https://www.pcgamer.com/gta-online-makes-half-a-billion-dollars-a-year-even-though-its-a-hot-mess/

What the heck. Half a billion in microtransactions for a game that (according to this article) sounds like a real turd of a user experience. I loved GTA 3 and Vice City back in the day…I got GTA 4 in a Humble Bundle, haven’t spent much time with it yet. Anyone know if it’s a decent experience for a solo, offline, lootbox-free experience?

As an old person who only kinda knew that lootboxes exist, this series was a huge eye opener to the insane amount of money and industry that has emerged around them. 10/10 would recommend to my fellow olds.

Now to head back to Bioshock where the only cost to looting boxes is that I might get attacked by a splicer.

YSK https://isthereanydeal.com/ lets you create a waitlist, set a price you’re willing to pay for each game, and notifies you when its on sale for ≤ that amount.

Even easier, set your phone dns to an ad blocking dns. I like to play the generic charades games with my partner.

Mostly. The runtime fee now only kicks in after $1 mil, and you are limited to a 4% cap, and they are honoring the old EULAs, so if you want to avoid the fee, you just stay on the current version of Unity. They can still eat my farts, but this is much better and won’t kill a bunch of games the way it would have before.

For that thing that killed hundreds of monkeys? Yeah, sounds like a great plan.

€10 may not be much, but as a broke gamedev student, I’m really hoping this Unity exodus is just the boost Godot needs to become more competitive with Unity.

Certainly Godot is the safer bet (probably why they are surging so much more right now), but Unreal is nowhere near as bad as Threads. Unreal is open source, and the license specifically forbids Epic from making retroactive changes like Unity just did:

7. The Agreement Between You and Epic

a. Amendments

If we make changes to this Agreement, you are not required to accept the amended Agreement, and this Agreement will continue to govern your use of any Licensed Technology you already have access to.

Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! Unless you have anything to do with Unity, because there are no winners in this shitshow.