[HN Gopher] Going forward, Unity devs will need Unity Pro to pub...
___________________________________________________________________
Going forward, Unity devs will need Unity Pro to publish on
consoles
Author : q_andrew
Score : 93 points
Date : 2021-08-05 15:52 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gamasutra.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gamasutra.com)
| [deleted]
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Unity makes a lot of moronic decisions imo.
|
| * You have to pay to remove the unity logo from your games. This
| causes low quality games to proudly show the unity logo and well
| funded games to hide it.
|
| * Very few devs are likely to release on console while on the
| free tier of unity pro but this has a daunting effect on the
| aspirational newbie, I guarantee. Lots of people have this silly
| habit of thinking about the monetary opportunity of their amazing
| solo indie game that will definitely never happen, but it still
| GETS THEM ON THE TOOL which is important
|
| * Needless to say, breaking their own networked multiplayer setup
| and not even having a working replacement.
|
| The engine really is fine, but the business is poorly run, and I
| feel that drives the trajectory of the engine downwards.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Oh and I forgot my personal favorite. Filling my harddrive with
| TB of log messages saying the telemetry failed to phone home
| due to no internet when left alive overnight.
| q_andrew wrote:
| To add to the list, Unity changed their policy on console
| development 6 days ago, and didn't tell anyone or even give an
| explanation (this article was written after a few developers
| noticed it in the license by chance). Whether or not it was a
| good choice is almost overshadowed by the lack of disclosure or
| transparency.
| rincebrain wrote:
| I'm pretty confident you're referring to the license change
| from the article and not an earlier license change, but June
| 30th is no longer 6 days ago.
| didntknowya wrote:
| yes I used to pay for unity but if I were an aspiring dev
| today, I'd jump right into the unreal ecosystem as their
| freemium model makes much more sense to start in.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I'd like to add the biggest issues from the point of view of a
| small independent game studio:
|
| * Open bugs from years ago
|
| * Refusal to fix bugs in the LTR = long term support version.
| They always try to weasel their way out by asking you to
| upgrade to the latest beta, which nobody will do mid-
| production.
|
| * No source code access and no option to purchase it, because
| they are above negotiating prices with small companies.
|
| * Bug reports are forcibly kept secret. For example, try
| searching for "Particle Rendering Errors & Flickering - Last
| light color in unity_LightColor0[] multiplied by random small
| number" which is a bug that affects 2018 LTR, 2019 LTR, and
| 2020 LTR and is still unfixed. (It's ID 1242620)
|
| As the game developer, you're then forced to work around bugs
| in the Unity C++ core with pixel shaders and the stuff that
| they expose to C#, which is horrible for readability and (of
| course) very fragile.
|
| Contrast that with UE where you have full source code and can
| step through things in a debugger...
| BoorishBears wrote:
| The truth of the story is Unity just changed how _Xbox_ builds
| work, and not much more.
|
| Console manufacturers providing tools for development after you
| join their dev programs is bog standard stuff. In fact only
| needing a key is a huge step forward, back in the Wii-U days
| Nintendo would provide the actual binary of Unity Pro with
| changes baked in, not even a key.
|
| If I had to guess Sony and Nintendo are paying some sort of fee
| to get those Pro licenses they then give to devs for free, and
| MS was relying on the fact that Unity didn't gate console
| targets.
|
| Now Unity is forcing MS to join the program, which really isn't
| unreasonable to me. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's
| a way to recoup the very real cost Unity incurs supporting
| these targets to the benefit of the manufacturers.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| Seriously asking... what's the benefit of getting them on the
| tool if the tool can't be monetized? What's the angle here for
| Unity as a business model? Some kind of revenue sharing
| arrangement or something for if/when a game ends up successful?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > Seriously asking... what's the benefit of getting them on
| the tool if the tool can't be monetized? What's the angle
| here for Unity as a business model? Some kind of revenue
| sharing arrangement or something for if/when a game ends up
| successful?
|
| First to answer your question, luring in devs to the unity
| ecosystem is very good for unity because it creates a supply
| of unity devs who go on to create demand for the engine at
| studios. People don't like to switch tooling. It's sticky,
| like microsoft office.
|
| But second, that's sort of my point. Unity is already fairly
| heavily monetized. You must already buy this license if
| you're making $200k or more on their engine.
|
| But what if you're a solo dev who wants to publish something
| fun, small, and non-lucrative? Or something you think could
| be lucrative but is kind of a shot in the dark? $1,800 (per
| year) is a hefty price tag to take that shot. It doesn't move
| the needle on business revenue but it does scare away indies.
| Others are saying this is to get the console vendors to pay
| for it but honestly that sounds like its still adding a lot
| of friction.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| That makes sense. Thanks for answering. I don't have much
| familiarity with Unity as a tool or as a company/business
| model, so I didn't realize they already had alternative
| monetization methods.
| asutekku wrote:
| Unreal Engine does revenue sharing and the whole engine is
| free to use for anyone wants to. IIRC until certain amount of
| money Epic takes no cut from the sales. That's a million
| times better than what Unity is doing.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Yeah it's only 5% on revenues above a million on a title by
| title basis. Very generous terms and incredibly indie
| friendly. Probably more expensive for large successes, but
| imo much more preferable.
| dathinab wrote:
| > *Very few devs are likely to release on console while on the
| free tier of unity pro but this has a daunting effect [..] this
| silly habit of thinking about the monetary opportunity of [..]
|
| I fully agree, the idea that my small irrelevant hobby game
| might end up somewhat successful and I might be able to sell it
| on console and be maybe able to live from and for it for ~1
| year or so are quite tempting.
|
| On the other hand the idea that even if my hobby game gets
| successful I will most likely never be able to put it on
| console is quite off putting.
