Game News 2.0

Just remember that while he was CEO of EA he p'd SUDA 51 off so much during the development of Shadows of the Damned that he made him a boss in No More Heroes 3.

There was some really irresponsible reporting about board members dumping shares. It's simply not true, the share sales reported on were tiny in proportion to the amount owned, and were simply part of a regularly scheduled share sale (something that is a common set up, selling small quantities of shares on a regular pre-set repeating schedule, precisely for the reason that it eliminates any possibility of insider trading) - and in any case the intent of this move was to increase share price, not lower it. So selling beforehand would make no sense.

The communication on this has been dreadful, and they've had to walk back repeatedly, but it must be seen in the context that Unity have been making a loss for years and they need to find a way to generate profit. Unreal takes 5% of revenues, while Unity has only ever taken a flat fee, which varies from free to a couple of thousand per developer for pro level support. There are games out there that have earned tens of millions where Unity only got a cut of ten thousand or less, while the same game running on Unreal might have earned a million or more for Epic.

Now even with these changes for the majority of large developers it would still work out cheaper than Unreal's revenue share, and for the majority of small indie developers it would effectively cost nothing - it's free if you're earning less than 200k per year, and if you're earning up to a million per year you just need to pay the flat licencing fee of 2k. Beyond a million they start taking a few cents per download, but it would still be much less than the 5% Unreal takes in most scenarios.

I have seen people talk about situations where it could cost devs big time, but these are usually contrived scenarios where a game earns more than 200k, the developers don't bother upgrading to the pro or corporate licensing, and then they decide to start giving away this highly profitable game for free through charities or subscription services. Unity are already walking back and finding ways to accommodate these situations because I don't think this was ever the intent.

This was a move targeted at mobile games where Unity is by far most prominent and where installs are a more measurable metric than revenue, which comes from microtransactions and ads rather than actual sales. It's some mobile developers that could be really hurt by this, the ones where they get 100 million+ downloads from their fake facebook ads and then leech what little money they can from that audience. But those devs arguably aren't good for the industry anyway.

Regardless of all that though, the harm this has done to Unity may be irreparable. There are two things that have come from this - one is the complete loss of trust due to effectively retroactively changing terms. If you start developing a game in unity now, you don't know what the pricing model will actually be when you release it in 2 or 3 years time, which is scary. And secondly is the impact this will have on the community, as one of the biggest strengths unity has is the community building assets and plugins and tutorials that all feed back into strengthening the engine. If this turns developers away from the engine that can quickly snowball. This is probably something that's going to hurt 3+ years from now more than the next year or two.

Holy ****, Tomb Raider 1, 2 & 3 remaster coming to all platforms in February. Yeah, not the remake a lot of people want but goddamn my nostalgia is going into over drive at the thought of playing these again!

But will they still use tank controls?

From what I'm reading, yes. They want to keep the feel of the originals, and you can switch between modern and polygon graphics on the fly, and judging by the sharp corners on the environments, it is literally just a graphics overlay on the original game. I'm sure we'll find out more before next Feb anyway. These ain't for me, but I would love a modern remake of them. Less murder, more exploring please!

In related news, I didn't realise Netflix were doing an animated series of Tomb Raider with Haylet Atwell voicing Lara. It's on hiatus since the strike though.

1 was so atmospheric, the music, level design, exploration.... i have a vivid memory of playing it on my 14 inch tv :) TR 2 had some iconic levels. Will be interesting to see how well these remasters turn out to be.

I will say this for the TR remaster, great price at 30 euro for the bundle for 27 if you preorder on psn and have ps plus. That's a tasty price for the nostalgia.

This is what Red Dead remaster should have been.

I'm not a nut for Tomb raider but this is the price point I'd take a chance on at some point. Great to see some sense from publishers on prices. Like @Potential-Monke , I've some great memories of Venice in TR2 and would chance that again for fun

Ha, just started Painkiller in Netflix and there's an extended scene in the 1st episode showing a woman playing the original Tomb Raider, keeps dying and rings the tomb raider hotline for help to get through the Atlantis level :D

Oof, now Unity are restricting what registered charities they accept for exemption from the installation charge.