I think it's entirely reasonable to desire ratings for all games, so people know what they're buying for themselves or their kids or whoever. But it rubs me the wrong way that their answer to unrated games is a sales ban, rather than just an assumption of the highest possible age rating, so that fully grown adults can make up their own minds.

I assume, therefore, that this isn't entirely about age appropriate labelling, but also about the German authorities' desire to censor media. Are Germans still blocked from looking at too much blood?

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Quoting: EhvisIndie should be developed independently. So, developed without publisher money. Sure, that includes some pretty big games, but it's still the only definition that means anything.

I don't think this is the only definition of independence, nor the one that makes most sense in this awards context. If we take game awards as a celebration of games as an art form, rather than as a business, then the independence that should matter most IMO is that of the artistry.

So to my mind, for a game studio to be artistically independent, it means that the development team themselves call all the shots as to the nature and content of the game.
For example, if a publisher has any power to require changes to a game's content, then the game cannot be considered "independent" in an artistic sense IMO.

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Quoting: BumadarAs for Unity, the 2022 gaming report states unity has 230.000 active developers doing 750.000 games.
Let's say 5% of those have been (publicly) angry about this whole debacle, that would be 11.500 (way to high a number but let's be positive), let's say 1% of those are really going to quit with unity, that would be 1150 (again way to high but hey), that still leaves 228.850

Your reasoning is.. not reasonable.
Aside from piling complete guesses on top of complete guesses, "developers who are really going to quit with Unity" is not a subset of "developers who are publicly angry with Unity".
Public denouncement is towards the extreme end of dissatisfaction with something. Most people who are dissatisfied with something just quietly take their business elsewhere.

Quoting: BumadarUnity is not going anywhere, how frustrating it might be, it is so big (as is epic) it can simply get away with this stuff.

I think that's what the Unity board think, but I think they're confusing gamers with game developers. Gamers tend to be short-sighted, fickle, and easily distracted by shiny things. Game developers are running a business, and need to make long-term business decisions; and there are plenty of competing game engines.

It's true Unity isn't likely going anywhere for a while - there's a lot of existing back catalogue and games too far along in development to switch. But I wouldn't be surprised if they lose significant market share in the coming years. And yeah, a lot of that will likely go to Unreal.

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We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused.

This, ladies, gentlemen, and everyone between and beyond; is a classic example of what we call a "non-apology". They're not apologising for what they did, nor admitting that they were wrong to do it. They're apologising for making you feel bad about what they did.

"I'm sorry you feel that way"

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Quoting: pb"Unity", right. Time to change the name.

I dunno, I don't think I've ever seen the gamedev community as united about any topic as they are right now!

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Quoting: BloomberyWhat is "unknown", Linux?

Given that a large jump in "unknown"s apparently happened at the same time as a large dip in "Windows" (April), my guess is that Microsoft changed something privacy-wise in Edge which made Statcounter not be able to identify them as Windows.

Then, that the subsequent drop in "unknown"s in June resulted in a fairly proportional increase in all the platforms, suggests to me that Statcounter (likely driven by the increase in "unknown"s in their data) found a way to identify (or guess/assume) a browser's platform in spite of some common cross-platform privacy feature.

Edit: This effect seems especially stark in India! https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india [External Link]
(also, 13.8% Desktop Linux in India!)

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Quoting: Liam DaweIndeed, so Native or not, the risk is pretty much the same unless the developer is truly dedicated to their Linux build which is...rare.

This is why I stopped buying games pre-emptively, even during sales.

I now only buy games that I intend to play immediately, so that if in future a game stops being supported, at least I'll have got my money's worth out of it in the time I had.

Which I guess means that Valve not having a general refund policy for games which drop support for a platform, means that they're getting less money from me overall.

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Quoting: AsciiWolfThis mindset is one of the reasons why I am still not sure whether I am happy about the popularity of Valve Proton or not...

Not sure if it'll change yours or anyone's opinion, but I find it interesting that Roblox staffers seem to consistently refer to Wine, rather than Proton 🤔

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Given that Steam proper is blocked in mainland China [External Link], but AIUI many people there still use it because the local version of Steam has very few games, here's some hypotheses:

1. Steam proper got temporarily un-blocked by the Great Firewall for whatever reason, and all the people with Steam installed were able to connect for a short time.

2. Some very popular game was released/updated on Steam, so a lot of Chinese people risked using a VPN to connect and download it.

3. Some game was released on Steam which was interpreted to be critical of the CCP, so a bunch of fake accounts got created to review-bomb and report the game for "hate speech". (As has happened before)

4. Valve accidentally mixed in the stats from the PRC Steam version with the main Steam stats (again?)

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Un-wishlisted :(

They saw a "very high amount of non-gameplay-related bugs (random crashing, high VRAM usage, file access issues, etc.)"

Given that a large number of Unity games with native Linux versions seemingly don't experience random crashing, high VRAM usage, or file access issues, I would classify these as likely "non-knowing-how-to-use-Unity" bugs, which will probably bite them in the Windows sooner or later anyway.

Oh well.

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