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Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

blender.org

51–60 of 261 posts

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#51
post #26

Epic are doing a great job improving fairness in the gaming industry, and the economic conditions for developers. I'm looking forward to their Epic Store opening up to more (high quality) Indie games.

The % deal they are offering is a good start but I'm not sure buying exclusivity of game releases is good for "fairness in the gaming industry."

A few exclusives is more than worth breaking Valve's near-monopoly and 30% toll on game revenue. That 30% is coming straight out of gamers' pockets and HN usually hates middlemen; it's baffling to see so many people in support of Valve.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#52
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"“Open tools, libraries and platforms are critical to the future of the digital content ecosystem,” said Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games." Contradictory sentiments like these are what lead me to believe this grant is mostly for marketing purposes. (tin-foil hat mode)

Tim Sweeney thinks Win32 is an open standard. I think he's operating with a different understanding of the word "open" than the rest of us.

Quote on that?

Also, there's Wine and ReactOS, no? Aren't those two alternative (even if somewhat incomplete) implementations of Win32?

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#53
post #29

In the spirit of supporting open software, it would be fantastic if Epic Games Store and its DRM warmed up to Linux next. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19844241

The anticheat they use (EAC) for fortnite checks if Wine is in use, and will fail to run the game if it is. This is taken directly from the EAC dll: https://i.imgur.com/a4wBVWz.jpg

Wow, that's just evil.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#54
post #30
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The % deal they are offering is a good start but I'm not sure buying exclusivity of game releases is good for "fairness in the gaming industry."

I'm legitimately surprised to see so much good will towards Epic and Tim Sweeney here. I'm happy about their revenue share and was excited when they got started - until it became obvious that their tactics didn't align with their PR.

Yeah, their revenue share isn't about helping developers, it's about hurting Valve. When Epic pays a publisher for exclusivity, a lot of the time it's actually "sell it anywhere except Steam". Their deals still allow the developers to sell the game on stores that take the same 30% cut that Steam does. Plus there's the issue of a game being developed with Linux support, then Epic pays the publisher for exclusivity and the Linux version goes away because the EGS is Windows only.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#55
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares? "I don't give a rip whose money it is, mate" - Steve Irwin, when asked about accepting money from "unethical" groups and using it for conservation. https://youtu.be/-1gVkTFam1w?t=753 If it helps a good goal, what does it matter?

Source on that quote?

Updated to slightly correct quote and post source

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares? "I don't give a rip whose money it is, mate" - Steve Irwin, when asked about accepting money from "unethical" groups and using it for conservation. https://youtu.be/-1gVkTFam1w?t=753 If it helps a good goal, what does it matter?

What matters is if the accepting of the money outweighs the good of turning it down. It's not always an easy equation.

But that money is going to exist whether you accept it or not. You not accepting the money doesn't mean the way it was acquired stops happening.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#57
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I understand your frustration, and it has options to use the legacy UI (IN PART).

I'll get over everything (i've complained about so far) except how collections work and how merge doubles is gone. If the devs don't sort it out by release, I'll solve it with addons. Just engaging in the time honored tradition of hand wringing.

The remove doubles operator is now called "Merge by Distance". You can find it in Mesh > Clean Up. That's actually the first thing I added to the new quick favorites menu which you can access with the q key.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#58
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I understand your frustration, and it has options to use the legacy UI (IN PART).

I'll get over everything (i've complained about so far) except how collections work and how merge doubles is gone. If the devs don't sort it out by release, I'll solve it with addons. Just engaging in the time honored tradition of hand wringing.

"Merge doubles" is renamed "Merge vertices" (alt-m) > "by distance"... in the "Vertex" menu. (Though the change makes sense to me, I wish they kept an alias so people can still find it.)

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#59
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The % deal they are offering is a good start but I'm not sure buying exclusivity of game releases is good for "fairness in the gaming industry."

A few exclusives is more than worth breaking Valve's near-monopoly and 30% toll on game revenue. That 30% is coming straight out of gamers' pockets and HN usually hates middlemen; it's baffling to see so many people in support of Valve.

30% became the industry standard not just for video games for a reason. It costs money to seamlessly do business across n countries, and it's not like Valve does nothing else to try and earn that fee either.

Epic's play is to try and see if being a better looking deal for game devs will translate to being better for gamers or other groups (like linux users, open source advocates) too. We'll see. Valve has already demonstrated their goodwill towards all the groups multiple times, even if it's motivated by keeping their platform dominance.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#60
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What matters is if the accepting of the money outweighs the good of turning it down. It's not always an easy equation.

But that money is going to exist whether you accept it or not. You not accepting the money doesn't mean the way it was acquired stops happening.

Some philanthropic donations are kinda prestige-for-cash deals. My employer, Oxford University, accepted a large chunk of change from Wafic Saïd to endow their business school. If they hadn't taken it, he'd certainly still have the money. But we wouldn't have lowered our own reputation by associating ourselves with a... not spotless businessman.

If it's done anonymously, then sure: you're quite right. But if it isn't then there is, in fact, a price. And it's not always a great deal.

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