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Latest Comments by Mambo
UK Government replies to petition about requiring publishers to keep games working
5 May 2024 at 10:42 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: jarhead_hThere IS an easy answer for this. REQUIRE that ALL SOFTWARE be open sourced ten years from date of first sale. Then the community can take it from there.

My proposal in the same spirit: once a game or a significant feature of a game (an online mode for example) becomes unsupported or no longer available, a dump of the server backend must be published, anyone who owns the game (or, excuse me, has or had a license) gets access to a DRM-free version and is permitted to strip their copies of DRM or point them to other servers, and the game and its servers and supporting infrastructure are fair game for reverse engineering, emulation, and so on (reversing the kind of preservation-hostile restrictions that crop up in EULAs).

No requirement for publishers to support their old games if they don't want to, but a right for anyone willing to do it in their place.

SCHiM is a unique platformer about jumping between shadows
18 April 2024 at 1:03 pm UTC Likes: 1

I've been following the progress on Mastodon, and this looks like it will be a well-polished game!

Crypt of the NecroDancer just got a Hatsune Miku DLC
5 April 2024 at 11:46 pm UTC Likes: 1

Anyway, she's a fun character to play, very dynamic, but not an easy one (like the other "don't stop moving to the beat" characters)

Crypt of the NecroDancer just got a Hatsune Miku DLC
5 April 2024 at 11:41 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: tonitch
Quoting: elmapulthe Queen of copyleft now is a guest character in an game that support linux natively, that is just perfect!

I really think this title is cool and I wanted to see if it was real or what. I searched on google only to realise that title is not given to anyone yet ! So is it a fact now ?
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22queen+of+copyleft%22

I looked, the official site has Creative Commons BY-NC character designs. It wouldn't cover this (commercial) DLC; and copyleft would be BY-SA. I don't know how the music is licensed (when going through Vocaloid software or without) either, and I think there's a lively doujin scene that would mostly ignore copyright as long as the players don't look too big. It is a form of remix culture, but not the same as open source or copyleft.

Dead Cells will be finished with the upcoming Update 35
12 February 2024 at 9:15 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: M@GOidSo what is he upset about: that they milked the game by creating multiple DLCs, or that they decided to end development of the game?
For anyone who didn't read the links to figure out the EE/MT relationship:

This former Deadcells dev blew the whistle on the former developer, now IP owner, of dead cells (MT), "firing" the entire outsourced dev team of 60 or so people (EE), a lot of whom were ex-MT, by making a unilateral announcement that dead cells was done being updated.

At this point MT has not been involved in dead cells outside of being an IP owner. I'm guessing most copies sold were after the split. The people who should have been involved weren't.

And it stings to think of the small cooperative behaving unfairly and the newer, traditional company offshoot supporting many more workers and being fairer to them.

Dead Cells will be finished with the upcoming Update 35
12 February 2024 at 8:53 pm UTC Likes: 2

Here's some industry journalism that sheds light on the relationship between Evil Empire and Motion Twin (via the dead cells subreddit): https://www.gamesindustry.biz/from-dead-cells-to-reinventing-retro-ip-the-untold-story-of-evil-empire

Dead Cells will be finished with the upcoming Update 35
12 February 2024 at 7:57 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: kneekooFormer lead designer and developer on Dead Cells, Sébastien Benard, said on Discord:
<snipped/>
Now an interesting blog post: https://deepnight.net/blog/regarding-dead-cells-termination/

I don't think he claims special knowledge of current events, but he would be well placed to know the history:

Quoting: DeepnightFor the context, I’ve been an associate at MT for about 19 years and was responsible for most of the design of Dead Cells, and its development, from gameplay, controls, balancing, items and down to the engine (see gamebase). I was not alone, but frankly, I had direct implications on all its parts.

Here is also a quick presentation of the Dead Cells related companies:

Motion Twin (including myself) created the game and released 2 DLCs.
While Motion Twin retained the IP, Evil Empire, created by former MT associates, continued the hard work and released 22 new major updates and DLCs, for about 5 years. They hired 50 people during that period of time.

Ubuntu 23.10 'Mantic Minotaur' is out now
13 October 2023 at 7:58 am UTC

It's freshly released, and I've been using it for a while in beta, but I'm starting to notice that it's not getting timely security updates: curl and libcue2 are both in main, have been the subject of highly visible vulnerabilities, they are not patched (curl (8.2.1-1ubuntu3) mantic; urgency=medium Mon, 11 Sep 2023 09:05:17 -0400; libcue (2.2.1-4) unstable; urgency=medium Wed, 20 Apr 2022 20:29:32 +0800).

The second one is one-click pwnage of a default install, so I'm getting motivated to switch (to Arch or Fedora?)

Unity Considers Tentative Changes To Controversial Policies
19 September 2023 at 3:52 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: BotonoskiSeems like so many tech companies lately are making hair brained greedy decisions, I'm used to them doing that but not so soon ome after another... Is this an effort on the part of the rich sorts to consolidate their wealth before the recession hits hard? If so they need to cut it out, just making things worse like the TP panic buyers. Wait... it was only really worse for those who didn't panic buy.
Here's r/gachagaming (yes…) discussing this trend. Interest rates rising after COVID are mentioned down the thread as a cause of such pressure. I don't know if it affects publicly traded companies the same way as pre-IPO startups. Unity could have done well for itself building a popular engine, but it wanted to corner the market, spent money in unreasonable ways (billions on acquiring movie effect companies, a hundred million a year on its top executives…). Now it's suddenly finding debts are expensive and trying to squeeze everybody else.

Unity apologises for the new runtime fee, say they will make changes
18 September 2023 at 2:01 pm UTC Likes: 3

> We […] will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days

How is making further changes any better?

Until they go back to being contractually obligated to sticking to past TOS and fee structure, there is no way to trust them. They don't honor past agreements and they will try to extort money from developers and players, if not immediately, as soon as they feel they can get away with it.

Background: around ~2022-08 they removed the TOS history they put on GitHub the last time (2019-01-16) they apologised for trying to retroactively change terms (2018-12-05): https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16hnibp/unity_silently_removed_their_github_repo_to_track/
On 2023-04-03, they removed a clause about sticking with past agreements when developers stick to the SDK they were using at release time.