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Tag: Brandon Sheffield

  • The Intellivision Amico Console Is Somehow Still Not Dead

    The Intellivision Amico Console Is Somehow Still Not Dead

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    We bet you’d forgotten about sort-of-Intellivision’s disastrous attempted console, the Amico. Revealed in 2020 as this super-cheap, super-exclusive, family-friendly gaming machine, replete with exclusive $8 games, the following years saw the business go through clusterfuck after clusterfuck. And yet it seems it’s still somehow not dead. There’s an attempt to rejuvenate interest in the wholly undesirable project by releasing an app for your telephones. Not one telephone, no. You need at least two. Oh, and wait until you see the prices. Let us take you through the whole sorry tale.

    Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger

    The Amico, much like the also-disastrous but at least briefly extant Ouya, is an Android-driven console that was hoping to surf on people’s nostalgia for the late ‘70s Mattel home gaming device. Its initial fundraising effort saw it raise an astonishing $11.5 million. But since then, it’s been one colossal mess after another.

    A year after the initial announcement, the Amico’s intended price had increased by 50%, its game prices were up to $20 and no longer exclusive. In the meantime, Intellivision’s former CEO, Tommy Tallarico—who bought the rights to the name Intellivision and its games in 2018—had been very online in increasingly unhelpful ways, including following a range of white supremacists on Twitter.

    This non-releasing of a console reached what appeared its nadir in October 2021, when the company tried selling NFTs (remember them?) alongside physical RFIDs of games that didn’t exist for a console that didn’t exist. By this point, those game prices had increased from the proposed $8 to $150 for eight. And you couldn’t play them.

    Jump almost a year onward to June 2022 and everything got a whole lot worse. In February, GI.biz reported that the shambling zombie corpse of the once-loved Intellivision brand was in big financial trouble, saying it was going to struggle to make it to July. In June, emails were sent out to those who had pre-ordered the ethereal machine and were increasingly frustrated about the lack of news: in this it was revealed that another attempt at fundraising had gone (not unexpectedly) disastrously, falling short of an attempted $5 million by $4,940,000.

    This came with “significant” job losses, attempts to hawk the IP elsewhere, and remarks about how they were struggling to keep up with an “influx” of refund requests.

    Read More: Intellivision Is Selling NFT Games For A Console That Ain’t Even Out Yet

    Since then, both Intellivision and Tallarico have been much more quiet. Neither’s X accounts have updated since April 2022—for the latter, that’s likely an advantage, but for the former it’s not a great look. The official website for the “console” has had one news update since October 2021, which happened in May this year. This took the form of a screed from new CEO, Phil Adam, which instead of saying, “Here’s why we haven’t released the console we pretended to unbox last year,” rather opted for meandering nonsense about being “in the business of creating a living room experience that brings people of various ages together in group play…”

    The post went on to claim the imminent announcement of a “string of new partnerships,” once again suggesting they were just about to—any time now—start licensing out the IP. No further information on that has appeared.

    Extraordinarily, the post about having still failed to ship a hardware console went on to say, “We cannot solely be dependent on a traditional hardware console business model.” And then as if that weren’t enough, these incredible words appeared:

    We want to assure our fans that shipping a console remains a part of our product strategy.

    For “fans” one can presumably read, “the few people who haven’t demanded a refund.” It’s hard to imagine anyone among them who wasn’t thrilled to read that getting the thing they’d paid for would remain “part of” the company’s plans.

    It’s in this post that Adam first reveals the intention to “bring the Amico experience to other hardware platforms, starting with mobile devices.”

    “Amico Home,” he said, “will dramatically reduce the hardware footprint needed to enjoy Amico games.” No shit! Putting out Android games on Android phones sure doesn’t require a whole other console, although does perhaps somewhat fall short on the promise of its bespoke controllers and family-focused living room euphoria. (Although that footprint isn’t as reduced as you might think…)

    “Those who supported Intellivision early on,” he said, “helped set the foundation for all that we have been able to achieve.” Sadly he didn’t find room to list exactly what those achievements might be.

    What’s Amico Home like to use?

