Hottest Mess 2023: September Update

A few days ago, I was lamenting to a friend that the Hottest Mess competition had cooled recently. Somewhere, a monkey's paw must have curled, because Unity decided Embracer shouldn't go unchallenged for this dubious crown. This is not to say there are only two viable candidates for the top prize, but... hoo boy.

There is no shortage of candidates this year, both from news items I've pulled and suggestions in the Mid-Year Check-In thread from July. This isn't a fully comprehensive list, as I probably missed several during the crazy new release period a couple of weeks ago (or so Embracer would hope). If you have a suggestion, here's a reminder of the criteria I set for this to avoid becoming an enormous downer: "I understand why the category was discontinued [in GB GOTY]: none of the following compare to the biggest problems in the gaming industry. Those include harassment, abuse, grooming, threats, discrimination, exploitation, and layoffs. Some of these issues are even factors in the candidates listed below. However, these are also a huge bummer and the point of this category is to have some fun, at least as I see it." Additionally, the MS-ABK attempted merger was granted immunity for being a 2022 runner-up, but at this point it doesn't feel nearly as messy as a lot of this list.

One final note: I ended up removing the Twisted Metal TV show and Six Days in Fallujah from the original 2023 list. The former turned out to be OK at worst, and the latter didn't cause any splash when it came out. We're looking for bloopers and blow-ups, not tepidly questionable ideas. And lastly, I had a seat saved for the Borderlands movie, but that's coming out in August 2024, apparently.

The Candidates (2023):

• Baldur's Gate 3 patch rolls out and erases some save files, which end up being not recoverable in limited cases
• Crime Boss: Rockay City, which looked virtually unplayable at times on UPF
• E3 2023, which was cancelled after a questionable attempt at resurrection, and hopes look very slim for it ever returning
• Elden Ring's ray-tracing, which made the game perform worse on every platform
• The Embracer Group's leadership: (takes a deep breath) after the company hemorrhaged value as its acquisition strategy faltered, it shuttered studios during major embargo lifts to avoid attention and paying health insurance benefits, then began shopping properties it so lustily acquired a couple years ago; nearly everyone says "I told you so"
• The ESRB wants to add face-scanning tech to allow you to play games, which has privacy rights advocates salivating over potential lawsuits
• Final Fantasy XVI, which suffered severe framerate issues and prompted Square-Enix to lose $2 billion USD after it received the patented "Disappointed Parent" response from SE's leadership
• Geoff Keighley's security force, which can't stop people from Mr. Magooing onstage at Gamescom Opening Night Live
• The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which made Blight Club in the same year it was released and caused an entire studio to give up on making games
• Metacritic user reviews, whose more homophobic users review-bombed Horizon Forbidden West DLC and Skullgirls
• Minecraft servers, on which classified US Military documents were leaked and caused mainstream news outlets to clutch their pearls at the very notion
• Morons who got upset about being able to play with men and women on the same pitch in EA FC 24
• NBA2K24 becomes the second-lowest rated game on Steam ever for using a last-gen port
• NVIDIA RTX 4060, whose value was ridiculously poor for its price and performance
• Overwatch 2, which cancelled its PvE Hero Mode and arguably its reason to exist as a sequel, and was review-bombed on its Steam release as a result
• Overwatch League, which can't keep itself from signing groomers and may be on the verge of collapse
• PC ports riddled with bugs, most notably Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and The Last of Us, Part 1
• PS Plus dramatically increases prices, surprising many
• Redfall, which flopped right out of the gate
• Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which had a terrible preview showing and was delayed indefinitely afterwards
• Testament: The Order of High Human, which got terrible reviews to accompany its terrible name; also doesn't appear to even have a GB page
• Twitch, which changed (or attempted to) its payouts and branded content permissions
• Twitter (which I'm deadnaming), whose slow-motion implosion affects game developers and publishers as the social media diaspora continues
• Unity changes how they monetize, receives an enormous backlash, backpedals on some of it while clarifying it's probably worse than you think, and causing developers to seriously consider switching platforms or taking their games offline to avoid the charges
• Winter 2023's live service game graveyard, where a dominant game format began to meet its end

Once again, I'll update this list with a final pre-poll post in November or thereabouts. I'm considering making it a multiple answers poll and putting people on scout's honor, just to give each of these rancid little morsels the respect they've earned in the Hottest Mess category.

