The developers behind Space Marine 2 have announced that a planned multiplayer beta has been canceled as the team wants to focus all of its attention on the retail game and its launch. And after the last few years, which saw many big games launch in rough shape, this sounds like a smart move.
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Announced in 2021, and then delayed in 2023, Space Marine 2 looks pretty dang rad. I’m very excited to check out the third-person shooter when it launches later this year. And I’m not even a big Warhammer 40k guy! I just loved the original Space Marine, which launched on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2011. And this new entry looks to be even bigger and better. But if you were excited to check out the upcoming Space Marine 2 before its launch via a beta, well, bad news: It ain’t happening anymore.
On June 28, developers Saber Interactive confirmed that it was not going to hold a previously planned Space Marine 2 online multiplayer beta test. The devs say that the game is “almost ready” and that they are focused on optimizing, polishing, and fixing any remaining bugs and issues. As such, the devs decided to cancel the beta as they claimed it would take “the development teams away” from preparing for launch.
“We know this is disappointing news for some of you,” said Saber Interactive in a Steam post on Friday. “As a thank you to those interested in participating, players who registered via the online signup before June 28, 2024, midnight Paris Time, will receive the limited Bolt Pistol skin.”
“We appreciate your understanding and continued support as we work towards delivering the exceptional game you deserve,” said Saber.
Focus Entertainment / Saber Interactive
The now-canceled beta test was first teased in August 2023, with players able to sign up for access on the game’s official website. At the time there was no release date or window for the beta. After that initial tease, however, Saber Interactive went radio silent on the beta, leaving some fans worried about whether it was going to happen at all. Now we know.
On Steam, some fans expressed concern that Saber Interactive was trying to hide the game from players before launch. Others were confused as to why it took so long to announce this news. Personally, I’m hopeful that the team being allowed to focus on finishing and polishing up the main game instead of running a beta will give Space Marine 2 the best chance at launching in solid shape.
We will have to wait and see if canceling the test paid off. Space Marine 2 finally arrives on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on September 9.
In 2006, when another U.S.-backed war was raging, Nellie McKay released her sophomore album, Pretty Little Head. Among the many gems on the record (including “The Big One,” “Swept Away” and “Lali Est Paresseux”) was “Columbia Is Bleeding.” No stranger to making political statements with her first album, Get Away From Me, McKay had already established her knack for acerbic lyrics on politically-tinged songs like “I Wanna Get Married,” “Inner Peace,” “Work Song” and “Respectable.” With such tongue-in-cheek ditties giving listeners an introduction to McKay’s biting wit, they were technically “primed” to receive a message like the one on “Columbia Is Bleeding.” And that message gave the eponymous school plenty to quake in its very expensive designer boots about. Though, based on the continued use of animals (particularly baboons) in laboratory testing at Columbia, maybe the institution wasn’t affected enough.
For those wondering why Columbia has laboratories where animals can be experimented on in the first place, perhaps they’re forgetting that the university is above all a research one (a trait that played heavily into its role in helping to create the atom bomb). And “research,” unfortunately, always seems to involve animals. Beings who, for whatever reason, still have to be advocated for in terms of making humans believe they should be protected under laws that recognize them as sentient creatures. Which, of course, they are. And yet, it has only been in recent years that more and more scientists are realizing that all manner of creatures previously ignored under this category (particularly insects) have a far more elevated consciousness than once acknowledged. So yes, McKay was (and probably still is) rightfully upset about the cruel and torturous ways that “lab animals” are treated at Columbia. The lid was blown off Columbia’s gross mistreatment of the animals (e.g., eyes being cut out of their heads while they were fully conscious) in their labs starting in 2002, when a veterinarian working onsite became a whistleblower after their repeated reports and complaints went ignored by the “higher powers” at the institution. The frequent and excruciating testing on these animals without so much as an analgesic or anesthetic was just the tip of the iceberg. And yes, blood was spilled over and over again in the name of “research.”