    And now we can bring things entirely back to where we started, and an update on the Amico’s fundraising page that appeared on Tuesday, November 22. (Thanks Brandon Sheffield!) Not shared on the official site, nor on social media, Phil Adam brings the news that the mobile app he promised was arriving in “the coming weeks” some six months ago is finally here! Sort of! In beta!

    Leap to your non-Apple (for now) electronic telephone and you can now install Amico Home (Early Access) for Android. I just did, and let me tell you, this is one janky piece of crap. Before I could even click on one of the plain-text options, a screen called “TIPS AND TRIVIA – Cool things you might like to know” appeared to inform me that “Amico Home requires a separate controller per player to operate. Use mobile devices running the free Amico Controller app or real Amico controllers.” And then stayed there. Impossible to close.

    Because, seriously, to use this you need another Android phone to act as a controller. I swear to God, I did this for you. And to be fair, it hooked the two phones together without even having to ask for permissions or run any setup. (Is that good? I’m really not sure.) However, I cannot tell you how stupid it feels to control the screen on one phone by moving a virtual analogue stick on another phone. Nor how unbelievably frustrating and fiddly those controls are.

    Image: Intellivision

    According to the update page, a whopping two games are available to play right now, with an eye-watering two more due soon. Yes, that’s four games. Currently available are Astrosmash and Missile Command, which yes, you’re right, are original Intellivision games from 1981 and 1980 respectively, with reworked graphics that look like freeware from around 1998. And of course, both are free to play during this early beta perio… HAHAHA! I was joking! THEY’RE $15 EACH!

    Sorry, but that was my limit. I’d take a photograph of how stupid it looked spread across two mobile phones on my desk, but I’m already using two mobile phones so don’t have a camera to hand.

    Astonishingly, this increasingly embarrassing attempt to keep their nightmare alive has driven someone to the point of writing these words:

    For many households that already have a family tablet, Amico HomeTM is an affordable way to enjoy family gaming entertainment. We are delighted to invite you to join the family gaming revolution today with Amico HomeTM!

    This is, to be clear, bullshit. It’s not affordable to create a system where you need to have a tablet and a telephone in order to be able to play a port of a 40-year-old arcade game, and then charge fifteen bucks per game! If you’re a family with a tablet, I’ve good news for you: the Google Play Store has fifty squillion free games you can download and enjoy right now, and you don’t even need to use your toaster and fridge to control them.

    (Those who bought into the NFT idiocy will be able to redeem those RFID chips against games for this clumsy app nonsense, you know, when those games are released.)

    But there’s good news! According to this rambling update, “The release of Amico HomeTM [sic] puts us on a better footing to attract such investment or to eventually fund manufacturing from the proceeds of Amico HomeTM game sales.”

    Oh my god, no. No it won’t. This bewilderingly idiotic two-phone system for playing four-decade-old games at $15 a pop, that isn’t being advertised anywhere outside of an update to the remaining marks who backed the project (who should get the games free anyway), isn’t going to make any money at all. This company has managed to make releasing Android games on Android phones into something unmanageably complicated, expensive and unpleasant. It’s going to be a disaster. As has every other aspect of this years-long debacle.

    Oh, you can still “pre-order” an Amico! Incredibly, it’s—um—free to do so. Although when it definitely comes out, it’ll now be $290 with one controller (and presumably a bit empty space on top) or $340 with two. I wouldn’t!

    We have, of course, reached out to Amico, and will be delighted to update when they get back to us.

     

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    John Walker

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  • Devs React To Unity’s Newly Announced Fee For Game Installs: ‘Not To Be Trusted’ [UPDATE]

    Devs React To Unity’s Newly Announced Fee For Game Installs: ‘Not To Be Trusted’ [UPDATE]

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    Unity, the cross-platform game engine that powers games like Rust, Hollow Knight, and Pokémon Go, has introduced a new, controversial fee for developers, set to take effect next year. Indie developers quickly responded to the announcement, with many suggesting the costs of this policy would kill smaller games, while confusion spread as devs wondered how it would affect their bottom line. Unity’s attempts to provide clarity have only fueled devs’ frustration and spawned more questions from those with both currently active and in-development games using the engine.

