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Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

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Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are much more moral than you'd think. I've had a judge push my claim to the very end to ensure there were as few people in the court room, then totally rail on the plaintive suing me for wasting everyone's time with absolute bullshit. Then, after he said his piece and made it clear there better they needed to be quite persuasive, they did indeed lose. They tried to win on a little technicality in the law but as…

> They are much more moral than you'd think. They aren't > that is there for X reason, this is Y. It doesn't even apply Sounds like he was applying the law and the lawyer was misinterpreting it. > a judge can say that the evidence is not preponderance enough And that's not about morality, that's about proving you broke the law. The moral levers Judges have are in the punishment (within the bounds of the law), not whe…

If you’ve ever had to be a parent and judge between two siblings, you’d recognize how silly your comment is. All judgements are borne of three choices: to do what is right, to teach a lesson, or some combination of the two. Any judge can say “fuck you, you deserve it” and only a higher judge can overturn it (when there isn’t a jury). Any jury can, interestingly, do the exact same thing. Human rules made for humans can have all kinds of results when judged by humans.

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#122
post #85

Id recommend anyone who can to move to https://godotengine.org/ and give it an honest try

I'd recommend trying to make a game "from scratch", using only libraries, instead of an "engine", if you haven't done it before, and have only used fully-featured game engines. it's good to learn how to solve problems using structs and pointers and memory, instead of thinking only in high-level primitives like Entities and Components and Prefabs and Scenes and Nodes. not only will you level up your knowledge of how c…

"this is all assuming, of course, that your goal is, at least in part, to be able to honestly call yourself a "game developer" in general"

This is some Wagnerian level of gatekeeping snobbery right here. A game developer.... develops games by definition. They don't develop engines, they don't develop rigid body collision systems, they don't develop 3D renderers, they develop (aka make) games. If you find a suitable tool to facilitate the creation of your vision, you'd be a fool not to avail yourself of it.

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd recommend trying to make a game "from scratch", using only libraries, instead of an "engine", if you haven't done it before, and have only used fully-featured game engines. it's good to learn how to solve problems using structs and pointers and memory, instead of thinking only in high-level primitives like Entities and Components and Prefabs and Scenes and Nodes. not only will you level up your knowledge of how c…

"this is all assuming, of course, that your goal is, at least in part, to be able to honestly call yourself a "game developer" in general" This is some Wagnerian level of gatekeeping snobbery right here. A game developer.... develops games by definition. They don't develop engines, they don't develop rigid body collision systems, they don't develop 3D renderers, they develop (aka make) games. If you find a suitable t…

> They don't develop engines, they don't develop rigid body collision systems, they don't develop 3D renderers,

note how I never suggested doing any of those things in the post-Unity pre-Godot weekend project I suggested—except for the "engine". if you call yourself a "game developer" in general—as opposed to an expert user of a specific piece of game development software—then you should intuitively understand the level of effort it would take to create an "engine", using C and SDL (or something like those—Zig and raylib, Jai and Simp, whatever), specifically for creating a simple single-threaded 2D platformer, with multiple levels and a title screen, in a weekend's time—it's far from rocket science. some arrays of structs, some functions that loop through those arrays to simulate and render stuff (as colored squares), some code that handles input and makes it change some variables in a struct, and it all runs in an infinite loop that breaks when the player presses Esc (optionally with a frame limiter). then from there you can add an "asset system" (arrays of structs, plus an ID enum and a load function, for textures and sounds), and a "scene" system ("TITLE_SCREEN, GAME, ..." enum, switches that branch on that, and a current level integer). (stretch goal: particles.) there's a tiny bit more to it than this, but that's most of it.

for someone who calls themselves a game developer as opposed to an expert user of certain software, this should all be completely straightforward to write in a weekend, because these lower-level constructs—underpinnings to higher-level abstractions found in general-purpose game engines like Unity and Godot—arise naturally from thinking about the things the computer needs to do (functions) and keep track of (structs, arrays of structs, pointers) to make your gameplay come alive, more generally, unbound by tool-specific mental schemas. I'm not suggesting one write a game in assembly, but merely something a bit closer to that than GameObjects and Components or Nodes. proving to yourself that you don't need such abstractions to make a game is empowering, and causes "game engines" to be somewhat demystified for you, unlocking a breadth of new knowledge, understanding, and possibly even inspiration—if you've only ever thought about game development in terms of the high-level abstractions specific to a general-purpose game engine.

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#124
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Godot 4 is Vulkan (and I believe the plan is/was to add OpenGL ES3 back at some point)

Thanks! I assume on macOS that means they use MoltenVK?

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/contributing/developm...