So it is that McKay sardonically sings, “Chris Hougan/She had to run/Last night been a lot of fun/But now it’s French/A little tense/She hadn’t done the reading/There she sat/Hoped to pass/Didn’t think to face the fact that/Oh by gosh/Alas alack/Columbia is bleeding.” Painting the picture of students going about their daily, often frivolous business as unbridled torture went on behind closed doors, McKay continues, “Walkin’ down/Off the bus/Vickie Lucas crossed campus/Was thinkin’ how/She’s made it now/That successful feelin’/Walked by fast/Hailed a cab/No clue that she’d passed a lab/And while she’s sittin’ in lit class/Columbia is bleeding.” In the eighteen years since “Columbia Is Bleeding” was released, the students are very much aware of the kind of bleeding that’s going on outside their walls and, now in recent weeks, inside them. Not just for the animals, but the humans being attacked by police in response to pro-Palestine demonstrations.
The NYPD was summoned to the premises by the university itself, claiming that the students who had set up encampments in solidarity with Palestine were creating “a disruptive environment for everyone.” But the most disruptive environment of all was created by the NYPD’s presence as they cleared out the encampments and occupied buildings with the brute force they’re so “renowned” for. One officer even managed to let his gun go off in the process. Accident or not, bullets “grazing” students is nothing new in the university-based protest scene (though they did more than just graze the four students who were killed at Kent State by the National Guard, solely because they were protesting the injustices of the day: the government’s escalation of the Vietnam War and civil rights).
In the late 60s, which the current situation is being compared to, Richard Nixon commented of the rise in protests on university campuses, “You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storming around this issue. You name it. Get rid of the war there will be another one.” Sadly, Nixon, “dick” or not, wasn’t wrong about that last assertion (mainly because the same types of warmongering people will always find themselves in power). But his out-of-touch statements are mirrored in one of the evergreen lines from McKay’s song that resonates more than ever. Namely, her sarcastic delivery of: “Everybody knows/Protestors are those/Schmoes who don’t have a life.” With such attitudes from their “elders” lobbied against them, it’s a wonder that anyone in attendance at universities and colleges feels compelled to protest at all—and yet, students, being young and energized as they are, serve as the lone population with far less to lose than any other when it comes to protesting. This, of course, isn’t to say they aren’t putting their own lives on the line when they take that risk. A risk that many of their parents would urge them against. Not just because they don’t want their children to get hurt, but because they’re paying “good money” for them to be there so they can “learn,” not rebel.
Good money that is doled out in addition to the already sizable endowment Columbia is known for. Indeed, as a private university with one of the largest endowments in the United States, Columbia has nonetheless remained hush-hush about where they get said endowments and what they’re funneled back into (in 1968, student protesters found that it was funneled right back into killing the Vietnamese via the Institute for Defense Analyses). Hence, the protesters’ additional call for the university to divest “from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine.” A cute thought, to be sure. But, in case anyone needs reminding, Columbia began as a colonial university—of course it’s going to support a fundamentally colonialist “cause”: the occupation of another, “inferior” country. In part thanks to being a “colony college,” historically, the students that attend it are from a largely privileged and, yes, largely white background. It’s the Ivy fucking League, after all. Diversity has never been its strong suit. Something that tracks in another verse from “Columbia Is Bleeding” that goes, “Didn’t think to face the fact/That while he’s thinking, ‘Man that’s wack’/Columbia is bleeding/Quite a snob/He didn’t tip/Nice guy Rob watched the eclipse/Then looked around, ‘I’ve made it now I’m just so glad to be here’/Made a pass/Got hand slapped/Didn’t think to face the fact/That while he’s mackin’ on that ass/Columbia is bleeding.”
In the present, it would take a total lack of sentience to see that it’s not, and yet, there are many who would prefer to simply ignore all these “unpleasant scuffles” and return to the art of what it really means to be a student: getting drunk and high and sleeping in until the first afternoon class. And, of course, those in power would love, more than anyone, to see things magically “getting back to normal.” Which, in all likelihood, they probably will (even though nothing will ever truly be the same again). The revolution will not be televised, but steamrolled.
