Nice, having this in KDE would definitely be a great option to have besides the limited number of other ones.

He definitely should not be surprised but he might actually have an argument that the mod is more analogous to an emulator (which are legal but are still shunned by the industry) that simply transforms the display of the content than a mod that deals with the existing content of the game.

He has also tried to make the argument stronger by supporting more and more games to make it more like a generic framework. Some questions do remain on how exactly he has done the modifications though as something as small as fixing existing shaders while reproducing a part of the original might bring you over to the derivative work territory anyway.

Can’t say for sure who’s right here but there’s at least a reasonable argument. The game companies obviously have a different view so ultimately this would need to be resolved in court as there’s insufficient precedent too. I guess for understandable reasons he’s just rather backing down when these complaints pop up and keeps modding other games from companies that haven’t yet issued a takedown request.

I’m fairly sure doing that would be in the clear yes. It’s really the selling of a derivative work that gets you in trouble usually.

I think AR/XR might be the more viable path if not wanting to go flat since all the big tech companies are more focused on that now. Skills would transfer well too and they’ll still be very much VR adjacent. Kinda surprised Meta isn’t just putting these studios to work on that but they probably want to spend on AI. I guess the one bright spot for VR specifically is Valve planning to release their new headset.

This is sad, VR seems to be at a low point with all the recent news. I guess the smartglasses stuff and AI just taking up all the attention. Cloudhead has been around since the beginning and Call of the Starseed was an early revelation…

well it’s the whole tech industry this time

It was weird that they thought they could sell enough of these at this price point for it to make sense to release it as an actual product instead of a dev kit at all. I don’t think anyone besides them and Apple fanboys looked at this and felt it made any sense from a business standpoint. Not even people who are very much committed to VR being the future.