What do you think about the last Jim Sterling video?

Book previews of ebooks are small, consist of table of contents and a few pages. That is not an indication that the book is as good at the end as at the beginning.

Reviews are based on the opinion of the user. A game I might like may get terrible reviews and a game that gets rave reviews may be a game I do not like.

Besides, if game play videos and reviews worked, this thread would not be here because no one would buy the "asset flipping" bad games that Jim rants about. So obviously, people are buying these games and giving bad reviews and supposedly destroying Unity in the process.

What I get from all this is that just as it is a reader's responsibility to read reviews, look at the previews of the book and then decide to buy it, it is also the gamer's responsibility to read reviews, watch videos, and make an educated guess on whether this is the game they want to buy.

If they buy the game, it is because they either like bad games, or that the process, reviews/videos is not honest or helpful....for whatever reason. Or they find that spending $1 to laugh at a very bad game with their buds is okay.

As people have said here, the asset flipping bad games are the minority. It is not hard for most of us to weed them out. So if they are making money off of these games, whose responsibility is it? Certainly not Unity's as they cannot control what someone does with the assets they buy. It is not the asset developer's fault as their goal is to sell assets and support them, not curate who buys them and what they do with them. It is not Steam's fault as they do not make the games (although with the new system it might become their responsibility).

So, if I buy a bad book even after seeing all the reviews and the previews, it is not Amazon's fault or even the writer's fault. It is my own. Unfortunately, I cannot get a refund for an ebook. But....all the good books I find and buy make up for a few bad ones.

 

You know this from experience right or are you just guessing? What's "reasonable" to one isn't to another, if you live in an expensive country it might not be worth it if you earn less than $100k a year. Are you saying most indies don't do what you're saying? Because IME they do and in a lot of cases it doesn't help enough, if it was just a matter of doing a different game again everyone will do it..

There's issues with either sides, go to niche and the following / player base might not be large enough and if you go too mainstream you'll have way too much competition in what's already an extremely flooded market.

It ain't that simple today, sure four / five years ago when Steam opened their gates it was.. Now you're just a tiny drop in the ocean.

@Murgilod

Platinum games have over 200 staff which drops them from the running of "indie", anyway I'm pretty sure that was exactly the point I was getting across, I'll quote myself:

"The irony there being some of the most famous / successful games have some of the clunkyest controls / systems out of both Indie and AAA.." In response to Hippocoder.

So you're essentially agreeing with me yes? I said games like Batman had "some of the best" not THE best.. I haven't played every indie game out there so of course there could be better.

@EternalAmbiguity

"I'd definitely say that DA: O had a fantastic combat system. One of the best I've played in a game period."

Just standard RPG mechanics we've seen in a platitude of RPG's no? Many borrowed from their own franchises and found often in top down ARPG's.. Sure the party AI system was pretty cool and the pause / relay commands thing (which had been done also many times) was good..

Although we're really talking about polish here (in terms of this topic), the animations were too slow which showed up all the issues with collision / weight / depth.. You essentially most of the time looked like you were striking thin air, there was no real engagement or interactivity. Not saying holistically it's a bad system because by that point it was a tried and tested methodology (if you like that sorta thing), although I've seen it done much better.. Kingdom of Amalur springs to mind..

As for DAO2: It was a crippled version of the first combat system with fancier particles and better animations, issue is it turned into an MMO style grindfest.. Especially as difficulty relied upon NPC health, I'm not sure why they didn't automate the combat system entirely as it would of removed quite a bit of tedium.

I seriously dislike MMO style combat systems in single player RPG's, they aren't intricate or interesting enough to keep player engagement in what's an especially long play genre.. DAI was the worst of the three and it's one of the first Bioware games (or RPG's for that matter) I couldn't get through, it was so dull.

 

Edited... victim of cell phone post or haste makes waste. lol

Anyway...
Some programmers may inflate their influence but really it is not about a "holy war" between programmers and artists. Not sure how this even came up. It is a simple matter there are many aspects to a game.

