Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Yeah, that's the word to be used: debacle.

A few weeks ago the makers of the Unity game engine, a very widely used game engine, announced a change to price per install which would have had major ramifications on small organizations, not to mention developers who had bought a license that they thought exempted them from such. It also would have exposed developers to 'hate installs' where someone could fire up a scripted virtual machine to install the game, delete the VM, create a new VM, reinstall the game, ad infinitum, to rack up charges against the developer.

A mass revolt of the install base began.

Some operations were too far into their projects to change engines. Some cancelled projects, others swore their next and future projects were going to other platforms. Word began to spread about another game engine called Godot that claims to be able to import all your Unity assets and you can hit the ground running.

There are two big new stories over the last couple of weeks and a huge one today. Initially, Unity was all 'We are surprised, but not bending'. On 9/22, the president of Unity, Marc Whitten had a press conference and said 'We're on a mission to earn back developer trust.' Which, of course, is weasel words to say 'We massively fucked up, it's obvious that it's really going to screw over the company, and we've got to suck up and try to get everybody back! Unity scaled back the fee structure, the question became whether this would be enough? The developers felt quite burned as they'd been assured that said structure would never have been changed in the first place.

I'm not going to go into the details of the new fee structure, you're welcome to read the Ars article. Regardless, a major serving of humble crow pie and the shareholders telling the board to dig in.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/unity-exec-tells-ars-hes-on-a-mission-to-earn-back-developer-trust/

https://games.slashdot.org/story/23/09/25/0245233/unity-president-apologizes-thanks-devs-for-feedback-pledges-sustainable-future


Literally the next DAY, the oldest Unity developer's group DISSOLVED! This group had been in existence for thirteen years, and they pulled the plug. Clearly it didn't happen as a direct result of the interview, you don't dissolve a group like this overnight - it takes some planning. BUG, the Boston Unity Group, was founded in 2010 and says that there's nothing preventing Unity from doing this backstab again.

From the Ars article: "Since its founding in 2010, the Boston Unity Group (BUG) has attracted thousands of members to regular gatherings, talks, and networking events, including many technical lectures archived on YouTube. But the group says it will be hosting its last meeting Wednesday evening via Zoom because the Unity of today is very different from the Dave Helgason-led company that BUG says "enthusiastically sanctioned and supported" the group at its founding.

"Over the past few years, Unity has unfortunately shifted its focus away from the games industry and away from supporting developer communities," the group leadership wrote in a departure note. "Following the IPO, the company has seemingly put profit over all else, with several acquisitions and layoffs of core personnel. Many key systems that developers need are still left in a confusing and often incomplete state, with the messaging that advertising and revenue matter more to Unity than the functionality game developers care about."

Again, it looks like the company going public and stock-based, having to answer to share holders and Wall Street, was the big moving force behind the per-install charges.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/oldest-unity-game-developer-group-breaks-up-over-lack-of-trust-in-the-company/

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/09/26/2151223/unity-dev-group-dissolves-after-13-years-over-completely-eroded-company-trust


Now here's the biggie from today.

The CEO of Unity has resigned from the company in hopes of 'avoiding a stock panic'!

So clearly it was all about the Benjamins from the beginning.

https://venturebeat.com/games/john-riccitiello-steps-down-as-ceo-of-unity-after-pricing-battle/

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/10/09/2129255/john-riccitiello-steps-down-as-ceo-of-unity-after-pricing-battle


It will be interesting to see what the next chapters of this debacle look turn out to be. They can't revert their pricing/licensing scheme to what it was before this all happened: the shareholders won't let them, and they've already burned their developers. Any budding game developers are going to be looking at other platforms because they've now seen how Unity treats their devs.

Anyone want any action on 'Fire sale for the corp in less than five years?'

Unity used to be THE game engine that developers went to. It was multiplatform, and it was pretty much free for small developers to get in to for early projects. Big developers paid more for it, which makes sense.

Well, that all changed this week.

There's an old joke that when you take your car to your mechanic and you need a whole bunch of stuff done, like your brake fluid filter replaced, that the mechanic needs to make a boat payment. Well, in this case, it's like Unity's entire board needs new boats.

They are going to start charging users of Unity's engine $0.20 every time someone INSTALLS a game using the Unity engine! The developers/game company eats that fee. It slides slightly, like if you're a huge company like Bethesda or EA, it goes down once you're above a certain threshold.

But let's look at a couple of very real events. A game company developed a game with the Unity engine, I believe it was called Vampire. They sold it on the Steam platform for $0.99. Steam automatically takes a 30% cut. Had Unity been taking $0.20 at that time, the developer would have been taking a loss on every single unit.

Second scenario. For whatever reason, you hate Bob at Bob's Game Studio. Maybe he left a snarky comment on a social media post that you didn't like. So you write a script that will create a virtual machine that will then download Bob's game, install it, then delete the VM and repeat endlessly. Costing Bob $0.20 until you decide to stop the process. And hey, why not rent some Amazon cloud servers and spin up a few dozen VM servers to do the same thing?