McKay concludes the song with the dry declaration, “This is the Ivy League/Columbia is bleeding…/Columbia is bleeding…” So, too, are many other universities in the U.S. right now, with the comparisons to the eruption of student protests in 1968 being the closest Gen Z has ever come to identifying in some way with baby boomers. The latter generation also believed that they were riding a “tidal wave that would just sweep over the world and cleanse it and make everything new” (which is kind of where Hitler was coming from, in his own skewed mind), as writer/former Columbia student James Kunen phrased it in an interview about his response to student protest history repeating. That was his take on how protesting felt in April 1968. In 2024, one wonders if it feels slightly less so. If it’s coming more from a place of being “fresh out of fucks” about trying to placate a genocidal government than it is “we can make the world anew.”
While many remain hopeful about the results that these protests might eventually yield, one can’t help but think of a certain monologue from Alex Garland’s 2020 limited series, Devs. In it, the head of security for a sinister tech company called Amaya finds himself in the position of needing to torture someone who has gotten caught up in the dangerous situation at hand. As an ex-CIA operative, Kenton (Zach Grenier) tells that person, while giving him a moment to collect his breath after waterboarding him, “My problem is I have to contain a very complex situation, but the situation is refusing to be contained. In fact, it’s cascading…” Sounds a lot like the protests that are going on now. And yet, perhaps like the government, Kenton insists, “But I’m not panicking, I’ll tell you why.” The why, for him, is: “Long ago… a popular uprising had started on mainland China. The focus point was Beijing. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators had occupied Tiananmen Square. Wouldn’t fucking budge. And at a certain point, my bureau chief called us into his office and said China was finished. Whatever the government did wouldn’t make a difference; the protests would spread across the country, the system would collapse. The tipping point was reached, the cascade was unstoppable. You know what happened next? The Chinese government sent in soldiers and tanks to Tiananmen Square, shot everybody they could, took the revolution by the neck and crushed the fucking life out of it.”
At the moment, that feels like the more probable result of these protests than any actual ceasefire, with blood, blood and still more blood spilling in universities across the U.S. as they try to make warmongers see reason. But you know what they say about trying to reason with crazy people: you can’t.
Video game publisher Krafton released a report that seemed to imply underwater survival sim Subnautica 2 would be a multiplayer-focused live-service game, which disappointed and frustrated many fans. But now the devs have quickly clarified that no, this isn’t the case and instead the game is going to just receive regular updates during early access, like the original Subnautica.
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Over the last year or so “live service” has become a nasty term, one which gamers seem more and more disgusted by, even if it seems a lot of studios and publishers are betting the farm on these so-called “forever” games being the future. So it’s not surprising that some people panicked when it appeared that Subnautica 2—a sequel to the popular, single-player story-driven underwater survival game from 2018—looked to be another live-service thing.
As reported by IGN, a February 8 financial report from Krafton caught the attention of folks when it mentioned that the upcoming Subnautica 2 was being designed using the “Games as a Service” model. Folks quickly assumed the worst: that this was a live-service game that would feature battle passes and seasons and all that stuff. It didn’t help that the report also claimed the sequel was going to be multiplayer-focused, a big departure from the first game. Quickly, people got out their pitchforks and began yelling that yet another franchise was being ruined by live-service shenanigans. But thankfully for those concerned players, that’s not the case.
Subnautica 2 devs set the record straight
Shortly after the report went public and news spread of Subnautica 2 being a live-service game, the developers—Unknown Worlds—stepped in and clarified in a blog post that it isn’t that kind of game.
“In reference to ‘Games-as-a-Service,’ we simply plan to continually update the game for many years to come, just like the previous two Subnautica games,” explained the devs. “Think our Early Access update model, expanded. No season passes. No battle passes. No subscription.”
The studio also claimed the game isn’t “multiplayer-focused.” Instead, co-op is “optional” and folks will be able to experience the full game by themselves.
Finally, the devs also explained that Subnautica 2’s early access launch isn’t planned for 2024 and that they will share more info “later this year.”
