When you “buy” software, you’re buying a license that grants you permission to use it subject to the terms & conditions. The stealing as the law would see it is from using software without purchasing a license or using it in violation of the license.

It even extends to digital content people “buy” on Steam, or Google Play, or Amazon including books, music, and videos. You didn’t buy that content, even if you think you did. You bought a license to it which is why occasionally Amazon or whoever will just scrub the content from your account without your consent. That’s also why in some countries you pay VAT on e-books even though you don’t pay VAT on real books - because you actually bought a software license which is liable to VAT.

So the best advice is don’t buy digital media from online services. For games and software it is unavoidable but recognize you don’t legally own squat although most console games on disc or cartridge can still be sold second hand. But even that is being eroded. Nintendo apparently are planning to sell “physical” games in stores but you open it up and there is a redemption code inside. Sony and Microsoft have both tried to get away from physical media too.

I think there is an implication that if you buy a game which is online by nature (e.g. an MMO) that the servers can and will shut down eventually. My cupboard is filled with defunct MMOs. And people do not “own” any commercial software per se, they run it under licence.

So I don’t see that Ubisoft has any legal obligation here. But as a good will gesture they really should put the server code in escrow, or open source chunks of it so that games can continue to enjoy life after the company itself has no economic incentive to continue running it.

You can see why Amazon’s efforts suck just by using it. That isn’t to say I defend Steam, or Epic, or GOG, or UPlay, or Origin, or Battle.net, or Microsoft Store because they all suck. They suck for existing as separate things that all do the same thing but each eating 500Mb of space on my computer.

The ideal situation would be a federated platform where everyone shares a single sign on, everyone shares the same update, backup & restore mechanisms, everyone can join the same lobbies and matchmaking. But that’s too sensible.

SteamOS is about Valve not paying Microsoft a license fee. It’s not some egalitarian move by them but a cost saving. From a game dev’s perspective it’s additional cost and effort to port a game, or hope it runs under emulation with Proton.

I am surprised they haven’t used it for cloud gaming yet since that’s where the real cost savings kick in but I bet they’re still saving on each Steam Deck they sell without Windows on it.

I think the issue here is people knew Diablo 4 was filled with monetization, season passes, cosmetic items etc and they bought it anyway and are complaining about it after the fact. The correct way to respond to sleazy companies is to take your business somewhere else. Reward games for being good, not for being cash grabs.

Yes. Some game “reviews” were such absurd, performative straw man attacks at JK Rowling that they bordered on parody. I’m thinking of the Wired one in particular but others were equally bad. The irony is these diatribes clearly helped the game, or rather, this really good game sold well in spite of that crap. Ultimately these websites just undermined their own reputations.

I thought it was a great game that captured the spirit of the books & movies so well. Thankfully all the mock outrage and virtue signaling didn’t affect its sales and probably boosted them.

Epic should count their blessings considering what the game started as and the billions they raked in during the meantime. I bet their active player count is well down from its peak though. Probably the kids grew up and/or got fed up of all the monetisation.

As for Disney they’ve tried many times to get into gaming and failed. I wonder if their corporate culture which is a subtle blend of naked greed, political correctness, risk aversion and schizophrenia over licensing IP just scuppers them every time. I’ve played a couple of decent games but most of their content is either shovelware or naked cash grabs. Even when they make a critically acclaimed or successful games, there is a sense that if they don’t get ALL THE MONEY, then they’ll shitcan it right then and there. Look at Disney Infinity or Club Penguin as examples of games that were killed for very unclear reasons.

Every single Uncharted was groundbreaking for its time. Not just the narrative, but the gameplay and the technology itself. They delivered again for The Last of Us and sequel. So two A-grade franchises under their belt.

Doesn’t mean they’ll have another hit but it stands to reason they’re not sat on their asses doing nothing right now. They’re either working on a TLOU spinoff or a new franchise or both. Now I’m not privy to what they’re up to but I’m sure if you google “Naughty Dog rumors” you might pick up some hints. e.g. one rumour suggests a game codenamed Paradox whose description sounds oddly close to what the Fallen London (Sunless Sea / Sunless Skies) franchise is although I doubt it would be the same, mores a pity. Fallen London is such a mad premise it shocks me it hasn’t gotten it’s own TV series.

They must be up to something. They have the pedigree to deliver a new IP franchise and for all anyone knows that is what they’re doing.

The same Hasbro that tried to make a land grab for all D&D derivative content by changing their Open Game License to grant them irrevocable, perpetual rights to it. This is not a nice company as they demonstrate time and again.

So maybe it’s time the RPG community stopped thinking Hasbro are ever going to change, mourn for what D&D has become, but move onto something else.

You’d think when Fallout 4 was panned, and when Fallout 76 was panned that somebody in Bethesda might have said “hey maybe we need a new game director”. And also “maybe we need a new game engine”. Instead they went with the tried and trusted and shat out Starfield to the acclaim of nobody.

Online services like games consoles and the likes of Steam / Epic should really allow games to be bundled such that users can choose to only install the “recommended” content rather than everything - the textures for their display & graphics card and multimedia and other assets for their region & localization. If a game is level based they could even grab it the first time it is used, rather than all up front. I bet in a lot of cases it would shave 30% off the download size.

Another source of bloat would be duplicate content - a hold over from hard disks where the cost of seeking an asset meant game data files would hold duplicates of assets wherever they were needed to load-in which increases bloat. In the days of SSDs, that should no longer be necessary but I bet a lot of games still do it anyway. Publishers just need to decide if they’re going to support HDDs or not and if the answer is not, then stop bloating games for no reason.

Fallout New Vegas is still considered to be one of the best Fallout games ever. I expect there was significant overlap in the development period with Fallout 3 though so just subtracting one release date from another doesn’t represent the amount of time in development.