Among the worst parts of this is that Unity promised to never do such a thing, now they're doing it. And to top it off, they're saying that this fee will be RETROACTIVE. The game that you made on a previous version of the Unity engine? Start coughing up those 80% of a quarter.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/game-developers-unite-against-unitys-new-per-install-pricing-structure/


Developers are furious. So much so that Unity has had to close two offices because of threats against the company and its people. Closed at least through the end of the week. They have 15 offices in North America, 39 world-wide.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/potential-threat-shuts-two-unity-offices-after-per-install-fee-announcement/


But there is a bright spot on the horizon: Godot. Yes, you don't have to wait for Godot. (sorry/not sorry: couldn't resist)

There's a new game engine in town that goes by Godot. It's fairly mature, up to the V4 stage with the v3 engine in long-term support. It is multi-platform including iOS and Android, supports C#, C++, Rust and a number of other languages. AND it's free and open source. You can use Blender with it and several other languages to create assets for it.

Absolutely guaranteed that computer game developers will be switching to it by the legion.

Humble Bundle frequently sells programming bundles for game developers for Unity. I wonder how long until they sell them for Godot and whether the frequency of offering them for Unity goes down.

https://godotengine.org/

My wife and I started playing Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). We enjoy it quite a bit. My wife is a minor Lord of the Rings scholar, and they have a free mode: you can play two characters per server with only minor restrictions. It's a pretty good game, all in all. One thing that I particularly like is that everybody is playing a good guy: there's no Horde vs Alliance in this game. You can duel other players, but I've never seen it.

And best of all, they have a Mac client, letting my wife and I play! Well, I could play anyway since Dave gave me that gaming laptop monster Windows machine. They also have a WINE client, so if you're running Linux on a beefy machine, you can also play it. Pretty cool!

They have one serious problem: they don't patch their code base. When you download their game, you're downloading nearly their 1.0 version, so you're going to spend a lot of hours downloading that beast, then you're going to spend another bunch of hours bringing it up to date with seemingly every frickin' patch ever released.

Early Tuesday morning was a patch day. No big deal, took about an hour to download and apply.

And all our Mac installs broke.

None of them could connect to any server. My Windows laptop: no problem. And I couldn't see any activity on the forums, nor did a Google search for the error turn up any screaming. So I sent in a ticket, updated this morning by a screen shot with a little more observational commentary.

This afternoon I got a response, pointing to a page posted mid-April, so about 50 days ago.

With the latest update they discontinued the Mac client and Mac users have to install the WINE client.

No notice in the little news box in the loader. No popup in the software if it detected it were running on a Mac, which is trivial to detect. No notice in the last three patch readme files.

Just this announcement on a web page, if you happen to dig in to the forums, three layers deep, in the basement, behind a locked door, in a file cabinet, in a disused lavatory, behind a sign that says Beware The Leopard.

What really pisses me off is it takes over 12 hours to install it on my new laptop, and probably 18 hours to install it on my iMac. AND I'VE INSTALLED IT ON BOTH IN THE LAST WEEK!

HAD I KNOWN I HAD TO INSTALL THAT WINE CLIENT, I COULD HAVE INSTALLED THAT AND ONLY DONE IT ONCE ON EACH INSTEAD OF HAVING TO REPEAT THE FIRK-DING-BLAST PROCESS!


Grrrrr..... Masters of communicating to their users they ain't.


If you play LOTRO, let me know: we're on Brandywine, Crickhollow, and Gladden. We created a Kinship on Gladden called Those That Abide, gotta get a Big Lebowski reference in there - then on another server I saw a guy named Duderino!

Zork. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Planetfall. A Mind Forever Wandering. Leather Goddess of Phobos. Sorcerer. Deadline. All the source code is there, as is a link to a manual that explains how the Lisp-like Zork Implementation Language, ZIL, works (scroll down to download it in PDF, epub, Kindle, and other formats). There's interpreters for all of the major operating systems available, apparently ZIL is very popular in the interactive fiction community.

Activision still holds the rights, and technically this could all disappear in the blink of an eye, but the code is so ancient that it might just stay up. It should prove to be quite an interesting study in natural language parsers.

There's a total of 54 repositories, it took me about 25 minutes to download all the zips and it's a total of about 167 meg when all is said and done.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/you-can-now-download-the-source-code-for-all-infocom-text-adventure-classics/


Just to add to stuff that you might want to download, Archive.org has a thing called the Infocom Cabinet, containing stunning collections of documents scanned from Infocom documenting behind the scenes stuff from Infocom projects. For example, the tome, and there's no better word for tome as it's near 600 pages long! on Hitchhikers - is just on Hitchhikers! There's similar for Zork, Leather Goddess, Mind Forever Wandering, two for Planetfall, etc! 28 entries in all. This is going to be an amazing partial biography and behind the scenes of Infocom! It's a somewhat bigger download: 28 files which, in epubs, is 1.4 gig!

Back to downloading, I guess....

https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet

Like I need yet another way to waste time.

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/11/1856212