“Thanks for keeping an eye out for any news about our progress on the next game,” the devs added. “We’re so excited to show you what we’ve been working on and hope that you love it as much as we do.”
While it might seem like a lot of folks overreacted, the reality is that with reports of so many live-service games in development and after so many have failed to stick around or turn out well, a lot of gamers are jumpy about games-as-a-service and live-service “forever” games.
I expect—in an effort to avoid these situations—we will see some studios try to come up with a new term for games that just get occasional updates and patches, but which have no other “live” elements, like battle passes or seasons. For now, you can all relax. Subnautica 2 isn’t going to be a live-service thing like Suicide Squad.
Rocksteady developers behind the upcoming Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League—a DC villain-themed open-world co-op looter shooter—revealed some new details and thoughts behind the game’s battle pass, seasons, and endgame content. And while it’s still a live-service game that will likely have its own issues come launch, I’m feeling optimistic about it based on these recent answers that, at least on paper, sound good.
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First revealed back in 2020, Suicide Squad is the next game from Rocksteady, the devs behind the earlier Batman: Arkham games. And while this new shooter is set in that same universe, since its reveal, fans haven’t been terribly excited about the game. Whenever we see more of it—via trailers or leaks—it looks a lot like a live-service shooter, even if Rocksteady is unwilling to admit that. Mixed previews earlier this month didn’t help win over folks, either. However, in a recent Discord Q&A, the devs laid out their plans for Suicide Squad’s endgame and seasons, suggesting that this game is fully playable solo and won’t make you grind for weeks to play limited-time content.
On January 26, over in the official Suicide Squad Discord server, the devs held a second Q&A after the previous one was so well received. This time around, many of the chosen community questions and developer answers seemed focused on convincing folks that this game won’t demand you treat it like a second job.
“We all love playing games, but we also have lives,” said Axel Rydby, Game Director on Suicide Squad.
“That’s been a big part of our design philosophy making this game. We don’t want the game to feel like a life commitment or be a game where you have to sacrifice a lot to see all the content on offer, or feel like you’re not making good progress in the game if you can’t play hundreds of hours,” explained Rybdy.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League – Suicide Squad Insider Episode 3 “Introducing Elseworlds”
A good example of this is that seasonal battle passes—which Rocksteady reminded folks multiple times in Discord only contain cosmetics—and all the content that is added to the game with each new season, can be done at any time. All that stuff, like battle-pass-exclusive outfits, new locations, missions, and the game’s first new playable character, The Joker, will not leave the game once the season is over. According to Rocksteady, you can always go back and make progress in a battle pass from a previous season or even buy the premium version well after its release.
“We believe that our team has created some of the best-looking cosmetic items ever,” added Darius Sadeghian, studio director at Rocksteady. “We want those to be available for our players to enjoy without fear that they’ll miss out on anything.”
As someone who plays a lot of Fortnite, a game that is built on battle pass FOMO and limited-time items in its ever-rotating store, this sounds very nice.
You can play all of Suicide Squad solo
Another example of Rocksteady claiming the game will respect your time and not demand you spend every day playing it is that every mission and activity in the game, even the toughest endgame content, can be completed solo. This, Rydby pointed out, is part of the studio’s philosophy when developing the co-op game.
“We want this game to be generous, both with your time and with all the features we have to offer,” said Rybdy.
Adding to this, Rocksteady confirmed in today’s Discord Q&A that you will be able to go back and replay any and all missions from the game’s story. And if you play with friends, and move past your current point in your own game, the devs say you’ll be able to skip those sections when you hop back into your solo world. Another example of the team trying to respect players’ time, which I appreciate.
Of course, just because a game has great endgame and season pass plans, doesn’t mean it will be good. If Suicide Squad’s combat is bad, its traversal gameplay clunky, and/or its narrative boring, it won’t matter how nice the season’s cosmetics are or how generous the battle pass might be; people will stop playing.
We don’t have to wait long to see if the game will be fun enough to invest any time into future seasons, characters, or more, since Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League launches on Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC on February 2, 2024. If you pay the publisher-created ransom fee and pre-order the deluxe edition, you can play three days earlier.