I think some of these should not qualify. Sexist/racist gamer morons would win every year and it's not EA's fault that they are out there being dumb. Military secrets leak in various games a lot more than you would think and again it's not Mojang's fault.

I also think Final Fantasy XVI shouldn't qualify. It's sitting at an 87% on Metacritic and so while it didn't satisfy everyone (I myself got scolded by @zombiepie for whining about it too much) I don't think you can call it a hot mess. Square Enix as a whole might qualify for their being forced to divest their western studios, shuttering Babylon's Fall after one year, and their constant over-estimation of sales figures, but that's spread out over the last few years so it would be like an honorary Oscar for career achievement in hot-messiness.

I also think that Suicide Squad shouldn't qualify because it's unreleased and a lot of games have to be retooled before release.

I mean if Suicide Squad is there why not Skull & Bones, the game that at this point is mostly known for being delayed over and over and is approaching Duke Nukem Forever levels of redevelopment?

ETA: Does Forespoken deserve consideration? It was just kind of bad not epically terrible like Gollum but it did get the team folded into Square Enix and it could be part of a larger Square Enix topic covering the various issues discussed above.

@bigsocrates: These are fair points. A couple were suggested by comments in the last post, so I’m loath to remove them. And the others seemed like bigger deals at the time, but in light of the roster filling out, things like Suicide Squad having a bad trailer can probably get cut without losing anything.

For FFXVI, I take your point if the framerate issue is resolved by end of year. It could be reworked into a larger S-E thing, because that company sure is bizarre the last couple years. However, it still has time to release an utterly disastrous PC port and reap the critical reexamination that feels like is coming.

@allthedinos: I mean the list can contain whatever I just don't think the Suicide Squad trailer has much of a shot in a year with Gollum, which makes Balan Wonderworld look like Super Mario Odyssey.

Speaking of which, in addition to Forespoken, Square Enix just had one of its high profile creators, Yuji Naka, get sentenced for insider trading he did while making/after Balan Wonderworld. Having one of your ex-employees get sentenced for insider trading of your company should go in SQUENIX's basket!

Out of that list: I pick the PS Plus price increase out of nowhere. Unity becoming greedy. Blizzard's Overwatch 2 con job. And the Redfall flop as the hottest messes so far.

2K Sports screwing people over with their basketball game is nothing new. And the sports heads will still buy the game and spend hundreds of dollars on microtransactions and ultimate teams. At this point, the fault is on the players. You can't blame 2K for milking them for all they're worth at this point.

Ray-tracing in Elden Ring making the game harder to run is no surprise. RT is very taxing on the system and it happens in almost every game its used on. This is why many console games that use it are forced to perform in 30fps mode.

The Nvidia RTX 4060 being a terrible budget card for the money is an honorable mention.

I also agree Final Fantasy XVI doesn't fit as its a solid game, whether some people like it or not. But Square-Enix constantly overestimating how well their games will do financially, and getting mad afterwards for it not meeting expectations certainly does.

Most people knew Gollum was going to be bad. No surprise there.

And Embracer is not a surprise. As I said in the earlier thread, as many people saw them failing with all of those companies coming a mile away.

That's all I can say based on the current list. I would say something about Twitter, but many people are still using it as I figured they would. So why bother.

I often am against the idea of Hottest Mess getting too real, because I think it sours the taste of good fun we try to have at laughing at people getting too big for their own britches, and nobody wins when passionate people lose their jobs and storied companies get shut down (in the past, I was against the nomination of Telltale and Activision layoffs), but damn it, if The Embracer Group crumbling like a house of cards is not the biggest, hottest mess I have witness in the last few years, I don't know what is. Not in the beating a dead horse kind of mess, more in the watching a train accident kind of mess...

That is all I have to say. I will still feel more comfortable laughing at the implosion of Twitter after being bought by a certifiable manchild or the ESA struggling to justify their own existence, than people being cut off of their livelihood by executives so out of touch that still think NFTs are the future, but I can see that mess is an apt descriptor for those news...

