Posts Tagged: ‘Unity’

This Week On TechDirt Sept 22 – Oct. 7

October 7, 2011 Posted by zachary

Starting this week, I am going to be doing weekly summaries of what I wrote for TechDirt during the week. It will be a lot easier to keep up with it all. So without much ado here we go:

Microsoft Convinces Yet Another Company to Cough Up ‘Protection’ Money

MIcrosoft managed to get Casio to sign up for a cross licensing deal for their patents. They managed to do so by threatening Casio with patent infringement over some 235 patents they claim Linux infringes. We still don’t know what those patents are but they must be convincing.

Conan O’Brien Has The Inside Scoop On More Netflix Changes

Just a funny video in which the Conan O’Brien rips a new on in Netfilx’s apology for raising prices.

Bethesda Turns Down Quake Fight Over Scrolls Name; Takes Guaranteed Loss By Going To Court

Notch tried to settle this whole trademark dispute with a game of Quake, but Bethesda didn’t want anything to do with it. Now it is going to court. It doesn’t matter if Bethesda wins or loses this case as they have already lost in the eyes of the gaming public.

Gaming Company Sees Massive User & Revenue Growth Because Of Piracy

Unity’s Asian branch has seen tremendous growth over the past year or so basically because of a bunch of Asian game companies pirating their software. They aren’t mad, because revenue is up 258.7%

No Rest For The Productive And Successful; Nintendo Sued Again Over The Wii Remote

Yeah. Nintendo is sued once again for patent infringement. This time from a company called UltimatePointer. They claim to make a product much like the Wii Remote, but it is still in “testing.” Funnily, this patent was filed for the same month Nintendo revealed the Wii to the world.

EA Sues EA Over The EA Trademark

Energy Armor has a logo very similar to the Electronic Arts logo and Electronic Arts is not happy. It doesn’t help matters much that Energy Armor’s product is sports gear, which Electronic Arts has a hand in.

Nintendo Thrilled To Have Game Copy Devices Found Illegal In France

Nintendo got flash carts and other mod chips banned in France. Not a big surprise. What is really frustrating is that Nintendo continues to ignore the greater truth that these chips open up its consoles as customers want. Nintendo would rather fight to keep their consoles locked down.

So that’s it for the week (and some before it). Enjoy. There is plenty more to come.

Unity Exporting to Flash? Wait. What? Why?

February 28, 2011 Posted by zachary

Yesterday, Unity announced that their engine will gain the ability to export to Flash. This seems to be an odd move considering they already have a web player built into the engine. What reason could they possibly have for such a seemingly contridictory move?

The first thing I can think of is the problem of plugin penetration. Untiy is far far from Flashes nearly 100% penetration rate. They need to do something to expand the possiblities for the users of Unity. This will provide game developers the ability to expand the market for their games while at the same time providing Unity the opportunity to splash a few “Created using Unity 3d” messages on games to gain some more market recognition.

This seems to be a good opportunity for game developers to limit functionality in Flash games and provide a message saying that the better moreĀ  full experience can be had using the Unity plugin. I am not sure just how big a deal this will be, since details about what features will support Flash as of yet. I think this would be something that Unity would be more interested in than the game developer since this would provide an incentive for gamers to install the Unity plugin. Thus, increasing the Unity penetration rate.

This could also be a stop gap in bringing Unity support to the Linux operating system. Since Flash is already supported on Linux, Linux users would finally be able to play browser games built using the Unity engine. I don’t really see why they would go this route instead of making full native Unity support for Linux. This is also more speculation since there is little information available.

So what does this all mean? Does this mean that Unity is on a death spiral? Probably not. While I still think this is an odd move, I doubt, and hope, this is not a sign of doom and gloom. Based on the comment to their announcement above, this is a welcome feature by Unity developers, most likely because it expands the potential player base.

Is this something that will get me to choose Unity for game development in the future? Not likely. My previous stance on the issue still stands. Until Unity gains full Linux support for both browser and client games, I will not support it.

I am aware of Unities efforts to expand their engine to support Google’s Native Client, but it seems to be a far off prospect. This support would bring Linux support, but only for users of Google’s Chrome Browser and only for browser games. For now there is no speculation on what if any effect Native Client will have on the browser market or if any other browsers will pick it up for integration. This could be just as limiting in the end as not supporting Linux at all.

So for now, I will just sit back, watch and wait.

Why Do We Hate the Penguin?

June 29, 2010 Posted by zachary

After my review of game development on the PC, I came to realize that there is very little if any support for Linux as a viable platform from the creators of game engines for the PC. Even those that advertise that they are cross platform engines only go so far as to be cross platform for Windows and Mac.

As a gamer that has decided to use Linux as my primary OS for me and my family, I find this disheartening.

I am well aware of the small market share that Linux has world wide. (around 1%) It is not that small when compared to the Mac market. (around 5%). (source) So why is Linux’s 1% valued so little compared to the Mac’s 5%. Both are relatively small compared to Windows’ astounding 92%. (more…)