True confession: while I admire and enjoy the heck out of Undertale, the hugely influential 2015 indie RPG that rewards a peaceful approach to conflict, I’ve never actually managed to complete a pacifist run of the game. That’s because I stink at its bullet-hell combat, which demands lightning reflexes and near-perfect memorization throughout its lengthy and brutal boss battles. So you can imagine my delight when I happened upon an adorable RPG that swaps twitchy, rage-quit-inducing challenges for gentle word puzzles.
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Leximan, from developer Knights of Borria, immediately caught my eye among the many booths at December 8’s Day of the Devs indie showcase. That was largely due to its monochromatic pixel art style, which is interspersed with trippy splashes of color. You play as a pointy-hatted wizard with a slinky, gliding stride, navigating your way through a variety of colorful dungeons and puzzles.
As is the case in any worthwhile dungeon, you’ll encounter baddies to dispatch, and Leximan puts a unique spin on the genre’s familiar turn-based combat. When you enter battle, you’ll see a swirling cloud of word fragments on the bottom half of the screen, which you can then use to create mystical incantations. There’s a variety of solutions to any given situation, and the most obvious word may not be the correct option—or the most interesting one. You might have a pretty clear idea of what will happen if you cast “Fireball,” but aren’t you the slightest bit curious about what might happen if you chose “Hairball” instead?
Leximan | Announcement Trailer
Once you’ve landed on your approach, the ensuing dialogue will dance and shimmer on the screen, often in vibrant contrast to the game’s mostly black-and-white aesthetic. On occasion, the game’s entire interface will transform or change color—as when I cast “yellow” in response to a foe wielding a green shield. These inventive riffs on the familiar combat system combine to allow each encounter to feel distinct and memorable in its own right. At least during my brief demo, there wasn’t any hint of the kind of spammy, repetitive encounters that often plague retro-styled role-playing games.
With its full-hearted embrace of punny turns of phrase, I wasn’t surprised to discover that the team behind Leximan is based in the UK (Cornwall, to be more precise). There’s a distinct dryness and Python-esque sensibility in the writing here that feels distinct from Undertale—and its many imitators—in a welcome way. If you’re a fan of an offbeat RPG with oodles of personality, this is one to watch.
Payday 3 devs have extended their apology tour that began back in September, when Starbreeze Studios CEO had to apologize for the state in which the co-op heist game launched. The always-online bank robbery simulator suffered from major server and matchmaking issues that were fixed a little over a week after launch, but the game still needed another major patch to fix some of its remaining major issues (particularly quality-of-life stuff). The team is now apologizing for going radio silent in the absence of said update.
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An October 25 post on the official Payday website attempts to “lift the curtains a little” and let players know why the major patch, which was initially promised to arrive in early October and bring with it over 200 improvements, isn’t yet here. “We’ve been quiet over the last few days, and for that we apologize,” it reads. “It’s not easy to communicate when we have not been able to offer any updates on the one big topic that’s on everyone’s mind right now: When are the patches coming to Payday 3?”
The post promises that the team is still working on the upcoming patch, before getting into the true cause of the delay: Starbreeze Studios’ update pipeline.
The reason it has taken so long to get this first patch is very long and complicated, but the short version is that we discovered critical errors with our update pipeline shortly after the game releases. There was a significant risk to player progression being wiped if we didn’t address this and ensure a solid test environment.
The issue is so prominent that the team can’t “consistently deliver patches” in the game’s current state, which means new content has to wait, as well—though the blog does promise that there will be “free content updates for the game before the end of the year.”
Though Payday 3 boasted an impressive 90,000 concurrent players on Steam shortly after its September 18 launch, those players were quickly inundated with the now-infamous double “matchmaking error” screen. Since the game requires players to have an internet connection even if they’re playing solo, the server issues rendered it unplayable for many.
As Kotaku reported on September 25, the cause of the matchmaking issues were twofold: “a technical issue made things bad right out of the gate” but “a faulty update on September 24 by a third-party online services partner broke things all over again.” It’s unclear what is the cause of the current flaw in Payday 3’s update pipeline.