The programming can certainly be a weakness or a strength as well as the visuals and design and audio and scope and so forth.

Bottom line is ultimately it is the logic that ties everything together and makes things happen (whether done through writing code in text or wired up visually). So the importance and influence in that to shape a game for the better or worse should be readily apparent IMO.

Saying that doesn't mean the design doesn't have a lot of importance or the audio or the visuals. They are all important in their own way and all work together to create the game experience. They don't all need to be perfect but either they all need to be at least solid (aome minimum level of quality) OR if not then other aspects need to excel to make up for the lacking on the other aspect(s).

Take any game that is great to play even with obvious bad programming and how much would it improve with quality programming? Probably much more than many people realize. Many games are great experiences with lower raw quality graphics or audio but they might actually be better experiences if they excelled in visuals and audio.

Thing is a person can only manage so much. So need to pick their battles as @ShadowK often mentions. For me I won't labor on visuals and instead will focus on design, programming and audio aspects because I am better at those. Play to your strengths.

 

Many games.
As to the rest you said.... Amen!

 

This is not a problem, this is a good thing. It's called not being twitch-based.

Fair points. Forgot about friendly fire. And true enough about the waves, though DA: O DID have those as well - just not anywhere near as frequently, and not for the first wave.

I always played rogue, so the area attacks never really stuck out to me.

I'll freely confess that the only "Infinity Engine" game I ever played was Pillars of Eternity, and the combat in that game was terrible.

 

It was the tactics system that elevated the game above most. The fact that you weren't stuck with this terrible AI like in most games, that you could modify their behavior based on situation. When starting combat, have everyone target mages. Have your mages focus on debilitating spells. Have your warrior focus on CC and aggro style skills. Though again, I'll point out that I played using the Advanced Tactics mod, which included a few new features (like being able to tell your mage to automatically revive a dead character, or tell rogues to maneuver behind an enemy for the flanking bonus - that should have been in the base game).

It was brilliant, and literally the only other game I've seen do this kind of thing was FF12 for some insane reason.

DA I was an absolute tragedy. It totally massacred the tactics system, and gave you horrendous AI (like your ranged characters running into and staying in melee territory) that forced you to play it the same boring way you play every other party based RPG, herding cats. It was terrible. Not only that, but you had the arbitrary, controller-based 8-skill limitation which only applied to the player (your AI partners used all of their skills, except when you switched to them), and of course when the game first came out it didn't have auto-attack (and it wasn't put back in for some time).

There was some interesting stuff, like the no healing spells, and barrier / guard (that was a really interesting mechanic), but by and large the combat was a dumpster fire.

It was a shame because the world-building and lore of the game was honestly amazing, with characters like Solas and Flemeth (among many others of course). It was a case where gameplay was bad, the main plot was mediocre, but the worldbuilding was strong enough (for someone particularly invested in the series) to hold it up.

 

That is not an infinity engine game. Infinity engine games are Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate I, PLanescape: Torment, Icewind Dale.

Have you played, for example Neverwinter Nights 1 and Neverwinter NIghts 2? 1st one had absolutely amazing combat animations.... second one was significantly uglier, but allowed combinatorial madness in class combinations.

Basically, DA:I combat system was a "normal default" for older CRPGs, maybe even dumbed down a little. I definitely didn't struck me as an "exceptional" in any way. It just played the way older titles would.

 

I am always under the impression when I watch his videos that he gladly plays his part in keeping the image problem alive. He talks much more negatively about Unity than the few positives he lists.

Personally I don't like him, though. I don't like his persona and I stopped watching hs videos. So I am probably biased as well.

 

There's a reason I put that in quotes I know it wasn't made in the Infinity Engine. But the combat was designed in the same format, no?

Edit: A few years I thought about playing BG. But I watched a few videos of the combat and it looked like such a spastic, unholy cluster[????] that I never bothered.

