Many years ago, there was a bit of a trend for computer game companies to include a novella with their latest big release. Whether the main reason for this was to enrich player immersion or to help justify the ridiculously large boxes popular at the time is a moot point. Space Leagues may not include an actual novella, but it does have a very wordy background story. If you opt for the long version, then you may want to settle back with tea and biscuits. There is a shorter version, or you can just stick with my even more abridged account – Evil is decimating the universe, which leads to surviving galaxies setting up space leagues to ensure the development of superior combat strategies.

Space Leagues is a fantasy sports management game, in which the sport involves bashing the bejesus out of the opposing team. The first team to eliminate all of the opposition players by draining their health bars to zero is declared the winner. If both teams still have active players when time runs out, then the match is declared a draw. There are four leagues, each with ten teams, who, during the course of a season, will play each other twice. The team that finishes top in each of the lower leagues is promoted, whilst the bottom-placed team is relegated.

Each team is made up of a group of oddball characters, from giant tics to steam-powered golems and pretty much everything in-between. There are over 120 unique characters in the game, which are rated in terms of strength, speed, charisma, intellect and toughness. Before each match, you select five players and allocate their roles. Smashers charge recklessly into battle using their brute force to dish out powerful melee attacks. Strikers attack with speed and cunning, freely roaming the battlefield to identify vulnerable targets. Charmers are the equivalent of magic sponge wielding physios, using healing spells to rejuvenate battered teammates. Blasters use their superior intellect to avoid direct combat whilst peppering the arena with fireballs. Finally, thumpers use their massive constitution to absorb damage, protecting weaker members of their team from attack.

Matches are initially very confusing affairs, being closer to a barroom brawl than a sporting event. The unanimated player graphics are very basic with the action being viewed from above. This means that in spite of player names and the use of coloured auras to identify opposing players, the action tends to merge into a confusing mass scrum. Eventually, you will be able to recognise your established players and have a little more idea whether or not you are winning. After a few games, you may even be able to pick up a few tactical hints. You may realise, for instance, that your blaster is getting thwacked early on because you don’t have a good enough thumper to protect her.

After the match, the otherresults in your league will be displayed. You will then be presented with a drama to resolve. It seems that your team is always bitching about something or someone, and your assistant doesn’t help, tossing in his own snarky comments to further fan the flames of unrest. In one situation, a player was complaining about a minor injury, or “boo-boo” as he insisted on calling it. Do I give him a dressing-down for being a wimp? Keep calm and tell them to toughen up? Sympathise and buy them a lollipop? If I’m too harsh his morale might dip, but although a lollipop may cheer him up, there is a big risk that the rest of the team are either going to lose respect for their sucker of a manager or begin queuing to discuss their ailments and favourite sweeties. These situations are full of humour and how you interact with their demands will impact on the individual’s morale and that of the team as a whole. Well this is the theory – no matter how mean I tried to be there did not seem to be a discernible impact upon team performance. Unfortunately, much like Murder She Wrote reruns, you will soon see the same dramas playing out again and again. Even the funniest ones begin to grate when you have to sit through them for the tenth time.

You also have a financial budget, which will provide you with the funds to buy new players and offer established ones new contracts. Your scout does his best to uncover promising stars of the future, although, he is never actually gushing in his praise. You will usually have a choice of three new recruits and only a rough idea of their overall ability. Getting a new player to join isn’t always that simple. You make them an offer and then follow their thought process as they mull over the offer. Some ambitious types will weigh up the chances of actually winning a trophy, others could just be thinking that they are badly in need of a comfort break. This all sounds quite involved until you realise that it is made redundant by a glaring oversight. A squad of just five players never suffer injuries and these players will improve as soon as they start winning games. Have more players in your squad and injuries will occur, causing experience points to be spread among a larger pool of players. So, stick with five established players and apart from renewing contracts, there is nothing else to worry about.

Space Leagues sets the scene well, being full of humour and quirky characters. Together with the Danny Elfman style soundtrack there is definitely a Nightmare Before Christmas influence. The interactions between the players and management are definitely the game’s highlight, but even these become stale after a short time. The biggest problem is that the strategic elements do not have enough depth to maintain interest. The lack of a squad overview screen means that team selection requires way too much flicking back and forth. You cannot scout the opposition, so you end up going into games blind, meaning that nine times out of ten the best strategy is to ditch any ideas of finesse and just stick to a team made up of smashers and strikers. Grind out a couple of seasons in the lower division to improve your players and your team will begin to rise through the leagues with relative ease. Sadly, by this you point, you will probably be ready to move on to something more rewarding.