    This Action Game Asks What If Ninja Gaiden Let Its Hair Down

    The new Runtime Fee, announced in a September 12 Unity blog, is based on the number of installations a game built with the Unity engine receives, as well as the revenue it generates. Though it won’t start until January 1, 2024, the Runtime Fee will apply to any game that has reached both a previously established annual revenue threshold and a lifetime install count. Games developed with the lower-cost Unity Personal and Unity Plus plans reach that threshold at $200,000 of revenue in one year and 200,000 lifetime installs, while Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise accounts must reach $1 million in revenue and 1 million lifetime installs for the fee to kick in.

    Read More: Unity CEO Calls Mobile Devs Who Don’t Prioritize Monetization ‘Fucking Idiots’

    Unity Personal and Unity Plus devs will have to pay $.20 for every game installed past their subscription-specific thresholds, Unity Pro devs will have to fork over between $.02 and $.15 for every install past theirs, and Unity Enterprise devs’ costs range from $.01 to $.125. Developers in emerging markets will have lower costs per install past their threshold. The announcement was met with widespread confusion, as devs of free-to-play games scrambled to figure out if they’d end up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars, charity bundle creators became concerned about potentially being punished for supporting a good cause, and more.

    Developers react to Unity Runtime Fee

    Shortly after the policy was announced, Rust developer Garry Newman wondered if “Unity [wants] us to start paying them $200k a month” before doing the math and realizing that Facepunch Studios would owe the game engine company about $410,000 total.

    “While this isn’t much, here’s some stuff I don’t like,” Newman shared to X (formerly Twitter). “Unity can just start charging us a tax per install? They can do this unilaterally? They can charge whatever they want? They can add install tracking to our game? We have to trust their tracking?”

    Though many devs initially thought this new fee would apply to all games made in Unity (including free ones), and reacted accordingly, it soon became clear that the fee will only apply to monetized titles. Axios’ Stephen Totilo shared some clarification he’d received from Unity a few hours after the initial announcement, including that charity games and bundles are excluded from fees. But some of Unity’s clarifications only served to further suggest the notion that it didn’t really think this initiative through.

    “If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that’s 2 installs, 2 charges,” Totilo posted. “Same if they install on 2 devices.” This means that developers could be “vulnerable to abuse” from bad actors who repeatedly uninstall and reinstall their games. “Unity says it would use fraud detection tools and allow developers to report possible instances of fraud to a compliance team.” So, if you get a massive bill from Unity, you’ll just have to wait on their customer support line. Shouldn’t be an issue, right?

    Xalavier Nelson Jr., head of Strange Scaffold, the indie studio behind games like El Paso, Elsewhere and An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs, expressed concerns about the entire situation. “This is the danger of modern games and game development cycles becoming exponentially more complicated, lengthy, and prone to immense dependency,” he told Kotaku via DM. “When a decision like this gets announced, and you’re three years into a five-year journey, you have little to no choice. You’re stuck with a partner who may be actively working against your interest, and who you increasingly cannot trust.”

    Tiani Pixel, indie developer and co-founder of Studio Pixel Punk, the studio behind the 2021 Metroidvania Unsighted, told Kotaku via DM that “there’s a lot of things in Unity’s statement that aren’t clear and are very worrying.” She brought up not only how complicated it is to measure actual installs, but the privacy issues inherent with such a policy.

    “There are some certifications you need for having such service in your game and releasing it on consoles and other platforms. You need an end-user license agreement (EULA), because you’ll be sending info from the player’s device to an external server. So, will indies be forced to add such DRMs on their games so they can track the installs? Again, Unity does not make it clear. Forcing DRM on games has a long (and bad) history in gaming. Many tools used for this are literally indistinguishable from malwares…There’s no benefit to the devs or the user here.”

    She also pointed out how these new fees could affect indie developers. “Small indie games, like our game Unsighted, which had the chance to appear on services like Xbox Game Pass, (in which the game isn’t sold directly to the consumer), might be penalized for becoming popular there, because we will be charged for every install,” she said.

