Starfield’s upscaling controversy on PC continues. The person responsible for the open-world sci-fi RPG’s most popular mod offering DLSS2 support has now created one for DLSS3 as well. It’s locked behind a Patreon paywall though, angering some in the mod community and leading a few to circumvent the project’s DRM and pirate it for free instead.

If all that sounds like a confusing mess, that’s because it is. To briefly recap: Bethesda Game Studios and AMD announced an exclusive partnership for Starfield. This meant it would only support AMD’s upscaling technology for better resolution and framerate performance, FSR2, rather than competing tools like Nvidia’s DLSS2 and Intel’s XeSS. AMD claimed nothing was stopping Bethesda from supporting the rival upscaling technologies. Nevertheless, Starfield launched without options to turn them on in the settings menu.

Enter modder PureDark and “Starfield Upscaler,” which is currently the most popular mod for Starfield on NexusMods and replaces FSR2 support with DLSS and XeSS. It’s free and has been downloaded by over 150,000 players so far, improving their experience with the game thanks to PureDark’s simple workarounds. “Yep, DLSS2 was too easy, Bethesda exported all the FSR2 functions,” they wrote. “It’s like I can just reuse 95% of the code from Elden Ring or Jedi Survivor.”

That would have been the end of the story, except that PureDark proceeded to release a test build of a second mod on September 2 that supports DLSS3, the latest version of the tool for improved framerates released by Nvidia in September 2022 (via The Verge). Instead of being free, that mod was locked behind PureDark’s paywall, reigniting an age-old debate about the ethics of profiting off mods vs. giving them away. The kicker was that PureDark even added DRM to the mod in the form of an authenticator to prevent players from accessing the tool without a one-time, active $5 Patreon subscription.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some in the PC gaming community responded by “cracking” the mod just like they would a new release in order to pirate it. “STARFIELD DLSS 3 FG Mod by PureDark Has Been CRACKED Already,” tweeted the account PC_Focus on September 3 (via IGN). “Paid mods get what deserved [sic] for having DRM implemented.”

Others in the modding community, meanwhile, have attempted to release free mods that support DLSS3. One of them is by LukeFZ564. Uploaded to NexusMods, users initially reported a number of bugs and crashes with it, but some of those seem to be resolved. The latest comments are all thanking LukeFZ564 for the free alternative to paid mods.

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CEO John Riccitiello has retired from game development software company Unity after possibly its worst month of bad headlines ever. The tech company that’s slowly morphed into an in-game advertising firm announced a confusing and seemingly predatory new set of fees for game makers in September, only to walk the policy back after studios threatened to abandon the Unity engine moving forward.

James M. Whitehurst, former head of the IBM-acquired open source software company Red Hat, will take over from Riccitiello as interim CEO while Unity’s board of directors search for a new long-term replacement. “It’s been a privilege to lead Unity for nearly a decade and serve our employees, customers, developers and partners, all of whom have been instrumental to the Company’s growth,” Riccitiello said in a press release. “I look forward to supporting Unity through this transition and following the Company’s future success.”

Riccitiello joined Unity back in 2014 shortly after leaving Electoronic Arts. He oversaw the game engine company’s shift from one-time licensing fees to an ongoing subscription model, launched the IPO in 2020, and made a series of acquisitions, including the in-app monetization firm IronSource in 2022. When Unity first went public, its stock price was around $68. Today it’s just over $30.

Once synonymous with the explosion of creativity and experimental design in the indie gaming space, Unity is being left by Riccitiello a month after a bungled new monetization strategy rollout burned bridges with tons of game makers. The initial messaging made it sound like game developers might be charged fees every time their game was installed, including retroactively.

A follow-up apology by president and general manager Marc Whitten later clarified that the new terms would only apply beginning in 2024, and laid out much bigger carve-outs for smaller studios whose games don’t hit a certain threshold of income. But for many developers it was too late. Their trust in the company had already been irrevocably shaken. Re-logic, maker of the Steam hit Terraria, pledged $200,000 toward the creation of a Unity competitor, and Slay the Spire dev, Mega Crit, says it will still move to rival game software platform Godot.

Rethinking monetization more aggressively was also one of Riccitiello’s legacies at EA. His seven years at the FIFA (now EA Sports FC) and Battlefield publisher saw it experiment with day-one DLC, microtransactions, and a focus on post-launch content. While there was no week-long crisis moment on the scale of what happened at Unity last month, it’s clear he helped usher in the company’s current live-service era, which many players now feel nickel-and-dimed by. Madden and FIFA’s lootbox modes were both added while he was head of EA, though they didn’t become the billion-dollar windfalls they are today until the tenure of his successor, current CEO Andrew Wilson.

Perhaps nothing summed up Riccitiello’s time at both EA and Unity better than another controvertial incident last year. In an interview with Pocketgamer.biz in July 2022, he called developers who don’t think about monetization early in the process “fucking idiots.” He immediately walked the comments back the next week, calling articles about it “clickbait” that took his comment out of context, but later apologized, saying he should have chosen his words more carefully.

That unforced error came shortly after the company revealed hundreds of layoffs at the same time it was buying IronSource in a $4.4 billion all-stock deal. Six hundred more were laid off at Unity earlier this year. Meanwhile, Riccitiello, in addition to the millions he has in Unity stock, will be kept on salary until April of 2024.

Update 10/11/2023 4:50 p.m. ET: SFGate reports that Riccitiello is set to earn up to $8.4 million through stock options over the next six months. That’s in addition to the roughly $253 million he already holds in current Unity stock.