@hermes: People lose their jobs from every hot mess. Lots of people lost their jobs at Twitter. I'm sure the ESA has fired most of its employees or at least the ones who focused on E3. Gollum caused Daedric to close as a production studio (though it will still be a publisher) and that studio made a bunch of well regarded games before its one fatal flop.

Volition closing sucks, but Saints Row was considered a hot mess last year and its messiness led to those people getting fired.

When there's a big flop people lose their jobs, and often people who didn't deserve to.

The thing about Embracer is that yeah it’s terrible and were this the Biggest Bummer then I’d call it a shoe in.

But Unity waking up one morning and pissing in the cheerios of all its customers past present and future, now that there is a proper Mess.

@efesell: The thing is that Unity can still fix most of the damage, and in fact has already "clarified" or backpedaled on a number of issues (no charge for demos, Microsoft will pay for Game Pass installations, etc...) and can do so further. So depending on how it responds it could clean up the majority of the mess pretty quickly.

Embracer is just screwed. They may or may not go bankrupt but this is a mess they'll be trying to clean up for years.

To be fair Unity still has the opportunity to screw themselves in a similar fashion we just need to see how they handle it.

Twitch is the embarrassment of the year all years for the sheer number of weirdos that are constantly getting into trouble

I dunno I think if there’s like a 3 day cycle of Announcement, No No No Wait hold on, and roll back that would only enhance its nature as the hottest mess. Even if it’s all technically smoothed over quickly.

Like yeah Embracer is never gonna get all the stains out but Unity has REALLY fucked up a room for a day.

This whole Unity thing has the same vibes of when Steam started to truly catch on in 2008-2010 or so and many of the PC game publishers panicked then made a bunch of horrific decisions that ultimately accelerated killing them off or pushing them all to Steam because they scared away the customer base from ever buying stuff or services from them. Back then it wasn't rare to see publishers trying to sell games digitally do things like limiting the number of installs per license, limiting the number of times you could download a game (if you downloaded it too many times you'd supposedly have to buy the game again), and all these other user-hostile things. All the while another option (Steam) existed where none of these restrictions were present. Except this is even worse because it's the equivalent of putting in these user-hostile protocols after the user had long ago bought and used the service for years (e.g. "Oh by the way, that copy of Skyrim you bought in 2011 and installed on a bunch of times? Well now you owe us for three more copies of it").

It's seemed like the writing has been on the wall for Unity for a number of years now and this is just gonna finish it off once and for all. Even before this latest news it seemed like Unreal and other engines were eating Unity's lunch but this news is just accelerating the death spiral. No reasonable developer, especially a smaller scale one, will use Unity for any projects going forward. My assumption here is that the rank and file workers at Unity probably warned management that this was a monumentally stupid idea but management, either out of panic or sheer hubris (or both), ignored them and went ahead with it.

Ironically since I'm talking about 2008-2010, that was probably the last time John Riccitiello was mentioned in any capacity in a news article in a way that wasn't wholly negative. The dude's been a colossal fuck up for well over a decade now. He burned all that good will from greenlighting Dead Space and Mirror's Edge many years ago. But of course he's a C-suite so none of this matters. He'll get a golden parachute anyway even after he destroys Unity.

@ben_h: Is that the case? I kind of feel like it's the opposite. I feel like Unity started as kind of a dumpster fire that was viewed with disdain "oh, it's a Unity game" and over time has gotten better to the point where it is the default for small and medium games, with only bigger projects using other engines most of the time (with plenty of exceptions, of course.) I certainly see the Unity logo a lot and I feel like it does a pretty good job with 2D or lower fidelity 3D games (and even some higher fidelity ones.)

Unity report: Number of games made with Unity grew 93% in 2021 | VentureBeat

This feels to me like Unity started to view itself as kind of a monopoly and decided to start extracting rents, or just was rejiggering its model without thinking things through. The problem is they aren't a monopoly and even if they backpedal here they will have a Darth Vader reputation of "I have altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further" for some time. Any studio with bargaining power will demand a contractual agreement that their game will not have its payment structure modified and if Unity won't give those then the bigger fish will swim away.

I think if Unity were desperate they would have rolled this out a little differently because they would have been scared of the reaction. They would have tried to explain why "no, no, no it's a good thing!" and had an argument.

