Readit Newsfranknine commented on Unity is acquiring a company who made a malware installer pcgamer.com/unity-is-merg... · Posted by u/doener
Very few new games use their own engine. Excluding legacy titles and AAA publishers who have their own tech developed across decades, I believe proprietary engines are less than 10% of the market today. The only exception is the Japanese market but even that has changed in recent years with Unity and Epic making inroads.
It’s very difficult to justify the expense of developing your own engine, especially if you intend to release for multiple platforms.
It's unlikely for a small indie to roll a mobile game engine But if you are talking about companies with millions of dollars of income from gacha games like Hearthstone, most of them have already attempted to roll their own or even used in production already. (NeoX from NetEase, Cyllista from Cygames and Supercell’s unnamed engine…) For mobile game engines, they are not striving for crazy visual fidelity since mobile hardware is really limiting. Those who stick with Unity now because it’s cheaper, but if Unity tries to charge way more, they will definitely spend that markup to push their own tech onto production instead of surrendering money to Unity.
Unreal has technology moats like Lumen and Nanite to justify the royalty while Unity doesn't.
Straight from the horse's mouth:
The World of Notch - The origins of Minecraft | https://web.archive.org/web/20160604071857/https://notch.tum...
> While looking through some project folders, I found an old protype of a game that never quite became anything. Kinda.
> It was called “RubyDung” (for various reasons), and was supposed to be a base building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress
> As the RubyDung engine got more advanced, I started thinking about adding a first person view for following your minions around, kinda like in Dungeon Keeper. It worked ok, but the graphics got very pixellated and distorted, so I left it out.
> But then I found Infiniminer. My god, I realized that that was the game I wanted to do. I played it in multiplayer for a while and had a blast, but found it flawed. Building was fun, but there wasn’t enough variation, and the big red/blue blocks were pretty horrible. I thought a fantasy game in that style would work really really well, so I tried to implement a simple first person engine in that style, reusing some art and code (although not as much as you’d think) from RubyDung, and came up with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k
Unfortunately, that last YouTube link is not viewable for me ("This video contains content from Nizzotch. It is not available in your country.").
But the conclusion is: Infiniminer was definitely a huge inspiration on Minecraft.
People Make Games made a video about this Infiniminer/Minecraft story and they interviewed Zach Barth. When Microsoft was reviewing the 2.5B Minecraft deal, Zach was working for Microsoft and was on those meetings.
Sometimes they just force you to implement feature for them, like “Sign in with Apple”
> We’ve updated the App Store Review Guidelines to provide criteria for when apps are required to use Sign in with Apple. Starting today, new apps submitted to the App Store must follow these guidelines. Existing apps and app updates must follow them by April 2020. We’ve also provided new guidelines for using Sign in with Apple on the web and other platforms.
> 4.8 Sign in with Apple Apps that use a third-party or social login service (such as Facebook Login, Google Sign-In, Sign in with Twitter, Sign In with LinkedIn, Login with Amazon, or WeChat Login) to set up or authenticate the user’s primary account with the app must also offer Sign in with Apple as an equivalent option.
And implementing Sign in with Apple in Unity is one of the worst experience in my career that I dedicated a blog post talking about:
- Native Sign in with Apple button not working in Unity
- Official Sign in with Apple plugin provided by Unity also not working
- Hooked up API with help from GitHub and created Sign in with Apple button by myself ended up getting `4.0 Design` rejection without explanation
- Trying crazily to contact Apple reviewer for weeks only to find out you have to use system font on that button
- Unity cannot support new Thai system font after iOS 13 and they mark it won’t fix
- Ended up building a native sample app and screenshot Sign in with Apple button from it in 12 different languages into PNGs and ask the my designer co-worker to remove background for me to import them into Unity
- After all these the update is finally accepted by App Store
- Casually downloaded games by other companies a week later, saw a totally malformed Sign in with Apple button not being nitpicked by reviewer and just went live like thatIt's called code-rot..
Systems improve over time. Apple's privacy in iOS improved a lot. Not updating your apps makes it hard to keep up with API changes. Its normal you have todo some work to ensure it still works. Sometimes you're out of luck. But not all dependencies stay with us forever. Software is sadly enough not immutable, environment impacts how software runs... My old android game stopped working on newer devices 3 years ago due to a OpenGL bug that was fixed, i depended on the bug in order to make my app work.
Welcome to the real world
Sometimes they just force you to implement feature for them, like “Sign in with Apple”
> We’ve updated the App Store Review Guidelines to provide criteria for when apps are required to use Sign in with Apple. Starting today, new apps submitted to the App Store must follow these guidelines. Existing apps and app updates must follow them by April 2020. We’ve also provided new guidelines for using Sign in with Apple on the web and other platforms.
> 4.8 Sign in with Apple Apps that use a third-party or social login service (such as Facebook Login, Google Sign-In, Sign in with Twitter, Sign In with LinkedIn, Login with Amazon, or WeChat Login) to set up or authenticate the user’s primary account with the app must also offer Sign in with Apple as an equivalent option.
The longer you leave the yak unshaved, the longer it takes to shave it.
Working on games with Unity for nearly a decade, the standard approach is to defer upgrading Unity as long as possible. Generally we stay on the old LTS (Long-term support) version until it’s no longer supported. Latest version and new LTS are very unstable with game crashing bugs on certain platforms that I had to spend weeks to track down and spend weeks to convince Unity QA there is actually a problem then wait for months to get it fixed. It’s better to just stay away from the latest and greatest, having other people do the demining.
franknine commented on The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen nicole.express/2022/the-c... · Posted by u/luu
A lot of the story regarding the Tetris split between Nintendo and Tengen is covered in the great Gaming Historian video [The Story of Tetris](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8&t=1s).
There's another episode from Gaming Historian specifically for Tengen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLA_d9q6ySs
It talks about how Atari abuses the copyright system to gain access to Nintendo’s protection system source code.
Here's some of his other huge devlogs on TIGSOURCE:
1. Papers, Please. https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=29750.0
2. Return of the Obra Dinn. https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.0
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=46289.0