I'm not really sure what the combat animations have to do with the quality of the combat itself (unless we're talking about character action games). I pointed it out in my reply to ShadowK, but the main thing about DA:O was the tactics system. The ability to rise above the "herding cats" bog-standard combat systems RPGs typically espouse was, in my opinion, a huge step forward.

You had similar things for FF 12 and 13, which I also regard as having very good combat systems.


I actually just recalled that PoE had something similar. But it didn't feel anywhere near as deep.

 

Nah grandia 2 had better fighting system /contrarian
lol

I have't played those game yet and I'm waiting for ff12 to come to pc steam.

 

Haven't played it though I did play Child of Light, which I hear has a similar system. I thought it was pretty neat. And unlike that garbage ATB, it actually stops when a character has a turn.

I'm sorry, did I derail this again? Not like it was going anywhere special...

 

Grandia 2 had character moving through the space and you could do neat combo like having a two hit sword, kill an enemy on the first strike then hit his neighbor automatically with the second, and since all character share the same visual bar for turn taking and you had canceling move, it created tons of fun to anticipate, combo, hit, whatever. Children of light only had the visual bar

 

What gets me about moderation around here is a thread on AI gets locked and this crap thread goes on and on and on giving this reprobate leather queen and his foul mouth a publicity platform. Kinda skewed moderation IMHO. For the sake of the children reading here this guys videos should be banned from being posted.

 

Unity should completely change their branding strategy. They should FILTER games based on their quality and ONLY the highest quality games should be FORCED to use the Unity logo. All mediocre and poor games should be FORBIDDEN from using their logo. This solves all problems and would boost Unity brand considerably.

 

I see yeah, so that they don't make any money from the largest portion of their userbase? smart. This would improve Unity by lowering their profits and losing staff so we could have less updates and Unity would fall behind UE4 and eventually languish with game maker before going extinct. They are so stupid and we know best!

Joking aside, the only way to make non-branding work on those scales is to make services bear the brunt of the cost, or introduce royalties, royalty tracking and invasion of privacy, none of which I'm a huge fan of.

 

This would hurt unity. With no splash screen to buy your way out of why would they keep a free version. Why would someone pay for the full sub if they knew they would be forced to use the splashscreen if they made a good game. I think they should offer incentives to good games to include the splash like paid advertising.

 

Yeah, forcing the splash on paying customers is a ridiculous idea.

Maybe acting as a publisher for select games would make sense. Unity could invest in developers that have a proven track record of shipping quality games with the condition of showing off the engine.

 

Agreed, they could do some good without even heavy investment, just free subscriptions. They could have a made with unity contest where we all vote on which games shine and reward them with a chance to get free/discounted subscriptions, assets, or whatever incentive unity decides on for displaying the splash screen.? Just thoughts though I'm no business tycoon.

 

Not a bad idea ... both parties invested in making the game as good as possible, developer gets marketing for the game, and Unity gets to market their engine in a targeted high-quality setting.

 

Exactly, seems like a win win to me.

 

Very true.

Something to be said for the bad games too. Bad games cause people to want to buy Plus or Pro to hide that they are using Unity for their game. So really, there is no incentive to get rid of bad games. Bad games sell Pro.

 

I agree. From a tao viewpoint the bad is just as necessary as the good, contrast and all. It would be nice to have some real well done work to show off on the other side though and it seems like most games that really have alot going in their favor hide the splash so no one sees the good.

You take the good, you take the bad, you take em both and there you have

Spoiler: you knew it already

The Facts of Life

 

Look at the games in Made with Unity and showcased at the Unite cons. Also, games like Firewatch are out there promoting their game along with Unity.

It is so easy to overlook games like this and only see the bad ones. Seems to be a human failing to over inflate the bad and not see the good.. Probably something the Taoist struggles with every day.