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#125
post #86
post #2

some of those companies that are at the bottom of this letter, are one of the worst i've ever seen. many of them are known to just copy other indie games, and just heavily monetize them.

The interesting part is who is not on the list e.g. HoYoverse. It has been speculated by many that this is all about Unity Technologies wanting a much larger share of the billion dollar profits of the gatcha games based on Unity. If all indie devs quit Unity, but HoYoverse (the company behind the money printing press "Genshin Impact") does not, it would still massively increase the profits of Unity Technologies. Of c…

From what I heard, Unity China is not actually owned by Unity, and Hoyoverse has a stake in Unity China: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-reportedly-looking-to-se...

So the answer here may legitimately be that Hoyoverse isn't affected by this.

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#126
post #2

some of those companies that are at the bottom of this letter, are one of the worst i've ever seen. many of them are known to just copy other indie games, and just heavily monetize them.

I looked at those companies and thought, “you wish you were stakeholders.” Tell me when the developers of Among Us, Pokemon, GRIS, Cuphead, Hollow Knight, Ori, Cities: Skylines, etc. join the letter.

tell you when the (relatively speaking) peanut gallery joins in?

You may not have heard of them but each of these companies have a billion downloads in their portfolio minimum. This is massive that they all rejected this.

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#127
post #101
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our Craft = Coding what the resident psychologist came up with that will have the greatest likelihood of addicting players to buy our loot boxes.

I am wondering at what point will governments step up and regulate social media, loot boxing, and other such digital-based addictive things just as they regulate other addictive things like drugs, alcohol, and gambling?

it's been in argument for years. I don't think the US will ever step in given its culture.

Also, I'm unsure how you step in and "regulate social media" to begin with. The whole issue is that social media provides much of its content via users, and users take these bathroom writings as gospel. That's a societal issue. Even if you regulate the money out of social media people will just join some home spun sites or even the fediverse, and the core problem continues.

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#128
post #85

Id recommend anyone who can to move to https://godotengine.org/ and give it an honest try

I'd recommend trying to make a game "from scratch", using only libraries, instead of an "engine", if you haven't done it before, and have only used fully-featured game engines. it's good to learn how to solve problems using structs and pointers and memory, instead of thinking only in high-level primitives like Entities and Components and Prefabs and Scenes and Nodes. not only will you level up your knowledge of how c…

>(if any downvoters could explain why they find this post to be disagreeable, I'd love to hear it.)

https://aas.sh/blog/make-games-not-engines/

I post this as someone who in fact is an engine developer, To my chagrin, most people don't want to actually work on engines.

>this is all assuming, of course, that your goal is, at least in part, to be able to honestly call yourself a "game developer" in general, as opposed to merely an expert user of a specific piece of software.

this gatekeeping doesn't help much either. there are multiple successes made on GameMaker from people who barely know more than the rudimentary sctipting/programming basics. I don't think many would argue with them being "game developers", even if they wouldn't necessarily get jobs at Naughty Dog or Blizzard.

There's a lot about proper game design to learn that you can pick up without ever touching a line of code. Or even a computer if you want to go super old school. I'd only recommend your path to current computer science students hoping to work in industry after graduation, not someone who wants to ship an actual full game

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#129

TLDR: Don't bet on Unity's success. Bet on their collapse. The place has zero integrity in management. I've never worked at a worse managed place, and I hope I never do again. (Disclaimer: two of my three engineering managers were actually very good skilled engineers and managers (the one bad one was the "people manager", who "always knew he wanted to be a manager" and was put in charge of an engineering team... he h…

Sounds like you got a particularly bad part of Unity (and I have heard about those parts, even if they were far from my line of work). I had a wonderful team/project at Unity and while there were some who would talk politics I can't imagine any of them spending hours arguing about it on the company hour. I can't definitely say no one did, because Unity had literal thousands of public channels to grok through (there was literally a channel dedicated to asking what channel to post a question in. It's that saturated).

But that might have been because my director shielded the team from a lot of the BS up top. Come 2022, I and quite a few others of my team were laid off, and within 12 months said director was also out of the company. I don't think it helped that Johacim took a silent leave within that timeframe either.

The only agreement I have with your experience is that you do have tons of interviews. But mine were all fit into one full-time day, and it was mostly to see if any of the teams in that office wanted me. So less "5 interviews for a single position" and more "5 interviews with 5 teams, and 1-2 with directors to ask about the company".

Re: Game developers turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization

#130

If those companies would disappear overnight, it would be a positive outcome for humanity. I guess there are upsides to Unity's insanity after all.

Those companies would rebuild their games from scratch before they truly disappearing. They have literal billions of dollars each, and they will long outlive Unity at this rate.
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