Unity announces a revolutionary way to extract revenue from developers! Steam celebrates its birthday with memes, gamescope adds support for Reshade, HDR Steam Decks, and Starfield Linux optimizations.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:14 Back massage
UNITY SHENANIGANS
03:06 Oh hi Scott
04:59 Unity pricing update
10:15 Unity telemetry
12:37 Blocking Unity telemetry
13:05 Unity employee threats
14:03 Retroactive payments
14:29 Lawsuits incoming?
15:33 Next step for developers?
17:14 Rolling back changes
17:35 Is GODOT an option?
19:19 Unity Knowledgebase
20:38 Bad business models
23:21 Lighting money on fire
24:15 iUnity incoming
25:30 Blaming John Riccitiello
24:54 The future of Unity
STEAM NEWS
30:38 20 Years of Steam
31:22 Identify the Valve meme
35:28 First time using Steam
36:54 Green Steam is back
39:25 SteamOS 3.5 and HDR on Linux
42:22 Bluetooth on Steam Deck
NEW GAMES
43:04 Untitled Ghost Game
45:00 Haunted objects
GAME UPDATES
46:06 Starfield optimized for Linux
50:14 $4 Avengers
52:17 StarRim
52:55 Distance retro console port
56:46 Venn played BloodStained
NEWS
59:43 VKD3D Proton 2.10
01:01:32 Direct Storage on Linux
01:02:40 Mangohud with AMD fans
01:03:05 Text outline girth
01:04:09 Steam Mango button
01:05:27 ReShade support with gamescope
01:07:59 WTF is ReShade?
01:08:28 Looking at some Shades
01:12:08 ReShade for Minecraft?
HATE MAIL
01:13:34 Hello from the Soul Reaver project
01:17:29 Moody vampires
01:24:35 Credits
Colour key – Venn Jordan Pedro Scott
Steam: News
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unitys-self-combustion-engine-this-week-in-business
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/unity-to-start-charging-fee-pegged-to-game-installs
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16hnibp/unity_silently_removed_their_github_repo_to_track/
https://old.reddit.com/r/unity/comments/16j23ci/i_know_people_dont_want_to_hear_this_you_shouldnt/
Last year Unity merged with IronSource, a mobile app ad network.
They’re also introducing new DRM requirements for the editor https://unity.com/pricing-updates
They’re charging developers 20 cents every time a user installs the game.
Is it going to track pirated copies?
Your PC + Steam Deck counts as 2.
How will they track installs you might ask.
“We leverage our own proprietary data model, so you can appreciate that we won’t go into a lot of detail, but we believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the Runtime is distributed for a given project.”
That’s some trust me bro level bullsh*t.
Apparently this is retroactive??? Unity is being sketchy about how they will track instals.
This part sets off my spidey senses.
Smells like a classic “introduce unbelievable bullsh*t but retract some of it after internet outrage so users think they won” maneuver.
Seriously, you release bad news like this on Friday, not Monday. Fishy.
Welp, here it is Saturday and it tools like they are sticking with it.
From Ars Technica:
“Unity initially told Axios’ Stephen Totilo that the “per-install” fee applies even if a single user deleted and re-installed a game or installed it on two devices. A few hours later, though, Totilo reported that Unity had “regrouped” and decided to only charge developers for a user’s initial installation of a game on a single device (but an initial installation on a secondary device—such as a Steam Deck—would still count as a second install).”
That’s some compound stupid.
Imagine you’re about to release a game that will sell a few million copies.
Remember a year ago when Unity merged/acquired an adware company and former EA CEO, John Riccitiello, said it was a good thing.
Very few people agreed then, and even less agree now.
LGC 517 if you’re wondering.
The backpedaling has already begun.
If you’re still on Xitter and would like a collage of people unhappy with this decision: https://twitter.com/FuckedByUnity
Where do you go? Unreal blueprints? Ogre 3d?
I wish GODOT had a better solution for console ports.
They’re definitely going to need to pump the gas on that side of the business.
The death threats are coming from inside the house maaan!
It was a good excuse to call off the town hall scheduled for that day.
Does this actually result in unity losing all developer trust? Folks need to stay mad
Folks like Gary and Rami Ismail have said that the big issue here is not the pricing itself, but how unity gets to unilaterally make this move and there is little recourse aside from the court of public opinion.
Even if they backtrack everything the mistrust will be there.
Unity (and Unreal) have unsustainable business models.
Imagine if Adobe gave away their products and only charged if your creation hit a set threshold.
Epic can get away with it because ForkKnife, Fallguys, Psyonix, and Bandcamp money.
Unity went around buying Weta Digital and merging with Ironsource.
Unity has never had a profitable quarter in its history.
