I made games primarily for Windows which we also compiled for Linux. It is mostly input/output stuff, aka hardware issues. That is, audio issues, input issues, storage issues, dependency issues. Modern game engine mostly handle the rest. It wasn’t such a big deal to fix, but most gamedev lacked experience with Linux, and most projects are already over budget and late, so fixing Linux for an extra 2-5% of sales didn’t make much sense at small scale. Proton kind off fixed all of this tho.
Almost one in five men in IT explain why fewer females work in the profession by arguing that “women are naturally less well suited to tech roles than men.”...
This is what makes me uncomfortable about going all-in as an “ally”. I’ve heard very dubious and unprovable allegations in my time. If you dig a bit, it always end up being very much indistinguishable from insecurity. Everyone experience being ignored and talked over in those meetings, how is the get-go explaination sexism? How can you possibly know? Don’t get me wrong, I know for a fact that some of those situations are real, but I have witnessed way too many ridiculous accusations to take this talking point seriously anymore. I am not talking about overt sexism here and bad"jokes", but at this micro-aggression concept where you can be labeled a sexist for… not agreeing with a woman?
I can tell you my experience as a man tho, I worked with incredibly nice men who were scared to say the wrong thing or to participate in some meetings because we worked with extremely vocals and repressives feminists, and you can definitely lose your job for being accused of any type of misogyny around here. The tone gets really hostile real quick too. There is no discussion to be bad on this subject, my experience is invalid because I am a man, to be ridiculed because I am ignoring very clear evidences on purpose, apparently. Next week I could write about being ignored due to my height and I would get laughted out of the room, rightly so.
I have the impression that being “good” at the game wasn’t even a concern back then. I remember a lot of players being completely unbothered about their own character levels and wealth. Players were busy building communities and driven by small and personal achievements. Sometime I wish gaming had remained niche and never reached the masses. The early 00s was such a sweet spot.
“In the beginning, people could go to the market or to the stores. Now, no more. Stores have empty shelves. People are struggling to get food, but there are already people starving in Gaza,” warns Nebal Farsakh, spokesman for the Palestinian Red Crescent, speaking over the phone....
of all the games released on Steam in 2022, only 70 have hit the million dollars threshold. I think it is misleading to bundle all “indies” in one big basket. Those 70 games can afford to pay or negociate. Don’t get me wrong, total dick and amateurish move from Unity, but the amount of people around social media who believe game devs can just hit the threshold by accident and become unprofitable is ridiculous. Current gamedev here and ex Unity employee. It is worth denouncing Unity and fighting for our indies, but understand that this affect the 0.01%, literally. 70 games out of 6000 released games on Steam in 2022. Sure most games are shit and w/e, but you get the point.
You can live off minimum wage in Canada in some regions, if you’re children-free. It gets harder with kids, though the state will cover some of it of you’re low-income (Like a couple hundred per months, and virtually no income taxes).
In a recent communication, Amazon has alerted Kindle users about significant changes set to take effect from next month. The notification pertains to the phasing out of support for sending MOBI (.mobi, .azw, .prc) files through the “Send to Kindle” feature, starting November 1, 2023. This change, as News18 pointed out,...
We had unlimited PTO at my old job and I thought it was awesome. I’d take day off when sick, whenever I needed a break or I would pad my “annual” time off to extend my break over one extra weekend. This felt pretty standard in both places I worked with this policy. There was no question asked and no direct human interaction to take off. If people didn’t take advantage of that it is kinda on them imo. Not to remove anything from your point about forced PTO mixed-in.
Metal does not attracts lighting. The danger is elevation. The bolt stroke a tree and she was likely shocked because the ground itself became conductive. In a thunderstorm don’t stand near trees, don’t lay down, you get the fuck out and find shelter or a non-elevated area away from trees and elevated structures.
At this point I wish my client had an option to filter out comments with pictures. I swear this would filter out 99% of the snarky bs that sometimes plague Lemmy.
Netflix is profitable, Spotify never was. The differences between the realm of movies and music are so numerous that I won’t even bother listing them. Music and movies studios concerns are vastly differents, their economic realities are vastly differents, the product is too.
I always find this topic to be really interesting since there’s no objectively correct answer, and it tends to be something people have experience with....