So far in this systemd multi-part tutorial, we’ve covered how to start and stop a service by hand, how to start a service when booting your OS and have it stop on power down, and how to boot a service when a certain device is detected. This installment does something different yet again and covers how to create a unit that starts a service when something changes in the filesystem. For the practical example, you’ll see how you can use one of these units to extend the surveillance system we talked about last time.

Where we left off

Last time we saw how the surveillance system took pictures, but it did nothing with them. In fact, it even overwrote the last picture it took when it detected movement so as not to fill the storage of the device.

Does that mean the system is useless? Not by a long shot. Because, you see, systemd offers yet another type of units, paths, that can help you out. Path units allow you to trigger a service when an event happens in the filesystem, say, when a file gets deleted or a directory accessed. And, overwriting an image is exactly the kind of event we are talking about here.

Anatomy of a Path Unit

A systemd path unit takes the extension .path, and it monitors a file or directory. A .path unit calls another unit (usually a .service unit with the same name) when something happens to the monitored file or directory. For example, if you have a picchanged.path unit to monitor the snapshot from your webcam, you will also have a picchanged.service that will execute a script when the snapshot is overwritten.

Path units contain a new section, [Path], with few more directives. First, you have the what-to-watch-for directives:

• PathExists= monitors whether the file or directory exists. If it does, the associated unit gets triggered. PathExistsGlob= works in a similar fashion, but lets you use globbing, like when you use ls *.jpg to search for all the JPEG images in a directory. This lets you check, for example, whether a file with a certain extension exists.
• PathChanged= watches a file or directory and activates the configured unit whenever it changes. It is not activated on every write to the watched file but only when a monitored file open for for writing is changed and then closed. The associated unit is executed when the file is closed.
• PathModified=, on the other hand, does activate the unit when anything is changed in the file you are monitoring, even before you close the file.
• DirectoryNotEmpty= does what it says on the box, that is, it activates the associated unit if the monitored directory contains files or subdirectories.

Then, we have Unit= that tells the .path which .service unit to activate, in case you want to give it a different name to that of your .path unit; MakeDirectory= can be true or false (or 0 or 1, or yes or no) and creates the directory you want to monitor before monitoring starts. Obviously, using MakeDirectory= in combination with PathExists= does not make sense. However, MakeDirectory= can be used in combination with DirectoryMode=, which you use to set the the mode (permissions) of the new directory. If you don’t use DirectoryMode=, the default permissions for the new directory are 0755.

Building picchanged.path

All these directives are very useful, but you will be just looking for changes made to one single file, so your .path unit is very simple:

#picchanged.path

[Unit] Wants= webcam.service [Path] PathChanged= /home/[user name]/monitor/monitor.jpg 

In the Unit= section the line that says

Wants= webcam.service 

The Wants= directive is the preferred way of starting up a unit the current unit needs to work properly. webcam.service is the name you gave the surveillance service that you saw in the previous article and is the service that actually controls the webcam and makes it take a snap every half second. This means it’s picchanged.path that is going to start up webcam.service now, and not the Udev rule you saw in the prior article. You will use the Udev rule to start picchanged.path instead.

To summarize: the Udev rule pulls in your new picchanged.path unit, which, in turn pulls in the webcam.service as a requirement for everything to work perfectly.

The “thing” that picchanged.path monitors is the monitor.jpg file in the monitor/ directory in your home directory. As you saw last time, webcam.service called a script, checkimage.sh, took a picture at the beginning of its execution and stored it in monitor/temp.jpg. checkimage.sh then took another pic, temp.jpg, and compared it with monitor.jpg. If it found significant differences (like when somebody walks into frame) the script overwrote monitor.jpg with the temp.jpg. That is when picchanged.path fires.

