some of those companies that are at the bottom of this letter, are one of the worst i've ever seen. many of them are known to just copy other indie games, and just heavily monetize them.
Funny, because Google denied my Hole genre game that was real multiplayer. Their reason was that it was too similar to Hole.io, which was single player.
I looked at hole.io vs donut county. I have played neither. From app store descriptions, hole.io looks like a casual mobile game and donut county seems a polished and complex product, with storyline and quality art.
It reminds me of 2048 vs threes. Thing is, sometimes I prefer a casual game.
The copying is still poor taste, I agree with that. At the same time the titles can be different and respond to different market needs.
I’m not sure what to think of that or about the industry as a whole. Especially since when I searched donut county on the app store, there were more copycats.
The interesting part is who is not on the list e.g. HoYoverse.
It has been speculated by many that this is all about Unity Technologies wanting a much larger share of the billion dollar profits of the gatcha games based on Unity.
If all indie devs quit Unity, but HoYoverse (the company behind the money printing press "Genshin Impact") does not, it would still massively increase the profits of Unity Technologies.
Of course because we are literally talking about billions of dollars on the table here HoYoverse & Co will probably all try sueing first.
Considering that as paid games, none of them have ads in them, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make since they can't meaningfully join in to a boycott of IronSource and Unity ads by virtue of not using them in the first place?
I updated the list. I’m sorry - Stardew Valley is not unity, and “Nintendo” wasn’t specific enough to referring to some of their Pokémon projects. (I also added everything after “Pokémon” in the list after this comment and they all use Unity.)
Nintendo has used Unity for certain titles. Off the top of my head I can think of the Pokemon Sinnoh remakes, Super Mario Run, I think the fire emblem mobile game too?
tell you when the (relatively speaking) peanut gallery joins in?
You may not have heard of them but each of these companies have a billion downloads in their portfolio minimum. This is massive that they all rejected this.
Liveroverflow, already made a call to fellow hackers. To start planting bugs and exploits into open-source projects. Mainly in the form of forks. In an April fool's joke video with only a disclaimer in the comments. tbh, I don't want to assume anything about his intentions, but that did seem sketchy at best to me.
Non-deterministic computer programming (which is conceptually what ML/AI is: brute force the mapping from input to output upfront) sounds great and can truly unlock whole areas of problem and solutions spaces we didn't even know existed. Until you realize you're just creating infrastructure where you cannot possibly hope to determine behavior. Something that is fundamental to debugging and security.
Also I wonder how much scientific rigour went into the recent progress in AI/ML. At least in principle there might be ways to determine invariants and boundary conditions (without modifying models), also considering there had been efforts to change ML models and make them explainable.
I think all of this will be rendered bunk with the erosion of the cheap compute that underlies this current boom in cloud/saas/ml/ai. It all rests on printing dollars and shipping them to China and will implode as soon as the CCP decides they need to militarize the Taiwan matter. Every cottage industry dependent on an exploding number of datacenters should fall in line with the rest of the economy then and we'll be back to resource constrained software.