 

Im not taoist Buddhist or any other specific religion but I do read the teachings of a large spread of the available spiritual guidance, Christian bible included. Rather than overinflating the bad I strive to see it for what it is, necessary, part of your experience here, just something that is not something that requires you to dislike it, something to be embraced and experienced as it puts the other side in perspective and brings you to what you are now. I fail at this regularly.
It does seem the general social norm is to point out the atrocious while nearly not seeing the wonderous. I may have done that in reguards to the unity splash screen. I just recall more ill spoken of games with the splash that good. I was thinking of ways to bring the otherside into focus is all.

 

IMHO there is no image problem or even a problem with the logo. It is meaningless. It is a small picture for a couple of seconds. A moth farting in Venezuela has more importance.

Unfortunately, a lot of people with low intelligence have access to the internet, and these same people wish to ensure that a 2 second picture changes the developer's income, for no reason of course. It's human madness at it's finest. The same stupidity that kicks off wars and sustains them. The same stupidity that allows despots to rule them and use them, metaphorically and literally.

In a vacuum, I doubt anyone would ever mind the logo but that's not the world we live in.

 

This seems like a neat idea.

 

Well it was reported fiscally Epic was earning more than Unity (out of dev's) and they have no paywalls / it's optional to keep the logo.. I actually get the feeling Epic would prefer you to ditch the logo if your game is sub-par.

Although I'm sure Epic's monetisation scheme with Unity would go down like a led baloon.. Although if nothing else it shows there are alternative ways.

@hippocoder

Gamers are mainly not developers, they don't know.. How would they know the inherent limitations of an engine are and / or whether it's the dev's fault?. From their perspective all they see is a bunch of badly made games coming from a specific engine and then decide to avoid said logo.. Yes I understand some are just creating drama for the sake or it and some are making a career out of it.

Ultimately though why are Unity monetising via a splash screen? Are they playing on dev's paranoia? There's a ton of things they could do like add priority support (like CE) does which would be far more useful..

Even the income paywall makes far more sense but enforcing a logo at the bottom has always seemed odd to me, even though for me personally it doesn't matter in the slightest as I can just get pro..

 

Who's paying to whom?

Not a good idea, if it means "one more game store". There's already steam, gog, origin and uplay. If the idea is to make unity invest in game project (like traditional publishers did)... I'm not sure about it. Seems like too far detached from company's area of expertise.

 

Maybe they are just people who have been burned one too many times with half-assed games, and the most visible thing they share is the splash screen?

I'm all for more opportunity and a generally open market, but I think it's good to see the problem from a naiive customers point of view - shopping in a market where it seems to be implicitly expected by the stores that if you download a completely disfunctional product you just have to return it in good humor, sans X minutes of your life you'll never get back - that's not something that really works in any other industry.

It's not Unity's fault of course, I think the whole splash screen conundrum is simply a focal point for frustration with the state of the industry in general, and especially problems at point of sale. Besides, I didn't even know what Unity was until I became a developer, probably many customers think it's the name of the studio that created the game.

 

Yeah, I meant more along the lines of traditional publishers, not Unity's own store front (that would be pointless). Doesn't seem too far detached to me though. I'm not talking about Unity becoming a full blown publisher, just striking a few deals with experienced developers to help their vision come to life and have a few top tier titles on Steam or wherever with "Made with Unity" for all to see.

 

Still, if they were bright they'd realise it's not connected. There is no excuse for ignorance other than the fact they are ignorant with no will or dive to surmount it.

My point here is not about blame, it's about observing reality. That's the fact and what we do about it is left up to us. But still, the logo is not to blame.

 

Something like the Unreal grants might be a good idea, in exchange for mentioning 'Unity' on a regular basis.

 

Their current strategy is working, though. Over 3 million developers use Unity. The reason it works is because thousands of games have the "made with Unity" splash screen, and new developers see that and think they could do better. So those new developers download Unity. Switching to only showing the splash screen on a few great games would not have the same effect.

