It's been progressively getting worse over the past few years as they've continued to "optimize" their search engine for more ad placement and sponsored content. I'd say these past few months, it's become borderline unusable for finding actual information.
So that game developers don't have to rebuild all the rules for their game universes for every game, they use Unity which is one of several products that offers pre-built frameworks to build their games on top of.
This offers several advantages, the main ones being:
You don't reinvent the wheel or the physics for angular momentum for every game, so development time is massively reduced.
You only develop your game once, but can compile it for use on many platforms. So a single developer can be writing code that can be used for the PC, Play Station, XBox and so on.
Skills learned in one game's development transfer to quicker development in your next game.
The way that Unity were paid historically was that you paid a subscription for each developer that was using it to write your game. There were several tiers of subscription, that met the needs of developers in small indies right through to huge multinationals.
It didn't matter how well your game sold, your cost was limited to the subscriptions you paid for. And you released your game bundled with the framework's 'run-time' from Unity that supported your in-game universe.
This changed recently when the executives at Unity had the spiffing idea of charging 20 US cents per installation of the run-time too, while also killing off the cheapest tier of the model subscription.
This meant that the indies suddenly have to pay more for each subscription, and they get to pay a fee for every installation of their game - not every sale - every installation. So every pirated copy - extra charge, every second install on the Steam Deck - extra charge...
What extra has Unity done to deserve the extra cash? In a nutshell - nothing. They just decided to unilaterally change their terms and take a bigger chunk of the pie for doing nothing more at the expense of the customers making the mistake of building on top of their product and being tied into their ecosystem.
As an analogy, imagine buying a season ticket to travel on the train to work each day, you pay €200/month for unlimited travel between the station closest to home and closest to work. This carries on for several years, and then suddenly the rail operator announces a 'communal rolling stock fee', every time you use your ticket there's a €1/passenger fee for each passenger boarding the same train as you whenever you travel! The more busy the train, the bigger the amount you have to pay!
What was a fixed monthly fee could be anything, you have no way to budget the cost, and you have to trust the same people screwing you to get the count right each time with no way of being certain they got it right...
What extra work is the rail operator doing, nothing they are just charging more for the same service.
And what did you do to deserve this? Nothing you just trusted the company you were dealing with to remain reasonable, and not invent bullshit charges.
Back to Unity...
As a result a lot of developers in late stage development plan to switch to a competitor for their next game. Those in early stages are looking at starting over. And there have been reports of publishers walking away from deals with developers because of the unknown risks of a new game because it was developed using Unity.
The easily predictable end result: many if not all of Unity's customers are vocally incandescent with justified rage.
TLDR: Software library company got greedy; they shat in the pool and tried to charge their customers a 'poop in the pool' fee, and every last one of their customers is very (very) loudly incredulous at such ass-hattery.
Curious what resources you've consulted that state Unity can or will charge for every pirated copy. How is the feasible and by what legal mechanisms would they enforce this?
I'm truly a neutral party, I don't play many games but I understand what's going on here a little bit.
You clearly have a jaded viewpoint to it for better or worse and I'm not sure that's warranted and is a bit disingenuous.
Credible sources: multiple online reports from various media outlets, and reading the official announcements when combined with 30+ years of experience as a professional software engineer, software architect and software designer.
As regards the technical side: Well the only way you would be able to track installation would be to make the run-time 'phone home' with each installation so that Unity could increment the count on the developer's account. And the only way to know which developer/game to update is to have a unique identifier baked into each run-time that is sent with the call home.
A pirated copy is still an installation of the run-time unless the person who cracks the game goes to the trouble of intercepting the call home too.
And given the above described mechanism, it should be relatively easy to spoof installs that aren't really happening if you have impulse control problems, some technical ability, and a beef with the developer.
As regards legal mechanism, that's simple, Unity update their contract, invalidate their old contracts (they deleted their public copies of old contracts that allowed users to stay on old copies of the runtime). The new contract just needs to include terms that include their fee being due for each call home they receive.
And once you have a contract you can persue a breach through the courts using contract law. That's why contracts exist.
As regards neutrality, I haven't got a horse in this race, I'm not a games developer, but it's pretty easy to see an abuse and call it out when you see it. The Unity complany had a profitable business model that was working for a decade or more, then they decided they wanted some more of their client's income without actually offering any more for the additional charges.
The stance taken by the execs at Unity is just an ongoing part of the corporate greed trend we are seeing causing the cost of living crisis worldwide.
I don't think I'm jaded or biased, this is just my honest summary and appraisal of the situation for the consumption of someone who wanted to know the salient facts and implications.
Almost all pirated games are is removing the phone home ability? Like 90% of why people pirate is offline only mode (name 1 pirated game that can connect to official servers)
Seems like otherwise it'd be pretty simple to not boot without confirmation.
On the other hand it'd probably be a hell of a lot harder to make a pirated copy that looks legit - has the proper phone home, store authentication and account tied to it.
Cause like otherwise it'd be dirt simple to track who's cracking your games, just check who's phoning home way too much and send the authorities at that account.