Normal feels like I am controlling the vision frustum (where I want to look at), and inverted feels like I am moving the camera itself, as if it was a physical object. I can play both but I definitely have to remind myself what I am trying to control when making the switch.
I vastly prefer non-inverted, because I like the idea of just pointing where I want to look at. I hope it makes sense. All of this apply mostly for games with orbit camera.
There’s apps to sync your stuff when you move to another platform. It won’t be perfectand certain features on certain apps are paywalled, but you should get a fairly acceptable copy of your content after using a service like this.
We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical...
Can’t just be me, can it? Currently 0 for 3 on interviews because I can’t seem to get past the technical interview/test. Usually because of some crazy complicated algorithm question that’s never been relevant to anything I’ve ever had to do on the job in all my years coding....
Holy. One place I worked at had way too many HR personnel. It was crazy. I happenned to have my workstation directly next to them. They quite literally did nothing all day. Nothing. At. All. It blew my mind.
So why did we have so many? Well at basically every company-wide meeting this dep was putting on the biggest theater performance of being overwhelmed by “governmental endless bureaucracy” or something. So they always tried to hire more of their own friends. Temporary roles always became permanent and we ended up with 20% of the company working HR. The owner of the company, bless his heart, really could not say no.
My experience with HR in most companies has been hit and miss, but this one example really opened my eyes. Of course if you hire people who are basically actors you run the risk of forming an HR dep that is very dramatic and manipulative.
I can’t really blame the workers for taking advantage of an easy job and making a great living out of browsing Facebook and gossiping all day. But it really suck that the actual good workers were over-worked because other areas of the business were under-staffed. Virtually nobody else had the political impact in the hiring process HR had. Obviously this business wasn’t run by genius.
The fact this department even existed is a mystery to me. They didn’t even screen candidates or participate in interviews. It was basically 4 glorified secretaries. To be fair they also managed the payrolls, which consisted of sending the same excel file to he accountant each week. Realistically we would only have needed 1 person to keep track of whatever might pop up and to make sure the payroll system was up to date. The owners liked to screen and do the interviews themselves.
At some other place I worked we had 1 admin/accountant person working like 1 or 2 days a week for a business of about 40 employees. Again the owners were taking care of new hires.
HR as a department seems largely useless unless you’re hiring 365 days a year and have so many employees that you can’t keep up with all the requests. HR people are usually terrible at screening candidates anyway.
Yeah, payroll was outsourced and they met with the firm once or twice a year. The firm took care of mostly everything legal, including insurances and tax benefits afaik. The head of “HR” was a lifelong friend of the owner so I guess he didn’t want to go there.
My experience in a big software company was different and probably just like yours. The people there were rockstars.
Finally an article that goes beyond the drama and misinformation. It is not just about the new fee, which realistically is nothing compared to what you would owe epic for the same level of success.
What sucks is the shadiness and the deceptive nature of it all. I am sure the executives felt really clever and thought it would almost fly under the radar After all, they managed to spin this as not-a-royalty after years of boasting that Unity wouldn’t have any.
The new changes are essentially this :
You’re forced into going with the pro or enterprise license past a certain revenue (which was sort of a thing already).
You’re forced into serving Unity ads, or else you get charged a some royalties, which realistically should still be less than what UE charges.
You’re forced retroactively into it, as they deleted the old TOS behind the scenes.
They’re definitely not being upfront about their intentions, and due to their complete aversion to mentionning the word royalties, they managed to deceptively make up a lie that sounds worst than the actual truth. Even though this is a move targetted at multi-mullion dollars productions, actual students and hobbyist are now worried about being charged per user downloads, which is not happening.
It is sad to see, Unity went from being owned and operated by people who truely cared. I worked there for a number of years and most leaders and employees truely believed they were a force of good in this otherwise shitty world. It is crazy how much the company changed in just a number of years/months. It sucks, and whoever ended up in charge robbed both the employees and the users of something great.
John was a smooth talker, and even as the company was turning corporate and seemingly stepping on old values, he was very good at making sensible arguments and justifying the company transformation. I can’t help but feel deceived now. Ultimately I left the company because I disagreed with so many decisions. Virtually my entire backlog was stuff I disagreed with and I just couldn’t justify waking up in the morning. We’re long past the “Users first” slogan which made Unity so popular with indies.