Unity lit money on fire for decades to gain market share.
Raising money and making it are two different equations.
Gigaya, Unity’s in-house game project was noped last year because reasons.
Unity is Apple’s exclusive partner on Vision Pro so I want to see how that pans out.
I like the memes recreated with Valve characters.
I’m very happy Steam evolved into what it is today and almost everything that appeared because of or driven by it.
I look forward to future non-VR things they come up with.
I didn’t use Steam until May 24, 2010. Free Portals.
Didn’t install it again until 2011, when Skyrim showed up.
The year after that Steam released a Linux beta and here we are.
Would have been a good time for a HL announcement?
Some of those memes are pretty choice
They actually mentioned artifact. Good on them
Steam Machines and Steam refunds in the same year
Like sand in the hourglass, so go the unplayed games in our steam libraries
Do you miss the green?
Party like it’s 2004.
No one liked Steam when it was green.
It was the shit client that made games run worse, kept updating every time you went to start a game, and would crash for no reason taking the game down with it.
In an age where most computers were either single or dual core, the burden of running Steam was non-negligible.
I can’t have rose-tinted glasses for something I genuinely hated for its first 5 years of existence.
Oh, that takes me back. Powerful sense memory of playing counter strike in my childhood basement.
Now I’m in an adult basement
It’s fugly though.
I actually like the new UI.
Slightly tweaked color profile
Variable Refresh Rate and High Dynamic Range can now be enabled when connected to an external monitor that supports them.
Linux has HDR now?
Zoom and stretch as scaling for monitors with different aspect ratios.
This is a new major version which means your rootfs is going to be reset, if you had made any changes previously these will be gone.
SteamOS will now also automount your external drives, so you can be bottlenecked on USB 3 and not your microSD card
Supposedly better bluetooth connectivity. I haven’t really done much bluetoothing on my steam deck out of fear of draining it’s already limited battery
Someone ran pacman -Syu
Steam: New Games
Hide & seek with ghosts?
You track them down but then the exorcist comes in, apparently.
Someone really liked House House’s lack of naming convention
It’s free and it’s got online coop.
Happy one year anniversary
Steam: Game Updates
When Elden Ring first came out the performance was a lot more consistent on Linux/Deck than it was on Windows.
In the immediate aftermath of Todd Howard running his mouth and saying the PC version was optimized, VKD3D says no!
Yeah, like elden ring it turns out that they developers were acting the micky virginia
Or at least not using the ID3D12GraphicsCommandList::ExecuteIndirect method efficiently
Again, one nice thing about having an open source driverspace is issues like these can get named and shamed. Hopefully some future DX12 devs will know better next time. Or at least their VS AI code assistants will
Starfield allocates memory incorrectly, abuses ExecuteIndirect, and creates multiple `ExecuteIndirect` calls instead of batching them.
While it may not be optimized for PC, it will be optimized for Linux.
PS4 port incoming!
Fixes for cloud storage.
Call for community levels but that might be a big ask for the 20 or so playerbase.
At least they intend to release the PS4 and PS5 versions at the same time.
I know that Sony fired up the PS4 printers again because of the ‘rona shortages, but damn!
News:
Starfield and Ratchet & Clank specific issues addressed.
A Vulkan noncompliant implementation of shader model 6.7
It’s opt-in for now for that same reason
AC6 bug driven rewrite of descriptor set layouts.
And here I’ve been hearing that AC6 was the first proper PC port of a From Software game.
Not so much, it would seem.
DirectStorage Is now a thing, so we can have GPU decompression at home
No RE-Bar in halo infinite for you guys.
Causes CPU performance to eat poo.
AMD fanspin.
If you ever wanted all the options that mangohud gave you on the Deck but for your desktop, this is it.
You also get the same presets with the same numbers as you’d get on the Deck.
But of course you can also set your own custom view just with more options now available.
They got a nice explicit blacklist now, so no more mangohud on internet explorer for you sickos!
Reshade is a collection of shaders and other graphical customization options that Windows people have had access for awhile.
You could previously use some ReShade options in VkBasalt but the devs seem to be winding down development on that.
Gamescope, very much looking to become the default or at least the go to Wayland compositor, now supports ReShade as well.
ReShade was one of those things you just couldn’t do back in the dark OpenGL times, because shader calls in the middle of GL calls were a big no no.
I look forward to some proper mod parity with this and Vortex 2 being available on Linux
This can introduce quite a bit of latency if you go too crazy
Apparently amdgpu has ways of enabling some of these effects at a different level .
So what is reshade?
It lets someone else dick around with a game’s brightness, contrast, and colours.
You can find some good (and bad) Shades on SweetFX DB.
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