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A week after Unity announced dramatic changes to its Unity Engine business model - drawing immediate and widespread condemnation from the development community - the company has reportedly told staff it'll be making adjustments to the controversial new pricing plan.

As reported by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, Unity leadership addressed employees in an all-hands meeting held earlier today (a meeting originally planned for late last week was cancelled following a "potential threat" from an employee), saying the company was "considering" introducing a cap on its hugely unpopular new per-install fees.

Unity initially caused an outcry last Tuesday, when it told developers that, on top of their existing Unity Engine licence subscription, they'd be expected to pay an additional monthly Unity Runtime Fee each time a user installed their game, starting on 1st January 2024. This would apply to all games, including those already on the market, that had made $200k USD or more in the last 12 months and had at least 200k lifetime game installs.

Following in the wake of last month's sizeable 4.0 update, Genshin Impact’s latest patch is arriving next week - and we now know what to expect from the 4.1 release.

4.1 - aka To the Stars Shining in the Depths - continues the watery theme of 4.0 by expanding the sunken region of Fontaine into a new northern area. Up there you’ll find the Fortress of Meropide, ruins and floating platforms to explore.

Those areas will play host to new quests in Fontaine's Archon quest line, introducing long-awaited villain character Arlecchino, the Fatui Harbinger, as the player searches for Childe.

Trailer

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Genshin Impact’s 4.1 update will release on September 27th.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday pressed tech billionaire Elon Musk to condemn antisemitism and find a way to combat it on his social media platform X as the pair met at a Tesla factory in Fremont., Calif.

“I hope you can find within the confines of the First Amendment the ability to not only stop antisemitism as best you can, but any collective hatred of the people that antisemitism represents,” Netanyahu urged Musk in the meeting, which was live-streamed on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “I encourage you to find the balance. … It’s a tough one.”

Musk responded with a mild denunciation of antisemitism, while seeking to pivot the conversation to the importance of free speech and his efforts to combat bots on the site.

“I’m sort of against anything that promotes hate and conflict,” Musk said. He added that he was “in favor of that which furthers civilization and which ultimately leads us to become a space-faring civilization,” and that “we can’t do that if there’s a lot of infighting and hatred and negativity. So obviously I’m against antisemitism.”

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Netanyahu then pivoted to antisemitism, which seemed to make Musk uncomfortable. The pair agreed, however, on the importance of limiting the ability of bots to artificially spread hateful messages on the platform. Musk said he believes the best way to do that is to continue pushing X users to sign up for paid subscriptions and to prioritize the posts of those who do.

The “cord cutting” trend cable execs spent a decade claiming was a fad just broke another round of new records. According to Leichtman Research, major cable TV providers lost another 1.7 million subscribers last quarter, as users flock to streaming, over the air TV, TikTok, or, you know, books. Roughly 17,700 customers cut the cord every single day during the second quarter of 2023.

Over the last year (Q2 ’22 to Q2 ’23) the traditional cable TV sector lost a whopping 5,360,000 customers, compared to 4,235,000 customer defections the year earlier. The current number of U.S. households that has a cable connection sits somewhere around 46 percent, down from 73% at the end of 2017.

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Historically, a big cable company like Comcast or Charter wasn’t too hurt by “cord cutting” because it could just jack up the cost of monopolized broadband access. And while that’s still generally true; here too cable giants are seeing increased competition from community broadband (co-ops, utilities, municipalities), 5G home wireless, and phone companies belatedly upgrading to fiber.

Interestingly though, streaming TV providers also wound up losing subscribers, albeit at a much slower rate:

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To celebrate 2023's World Cleanup Day, publisher Secret Mode has confirmed that indie Loddlenaut – a game all about clearing up the pollution left behind by evil megacorps – will release on 16th November 2023.

The "creature-raising survival game" lets you explore an open-world, alien planet, raise your own loddles, clear up debris with your bubble gun, recycle trash to create upgrades and more helpful items, and unlock new gadgets to ensure you can clear up even the most stubborn ocean pollution.

trailer
steam page

Unity has apologised following the furore around its disastrous plans to charge developers when people download games made using its technology.

The plans prompted an enormous backlash from developers across the industry, and threw up a multitude of questions around how the new policy would work in practice - answers which Unity belatedly scrambled to work out itself.

This morning, Unity said it was sorry for the "confusion and angst" its changes had caused, and promised it would make unspecified "changes" to its plans.