But also not to be on unities side but they did say they'll not include pirated copies (if they somehow ever could)
No, The whole point of pirating the games is to make sure that you can install it and play it. They're going to remove any calls home that will stop them from running or any checks that make sure it's genuine. But they're not going to bother themselves with the unity call home unless it keeps the application from running.
Since you’re getting troll comments from right wingers I’ll try to give an actual answer
Feinstein was no longer mentally fit to serve in office. She was essentially the pre-cursor to a weekend at Bernie’s setup. She was not cognitively present enough to vote on legislation or even hold a conversation.
People are glad she passed because it means her seat is open to someone who can actually work on policy and benefit their constituents.
Liberals are not exactly a fan of letting the elderly die in office after the RBG situation that ended up with a stacked court when she had the option to retire under Obama.
Also Lemmy has definitely been having more right wing trolls recently and it’s making me want to use the platform less.
My son watches this show and all the media that’s based on it, there’s alot of bandwagon youtube stuff that people have jumped on just to get those all-important views. I try to understand what my kids are into, so I sat down and actually watched all 60+ episodes of it that were out at the time.
As others have explained, it basically started as a video made with Source Filmmaker that uses assets/characters from Half-life. Alot of it is non-sensical, but there’s some sort of invading force of skibidi toilets (toilets with heads popping out that sing the skibidi song) that are apparently attacking this world. There seems to be regular people there sometimes in earlier episodes, but mostly you see Camera Men (literally just people with videocameras for heads) that are fighting back in some sort of forever war.
As the series progresses, new characters, skibidis, and electronics people are added to the roster, it’s a sort of constant one-upsmanship between the two powers, almost akin to GI Joe or Transformers, but weirder. So you start seeing SpeakerMan, TVMan, and even -Woman, and -Titan versions of all these, but then the Skibidis too come up with new weapons or variants in the war.
And that’s the basic gist of it, though the lore just keeps getting built up over time and keeps getting progressively weirder. My son gets obsessed with it and the music is annoying as hell, I hadn’t heard the skibidi song before, but it’s apparently a remix of something. The electronics people also play a Tears for Fear song (“Everybody wants to rule the world”).
It's just a tiktok fad, the Guardian had a good article recently. Normal conspicuous consumption nonsense. They're good quality, have been around for a long time, but now they come in colors. The cynical take would be that it is just the most recent way to visually confirm that someone has no individual personality without actually having to talk to them.
This is the third post I've seen about Stanley cups and only now did I realize it had nothing to do with hockey. I was very confused how someone had spent $3000 on Stanley cups
So you'll see some things about how it fits in a car cup holder (Lots of others do too) or how one survived a fire (This is just how insulated bottles like that tend to work) and those are all... good enough... but they're not why there's so much hype. The Hype has been carefully engineered. The head of the company is a Marketing guy, and he basically imported Sneaker culture into a new industry. Stanley Cups are released on a limited basis, with partnerships producing only limited supplies. It's induced scarcity and marketing, people are rushing to get one because if they don't rush, there won't be any more, and that makes more people want to rush to get one.
It's just an insulated cup that is intentionally hard to find sometimes. That's all.
You will only get anti-hexbear answers because iirc theyve been defederated. Hexbear is a communist instance that has its roots from /r/ChapoTrapHouse. They're disliked by some beause they're aggressive and often intentionally inflammatory.
What they're NOT is alt right trolls in disguise as some idiots claim. Some people just can't comprehend that there's any position to the left of neoliberalism.
They don't 'defend Russia'. They recognize that the US is in many ways just as bad for the other countries they stick their noses in (look up the many coups they've funded in other countries) and that its better to have a counterbalance in geopolitics. That just so happens to be Russia (and China), but if you actually read the posts there (which I doubt most people have), nobody is actually a fan of Putin or his policies.
Edit: Russia is a capitalist nation that oppresses LGBTQ+ folks and has reactionary anti-communist policies. Just as I guessed, downvoters haven't actually read any Hexbear posts or they'd realize why thinking a communist instance supports Russia in a general sense is complete nonsense.
I'm sorry, but this is asking for a mental gymnastics meme.
Mental gymnastics: They don't defend Russia. They just recognize that the US is bad. It's better to have a counterbalance in geopolitics. They're still lefties. It just happens that Russia fills that niche. They don't actually like Putin.
Mental non-gymnastics: They claim to be lefties. They seem to defend Russia. They're strawmen.
But no, I agree with you that (at least a good deal of) Hexbear is actually left wing. Except there are probably some right wing poser trolls among them, and it's hard to say how many. There are probbably right wing poser trolls among us too. Hehe among us.
I agree with you. What I meant to convey is that users may support Russia in specific situations that run counter to the goals of the United States and other Western nations, but as a whole, Russia is not an ally of leftists or something that users represent as an ideal. Neither is the United States. Political nuance tends to not do well in instances like .world though. They prefer to brush off anything as "Russian trolls" rather than practice introspection as to why someone would want to resist their goals in the first place.
Out of the loop
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