 

A better solution is to educate the world that start up logos don't matter. Facts matter. Facts like if it it is a good game or not.

Hotline Miami achieved it's success with Game Maker 7. Hardly top tier engine wise.

Why don't people aspire to being clear thinkers? You don't need to have degrees or qualifications to accept that we are all relatively stupid, and we can only improve that by thinking clearly and weighing up the facts. Assuming we are flawed is a great start.

 

The only way that's going to happen is having a well known high budget / large scale AAA title released with it, if Witcher 4 or something was made with Unity everyone would zip it pretty quickly.. Also it would be good for us because Unity could learn a thing or hundred from the likes of CD Projekt.

 

I'm pretty sure you won't have to convince anyone here of this. Post it in a Steam forum or something and see how it goes though...

 

Exactly why I mentioned in another post I'd be removing the splash screen for that exact reason. I have no choice. I'm happy if people know but I'd rather they found out after they've had fun. In a sense, this is education.

 

Personally I think he's hysterical and doing a great service to serious game developers. I have not watched him lambast any developer or game that didn't deserve it and he only touches the tip of the iceberg. If you make a great game no one will give one flying eff what engine it was made with and if you make a crappy one with a solid engine it is no fault of the engine. Almost half my Steam library are big budget games made with Unity such as all those new RPGs like Wasteland 2 and Pillars of Eternity and they ALL put a unity logo.

 

Totally agree, but I think maybe we are too far removed from the average customers point of view despite sometimes shopping in the same market.

I just imagine the experience of shopping for something where I have absolutely no background knowledge in the general market - no idea about the pitfalls and general misinformation that might be expected in that area. I'd go in quite ignorant but with my eyes open, expecting things to make sense, and that if I follow logic I'll end up in a good place, with a product that I'm generally happy with - and if this doesn't happen it would be pretty frustrating, and it would be tempting to latch onto whatever the bad experiences have in common, as being the source of the problem.

IMO the game market is probably the most untrustworthy market I can think of in this respect, there's very little quality assurance (and very little agreement as to what exactly determines quality), and the fact that you can refund is a poor substitute for being able to get to a quality product fast.

I don't know of any easy fixes, but IMO it's worthwhile to spend a lot of effort to deal with frankly ignorant frustrations on the parts of customers, given the state of affairs - in fact I don't think there's a lot of choice. The only upside is that if you do really well, you can do really well.

 

A lot of mentioning that it isn't Unity's fault (including me) but let's consider for a moment... just in the interest of keeping an open mind and looking at everything objectively... that maybe it is in fact caused by Unity.

I think a big part of the problem is people throwing stuff up on stores that are unfinished, broken and even just the Unity tutorials... as is. That could be seen as the store's fault for not having very strict requirements (i.e. killing off the creative side of things and basically making things much as they used to be), or the devs fault for releasing such stuff on the stores or it could be seen as really the root cause is simply that they were able to (perhaps too easily) produce such stuff to begin with.

The thing that is odd about that is it seems like the same would be true for Construct, Gamemaker Studio and many other popular engines that make game dev as easy or even easier than Unity does. So the question becomes what is the difference?

And maybe the difference really is this whole forced splash screen thing for free (the majority of) users. Compared to Gamemaker Studio for example where last I knew there wasn't even a free option available and yet people can throw together a 2D game easier and faster than in Unity.

I guess what I am saying is maybe their goal just doesn't make sense and is what is ultimately causing the problem. Make a game engine and release for free with a forced splash screen so that every person can make games. But why? Seems like nobody ever really questions that part? The whole democratization of game dev thing. Why is it or was it ever needed to begin with? I think it wasn't and is probably the root cause of this kind of problem as well as others.

If someone wants to make games really wants to make games I'd think they'd spend some money on it. And considering GMS and others don't seem to have the same perception / image problem as Unity it seems to imply that it is mainly the free users creating the bad image and apparently Unity has the majority of them.