As you haven’t included a Unit= directive in your .path, the unit systemd expects a matching picchanged.service unit which it will trigger when /home/[user name]/monitor/monitor.jpg gets modified:

#picchanged.service

[Service] Type= simple ExecStart= /home/[user name]/bin/picmonitor.sh

For the time being, let’s make picmonitor.sh save a time-stamped copy of monitor.jpg every time changes get detected:

#!/bin/bash

# This is the pcmonitor.sh script cp /home/[user name]/monitor/monitor.jpg /home/[user name]/monitor/"`date`.jpg"

Udev Changes

You have to change the custom Udev rule you wrote in the previous installment so everything works. Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/01-webcam.rules so instead of looking like this:

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="video4linux", ATTRS{idVendor}=="03f0",   ATTRS{idProduct}=="e207", SYMLINK+="mywebcam", TAG+="systemd",   MODE="0666", ENV{SYSTEMD_WANTS}="webcam.service"

It looks like this:

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="video4linux", ATTRS{idVendor}=="03f0",   ATTRS{idProduct}=="e207", SYMLINK+="mywebcam", TAG+="systemd",   MODE="0666", ENV{SYSTEMD_WANTS}="picchanged.path"

The new rule, instead of calling webcam.service, now calls picchanged.path when your webcam gets detected. (Note that you will have to change the idVendor and IdProduct to those of your own webcam — you saw how to find these out previously).

For the record, I also changed checkimage.sh from using PNG to JPEG images. I did this because I found some dependency problems with PNG images when working with mplayer on some versions of Debian. checkimage.sh now looks like this:

#!/bin/bash mplayer -vo jpeg -frames 1 tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=640:height=480:device=

  /dev/mywebcam &>/dev/null mv 00000001.jpg /home/paul/monitor/monitor.jpg while true do mplayer -vo jpeg -frames 1 tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=640:height=480:device=

  /dev/mywebcam &>/dev/null mv 00000001.jpg /home/paul/monitor/temp.jpg imagediff=`compare -metric mae /home/paul/monitor/monitor.jpg   /home/paul/monitor/temp.jpg /home/paul/monitor/diff.png 2>&1 >   /dev/null | cut -f 1 -d " "` if [ `echo "$imagediff > 700.0" | bc` -eq 1 ] then mv /home/paul/monitor/temp.jpg /home/paul/monitor/monitor.jpg fi sleep 0.5 done

Firing up

This is a multi-unit service that, when all its bits and pieces are in place, you don’t have to worry much about: you plug in the designated webcam (or boot the machine with the webcam already connected), picchanged.path gets started thanks to the Udev rule and takes over, bringing up the webcam.service and starting to check on the snaps. There is nothing else you need to do.

Conclusion

Having the process split into two doesn’t only help explain how path units work, but it’s also very useful for debugging. One service does not “touch” the other in any way, which means that you could, for example, improve the “motion detection” part, and it would be very easy to roll back if things didn’t work as expected.

Admittedly, the example is a bit goofy, as there are definitely better ways of monitoring movement using a webcam. But remember: the main aim of these articles is to help you learn how systemd units work within a context.

Next time, we’ll finish up with systemd units by looking at some of the other types of units available and show how to improve your home-monitoring system further by setting up service that sends images to another machine.

Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.

By Bob Lord, Chief Digital Officer, IBM

Today is the first official day of Call for Code, an annual global initiative from creator David Clark Cause, with IBM proudly serving as Founding Partner. Call for Code aims to unleash the collective power of the global open source developer community against the growing threat of natural disasters.

Even as we prepare to accept submissions from technology teams around the world, the response from the technology community has been overwhelming and today I am thrilled to announce two new partners joining the cause.

New Enterprises Associates (NEA) has confirmed its participation as a Partner Affiliate and the official Founding Venture Capital Partner to the cause. With over $20 billion in committed capital and a track record of partnering with entrepreneurs and innovations that have truly changed the world, NEA will extend the Call for Code into the startup and venture capital ecosystem and the Global Prize Winners will have the opportunity to pitch their solution to NEA for evaluation and feedback.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has also confirmed it will join the Call for Code as a Gold Sponsor. CNCF will bring invaluable experience and advice for technology teams looking to deploy their solutions across a variety of topologies and real-world constraints.

With NEA and CNCF on board the commitment to the cause is widening, and this is only the beginning. Since making the announcement, technology companies, consumer companies, universities, NGOs and celebrities have all expressed interest in answering or supporting the call. Events have taken place in 50 cities around the world, and many more are planned in coming months, providing training and bringing teams together.

Announced on May 24 by IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty, IBM is investing $30 million over five years as well as technology and resources to help kick start Call for Code to address some of the toughest social issues we face today. The goal is to develop technology solutions that significantly improve disaster preparedness, provide relief from devastation caused by fires, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes, and benefit Call for Code’s charitable partners — the United Nations Human Rights Office and the American Red Cross.

