This is the problem with the shareholder mentality that’s ruining a lot of products and services. They don’t give a damn about the longevity of the company. They only care about money now; and as soon as things go sour, they’ll sell their shares and move on to the next company.
I picture it as taking off in a plane full of their employees and customers, and climbing as high as possible. Then, as soon as the engines stall or fuel runs out, the execs casually jump out and pull the ripcords on their golden parachutes.
There should be law forcing major players in the market to commit for 10 years + when they buy shares above a certain threshold and when those 10+ years pass they should be forced to justify when selling. Might be dumb but just saying as things are the market/system will just rot on the daily. Shits corrupted to the core imo.
IPOs usually come out with something like that, investors who commit to not sell their shares for half a year or maybe a year. After that… it’s each one for their own.
I know that execs have time windows they have to be in to buy and sell their stocks, and it has to be planned months in advance, but a massive TOS change like this doesn’t happen overnight or without buy in all the way to the top. They absolutely planned this, and I hope the SEC nails their asses to the wall over it.
yeah I’ll admit i don’t know much about how all this stufd works, but thanks to others i also found out about these rules. But imo those time windows are absolutely useless in preventing insider trading if they plan to do both things in the same time window anyways
I’ve been working on an indie game project for several years now and invested thousands of dollars into it. Fortunately, I had the foresight to use Godot for it, but if I’d used Unity instead I’d be completely screwed right now. Hell, I’m still using the 3.X branch of Godot because I figured that migrating everything to version 4 would be more trouble than it’s worth. Going to a completely new engine at this stage in development would be completely out of the question.
No, it’s a commercial release. I’d been doing everything with placeholder art throughout most of development but I’ve recently commissioned some artists for some professional assets, and I think I’ll have enough to put together some screenshots and a demo video and get a page on Steam, etc. set up within the next few weeks.
It’s a Metroidvania with influences from cinematic platformers (Another World, Flashback) and immersive sims (System Shock, Deus Ex.)
I’m sorry to stifle your expectations, but if you’re working on that project on your own, you’re very unlikely to reach the 200k/year revenue necessary to trigger this new pricing scheme.
I bought the game for science cause it was the only game so far using all major features of UE5 and is a good reference to see how they manage asset, etc to keep the game running at 60fps with provided spec.
I think it does have potential, the mechanic is tight enough(the kbm default binding is not good, needs some rebind to make the combat flow more fluid), frame pacing is smooth majority of time(you have jitter mostly when it switch between cutscenes<->game), pretty much checked all the boxes and doesn’t feel lacking when playing the game.
BUT, it does have poor marketing plan and kinda bad luck in releasing window. It’s a good “alt shooter game” IMO.
It also requires EA's always-online DRM like the recent Star Wars Jedi games. Steam needs to make that notification bigger so I know not to buy that sort of trash.
You mean denuvo? I think it’s a money sinker now so might as well remove it at this point. But it’s EA’s call. Also, yes I have to download EA’s launcher as well.
And EA's launcher requires an active internet connection. Try playing Jedi: Fallen Order on a train, because I sure did, and it doesn't work. There may be a way to sidestep the launcher, particularly on older games like this one that had the launcher retrofitted into it after launch, but regardless, it tells me to stop buying EA games.
I generally avoid denuvo and EA. I literally break this stance just to see what they did with UE5 but ended up enjoying the game as well. It sucks cause denuvo means I can’t hook up RenderDoc and see how they render a frame compare to stock UE5. The movement reminds me a lot of original Quakes(very close to Q3) where you can have lots of control mid air and really snappy movement speed with their mechanics(blinks and grapples). But yeah, if this game doesn’t have this “use all UE5 latest tech” tag I will probably not even know or touching it cause I don’t play shooters after like Battlefield 3. Cause I am old and I like fast arena shooter not modern slow pace CQB/battle pass shooter, I was quite disappointed after trying Halo Infinite. But, that said, any shooter fits my criteria, would probably fail in sales. ^^;
lol, I go take a look, yep, battlefield 3.(note, I have no idea when I added crysis, it’s probably from a bundle or something and it redeems directly. I had high hope when crysis 2 released. ) And yes, I did played 2042 open beta cause we had a company game day that picked the open beta.(and yep I don’t like it. )
Like which type of shooter is your thing?? For me it’s the quick arena/team shooter, my good shooter example would be Q3 and Tribes 2. I think it’s really satisfying when moving quickly and shoot people with actual projectiles, rocket/disc launcher in my examples. (not a fan of hit scan type)
Not quite Quake speed, though I enjoy Quake just fine too. For me, the sweet spot was stuff like Halo, 007, Metal Arms, Half-Life, Crysis, that sort of thing. But yeah, everything these days is an online-only, live service battle royale or extraction shooter.
Not even an anonymous threat, which could have been implied by the initial reporting. Riccitiello used this opportunity to cancel a town hall event where he could be confronted with these controversial changes by overblowing the actual threat to his company and his employees. Wow, coming from this sleazebag I'm not surprised.
EDIT
So now, anytime a CEO or representative uses death threats and/or retaliation against employees as an excuse to interrupt company functions it could be considered entirely suspect. He's not the first to do it recently (fuck you u/Spez), but this doesn't help respond against actual credible threats to people from disgruntled users.
I had assumed it was a fabricated threat that came from “inside the house.” Now it looks like it was a real threat from inside. I can’t condone what the employee said, but I can sympathize with their plight. Not to mention that of all Indie devs whose workflows have likely been uprooted by Unity’s selfish move.
“The customers love you, your colleagues respect and trust you… but upper management have expressed concerns about your comments around flaying them and their families alive.”
I don’t think “regular employee” should be used anywhere close to this story lol. Imagine your passion project being building something for someone else and when that gets upset you resort to death theeats against your employer? Jesus.
Edit: Lol when this story first came out the consensus here was that death threats were not cool, now that it’s an employee everyone is sympathetic? Alright, let’s spin this story to fit our bias, why not!
That’s ignoring voting though, which is a good way to get the average sentiment of a community regardless of who is doing the commenting. Is it more likely that the community’s average opinion of death threats flipped overnight or that the new information changed the average opinion?
Either someone hates to see their company burn to the ground and responded in an extremely immature way, or a higher up went "let's get this public town hall canceled in a way that people feel sorry for us. SIMMONS! MAKE A DEATH THREAT NOW!"
The former seems the most likely, but I always hold out hope that it's middle management being a dumbass as corporate's gonna corporate
The CEO and his cronies don't understand that people work for more than money. They think all people come into work just to do what is required to get money or, if there is ambition, to rise through the ranks and make more money or have ideas that make more money.
However, there are people, especially in projects like this, that are also there because they believe in something. Believe that they can help creating something special that helps people. Unity has it's dominance among other things because it's an easy to use and easy to learn tool that enables people to create games that would've otherwise had trouble getting into development.
It’s not so black and white though. Passion jobs are often exploited because people will put up with it more and there is higher demand for those types of jobs.
Your best bet is to find something that is interesting and nice enough to keep you content and not bored to death but not so enthralling that you feel like working unpaid overtime or what ever. Bonus points if it’s paid relatively well.
Oh, I imagine working conditions there have gotten worse in recent times, too. The kind of leadership that fucks over their clients like this don't start with those clients. They treat everyone as a resource to be exploited, and employees are the ones they can abused most readily.
The public furor over the pricing model is the opportunity, not the motive.
On one hand, I applaud EA for at least attempting a new IP this time around instead of churning out yet another sequel, but on the other hand, damned if Immortals of Aveum didn’t look like the most generic thing out there.
polygon.com
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