Skull Island: Rise of Kong was released earlier this week and was quickly derided as one of the worst games of 2023. What happened? Well, a new report claims it was made by a small team of developers on a tight budget in just one year, putting the studio in a situation where making something good, both quickly and cheaply, would be nearly impossible.
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Announced earlier this summer, Skull Island: Rise of Kong is the first King Kong video game in nearly two decades. The last game featuring the famous giant ape was 2005’s Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie which was developed by Ubisoft. Since then, folks have been waiting for another King Kong game, and on October 17, we finally got one. But sadly, Skull Island: Rise of Kong is a bland beat-’em-up with awful cutscenes, nasty visuals, and not much else. So what happened? Why is this game so bad? Well, it appears you can blame Skull Island’s publisher.
In a new report from The Verge, developers from IguanaBee—a small indie studio based in Santiago, Chile— spoke anonymously with the outlet and explained that Skull Island’s publisher, Game Mill, gave the team only one year to develop the game from scratch.
“The development process of this game was started in June of [2022] and it was aimed to end on June 2nd [of] this year. So one-year development process,” said one dev behind the King Kong game.
Kotaku has reached out to Game Mill about the report.
Game Mill / IGN
According to other developers at the indie studio, Game Mill—a U.S. publisher of many not-so-great video games—frequently uses smaller teams of developers to create licensed video games in similarly short amounts of time. Devs at IguanaBee claimed that Game Mill wouldn’t provide teams with “all the information” about the project, leading to frustration and forcing teams to “improvise with the limited information” they had.
Other complaints suggest Game Mill wasn’t willing to provide enough money for IgaunaBee to maintain a large, skilled staff of developers. Sources tell The Verge that for most of Skull Island’s development, only around two to 20 people were working on it. As you might expect, at least one developer reported that crunch happened, and it was bad.
“The crunch was really set in motion in February,” said the anonymous developer. “I was on automatic pilot by the end of February because all hope was lost.”
According to The Verge, even though developing the game was tough and the money wasn’t great, some folks on the team still take pride in what they were able to ship in such a short time under such difficult circumstances, with one former dev sharing on social media that they were still “proud” of IguanaBee’s King Kong game.
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.
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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.
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 12that “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.
Remember that awful looking The Last of Us clone, The Last Hope, that got released earlier this month? Well, it turns out the game is much worse than the trailer first suggested. Apparently, the whole game is only about 20 minutes long, takes place in one street, and is a broken mess.
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Let’s cast our minds back to last week. That’s when a horrible-looking Nintendo Switch The Last of Us clone went viral online. A trailer for the game looked like a blatant copy of Naughty Dog’s award-winning franchise, complete with its own Ellie-like companion. It was even called The Last Hope. Yeah, the people who made it weren’t being subtle about where they were pulling their “inspiration” from. Most would agree, it looked bad, but now thanks to Digital Foundry, it’s clear this is much worse than we thought. In fact, it might be the worst game of 2023.
In a new upload on Thursday, the video game tech analysts at Digital Foundry ripped The Last Hope apart in a video that is about as long as the actual game.
Digital Foundry / West Connection Limited / VG Games
Where to even begin? For starters—this might be the most shocking—the entire game seems to take place mainly on one U-shaped street in a generic city. Thanks to the game’s reliance on Unity store props, it’s a rather confusing place. American flags can be seen next to European power outlets. Other assets also don’t seem to work together, with some being far too detailed compared to other, lower-res objects scattered about.
Playing The Last Hope is a frustrating, bad experience
When you actually start to play The Last Hope, you’ll also notice that the framerate is horrendous, often dipping well below 30. This makes it hard to play, as the game’s performance goes up and down constantly. What also makes it hard to play is that the game seems to have barely been playtested. As shown in the Digital Foundry video, it gives the player very limited resources.
For example, your stamina meter doesn’t recharge over time, limiting how many times you can swing your baseball bat. And there are only three MREs, that partially refill your stamina, in the entire game. Bullets are also rare, meaning that if you miss too many shots you could end up in an unwinnable situation.