The need was never more apparent. Even as we made the announcement in Paris, Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano was erupting, reportedly destroying more than 450 homes. In recent weeks, Guatemala’s ‘Volcano of Fire’ reportedly left 110 dead and around 200 missing. In a worrying preview to the 2018 Atlantic hurricane Season, two category 4 hurricanes – Aletta and Bud – formed in a matter of days last week.

2017 was in fact one of the worst on record for catastrophic natural disasters, impacted millions of lives and billions of dollars of damage – from heat waves in Australia and sustained extreme heat in Europe to famine from drought in Somalia and massive floods and landslides in South East Asia.

We can’t stop a hurricane or a lava flow from wreaking havoc, but we can work together to predict their path; get much needed supplies into an area before disaster strikes, and help emergency support teams allocate their precariously stretched resources.

Last week, The Weather Company, an IBM business, announced it would make weather APIs available to Call for Code participants for access to data on weather conditions and forecasts. IBM Code Patterns get developer teams up and running in minutes, with access to cloud, data, AI and blockchain technologies.

Of course, the real magic happens when coders code. The open source developer community has helped build so much of the technology that is transforming our world. IBM has been supporting that community for over two decades and together we have helped reinvent the social experience. Our hope is that this community can help transform the experience of so many people impacted by natural disasters in coming years.

To help rally that community the Linux Foundation, a long-term partner for IBM, is lending its support and Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, will join a panel of eminent technologists to evaluate submissions.

Less surprising, at least to me, was the enthusiasm IBMers showed in responding to the call. We saw internal celebrations around the world in support of the launch last month and we anticipate a healthy contribution to the cause from the 35,000 developers within IBM, plus of course IBM’s own Corporate Service Corps will help deploy the winning ideas on the ground.

Ultimately, the real measure of success will be the impact Call for Code has on some of the most at-risk communities around the globe, and the lives that are saved and improved. With Call for Code now open, the time to make a difference is now.

This article originally appeared on the IBM developerWorks blog.

Today in San Francisco, Microsoft Military Affairs will join our partners from LinkedIn to each share new commitments to the military spouse community.

Military spouses are an integral supporting force for members of our military, but face staggering 18 percent unemployment and 53 percent underemployment due to moves every two to three years, according to a 2016 study from Blue Star Families on the social cost of unemployment and underemployment of military spouses.

As part of our commitment to the military spouse community, Microsoft will launch a pilot program to provide spouses with technology skills training beginning in September.

Microsoft has successfully opened a technology career pipeline for transitioning service members and veterans via the Microsoft Software & Systems Academy (MSSA) program, which has expanded coast-to-coast and has a graduation rate of over 90 percent. We are excited to explore how to expand and tailor these opportunities to military spouses, which represent a diverse talent pool that is adaptable, resilient and highly educated and ready to take on new and exciting opportunities to further their professional and personal goals.

The U.S. government estimates information technology occupations are projected to grow 12 percent from 2014 to 2024, faster than the average for all occupations. Because there are 500,000 open technology jobs annually, we know that career programs are needed to help close the technology skills gap.



“Microsoft is excited to work with technology leaders and other organizations committed to supporting military spouses, and to find avenues that lead to meaningful career opportunities for active duty military spouses,” said U.S. Marine Corps Major General (Ret.) Chris Cortez, Vice President of Microsoft Military Affairs.

LinkedIn also announced today that it is expanding its military and veterans program to include military spouses through a new partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Spouse Education and Career Opportunities program. Beginning this July, LinkedIn will provide one year of LinkedIn Premium to every military spouse during each of their moves to new installations to facilitate their career transitions, and once again upon conclusion of military service. This will include free access to LinkedIn’s online library of more than 12,000 LinkedIn Learning courses, including its newly-launched learning path designed to help military spouses succeed in flexible, freelance or remote-work opportunities.

The Microsoft Military Affairs team is working closely with military spouses and nonprofit organizations to understand firsthand the unique challenges this community faces as we build out and learn from our pilot program.

We are thrilled to begin our pilot program in the fall and to continue our support of military spouses and their community by providing the skills they need to enter technology careers.

This week, Ubisoft announced that for Beyond Good and Evil 2, they’d be partnering with HitRecord to create art & music assets as part of a fan collaboration project to “build the universe” of their Nietzsche-named sequel.

