.
- Her anticipated games in 2024 are Cloudpunk, Nivalis, and Avowed.
- DunMeshi would be hard to adapt into a game because in the first place, what Kui depicted in the manga are parts that are omitted in games for the sake of brevity.
- If DunMeshi game was Wizardry-like, it'd be told through Laios' perspective and eating was essential not to die
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auranym · 8 months
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indie games are safe!!
good news! unity has walked back a lot of the runtime fee!
they made a blog post outlining their new terms, the link is here. but if you want a sparknotes version, here's the highlights:
1. the runtime fee is not retroactive. previously released games are safe.
2. the fee only applies to the next major version of unity. developers can choose not to upgrade if they don't want do deal with it.
3. the fee is opt-in and number of installs is self-reported. if they'd prefer, developers can instead pay a 2.5% revenue share. (for reference, unreal is 4%.)
4. interestingly, the splash screen is being completely removed. this is probably a way to improve their reputation.
overall, this is a HUGE improvement! but, if I remember right, there was not any revenue share before, so, we are not at the same point we started. unity will still be taking a larger cut of developers' revenue if they choose to use newer features. but, it is nowhere near as drastic as we thought it would be.
overall, I think we're in a stable spot now, but I also think unity has lost most if not all of the trust it had. especially with indies. there has already been a mass exodus, and I kinda hope that will keep going.
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pokeberry5 · 5 months
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i feel like i never draw tim smiling but bb robin tim smiles a lot! (in between angst and tragedy)
brought to you by my continued attempts at figuring out tim’s early robin hair
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treasure-mimic · 8 months
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So, let me try and put everything together here, because I really do think it needs to be talked about.
Today, Unity announced that it intends to apply a fee to use its software. Then it got worse.
For those not in the know, Unity is the most popular free to use video game development tool, offering a basic version for individuals who want to learn how to create games or create independently alongside paid versions for corporations or people who want more features. It's decent enough at this job, has issues but for the price point I can't complain, and is the idea entry point into creating in this medium, it's a very important piece of software.
But speaking of tools, the CEO is a massive one. When he was the COO of EA, he advocated for using, what out and out sounds like emotional manipulation to coerce players into microtransactions.
"A consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10, 20, 30, 50 hours on the game and then when they're deep into the game they're well invested in it. We're not gouging, but we're charging and at that point in time the commitment can be pretty high."
He also called game developers who don't discuss monetization early in the planning stages of development, quote, "fucking idiots".
So that sets the stage for what might be one of the most bald-faced greediest moves I've seen from a corporation in a minute. Most at least have the sense of self-preservation to hide it.
A few hours ago, Unity posted this announcement on the official blog.
Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November. We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.
Now there are a few red flags to note in this pitch immediately.
Unity is planning on charging a fee on all games which use its engine.
This is a flat fee per number of installs.
They are using an always online runtime function to determine whether a game is downloaded.
There is just so many things wrong with this that it's hard to know where to start, not helped by this FAQ which doubled down on a lot of the major issues people had.
I guess let's start with what people noticed first. Because it's using a system baked into the software itself, Unity would not be differentiating between a "purchase" and a "download". If someone uninstalls and reinstalls a game, that's two downloads. If someone gets a new computer or a new console and downloads a game already purchased from their account, that's two download. If someone pirates the game, the studio will be asked to pay for that download.
Q: How are you going to collect installs? A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project. Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses? A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes. Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data. Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games? A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.
This is potentially related to a new system that will require Unity Personal developers to go online at least once every three days.
Starting in November, Unity Personal users will get a new sign-in and online user experience. Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity. If the internet connection is lost, users can continue using Unity for up to 3 days while offline. More details to come, when this change takes effect.
It's unclear whether this requirement will be attached to any and all Unity games, though it would explain how they're theoretically able to track "the number of installs", and why the methodology for tracking these installs is so shit, as we'll discuss later.
Unity claims that it will only leverage this fee to games which surpass a certain threshold of downloads and yearly revenue.
Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee: Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs.
They don't say how they're going to collect information on a game's revenue, likely this is just to say that they're only interested in squeezing larger products (games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, Fate Grand Order, Among Us, and Fall Guys) and not every 2 dollar puzzle platformer that drops on Steam. But also, these larger products have the easiest time porting off of Unity and the most incentives to, meaning realistically those heaviest impacted are going to be the ones who just barely meet this threshold, most of them indie developers.