Instead they proceeded with all the thoughtfulness and care of the local cable monopoly announcing a rate increase in the 90s.

@bigsocrates: We're on the other side of the Unity Hubbert's Peak, which probably lines up with the 2020 IPO. The ascent you mentioned was very real, and was due to the fact that the engine matured with better features, tech, and documentation. And of course there was the Asset Store, and while it contributed to Unity's reputation as the engine of choose for no-effort shovelware, it also did gangbusters, had actual utility, and lit a fire under Epic to follow suit (boot up the Unreal launcher and you will see that oh yeah, they definitely did).

And then a few years ago, Unity the engine took a backseat to Unity the Financial Asset and Holding Company. Hell, even the additions to the engine itself became more and more focused on marketing and monetization. This isn't a company that makes and sells a product anymore; its business is now to make itself look as good as possible to investors (by demonstrating its potential for landlording in an endless stream of captive dollars) and get sold at a massive premium. The past few years at Unity have been comically top-heavy -- like look we all know that execs make decisions that benefit their portfolio over the company everywhere, but at least try to hide it a little.

Unity was hugely popular when I was learning game dev a bit under a decade ago because it was free for smaller games, user friendly, accessible to new developers, and powerful enough to do more advanced projects in. That's why "oh, it's a Unity game" became a thing eventually since that's what a ton of devs from that era learned on. In that era if you weren't using Unity when doing smaller scale projects you were limited to things like GameMaker, which at the time were a lot more limited than Unity. That's why Unity blew up so big.

However, in response to the rapid growth of Unity, Epic made Unreal free in 2015 and for the last eight or so years has been pushing for Unreal to replace Unity as the default choice for people learning game development. These efforts have been ramping up the last several years (most notably, Unreal was incorporated into the Epic Game Store along with assets. It's now trivially easy to install Unreal for free and get assets or demo projects for it). But obviously that doesn't do much for the folks that have been in the Unity ecosystem for the last decade (hence why Unity is quite common still. It had a big head start on Unreal and various other engines) but my understanding is that Unreal has been catching on more and more for smaller and larger teams while Unity has somewhat stagnated.

At the same time, Unity has been ending up in the news for the wrong reasons more often than not (labour issues, the whole "wait are they doing military work?" thing, etc.) which has burned a lot of goodwill folks had towards them and left people on the fence about continuing to use Unity for future projects. This latest debacle seems like it has the potential to push a bunch of fence-sitters off the fence and away from Unity once and for all. And that doesn't even get into the legal issues Unity could potentially have because of this (If I read right, Microsoft was considering legal options on this issue because of Game Pass which is not a fight Unity wants to pick). If they don't backpedal on this new decision completely they could be in big trouble.

I think ultimately we're in agreement. Unity's management probably didn't think of this as a desperate move even if they were warned by their subordinates. In the example I gave regarding old Steam, the publishers who all shot themselves in the feet seemed to think that their offerings were reasonable alternatives to an obviously better offering and resisted putting games on Steam or other third-party platforms. From the outside it was obvious that what they had done was not going to work and they were actively harming their future prospects by continuing to do what they were doing. It's the same for Unity here. The fact that it's so clearly a bad idea is why I think it's going to sink them or irreparably damage them ultimately. They tried to force a shit sandwich on developers while Epic and others were offering to throw pizza parties. At best this was going to net Unity some short term gains but at the expense of torpedoing their long term prospects. At worst it put an expiry date on the entire company. It's just stupid.

Uh, well, no. Unity might be an almost ubiquitous name in the game engine industry but for the past two years it has been bleeding money. In the past four years, the label has resulted in a net loss of two billion dollars. This year the company's losses have been about one billion.

What I would I give to bring back Hottest Mess as a GOTY category.

I know, I know ... it's about celebrating games. The world doesn't need to highlight more negativity.

But in a sea of people trying to "do the right thing". The schadenfreude of letting loose on these messes, really feels so satisfying.

Also, I really do think some of you are underestimating how important Unity is to the industry and, especially, smaller indie devs. I get that some of you were incredibly excited for some of the individual games on this list. But Unity is one of the most widely used game engines in the medium and is responsible for THOUSANDS of games being able to ship millions upon millions of physical and digital units. That resource simply imploding in front of us in the span of one to two days is simply unheard of.