At one part, players have to use a lockpick to unlock a police car, and while doing this you can be killed by zombies. The problem is the game doesn’t tell you this is happening. So you do your lockpicking, finish, and exit to a screen that simply states “You Dead.” This means that you’ll need to clear out the area of zombies before starting the lockpicking mini-game. But based on Digital Foundry’s math, you can only kill around 65 zombies with the resources offered in-game. So don’t miss a single shot, don’t sprint (as that wastes stamina), and also hope the game doesn’t randomly crash during all of this, erasing your progress in the process.
Oh and keep in mind that it’s only about 15 minutes long, assuming you manage your limited resources correctly and don’t get stuck trying to open a door that can only be opened with the “E” key. (Note: The Switch doesn’t have an E key.)
The Switch’s digital store is filled with this crap
And it’s easy to laugh at it, which I did and continue to do. But it’s sadly not an oddity on the Switch’s eShop, which in recent years has become filled with shovelware garbage that, some might say, is getting very close to scam territory. Not that I’m calling The Last Hope—a game that can be completed in 15 minutes and looks to be directly ripping off The Last of Us using poorly cobbled together Unity assets—a scam. Just, you know, some people might be saying that.
I think some folks just assume these shovelware games are bad and don’t think much of it. But I think Nintendo should try to bring back some quality control to its store.
For one, so many indie devs are working really hard on games that end up getting lost in a massive sea of content. Pruning some of the worst, most broken shovelware from the store might help these devs find more success. The Switch platform also has a lot of younger players and they or their parents might not know better and waste some money on something awful, broken, and terrible. Something like The Last Hope.
Hauntii is an upcoming twin-stick adventure game from Moonloop Games in which you play an adorable little ghost capable of haunting objects and using them to traverse the game’s version of eternity. Eternity features beautiful, bespoke graphics (almost all of which the four-person team illustrated on an iPad using Procreate), that are folksy and whimsical—the perfect vibe for a cozy ghost game.
Hauntii’s protagonist is, of course, a cute little ghost with glowing green eyes. You can use the twin-stick combat to shoot “essence” at objects, either destroying ones that will give you in-game currency or haunting ones that can be used to move around the game space. At one point, I jumped into a set of statues that I needed to move to unlock a teleport. At another point, I jumped into a tree that shook off some currency for me, my glowing green eyes peering out from the giant plant.
Hauntii – Official Announcement Trailer | Day of the Devs 2023
Hauntii also has a beautiful score to go along with its breathtaking illustrations, and though I only had ten minutes with it, I found myself wanting more. It’s due out for PC and console in 2024.
There are, by my count, 1732 indie games coming out every day now, which makes promoting them (for devs) and covering them (for us) almost impossible. One trend I’ve enjoyed lately, though, is an attempt to market a game not just by showing the game, but by showing what went into making the game.
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The Dungeon Experience is a good example of this, but another one popped up over the weekend for Lunark, a “modern take on the 2D cinematic platformer genre”, by which its developers (mostly just creator Johan Vinet) mean its in the same vein as classics like Another World and Flashback.
Those were two games defined not just by their cinematic aspirations, heavy on cutscenes and dramatic framing, but because they achieved a lot of that via rotoscoping, the technology where people act scenes out on film then animators recreate it in a game/show/movie.
Lunark, appropriately, does much the same thing, but what I was so happy to see over the weekend was the footage behind the animation, which reveals that for every scene involved a dramatic sci-fi chase or some complex alien machinery, there was…a dude in his kitchen sitting on a shelf, swinging on some bars at a children’s playground or lovingly touching his floorboards:
If you’re into what you’ve seen here, the official pitch for the game is:
Set in a future where the Moon has been transformed into a vessel for humanity’s survival, LUNARK is a 2D adventure inspired by ‘90s classics. Run, jump, hang, climb, roll, and shoot through gorgeously animated environments while overcoming traps, solving puzzles, battling enemy droids, and more! Uncover the dark origin of humanity’s new home in this epic story of survival, revolution, and mystery.