But despite days of confusion, Unity said it still needed more time to confirm what these changes might be - and the suggestion certainly seems to be that these changes will fall short of the full U-turn developers have called for.

That's effectively half the Steam Deck's GPU for near twice the price.

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Asus has announced it's going to be shipping the ROG Ally Z1 edition handheld PC starting from October 3 for the painfully high price of $599 (£599). This new device will ship with essentially the same base hardware as the top-spec ROG Ally, which sports the full AMD Z1 Extreme APU, so in a way you can see why it's only $100 cheaper.

After all, you're still getting the same lovely 500cd/m2 120Hz 1080p display, the same 512GB SSD, 16GB LPDDR5-6400, and a UHS-II microSD slot that may or may not melt the contents of which into so much silicon slag.

The issue is that, while the AMD Z1 is a supremely interesting chip, it's very underpowered in gaming terms compared with the Z1 Extreme because it's using the 740M iGPU as opposed to the powerful 780M option. The top chip then has the full complement of 12 compute units (CUs)—the same as the Ryzen 7 7840U that's powering all the best handheld gaming PCs right now—but the plain Z1 is rocking only a third of that.

With just four CUs you're getting 256 shaders compared with the 768 of the full Z1 Extreme chip. And that effectively puts it at half the GPU silicon of the Aerith APU at the heart of the Steam Deck. Yeah, a theoretical halving of the gaming performance of the Deck, but with a $599 price tag. Ouch.

Aesthetically Astrea makes a very strong first impression. Set in a slightly dreamlike world of astral mages and eldritch corruption, there’s a wide assortment of cute animal-people to play as, including well-dressed sharks, bees and (my personal favorite) robot crocodiles clad in swish wizardly robes, battling against warped ‘corrupted’ versions of their kith and kin.

While 2D animation is used sparingly on the watercolor backdrops and character art (featuring a lovely light palette of blues, reds and little inbetween), everything bobs and weaves with excited anticipation. The soundtrack, while perhaps a tad generic and orchestral, still has some memorable melodies. I didn't get sick of them, anyway, important for a game built on repetition.

Over the weekend, Starfield players began to share reports of a strange paranormal infestation. There are asteroids in the game that, for reasons known only to gods and/or programmers, follow you from orbit to orbit, flying eerily in formation with your ship, and sometimes even accompanying you to a planet's surface. "In one of my weirdest Bethesda glitch experiences, I've got a tiny asteroid that's been following me for the past 30 hours," user ReverendRoo posted on Reddit, triggering an avalanche of comments reminiscent of UFO chasers spotting each other at a NASA open day. "I would catch a glimpse of it from time to time," wrote fattfett. "I tried to approach it but you can't. It stays away. I assumed it had a deeper meaning [toward] the endgame." Some players, like Blackdius, have multiple asteroids in tow. It seems impossible to blow them up. I've dug up a Youtube video below of one such clingy space boulder from a couple of weeks back. As you can see, it's not just a fixed background point like a screen artefact, but seems to move in response to the player's ship. Most peculiar.

From the looks of it, legendary development studio id Software is working on a new version of its proprietary game engine - id Tech 8.

While most suspected it was coming, last week Capcom officially announced a new version Resident Evil 4 Separate Ways, the side story featuring Ada Wong from the original version of the game, would be launching this week. That initial announcement didn’t include much gameplay, but now Capcom has delivered a launch trailer full of juicy moments.

In terms of actual gameplay, the biggest takeaway from the Separate Ways trailer is the expanded role of Ada’s grappling gun. While she had the gun in the original version of Separate Ways, it was mostly something used contextually at certain set points, whereas now it seems to be fully integrated into gameplay. We see Ada use it to both traverse the environment and take on enemies, robbing them of their shields.

YouTube Launch Trailer

...priced at 450 us right now the RTX 4060 TI 16 gigabyte is 25% cheaper than the RTX 4070, though most models are still priced up around the 500 US MSRP making them just 17 percent cheaper. Which is still a nice discount I suppose and you do get that extra VRAM with the 4060 TI.

That said though you are also getting 26 fewer Cuda cores and 11 reduction in L2 cash and with slower memory and a more limited memory. Bus bandwidth has been reduced by a massive 43 percent so there's likely going to be numerous instances where the 4060 TI is a lot slower.