I've got a game dev buddy. One of the points he brought up is that they probably don't actually have the tech to track installs like they're claiming they do. So it would be them billing devs and if you question the legitimacy of the bills, basically all they can say is, "Don't worry, trust us."

Whether or not that's actually true I don't know. (He's experienced enough that I trust that he knows what he's talking about.) But even if it is and they fully backpedal on everything, another point he made was that it might be impossible for them to repair the trust they broke. Devs have seen what they're willing to do, so a lot of them are probably not going to risk their livelihood just to use that engine.

And high profile devs are saying a lot of the same things:

https://garry.net/posts/unity-can-get-fucked

EDIT/WHY I BROUGHT THIS UP: When I first saw this story, I wasn't sure I thought it was Hottest Mess material. But the more I hear about the possible ramifications of this move, the more I think it definitely belongs in a hypothetical Hottest Mess conversation. Does it beat Embracer Group? I don't know. But I'd hear that argument.

It's weird to see FF16 up for like... Severe Framerate cause I played that game in Graphics mode and it's rock solid the whole way through.

Is it just that Performance isn't solid 60? Cause I feel like if games not maintaining 60fps is grounds for hottest mess now then we're gonna have to make a lot more trophies.

@zombiepie: I have it on my personal list , and given how a lot of people in the industry and this website are talking about it, it might be seen as the hottest mess of 2023, unless something else happens. And it likely will

@rorie felt especially passionate about bringing up the framerate issues in the last thread. Love you Rorie.

Yeah, Unity might have done its "Hold my beer!" moment.

Brendan Sheffield wrote a featured blog on Game Developer basically telling people to get away from Unity if they can, because the trust is broken (https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-death-of-unity)

Garry of Garry's Mod fame was linked earlier.

People are delisting their games to not deal with this absolute bullshit.

And Unity's response so far seems to be doubling down and claiming people are just too dumb to understand what's happening, while resignations are hitting them from within over it.

I think it was the esteemed Will Smith that said Unity doesn't "dog food" their own engine, meaning they don't really have an internal division trying to use it to make big games and therefore improve workflow etc (for comparison, Epic uses Fortnite now and famously shipped Gears of War to prove the engine worked). They don't really know what they're doing anymore, and have completely lost it.

Embracer can still do worse though! Is this like sports where I root for my own country?

@zombiepie: I am fully willing to believe that Unity is bleeding money but if you look at that chart their revenue and gross profit have both jumped, and what's causing them to bleed is their expenses, which have absolutely exploded. So that's a different story than "Unity got desperate because they are losing market share and popularity." That's "Unity made some bad business decisions and is now scrambling to try and make up those losses."

Of course having your losses explode even as your revenue is growing is hot mess material!

@unclejam23: You may be able to strongarm some tiny operations but even a mid size studio will have enough money to hire a decent lawyer and they will force Unity to prove their tracking in a court of law. If Unity can't actually do this then it may be THEIR lawyers who are pressuring them to backpedal.

The Unity mess has the stench of very poorly thought out business decision being confronted with reality. I don't want to presume, but I wouldn't be surprised if the time between conception and communication of this plan can be counted on hours.

The fact they have to backpedal or double down with every concern raised, makes me think they didn't take much feedback before going forward... What happens with demos? What happens with game pass? What happens with games online? Who gets the numbers? How do we validate them? What happens if some malicious person decides to bump up the numbers to make us pay more?

@bigsocrates Specially if one of the small companies is Microsoft and they are trying to stick the bill for everything in the Gamepass Store.

I never said that they were losing market share. Unity's popularity has plummeted (note that losing popularity does not mean losing users. Just ask the millions of Adobe users what they think of that company. Unity had a lot of studios using it partly because the friction of moving elsewhere was not previously worth the effort and costs) but I was talking about the health of the company itself relative to the competition and the tone-deafness of their decisions. As others have pointed out, Unity has been in an awful state for several years now, losing money and shooting itself in the foot on a constant basis. Meanwhile, their main competition in the space, Unreal, has been making every correct move and setting themselves up to pounce the second Unity properly messed something up. That time has come.