Lunark was released back in March, and is available on Steam, Switch, PlayStation and Xbox.
While Battlefield 2042 is getting better with each update (or at least closer to the game it could and should have been at launch), there’s one thing that has annoyed a lot of long-time players ever since its release and continues to do so: Specialists, a bunch of “hero” characters designed to replace the old “class” system.
Rather than let players choose from a nondescript grunt with an assigned role—assault, engineer, recon, etc—2042 brought in cocky characters instead, each with their own gadgets and unique skills. It is kinda the same idea, only expressed with some more flexibility and personality, but loads of fans hate it. If not for their annoying catchphrases—which have been toned down—then for the fact you can never tell at a glance what kind of gear your teammates (or opponents) will be packing.
The most important of those changes was a reversion to the “class” system, which is finally on the way in the game’s 3.2 update that is out later this month. While it won’t go as far as many fans would like—it doesn’t ditch the Specialists entirely, just rearranges their gear and lumps them into classes—it will at least bring the same spirit.
I’m glad DICE is doing something about this, because the louder fans were right, the game has been a little lacking without what the devs call a “sense of role”, but as someone whose favourite Specialist (Mackay) is about to lose access to my favourite gadget (SOFLAM) as part of the class rearrangement, I want to try the new setup out myself before getting too excited.
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If you want to read more specifics on how the class system will affect loadouts and gadgets, beyond me just using this platform to make a personal complaint, you can check it out on DICE’s blog.
Last week’s comprehensive update to No Man’s Sky brought with it a host of changes. Some made the game far more malleable and approachable, while others, like tweaks to inventory mechanics, have been the subject of controversy within the community. Seemingly in response to the backlash, Hello Games appears to be making some adjustments to how the inventory works in the game’s experimental PC build.
No Man’s Sky’s “Waypoint” update brought with it a sudden change to the game’s inventory system. Naturally, the term “inventorygate” has developed in response. The result has been the usual rush of memes, review bombs, since-locked Reddit threads with gamers arguing over whether the game is “ruined” or not. Those upset over the changes have a point, however: The updated inventory layout limits players to three tech upgrade slots, capping potential power levels below what they were pre-update. However, the game’s October 10 experimental build added additional upgrade slots, suggesting the devs are looking to address the playerbase’s fairly widespread outrage.
An experimental update, however, might not be enough to quell the frustration many have aired. Steam reviews alone have taken a recent trend toward a “Mixed” status, with many specifically calling out the inventory changes. “The most recent update essentially deleted dozens of hours of grinding,” reads one Steam review. “With the new 4.0 update my inventories are unrecognizable and after all the grind time I have spent it all seems useless,” reads another.
The backlash hasn’t been universal, though. While many are “complaining that they worked 100+ hours for upgrades that are now functionally useless,” as one Reddit thread puts it, others have found that the tweaks and restrictions bring more balance and challenge to the game. The negative responses do appear to be the loudest, however, and it’s uncertain if those have influenced Hello Games’ decision to expand the slots in the experimental build.
The experimental build patch notes on Steam note that Hello Games has added “additional free technology slots,” both for players newly updating their game to the Waypoint version and folks who already have existing saves. You can access No Man’s Sky’s experimental build by right-clicking on the game in your Steam library, selecting “Properties,” navigating to “Betas,” entering the password “3xperimental”, and choosing the “Experimental” build.
Pictured: Above is the more limited inventory of the current build. Below reveals the expanded slots in the experimental version.Image: Hello Games / Kotaku
The changes are clearly visible on a brand-new save I created to test with. As expected, the regular, stable, build of the game only provides three possible technology slots at the top. Updating to the experimental build, however, doubles the slots on the top row. Further updates to the beta branch since October 10 also fix other issues many had with unlocking inventory slots and navigating the menu overall.
Though these changes have yet to be merged into No Man’s Sky’s stable build, there is no indication yet as to when or if these will be made permanent. Kotaku has reached out to Hello Games for comment.
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