Just a somewhat interesting thing to think about... how much would the image be improved if Unity had charged say $30 instead of it being free?

 

No, it's illogical for it to be Unity's fault. That is like a person using a mobile smashing their faces into walls and being run over... blaming the handset manufacturer.

All your fault Unity!

 

I could of probably saved 20 posts by saying this in the first place, if I manage to achieve my delusional vision of a high end looking well playing RPG I will keep the logo.. Not the made with Unity one because it looks like it was made by someones first crack at MS paint..

If a gamer somehow see's past the shiny graphics and gameplay, then somehow comes to the conclusion they want nothing to do with it because it has a Unity logo then it seems like it's one less headache to deal with..

End of..

 

This doesn't sound reasonable to me. You get an engine and get paid in exchange for mentioning the company name? How would unity profit from this?

Unreal grants are "no strings attached". They can be viewed as publicity stunts (to demonstrate epic games benevolence or something), or as an investment - Epic games gets their cut anyway, so they might get their money back at some point. But it is more of a publicity stunt, IMO.

 

I was thinking more like unity offers discounts or other incentives but in a clinical sense I suppose it would be unity paying for advertising.

 

It'd work if it was Capcom or anything with a budget beyond a few million. Unity would want to give them unlimited licenses for such a deal plus promotion. For everyone else I don't think so

 

If it's a very good game, and Unity are guaranteed certain kinds of promotion (and not just advertising as such, but also the publicity stunt/feelgood factor as well), it might be worth it. In the end, it really depends on how much of a negative impact the bad publicity is having. If it's negligible, then there's probably no value in doing this kind of thing.

To be honest, so far I don't think Unity is being impacted very much, that's why I'm mostly interested in what the problem is a symptom of. I really think the main problem is at point of sale, but so far I think it's a case of companies like Steam knowing that it's far better for the bottom line just to let everybody in, and ignore the clamoring (at least until it gets far worse).

In the meantime, I'm quite happy to hear people getting stuck into the issue (even if a bit misguided) because there's nothing worse than trying to enter a market of apathetically distrustful customers.

 

So, they pay you for giving you the privilege of using their engine that took many years to develop?
I think it would be automatic "no deal".

As hippo said, this kind of deal would work if you're something really big, and even in that case it is a big "maybe".

 

Paying for promotion only makes sense if the company was founded yesterday. Unity has been around for a long time, they're very promoted and known at this point.

When offering a deal it is a good idea to think what the other party is supposed to gain from it. If they gain nothing, there's no reason for them to accept the deal.

Too many people concentrated on what they think they "deserve" to get, and what would make more sense for them. I think a good idea is to start thinking about mutual benefit.

The idea behind free version at this point is that your project most likely will fail, but the engine will get some advertising. If it doesn't fail, well, there will be a bit of subscription money. It is decent enough, and it is already skewed in your favor, because you get subscription instead of royalties.

 

It's not a question of what you as the developer get, it's a question of what Unity gets.

If, and only if, bad publicity is having a negative impact, then it would be useful for them to try to get themselves associated with more high quality games. Whether or not they are being impacted, I don't know (probably not much). But who knows, if the devs feel the impact, it may be one reason why they might move to another engine.

... but is this advertising you want? After all, gamers are not Unity's main customers. The only value that they get out of advertising in a game is for the effects of positive association to influence developers (in some cases gamers who want to be developers) engine choices.

Unless just seeing the name everywhere is in itself enough to get would-be developers to become Unity's customers.

 

I agree in a way. Unity likely dosent stand to gain a great deal from giving away advertising money to top games. They may make a slight improvement to overall image but thats up for debate. As far as no longer needing to advertise because they are not a new company and everone knows the brand I have to disagree. Companies far older and better known than unity pour massive amounts into advertising and I can only assume unity still has an advertising budget.