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.

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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

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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.

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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?)

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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.

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> 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.

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Quoting: CatKillerRelease early, release often.

I'm getting the impression developers don't update the framework for their Unity games, similar to device vendors who throw their thing over the wall.

If you can't expect frequent post-release engine updates, games in the wild using many different releases is not likely to work out well for maintenance.
Part of the solution is care for API guarantees and backwards-compatibility, but there's a cultural issue as well.

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Quoting: belisamaI love this game! The settings panel for rebinding the controls doesn't quite work on the Linux version yet (it appears to not be registering the mouse), but if you're okay with the default controls it's great. (I'm not, I like swapping the right and left mouse buttons, so I went back to running it on Steamplay, which is also great!)

I think it's just poor design of the bindings editor that disallows reusing existing bindings, making it hard to swap; assigning an unused key first gets around the restriction.

If you still can't get it to work, add the following line:

<pref name="RebindOverrides" type="string">eyJiaW5kaW5ncyI6W3siYWN0aW9uIjoiUGxheWVyL0NsZWFyU2FmZUhleCIsImlkIjoiMGIxOGEzMDMtMzU1Zi00Yzk0LWJhMzktZWE2ZjgyMzNhZTQ4IiwicGF0aCI6IjxNb3VzZT4vcmlnaHRCdXR0b24iLCJpbnRlcmFjdGlvbnMiOiIiLCJwcm9jZXNzb3JzIjoiIn0seyJhY3Rpb24iOiJQbGF5ZXIvUGluSGV4IiwiaWQiOiI2ZGIzNzY3NS1jYjdjLTRmYWQtYjRiZi03MjRjMGI4NWQ5NWEiLCJwYXRoIjoiPE1vdXNlPi9sZWZ0QnV0dG9uIiwiaW50ZXJhY3Rpb25zIjoiIiwicHJvY2Vzc29ycyI6IiJ9XX0=</pref>

after the <unity_prefs version_major="1" version_minor="1"> line inside .var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.config/unity3d/ToastieLabs/hexceed/prefs (assumes flatpak Steam, otherwise use .config/unity3d/ToastieLabs/hexceed/prefs). This is base64 for {"bindings":[{"action":"Player/ClearSafeHex","id":"0b18a303-355f-4c94-ba39-ea6f8233ae48","path":"<Mouse>/rightButton","interactions":"","processors":""},{"action":"Player/PinHex","id":"6db37675-cb7c-4fad-b4bf-724c0b85d95a","path":"<Mouse>/leftButton","interactions":"","processors":""}]}

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Quoting: RandomizedKirbyTree47Is there an easy way to see which of these games have Linux-native support, aside from manually clicking on all of them?

Yes, now that the bundle is on ITAD (is there any deal)

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Quoting: 14I can't wait for an updated doughnut tutorial.

Already here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIoXOplUvAw

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