Sorry if this has already been reported, but I only really subscribed to report this bug, and nothing recent in the archive jumped out at me.
Some time after Jan 12, some change in my (Gentoo Linux) system caused 67 of my 72 commercial, closed-source unity3d games to crash on startup. gdb was no help, but strace showed alsa activity before two crashes, and, sure enough, reverting alsa-lib to 1.2.1.2 cured it.
I bisected to this commit (5ee5ef31b "namehint: correct the @args check"):
https://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-lib.git;a=blobdiff;f=src/control/namehi...
I don't know what the exact problem is, but reverting just this commit was enough to make everything work again (and its later modification in 6055f8a58 which doesn't make sense looking at the code as the function always returns 0 and str may still be NULL on exit, but adding a check for NULL str is not enough to stop unity3d from crashing).