Fair enough, this is an atrocious billing system, but I I firmly believe that this is simply a gimmick to get around charging royalties without calling it so. Maybe I am biased, but the people working at Unity are not monsters, and I believe the employee who posted publicly and stated that the people implementing this system made sure that it would be under-reporting installs is speaking the truth. I think there is this misconception that Unity is simply gonna fire an event for every install and charge you directly for each report, but there is no way that this will be this simple. In all likelihood they will use this to keep a list of the popular games, and the actual fee will be based on heuristics like estimated sales and whatever other analytics and ads generated by the game clients. Sure it is a “trust me bro” system, yes it’s bad, yes it could be abused, I think it is fair to call it out and ask for a more transparent system, but deep down I just don’t believe that Unity is evil and did this to abuse the developers.
In all likelihood THEY will be the one forced to under charge, and really they’re doing this to force you into their ecosystem so it is likely that they will reach out the studios individually before incurring the fees. The whole thing is worded in a way that past a certain level of success, they will charge you royalties unless you play ball with them and serve ads and buy in other services. I would not blame anyone for calling it scummy, but I think it is important to understand their motives, they want to force your hand to use whatever they’re selling. The installation fee is just a smoke screen, they have nothing to gain bankrupting studios by making up numbers. Of course, this is just my own take. I think I have a fairly good understanding of how they operate, but I could be wrong.
That is just reductionism. The post above yours went above and beyond to explain why they can’t just change the engine. For a lot of business it would mean bankruptcy now. So you understand that given the choice between bankruptcy now or maybe being squeezed again by Unity later, the latter is still more an attractive option, right?
Calm down. It is a shit move and a break of trust but very, very few business will be bankrupted by those actual fees. You guys here are outraged but you have no stake in this, it is easy to claim that you’d burn your company to the ground to get rid of Unity, but there is a reason why only the rich indies are going to ditch Unity short-term.
Unity employees have extraordinary working conditions and pay. It sucks that their hard work gets tarnished by stupid executives and poor PR but let’s not paint the employee as a victim here.
Yes, very much. Unity has an army of highly-paid developers, some of which are behemoths in the industry and built other highly-regarded technology. It could be done, I mean, I don’t think Unity was particularly efficient spending its internal resources, but it is gonna take a while for other open-source engines like Godot to catch up.
I am curious, what exactly is missing in the latest LTS version from .Net what makes it so clunky to use for students? Afaik it is pretty solidly close to actual .Net 4.7 nowadays.
Too early to tell, but it could signal the start of a trend where developers and game studios at least entertain the idea of having a look at other engine before going with unity.
Don’t underestimate the sunk cost of Unity. The commitment to Unity it big. Unity is taught in game classes, people are formed and specialized in it, and you might have years of in-house tools which you couldn’t re-use.
I can see hobbyist switching and game studios with games that are easy to port, like arcade-style 2d games. For a lot of studio switching is a real risk of bankruptcy, more so than the extra fees. It will take more than a few days for Unity to fall, or even have an “exodus”.
In practice it mostly affect studio making over 1M in sales per year. The download fee only occur on pro users past that threshold. The fee is so ridiculous that they’re basically forcing devs to get pro, but that was kinda already a thing anyway. For studios malong over 1M a year, well they gotta pay up unfortunately. Unfortunately 1M per year ins’t that much for a middle-sized studio, but small studio are barely affected by this change.
I agree with the essence of your post, but the part about Unity already charging devs proportionally based on sales is not true. The editor is currently licensed per-seats and there is currently no cap to how much money you can make if you run the enterprise license, which is 5k/year per employee.
30% of which already go to Steam in the case of Garry. Plus wages, taxes, rent, equipment. You add another 10-20%+ on top which you can’t predict now because of Unity. Plus all the paid libraries and licenses already charging per seats or game revenue.
That being said, devs like Garry absolutely make banks and 400k is not that huge of a chunk for him. He, and a lot of devs, would probably be paying more on a royalty system like UE, which is the real irony here. But yeah, what most people lament is the slimeyness of the move and the terms.
We’re all so bad at communication and it is the bottleneck in most relationships, workplaces, and in politics.
We talk past each others when we argue. We’re bad at definining the stuff we argue and talk about. We’re bad at ignoring the pedantic stuff and focusing on the “spirit” of the argument.
