Title worried me for a moment that they were dropping Steam Input; happy to see they seem intent on the opposite.

Well this is a tremendous step in the wrong direction. The economic problem is the ad supported model in the first place, no matter how it’s run. This is the same thing Google does, they keep user data to themselves and sell the ad placement. So now Mozilla has the same economic incentives as Google. Unfathomably bad move.

If you read carefully this is actually very similar to the Steam news. I doubt Valve or GOG care, but generally the games are “sold” by the publisher as non transferable licenses for you to play them. So the part that matters isn’t up to them.

Wonder how we should interpret the country “XD” being on the list. As far as I can tell its never been used for any real country.

This must be pandering to shareholders, no company in their right mind would want to compete when Meta is selling their first party headset at a giant loss.

After doing some Meta/Facebook VR development in my job the lack of popularity made increasingly more sense. In brief, they’re both incredibly incompetent and transparently greedy.

I’m honestly baffled how they could spend so many tens of billions of dollars and have such bad software, it is completely bug ridden. You’ll hit a bug, research it, and find out it’s a major know bug for literal years they haven’t fixed. They care so little that they couldn’t bother to update the Oculus branding to Meta for over 3 years in various software tools and libraries.

Their greed might be more salient aspect preventing adoption, though. They transparently wanted to be the gatekeepers to everything “metaverse” related, a business model that is now explicitly illegal in the EU after years of being merely very sketchy. They are straight up hostile to anyone else trying to implement enterprise or business features. Concrete example: fleet management software, aka MDM. There are third party tools that are cheaper and much more featured than Meta’s solution, but in the last year they’ve pushed hard to kick those third parties out of the ecosystem.

I could go on, but in short nobody in their right mind would build a major business on their ecosystem. They’d rather let Meta burn billions in R&D and come back later. Besides, not even Meta is able to make money in the area now.

The original UE5 seemed slightly premature, the 5.1 and 5.2 updates were significant and non trivial to update to. It also seems like a tool that gives you enough rope to hang yourself. Unlike Unity, everyone gets ready access to the full engine source code. Fortnite runs UE5, so the performance isn’t inherently bad.

The headline is pretty misleading. The full quote states this being the studios debut game made several factors major problems. UE5 as the engine, a highly competitive genre, and a new IP made nearly insurmountable obstacles. For comparison, Doom Eternal, their obvious AAA competitor, was from a veteran studio with a legendary IP built on literal decades of custom engine experience. On the other hand, a game like Ultrakill can compete by having an incredibly tight scope.

Architecture emulation for current gen games is exceptionally unlikely right now. At a fundamental level, wine/proton doesn’t change the instructions the code describes, rather it translates the input and output. It’s a reimplementation of the same instructions in Windows. For architecture crossing you’d either have to create virtual hardware, which adds tremendous overhead, or recompile the binary. Recompilation is theoretically possible, but for x86_64 to ARM64, for games no less, it’s beyond the realm of mortals. It’s like how some jokes can’t be translated between languages; the structure and vocabulary is just too different.