Vice City was more like 18 months of development, some of which overlapped with GTA III. I suppose it helps to have a working game engine and an experienced development team who can iterate on something they’re already made.

Who on earth would rely on a game engine in bankruptcy? Would you get support? Would you get product keys? Would backend services get turned off? Who would collect revenues and would the terms change again? I think Unity has already done itself irreparable damage and if it ends in bankruptcy then blame the outgoing CEO. Engines need a constant conveyor belt of new games to sustain their revenues and I don’t see this happening. If the company is bought it will just be to pick the bones of a dead platform, collecting revenues from games out in the wild.

And yes there is pain and a learning curve to moving to other engines though I think most programmers would be able to cope with change and if they’re that incurious and inflexible that they can’t then maybe it’s time to find new programmers. I expect most teams will jump to another engine at a natural break in the development process, e.g. after completing a game and moving onto the next and they might start on a smaller project and work up to familiarise themselves with their new tools.

As for Godot, I am sure it is not a 100% feature for feature replacement for Unity. But it sure as hell is capable of powering 95% of indie games out there no trouble whatsoever and I daresay some more challenging titles. Another compelling reason for devs to reevaluate their relationship with Unity.

Probably too late for Unity. A commercial game engine only makes money if there is a constant influx of new games to sustain it. I bet a lot of developers, large and small, have already decided to dump the platform either immediately or for their next project. So revenues are going to go into free fall.

Devs will move to Unreal (powerful) or Godot (free) and Unity will die. And it’s all thanks to John here and the other members of the board who thought squeezing people for $$$ who have choices was a good idea.

Use Mastadon or some other social media platform. Not always a choice and if you’re stuck with Twitter you might as well ensure you’re not enriching the platform.

My solution works fine on Android

1. Delete the Twitter app.
2. Open the site in Firefox Mobile
3. Open the Firefox menu and choose Install
4. Install uBlock Origin into Firefox

Now you have a launcher icon for Twitter that opens in Firefox and has all the ads stripped out. I believe there is even a “Twitter Control Panel” add on that will remove a lot of the remaining clickbait from the page too - what’s trending etc.

The fanbois have obviously found this story and voting down the people saying how obvious the grift was/is.

I wonder how many other space sim genre games that conspicuously did not hand out the begging bowl, or squander all their money and were actually delivered have happened in the time that Star Citizen hasn’t. Being generous the best that can be said is the project is just badly mismanaged. At worst, and more realistically, much of that money just got siphoned away to fund lifestyles. Maybe the devs know they can run this grift for as long as their people stupid enough to keep funding them, knowing they’ll never have to actually deliver on their promises.

Serves people right for crowdfunding a game let alone one built around some libertarian wet dream where you have to buy your way to success, dropping thousands on content like spaceships.

Unless the CEO walks and takes his yes-men with him, I don’t see Unity recovering from this self-inflicted shitshow in the near term. I bet it has motivated a lot of devs to look at the viability of using Godot instead and being free of future shakedowns.

I wonder from a cost benefit analysis if even its even worth the effort. If someone is playing a game under emulation then most likely they never had the intention of buying the game. So what’s the point of using anti-emulation checks? It’s just an additional cost (and drag on development / testing) that doesn’t translate into extra sales.

I’ve certainly run emulators, p2p software and other things on my android that Apple would never allow in their store but Google does, plus of course easy sideloading. I don’t know if that would matter to kids but honestly when I run an iPhone or an Android phone these days the functionality is so similar that the choice just boils down to price and variety - Android phones sell at lots of price points and in a variety of form factors and iPhones don’t. That means when I’m buying a kid a phone I can spend €100 on a PAYG device with a 6" screen that runs all their apps rather than the very cheapest iPhone for €549. Same functionality for less that 1/5th the price. I’m sure some kids don’t see it in those terms but I do and I imagine most parents do.

My kids both have android phones (cheap ones) and if they demanded iPhones I’d tell them to gtfo. But my kids aren’t brats and are content with their phones they have - cheap Samsungs - that are capable of running all the crap they’re into - Tiktok, Snapchat, Whatsapp etc. Why would they even need anything more powerful?

Maybe there are private schools where phone snobbery is a thing and rich parents indulge their brats every desire. Maybe in that environment an iPhone holds an allure that an Android cannot match. But there are plenty of weird premium Android phones - flip phones, folding phones etc. so maybe that is nonsense too. If I were a spoiled brat with rich parents I might be demanding mommy & daddy buy me a Z Fold to show off. If my parents were super rich I might be demanding they get me a designer phone like a Vertu.

TakeTwo / Rockstar seems to outsource this work onto a 3rd party porting house which does the minimal effort to port the thing on time and on budget. Look at the debacle that was their GTA “definitive” edition which but was so buggy, broken and gimped that it was universally panned. I wonder if Grove Street Games will get the porting gig for RDR or if Rockstar will foist it out on someone else. And charging $50 for a port is taking the piss in any event. If it were a remake, or reimagining with a new engine then maybe, but just porting all the code and assets and tossing in a few extra textures? No way.

There are quality porting houses (e.g. Bluepoint), and really RDR is a game that should be given to someone who cares about the port and is given the time and money to make it work.

I’ll give the game a go but I’ve played so many MMOs to know the warning signs of a game using grind (travel, upkeep, etc.). If that happens I’ll be gone as fast as I signed up.

And I say that as a veteran of Asherons Call, Everquest, EQ 2, Lord of the Rings Online, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, A Tale in the Desert, Company of Heroes, Company of Villains, Guild Wars and many more. I think I played EQ for 18 months on subscription but the amount of grind convinced me I’m not going to put up with that any more. When those other games resorted to the same BS I was gone.