At the workplace I feel the ability to share information to all the relevant parties without it being noisy as never been solved in big corporations. It is either a free-for-all situation where you’re expected to read hundred of emails, answer anyone anytime, go in tons of meeting, OR to work in complete silos where you only talk to a supervisor once in a blue moon.
In friendships you have people who talk but don’t listen and people who listen and don’t talk. Oversharers, bullshiters, people who can’t get to the point, people who gives 5 minutes of context and disordered information for every little things. Friends who mumble, or who don’t finish half their sentences.
In relationships we let unresolved issues become taboos, and we let petty stuff buildup because we can’t addresss it without anyone feeling attacked.
Communication is important, as you’ve already been told by a poster or an HR person, but I rarely see people actively try to better themselves in that area, nor the corporations I worked at. You won’t have anything durable without it, or anything capable of scaling efficiently.
I am probably very bad at it too, for the simple reason that virtually all the people I know are ever good at best at a few aspects of it. I am self-conscious about communicating properly but I too probably suck at it and I have my blind spots just like everyone else. For this reason, this is the thing I hate about everyone, we can’t communicate for shit.
I have worked in the gaming industry and let me tell you that in some game studios most of the people involved in making the games are not gamers themselves.
Lots of programmers and artists don’t really care about the final game, they only care about their little part.
Game designers and UX designers are often clueless and lacking in gaming experience. Some of the mistakes they make could be avoided by asking literaly anyone who play games.
Investors and publishers often know very little to almost nothing about gameplay and technology and will rely purely on aesthetic and story.
You have entire games being made top to bottom where not a single employee gave a fuck, from the executives to the programmers. Those games are made by checking a serie of checkboses on a plan and shipped asap.
This is why you have some indie devs kicking big studio butts with sometime less than 1% the ressources.
Afaik even in other “similar” industry (e.g filmmaking) you expect the director, producers and distributors to have a decent level of knowledge of the challenges of making a movie. In the video game industry everyone seems a bit clueless, and risk is mitigated by hiring large teams, and by shipping lots of games quickly.
No, not to the same extent. I mean past a certain size we probably shouldn’t expect big executives to care, but you still have a lot of passionate people in this industry, so you can totally have “true” gamers working in big budget games.
Hey, fair points. I am not saying that all big are bad and all indies are good. The industry is definitely getting carried by indies in some genres and that is ok.
It would seem you agree on most points, as I passionate myself it just surprised me to sometime be surrounded by people who didn’t really care. It depends on the project and the studio of course. I can’t really blame the workers though as I said, so I agree with you that it makes sense in most cases to not recruit only “gamers”. Thanks for sharing!
It feels like anything is mowed down on the internet. I’ve been a dev for a long time too, and I never feel sure when I chose a stack for a new toy project (in my day job I rarely get to chose, so that’s a non issue there)
It is incredible really, I worked with C# for so long, and I tend to be very critical of the stuff I’ve used for a long time. For C#, I am struggling to figure how I would improve it, because all the stuff that suck in C# is usually the lesser of two evils.
Of course if you hate classes, types, managed memory or anything invented in the last 20 years you will hate it, and I’ve met people like this. That is why you gotta keep learning as a dev, you don’t want to be one of those.
I really like ReactiveX for async programming, though having to go through a library is definitely a pain. It also does not make it less awkward to design your public API unless you’re okay exposing Rx types. Fair points!
I love Valve, but I really don’t understand why gamers give Steam so much praise. It is a closed platform filled with DRM on which you don’t truely own a copy of the game (unlike gog), and on top of that they take a 30% cut of every sales and transactions which is enormous for small guys. Support is poor and the algo/front page distribution of traffic and promotions is a black box.
Don’t get me wrong, Gabe seems like a sensible human, and Steam is successful because it offered such a great service to players. But it’s been almost 20years now since Steam, and I have not seen Valve slow down the greed. They don’t need the money as this point. They don’t need 30% of every game sale on PC. This is just as greedy as the other company people hate.
Do not say we have free speech in Canada (noraloreto.substack.com)
New Google Trial Docs May Explain Why Search Sucks So Bad Now (gizmodo.com)
Gamedev and linux (treebrary.pone.social)
Source: reddit.com/…/despite_having_just_58_sales_over_38…
Tech bros' attitude to female colleagues stuck in dark ages (www.theregister.com)
Almost one in five men in IT explain why fewer females work in the profession by arguing that “women are naturally less well suited to tech roles than men.”...