Aggro Crab Games, one of the first to properly break this story, points out that systems like the Xbox Game Pass, which is already pretty predatory towards smaller developers, will quickly inflate their "lifetime game installs" meaning even skimming the threshold of that 200k revenue, will be asked to pay a fee per install, not a percentage on said revenue.
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[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Hey Gamers!
Today, Unity (the engine we use to make our games) announced that they'll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold - regardless of how that copy was obtained.
Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in 2024? That's right, it's us and a lot of other developers.
That means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.
And that's before we even think about sales on other platforms, or pirated installs of our game, or even multiple installs by the same user!!!
This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles. If these changes aren't rolled back, we'll be heavily considering abandoning our wealth of Unity expertise we've accumulated over the years and starting from scratch in a new engine. Which is really something we'd rather not do.
On behalf of the dev community, we're calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product's actual users.
I fucking hate it here.
-Aggro Crab - END DESCRIPTION]
That fee, by the way, is a flat fee. Not a percentage, not a royalty. This means that any games made in Unity expecting any kind of success are heavily incentivized to cost as much as possible.
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[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A table listing the various fees by number of Installs over the Install Threshold vs. version of Unity used, ranging from $0.01 to $0.20 per install. END DESCRIPTION]
Basic elementary school math tells us that if a game comes out for $1.99, they will be paying, at maximum, 10% of their revenue to Unity, whereas jacking the price up to $59.99 lowers that percentage to something closer to 0.3%. Obviously any company, especially any company in financial desperation, which a sudden anchor on all your revenue is going to create, is going to choose the latter.
Furthermore, and following the trend of "fuck anyone who doesn't ask for money", Unity helpfully defines what an install is on their main site.
While I'm looking at this page as it exists now, it currently says
The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.
However, I saw a screenshot saying something different, and utilizing the Wayback Machine we can see that this phrasing was changed at some point in the few hours since this announcement went up. Instead, it reads:
The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.
Screenshot for posterity:
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That would mean web browser games made in Unity would count towards this install threshold. You could legitimately drive the count up simply by continuously refreshing the page. The FAQ, again, doubles down.
Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included).
And, what I personally consider to be the most suspect claim in this entire debacle, they claim that "lifetime installs" includes installs prior to this change going into effect.
Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024? Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.
Again, again, doubled down in the FAQ.
Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones. A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.
That would involve billing companies for using their software before telling them of the existence of a bill. Holding their actions to a contract that they performed before the contract existed!
Okay. I think that's everything. So far.
There is one thing that I want to mention before ending this post, unfortunately it's a little conspiratorial, but it's so hard to believe that anyone genuinely thought this was a good idea that it's stuck in my brain as a significant possibility.
A few days ago it was reported that Unity's CEO sold 2,000 shares of his own company.
On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none.
I would not be surprised if this decision gets reversed tomorrow, that it was literally only made for the CEO to short his own goddamn company, because I would sooner believe that this whole thing is some idiotic attempt at committing fraud than a real monetization strategy, even knowing how unfathomably greedy these people can be.
So, with all that said, what do we do now?
Well, in all likelihood you won't need to do anything. As I said, some of the biggest names in the industry would be directly affected by this change, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're not just going to take it lying down. After all, the only way to stop a greedy CEO is with a greedier CEO, right?
(I fucking hate it here.)
And that's not mentioning the indie devs who are already talking about abandoning the engine.
[Links display tweets from the lead developer of Among Us saying it'd be less costly to hire people to move the game off of Unity and Cult of the Lamb's official twitter saying the game won't be available after January 1st in response to the news.]
That being said, I'm still shaken by all this. The fact that Unity is openly willing to go back and punish its developers for ever having used the engine in the past makes me question my relationship to it.
The news has given rise to the visibility of free, open source alternative Godot, which, if you're interested, is likely a better option than Unity at this point. Mostly, though, I just hope we can get out of this whole, fucking, environment where creatives are treated as an endless mill of free profits that's going to be continuously ratcheted up and up to drive unsustainable infinite corporate growth that our entire economy is based on for some fuckin reason.
Anyways, that's that, I find having these big posts that break everything down to be helpful.
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I dreamt of a character that would be obsessed with keys and who could open doors wherever he was as long as there was a wall... Thought I might draw him!
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