Later, after journalists and developers alike raised concerns about the prospect of this being unpaid work, they confirmed a $50,000 pool that would be available for people whose work is used in the game, sparking a week-long conversation about the nature of fan labor, spec work, and if Ubisoft was depressing the value of creative work with this initiative. 

Actor and HitRecord founder Joseph Gordon-Levitt did do post a follow-up blog that indicated he and his cohorts were listening to developer feedback and hoping to create a clear, transparent process around Beyond Good & Evil 2, but we at Gamasutra still wanted to suss out why this topic resonated with developers and readers over the course of the week. 

So during our E3 wrap-up chat (which you can watch in its entirety here), we revisited Ubisoft’s announcement and Gordon-Levitt’s follow-up comments to examine our own feelings about this kind of collaborative work, whether or not it qualifies as spec work, and what it means for the game industry at large. 

Emma Kidwell, contributing editor (@EmmaKidwell): Well, I think people should get paid, always. And I know he mentioned in his blog post that it’s unrealistic to pay everybody who wants to contribute. Which is fair. But also I think that if you’re using, “hey fans of Beyond Good & Evil 2 should work on this,” I think it’s almost a little manipulative, even though I honestly believe Joseph Gordon-Levitt has good intentions with it but doesn’t understand the kind of grunt contract and freelance work a lot of developers go through.

So I think the intentions are good, but not really understanding “how do I know if my work’s going to be put in the game,” “how are the funds going to be split,” and I think over the past few days they’ve clarified that on certain points, but based on what I’ve researched, I don’t think there’s a clear vetting process.

It’s clearly not a contest…but it’s more like a bunch of collaborators building on top of each other’s work, and that muddles up how you’re going to get credit, how everyone’s going to get paid, because they put aside $50,000, and then that’s it. And I know that if your work is used more, you get paid more, and there’s no guarantee anyone gets paid. It just kind of depends on who decides what is worthy. And I don’t know that I like that very much!

But I do think they had good intentions, and it’s not a good way to execute asking for assets, when I think a big company should be able to pay for what they’re asking for.

Alissa McAloon, contributing editor (@Gliitchy): Re: the contest thing, it’s hard to be on stage and say “it’s not a contest, we’re just going to pay people…everyone contributes work, and the stuff that gets used gets paid.” That kind of just reads like you’re competing against other artists to see who gets a chunk of that pie, because everyone’s only getting the $50k that HitRecord put up, which is being split among every creator that contributes based on how much work they put into it.

So it’s—it’s muddy. I feel like it would have been better received if Ubisoft put in additional money on top of that, or if there were more for that. I don’t know.

One of the other criticism I’ve seen is that people are like “oh you could be paying someone at Ubisoft, you could be hiring composers to do this,” because they’re looking for art to add into the game for posters, but they also want songs to play on in-game radios, announcements on in-game radios…there’s a lot of voice acting, music, writing, art, graphic design, all these different different contributions which are like, these are actual professionals who, if they have the skills to do this for this fan project, it’s likely they have the skills to do it professionally.

So having them contribute as a fan rather than a professional is demeaning in a way to the work that they do? I would say?

Alex Wawro, managing editor (@awawro): I think this whole thing is so interesting. I agree with you both ,and I think with most people, that it could have been handled better, the rollout. I think Ubisoft kind of hung HitRecord out to dry by not getting on top of this more quickly, and maybe taking off the gate on how much money they’re going to pay out or being more clear about that.

But it does seem like something done in relative good faith, or at least I could believe it was, and I think it’s so interesting that if you think about—if you look at Kickstarter, that’s a platform where people give money to developers. They give time, in money form, for people to make a video game. And in return, they get a copy of the game, or rewards.

Would this be different, if instead of giving them money for their contributions, they gave them a copy of the game? Or is that just a different way of looking at crowdfunding? Like I think it’s so—

Bryant Francis, contributing editor (@RBryant2012): That was some galaxy brain shit right there.

Wawro: I think Ubisoft should be doing what Gordon-Levitt is doing. I think it’s a good look to be listening to people, I think it’s good to be having a conversation about labor, and about what it means to do spec work versus actual, meaningful, remunerative work, but I don’t think it’s pure evil. I think it’s an interesting way of talking about this, I wish Ubisoft had been more upfront and more open to talking about it.