    Brandon Sheffield, creative director at Necrosoft Games, warned game developers off the engine in a scathing op-ed for Insert Credit. “But now I can say, unequivocally, if you’re starting a new game project, do not use Unity,” he wrote. “If you started a project 4 months ago, it’s worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted.”

    The op-ed ends by stating that Unity is “digging its own grave in search for gold.”

    Unity continues to court controversy

    Shortly after Unity’s blog post went live, game developer John Draisey posted that Unity had “eliminated Unity Plus subscriptions” and that the company was automatically switching members to its Pro subscription next month. Draisey shared an image showing the price difference between the two subs, which are billed annually, and it was nearly $3,300. “Be careful not to have auto-renew on your account if you can’t afford the price. And this is with just 2 people on my team with project access,” he warned.

    It’s unclear how the potential change in subscription options will translate to the newly minted Runtime Fee, as the thresholds are different for each sub. Kotaku reached out for clarification, and a Unity spokesperson pointed us to their FAQ page. When asked for further clarification, the spokesperson sent this statement: “Unity Plus is being retired for new subscribers effective today, September 12, 2023, to simplify the number of plans we offer. Existing subscribers do not need to take immediate action and will receive an email mid-October with an offer to upgrade to Unity Pro, for one year, at the current Unity Plus price.”

    The bigwigs at Unity have been making some, uh, interesting decisions as of late. In June, the company announced two new machine-learning platforms that would be integrated into its engine: Unity Muse (essentially ChatGPT for using Unity, a service that would allow devs to ask questions about coding and get answers from a bot) and Unity Sentis, which “enables you to embed an AI model in the Unity Runtime for your game or application, enhancing gameplay and other functionality directly on end-user platforms.” As former Kotaku writer Luke Plunkett pointed out at the time of the announcement, AI technology heavily relies on “work stolen from artists without consent or compensation,” so Unity Sentis raised a ton of eyebrows.

    And as Rust’s Newman shared shortly after the latest Unity announcement, it seems these changes are having a negative impact on the company at large: their market shares tanked as of 11:17 a.m. EST. Let’s see if Unity sticks with these changes, or makes adjustments based on feedback from developers.

    Image: Facepunch Studios

    Unity responds to negative feedback

    At 6:38 p.m. EST, the official Unity X account shared a post on the game engine’s official forums titled “Unity plan pricing and packaging updates.” The post contains a series of frequently asked questions that cropped up shortly after the announcement of the Runtime Fee, many of which were focused on game installations.

    As many devs worried on social media before these FAQs were released, under Unity’s new policy, multiple reinstalls or redownloads of games will have to be paid for by creators—and the definition of “install” also includes a user making changes to their hardware. Further, any “early access, beta, or a demo of the full game” will induce install charges, according to the FAQs, as can even streamed or web-based games. And Unity won’t reveal how it’s counting these installs, posting that “We leverage our own proprietary data model, so you can appreciate that we won’t go into a lot of detail, but we believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project.”

    The FAQ does not clarify how Unity will ensure it does not count installations of charity games or bundled games with its “proprietary software.”

    The Verge’s Ash Parrish was quick to point out that the multiple install charges could give right-wing reactionaries a new way to damage a game and/or studio: revenue bombing. If certain groups are angered by, say, a queer character in a game or a Black woman lead (both of which have whipped gamers into a frenzy before), then they could repeatedly install said game over and over again, racking up Unity’s Runtime Fee for the studio.

    “I can tell you right now that the folks at risk of this are women devs, queer devs, trans devs, devs of color, devs pushing for accessibility, devs pushing for inclusion—we’ve seen countless malicious actors work together to tank their game scores or ratings,” developer Rami Ismail wrote on X.

    Nelson confirmed to Kotaku via DM on the evening of September 12 that “concrete talks are happening among some of the most significant developers in the space” regarding a class-action lawsuit against Unity.

    Update 09/12/2023 7:35 p.m. ET: Updated to include information from an official Unity forum post, more reactions from devs, and the confirmation of a potential class-action lawsuit.

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    Alyssa Mercante

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