Chroma: Ubisoft's internal tool used to simulate color-blindness

As with most things, this is an issue of education and awareness. It's not that most developers intentionally break accessibility, but rather that a very large number of developers simply don't even know it's an issue, let alone something that they should keep in mind.

"customizing shit that you probably shouldn't be customizing" is kind of a standard in video games.

Video games are not meant do be productive, they are meant to be fun, and standardization is boring. It means that they can't completely rely on OS frameworks to make an appealing game, it means that accessibility needs first hand consideration.

Publishers that want to work with indie studios are already accepting 100s of pitches and choose 0.1% they like. If a big publisher will buy a lot of small indie studios you'll soon see titles in a press like "{PUBLISHERNAME} force developers to live on ramen and work 12 / 6".

Simply because working on very tight budget likely 12/6 is how indie games are made. And to be honest in modern economy having any budget at all is kind a success already. So I'd belive most of small games are built on enthusiasm and founders own money.

Vast majority of "indie" games budgets are in range of $100,000 and $300,000 total. Over that amount there is gap where no one invest except few rich, successful and picky publishers. Getting more funding for a small-scale project is extremely hard so if your game needs more then it's must be AA project for at least $2,000,000+ budget. But AA+ means $40+ price tag, completely different production quality and large team so very few kind of games fit the math.

PS: I co-founder of a small gamedev studio and I know quite a few other people in this industry.

PSS: I'm happy to be wrong though. So if you know how to get game funded I have 4 cool playable prototypes to build into a game, team of 10+ devs and we track record for 3 released titles including one for consoles.

The short answer is that for a company like Ubisoft or EA, big blockbusters are much more reliable and more profitable than indie games. Not that smaller games can’t do amazingly well, but most don’t make a profit, and the risk doesn’t justify the expenditure for that kind of company.

Also, like another poster mentioned, there already exists a host of creativity in these AAA companies, that’s not the problem. The problem is making something that will reliably keep the company in the black.

The Trump admin is literally withdrawing ADA guidance without replacement. And as part of his executive orders they consider accessibility as part of the whole phrase (DEIA) [1]. So you're factually wrong.

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/29/2025-01...

>Hungary passes constitutional amendment to ban LGBTQ+ gatherings

Just the first one that comes to mind.

(continental) Europe never really had much of a push in that direction, though.

The whole concept of DEI / woke is not much of a thing outside the English-speaking world. Very small parts of it (gender parities, a bit more transgender awareness, the "transgender athletes in sports" kerfuffle) have leaked through, but that's it. Where I live (Poland), most people, even well-educated people, haven't ever heard of the concept of specifying your pronouns.

> I've seen the slept agenda

"Slept" as the opposite of "woke", right? This is genius! Is something actually used by more people?

Yep, exactly. I know cardinals are red and they look obviously red to me. Hard as hell for me to spot one in a tree though, this was the first sign when I was a kid. "What do you mean you can't see it!?"

> can be injected into any game without modifying any engine / game code

This sentence is an oxymoron...

Once you inject code, you have modified the original code. That isn't always possible or desired.

If you take 2 minutes to read the user guide of both softwares, the difference is obvious.

Reshade requires you to select the game executable and inject tools into the executable. It is specifically built to be compatible with all the major graphics drivers.

Chroma does not require you to point to the game and seems sit on top of the whole screen. I assume it just captures the screen and applies transformations to it at the surface level.

Simple example: you want to develop a game and are looking for example implementations of specific mechanics or UI elements. You go through existing titles, and exclude those that use implementations that don't work well for colorblind people.

It's not hard to come up with more examples.

QA works off of builds, not a Unity project. So you could apply this tool on test builds of a game for QA to reveiw without having to ask dev to add 'colorblind testing mode'. That then means the QA team could instantly use this on all titles past and present without needing additional code. Seems like an obvious win.

There is not really a big disadvantage, is there? It keeps the .exe around in all possible versions without additional effort, even if external build dependencies were to fall away etc. Sure, nothing proper releases can't mostly achieve as well. But also not something bad.

It's a little bit like when projects include their dependencies instead of just listing them in a gemfile etc. Some hate that, but it can make things easier.

I've done this when we had existing scripts that were run after cloning a specific git repo, that then needed an .exe for reasons, and just adding the exe to the repo was the easiest solution so we didn't have to change all the existing tooling and processes.