Kris Graft, editor-in-chief (@KrisGraft): I saw him show up [at Ubisoft’s private event], and I was like “oh my god, I need to ask him if he’s supposed to be Robin at the end of The Dark Knight Rises.” He’s got a great smile! Certainly can’t be evil.

So, no, but I think one of the key things that Alissa hit on is that, I think they made this, and they announced it, like, thinking so much that this would be a fan-contributed thing. They thought this would be a good opportunity for the fans, and that’s cool, but they didn’t think that, what about professionals? Or people with skills that are professional people that are putting time into this stuff?

Maybe they look at it as ‘whipping up a quick bassline’ like Ed in his basement is laying down a track or two then uploading it to HitRecord. I think that the whole thing is meant to be just for hobbyists, and that wasn’t in the messaging enough, and even if it was in the messaging, I don’t know how you say that.

Francis: “Professionals need not apply” is such a weird thing.

Graft: So yeah, it completely turns out to be 99 percent spec work. That’s the only way you can really describe it. Making something without getting paid but you might get paid. That’s the definition of it. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s just a flawed model and I don’t know how you explain your way out of it. Sorry JGL!

Francis: I’m going to jump in…I was trying to mull about this all week because like JGL, I was trying to listen to everyone talking. What I would like to point out is that from Ubisoft’s end, I was trying to put myself in Ubisoft’s point of view, they are thinking about this I’m sure from a marketing standpoint.

What they have is a new game, based on a franchise that has a fanbase, but not for the kind of game they’re making. They made a 3rd-person platformer in the 2000s, it became a cult hit, it turned out people were passionate about it, now they’re making a nearly No Man’s Sky-level Space Game with exploration, and ships that go into other ships. That’s big, that’s expensive, and I’m sure they’re trying to make sure to advocate to it to other people when they move into the bigger PR stages.

I think a lot of developers for a while have been trying to figure out how to integrate their communities more with their games. You got to BlizzCon and you see fan art contests, the work’s as good as professional. Blizzard’s own employees will cosplay, like they had a Widowmaker cosplay out there the day Overwatch was announced, so like, what happens when your own employees are fans of your own games, or other people’s games, and they’re doing that kind of thing…it can’t be overstated that, every developer out there, if they could take fan art and legally work it into their game as fast as possible,

I’m sure they would, because that’s a good way to reward your audience, the people who are buying your game, playing your game, telling you how much they love your game, and hopefully if they do it more, it helps you stay in business.

From Ubisoft’s standpoint, I don’t—Alex you were implying earlier in the stream they might need to reach out to fill up this universe with assets, but I only don’t agree with that in that I don’t think Ubisoft would have gone up there and said “this project is TOO BIG, we’re teaming up with HitRecord to fill up our game…” they 100% could on their own! 

Wawro: I want to back that up, I did imply that and I didn’t mean—I don’t think anyone at Ubisoft is relying on HitRecord as a meaningful part of their production pipeline. A couple of years down the line, once more companies have more opportunity to work with partners like this, that could be a real concern. But this just seems like a genuine marketing effort.

Francis: My 100 percent concern walking away—I think the spec labor concerns are real, I think I agree with Alex in that JGL has done his best to at least not be silent about it. They didn’t even mention the pay onstage first thing and he jumped on Twitter and was like “100%, we screwed that up, here’s the pay details.”

But it doesn’t take much of a bad faith read, or a bad faith actor to look at what they’re doing, and if they get away with it, to say “hey, sweet, now we can take fan labor and get it into our game,” because not other companies have as many employees as Ubisoft.

Ubisoft relies on—we talked to Nouredine Abboud about this a while back—relies on the fact that they can onboard a lot of developers from one of their studios really quickly to help out with a game project. So that means we can only look it from their perspective as a marketing challenge, that they are now going “oh god this isn’t what we expected, is this gonna be worth it, we’re going to have to deal with this PR mess through the rest of production,” but, other game developers are looking at it and going “if THEY can get away with it, can we?” And I have a lot of faith in game developers, but it’s not a giant leap in a kind of scary way.

McAloon: I just wanted to mention that, the second this was announced, my chaos of a Twitter feed became people saying “these people are gonna get paid right?” It was all people asking about compensation and going “free work is not okay.” Developers, press, and people who aren’t in the industry at all, people who know the value of creative work. No matter what comes of this, if Ubisoft makes a statement or not, it’s good that people are having this conversation and that that was the first reaction is uplifting in a way.

For more editor roundtables & developer interviews, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel!