Mastodawn

cancel Jul 13, 2022

Unity (former game engine company) has merged with an actual adware and malware distribution company. That's not an exaggeration. Fake Flash installers, was blacklisted by Microsoft's anti-malware tool, VirusTotal entires, that kind of thing.

https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-ironsource-and-installcore/

https://www.benedelman.org/news-021815/

Don't build your games on engines you don't have the source code to.

Adware Empire - IronSource and InstallCore

A recent Adware campaign using malicious Bing ads led me to a Chrome download that eventually deployed Adware to the user’s computer. The IPs and types of Adware connected back to IronSource Ltd., Babylon Software Ltd., and InstallCore – all Israeli companies that have connections to Adware. See her

INFOSTRUCTION

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cancel Jul 13, 2022

... if you can avoid it. Pico-8, GameMaker (though they're on some crappy subscription thing now), etc. are all OK for making smaller games. If you're going to invest many months or years of your life into some long-running project, maybe consider Unreal or Godot, instead.

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hazelnot

Jul 13, 2022

@cancel Fucking hell, I was considering trying to learn Unity cause it felt like the only engine both powerful enough and easy enough to learn to let me maybe actually manage to make something with it...

Although I can't code so that was probably never gonna happen anyway I guess 🤷‍♀️

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cancel Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot I think Unity would be a bit rough if you can't code. GameMaker is the go-to for 2D games without writing lots of code. (Though they recently switched to a subscription model... ugh)

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Csepp 🌢

@cancel @hazelnot I remembered some news about a gambling company (Playtech) buying them up a few years ago and it looks like that did happen but they have since been sold again to Opera. 🤔
Similar problem as in the OP.

Btw aren't there some web based low-code game dev tools? I'm not a huge fan of games that only run in browsers, so I haven't looked too deep, but I think I've seen tools like that.