@ben_h: I would call that losing reputation rather than popularity. To me "popularity" in this context means how many people use your service, whereas reputation means how you are generally perceived. I agree with you that Unity's reputation has suffered (though it has always been somewhat dodgy) but until now they continued to be extremely popular (as demonstrated by their hefty growth in revenue and the number of users.)

This could definitely be a tipping point for that, though. And popularity often lags reputation for a variety of reasons. Twitter remains pretty popular despite having the worst reputation I can think of for a social media company, even though Facebook still exists (though it's called Meta now, and they managed to lose so much money in VR that it's probably more than Unity's market cap.)

I feel like this year in particular has been a real group effort, and thus the title of Hottest Mess should go to all shitty businessmen everywhere.

Just wanted to mention the Dark and Darker mess as a possible contender.

For those unfamiliar:

To summarize: A group of people left Nexon (a south korean game publisher/development house) to create their own studio and do "things properly". They created a game called Dark and Darker, a roguelike dungeon crawler, which exploded online during their beta... which caused their former employers to pay closer attention to this rogue project, and it seems like the new game has some assets and code stolen and thinly disguised from the project they were previously working for on Nexon.

Not to side with the big corporation (for once), but it seems like they might have a pretty good case here, especially because when served, they proceeded to destroy (not delete, destroy) all stolen assets which, while not proving their guilt, certainly didn't help to prove their innocence. There are also screenshots of their discord talking about some unsavory practices. The game has been delisted from steam while the legal case is in dispute, but they continue to support it via torrent.

@hermes: If that's going to be nominated then should Only Up! get an honorable mention for similar reasons?

Yeah, the framerate in FFXVI made me stop playing around a half-hour in. Graphics mode, performance mode; both were definitely below whatever the framerate is to make it look smooth. I would've loved for it to be 30 but either it definitely didn't seem to be hitting 30 for me in either mode. I don't know how a game can look worse than Horizon: Burning Shores or GOW: Ragnarok and perform worse when it's a PS5 exclusive and didn't even have to worry about running on the PS4. Just an awful experience for a game I was looking forward to.

I would vote for Unity simply because, regardless of why they did it, it's a massive own goal. The more that comes out about it, the more it sounds like a comedy show as opposed to trying to run a legitimate business. Like, in a single day, they've manged to turn every brand champion and their entire user base against them, and they still can't get their messaging and details straight. Doubly damning for something that anybody with a brain could have predicted would create a firestorm.

Regardless of whether you think they were justified from a business perspective, the fact that they're making the terms retroactive is a real dick move. Anybody still using Unity after Jan 1 2024 under these licensing terms are either a) making so much money that they don't care or b) they're so far along in their project they can't switch in time. I also suspect that a LOT of games might also stop being sold after Jan 2024 too, to limit the developers exposure to potential future fees, especially in a world where anything can go viral at any time.

And to top it off, they've poisoned the well -- if you know a company might change licensing terms at any time for capricious reasons, why would you commit to a lifetime relationship to that company? As a game engine company at least, they're done, even if they backpedal. They changed the terms of the deal - pray they don't change them further.

Truly. If own-goals, bankrupting companies, or torpedoing company value were sports the c-suites the last year or so should be at the Olympics. And it's not just game companies themselves but the companies running games media.

If you haven't been following what happened with the Waypoint staff since they were laid off, it's been a real roller coaster the last couple months. Vice executives, who somehow managed allow Vice to lose something like 90% of its value over the course of six years, managed to somehow be even more insidious and greedy than it seemed at first. First, a day or two after Waypoint and something like 100+ other Vice staff were laid off, the company filed for bankruptcy. This messed with the severance of a bunch of people, especially those who weren't immediately gone from the company like the Waypoint folks. This sucks obviously but it gets way shittier. Court filings related to the bankruptcy revealed that in that day or two between the layoffs and the bankruptcy filing, a bunch of Vice execs paid themselves five to six figure bonuses, including the HR director who was lamenting the day previously in layoff meetings that the company didn't have the money to save people's jobs. Last I heard, the Waypoint folks were finally going to be getting their severance more than three months after their time at Vice ended and four months after they were laid off. Other Vice staff who were immediately out of the job, many of whom were forced to move to New York to work in-office at Vice, were left without income or severance in one of the most expensive places to live in the US. But hey, at least the Chief People Officer got a sick bonus and was able to write great LinkedIn posts about how trying the time was for them.