Why the original, 1999 version of EverQuest is still one of the best MMOs to play today (www.pcgamer.com)
Israel intensifies ground and air strikes on nearly cut-off Gaza while UN denounces 'war crimes' in conflict for first time and warns many will soon starve to death (english.elpais.com)
“In the beginning, people could go to the market or to the stores. Now, no more. Stores have empty shelves. People are struggling to get food, but there are already people starving in Gaza,” warns Nebal Farsakh, spokesman for the Palestinian Red Crescent, speaking over the phone....
"Fuck you, we're not paying": inside Unity’s Runtime Fee fiasco (mobilegamer.biz)
A major partner told John Riccitiello personally that it will not pay the Runtime Fee – and in the strongest possible terms.
Almost half of Russians say salary does not cover basic spending - survey (www.reuters.com)
Redditor when women (i.imgur.com)
Amazon issues warning about major change for Kindle users starting next month (goodereader.com)
In a recent communication, Amazon has alerted Kindle users about significant changes set to take effect from next month. The notification pertains to the phasing out of support for sending MOBI (.mobi, .azw, .prc) files through the “Send to Kindle” feature, starting November 1, 2023. This change, as News18 pointed out,...
Wall Street Journal complains about workers using their sick days (boingboing.net)
Florida girl, 16, dies after being struck by lightning while hunting with her dad (www.nbcnews.com)
A 16-year-old girl has died after she was struck by lightning while hunting with her father in Florida, officials say....
That's it, you're grounded! And you can forget about having any polar ice caps for dessert! (i.postimg.cc)
Disney’s password-sharing crackdown has begun (www.theverge.com)
It’s now explicitly against Disney Plus’s policies for Canadian subscribers to share passwords outside of their household.
"Magic 8 ball, am I stupid?" (lemmy.world)
Do you prefer inverted or uninverted camera, and what are your experiences with it in general?
I always find this topic to be really interesting since there’s no objectively correct answer, and it tends to be something people have experience with....
What’s the point of unpopular opinions if you can’t show them off (i.imgur.com)
Google Flat-Out Refuses to Bargain With Workers, Prompting YouTube Music Strike (www.vice.com)
Unity issue an apology on Twitter for "confusion and angst" over the runtime fee policy. (nitter.net)
We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical...
The only thing doing tech tests has taught me is that I'm too stupid to do the job I've been doing professionally for the better part of 2 decades.
Can’t just be me, can it? Currently 0 for 3 on interviews because I can’t seem to get past the technical interview/test. Usually because of some crazy complicated algorithm question that’s never been relevant to anything I’ve ever had to do on the job in all my years coding....
Unity's self-combustion engine (www.gamesindustry.biz)
Unity boycott begins as devs switch off ads to force a Runtime Fee reversal - Mobilegamer.biz (mobilegamer.biz) German
Mobile game developers are now boycotting Unity by switching off its ad products, mobilegamer.biz can reveal....
Update: Unity office death threat was made by a Unity employee (www.polygon.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/5340114...
Isn't it weird that we have exactly five fingers and five toes on each hand and foot.
I mean why 5, why 5 on each limb, why not 4 or 6. Why do our feet also have 5. Whats with our body being so symmetrical....
Unity Silently Deletes GitHub Repo that Tracks Terms of Service Changes and Updated Its License - GamerBraves (www.gamerbraves.com)
It's a mass extinction event (lemmy.world)
How to improve the gaming industry (lemmy.today)
Want to know more? godotengine.org/donate/
Unity Engine Rule (i.imgur.com)
Peak civilisation (lemmy.world)
Unity will start charging developers each time their game is installed (www.engadget.com)
Garry Newman: The new Unity pricing would have cost him $410,000 of lifetime revenue (i.vgy.me)
This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)...
What's something that you hate about all (or most) people?
What is a well known 'public secret' in the industry you work in that the majority of outsiders are unaware of?
What programming languages aren't too criticized here?
It feels like anything is mowed down on the internet. I’ve been a dev for a long time too, and I never feel sure when I chose a stack for a new toy project (in my day job I rarely get to chose, so that’s a non issue there)
People of Lemmy, I dare you to name ONE billionaire that's done anything good.