And the Unity mess takes a dark turn https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/14/23873628/unity-death-threats-john-riccitiello

It seems like the betrayal factor is what is driving the hate so much for what Unity has done. That is hard for most people to get over. So yeah, they might have sealed the crown with their actions. But we still got some months to go before 2024. In the end, the whole thing might blow over with more and more people showing up and justifying what they done, or it will get worse. Time will tell.

@av_gamer: I don't think it's the betrayal it's the lack of faith. When you unilaterally alter a deal that other people have been relying on for their business like this it means that even if you walk it back nobody can trust you not to do it again.

It's like if you ran a restaurant and your landlord decided that mid-lease he was going to jack up the rent 500%. You might have already disliked your landlord so it's not like he betrayed you, but now you just can't rely on him, and you're immediately going to start looking for a new location even if he backpedals.

They had a brief window where they could have perhaps shown they were responsive to the community by canceling the whole thing and saying "we're sorry, we'll do better next time, look you CAN trust us because even if we have a bad idea we listen to community feedback!"

I think that window has closed and everything they're doing now is going to increase the lack of trust and further damage the fundamental business relationship.

Even messier: https://twitter.com/jonoforbes/status/1702075391958204502

I mean this Unity thing takes the cake this year right? Even if they roll it back they've still caused so much damage and anti trust it's insane.

@cikame: I feel like "fucked over multiple types of games, even retroactively" is gonna be a real tough thing to beat, but it's not even Q4 yet, baby!

Oh hey, look, F2P games are boycotting Unity by switching off their ads/the mess once again got messier: https://mobilegamer.biz/unity-boycott-begins-as-devs-switch-off-ads-to-force-a-runtime-fee-reversal/

I feel like this could have done some good for them if it had been their immediate reaction. Now....they could staunch some of the bleeding with a reversal but the damage is likely to be lasting.

To me that does not sound like "And we're not doing it!" and that's literally the only thing anyone wants to hear from this at this point.

@efesell: It definitely doesn't sound like "we're not doing it" at this point but they did say they are making changes to the policy and some potential changes (such as not trying to apply this policy retroactively) could make a difference. And of course "making changes to the policy" could lead to a reversal. But I think that this shows just how hot a mess this was.

It's clear that some people within Unity the company knew this would go over like a lead balloon and the proper way to deal with that would be to run the idea out in public and see the reaction before implementing. If they had said "here are some changes we are considering making, here is why we think it's going to be good for everyone, what do you all think?" it would have gone over much better than acting like it was all set in stone already, especially since it seems like...it wasn't.

Yeah, its more like "How can we word this BS so you guys will accept it". Hopefully, developers continue to add the pressure, but seriously, Unity even thinking about doing this should be the nail in the coffin.

• Geoff Keighley's security force, which can't stop people from Mr. Magooing onstage at Gamescom Opening Night Live

I think this is the biggest issue and lapse by folks you would think would know better. It was bad enough that is was allowed to happen last year, but seemingly security is on the last rung of the ladder to be pulled up. This tells people that Geoff Keighley's events are OPEN SEASON for nut jobs. "Want to make a splash?," just show up for the audience.

They knew they had a security issue, they ignored it; and if I were a CEO or known video game executive I would feel Geoff events are mismanaged.

@rorie: Have you tried since that last patch? They added a toggle to tone down motion blur. Try turning it down to 2 or 3 (defaults to 5.) The graphics mode has always been a rather solid 30 but a lot of folks felt it was unplayable cuz the motion blur was way too intense. That could be your problem as well. Worth a shot if you're still interested in the game.

Yeah, I've tried all the settings at various times, including after the performance patch, and none of them make me think it'd be worth spending 50+ hours with the game. Just high standards I guess! It looks and runs like a PS3 game, so it's really weird that it's a PS5 exclusive.

I mean maybe if I turned on aggressive motion smoothing on my TV it'd be playable but that'd just screw up everything else I want to play/watch.

Microsoft court documents leak is now a dark horse candidate. ADD IT, @allthedinos YOU COWARD!