| nvoorhies wrote:
| E
| newsclues wrote:
| If your hobby becomes successful can't you then upgrade to
| pro and port to consoles?
| dathinab wrote:
| For a hobby came earning 1800 in profited is _a lot_.
|
| Not even speaking about you having to put it up upfront and
| every year (I'm not sure if it's every year you still
| maintain or sell the game).
|
| I mean typical prices for mini hobby games are 5-10 at most
| 20, if we go with 10 it means you would need to have
| already had 180 customers before publishing on a game
| console.
|
| And sure that might not sound like much, but we are
| speaking about small hobby projects of often young people,
| potentially worried about how to pay their student loans or
| teen not yet earning money.
|
| And sure in the sells aspects this doesn't matter for EA,
| but it will make more young people use different things for
| their first games.
|
| Furthermore when it doesn't matter from a sells perspective
| why increasing the burden? Why not just reducing the "less
| expensive" limit from 200k revenue to 80k or so?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| A lot of people will want to push to consoles to begin
| with, not to PCs. It's still a good deal if you're
| successful. But it's $1,800 lost if you're not. That's a
| big number to some hopeful newbie.
| SeriousM wrote:
| Do they still charge for the dark theme?
| q_andrew wrote:
| Not anymore, thankfully.
| socialist_coder wrote:
| This is the least of Unity's problems.
|
| Unity doesn't dogfood their own engine. Unity does not develop
| any games themselves. This is completely unlike Unreal, who has
| always released games using their own engine. Unity doesn't do
| it, and it shows.
|
| Unity has a handful of features that either barely work or only
| work in some contrived prototype case. They still have 3
| different rendering pipelines without clear direction on which
| you should use.
|
| They have this whole new game architecture (DOTS) but it seems
| like you should not use it. It's just there to confuse you.
|
| They have a new GUI coming soon? Maybe?
|
| Mobile builds are a complete clusterfuck with all the native code
| plugins you have to integrate. As soon as you get a few native
| code plugins (which every serious mobile game does), it takes
| several days of messing with your build pipeline to make things
| build properly on iOS and Android. And then you have to do it all
| over again every year to keep up with platform changes.
|
| They've also released a ton of plugins and features for AAA games
| and cinematics that are completely useless to indie devs and
| mobile devs. I would love to know what their revenue split looks
| like between mobile, AAA, indie, and everything else. From my
| perspective, they haven't done much the past 3 years to make
| mobile dev & indie dev better.
|
| Still no good webGL export if you care at all about load times.
| I'm not sure if they have just given up on this or what.
|
| The Unity Editor also just has weird problems sometimes. It gets
| exponentially worse if you have large projects too. This is why
| Unity never sees these problems because they only work with small
| prototypes. They have no "real" projects which can easily get
| into the 50+ gigabytes range. At that size of a project, you
| start to have more weird issues.
|
| Unity is still (usually) the best choice for mobile and indie,
| but man I wish they would just spend the time to make their own
| mobile game, see the many pain points, and fix them.
|
| I will say, they did create and release the Addressables system,
| which is a big improvement for resource loading on mobile. Also
| their acquisition of TextMeshPro and support of that plugin for
| rendering text, super good. Their shader graph editor is still
| WIP and tied into their rendering pipeline mess. Nested prefabs
| are also a huge improvement.
|
| If I was Unity, I would setup 2 internal game teams. One team
| building PC & console games, another team building mobile games.
| Build real games, release them on the app stores, and keep them
| updated for 2 years. Who cares if they don't make any money, that
| isn't the point. This is a realistic usage of the engine and it
| would expose problems that Unity doesn't seem to know about.
| q_andrew wrote:
| These issues are definitely real and need to be fixed. However,
| I do think that the URP/shadergraph pipeline has been unfairly
| maligned -- I've gotten some great results with very few bugs
| using HDRP as a solo dev (granted, the target platform is PC
| and it's running on a newer non-preview release). I made this
| game exclusively with shadergraph and HDRP deferred rendering
| and it runs quite well -- https://youtu.be/Vwu7gTVgDzo
| socialist_coder wrote:
| That looks amazing! Well done.
| q_andrew wrote:
| Thanks! It's the first game I've made that will actually be
| released, I'm excited to see people play it.
| cpeterso wrote:
| > This is completely unlike Unreal, who has always released
| games using their own engine.
|
| I wonder if the Unreal Engine team's testing includes
| recompiling and retesting shipped Unreal games to make sure
| engine updates don't break backwards compatibility.
| boterock wrote:
| That's an issue you don't have if you provide source code.
|
| If a customer relies on bad architecture/undefined behaviour,
| that shouldn't pull back all the other customers that want
| their subscription materialize into engine improvements.
| boterock wrote:
| I would also add their animation system is crap. If you try
| something like Animancer, you will never ever want to interface
| to the AnimatorController stuff because is so badly designed.
|
| Overall their business model of providing some kind of
| foundation to be filled up with plugins is terrible. I don't
| have an issue with plugins, but needing to rely on plugins for
| the very basic things like input management, localization,
| animation, source control... Just so they do less, and earn
| more (because otherwise people would just wouldn't pay for
| that, presumably?). That's a shitty way to run a software
| company.
|
| Only recently they have started to care, but I think it is too
| late, and it will be hard to beat the momentum that Godot
| already has. I would bet that in a couple years the tables will
| turn and Unity will be juggling to keep their market share.
| socialist_coder wrote:
| I would also try to completely redesign how mobile builds work
| in Unity. Instead of Unity creating a brand new xcode / android
| studio project every build - it should be able to take an
| existing xcode / android studio project and just add the Unity
| build to it. That way, theres no more stupid post-process steps
| that inject all your native code plugins into your xcode
| project. This step is super fragile and constantly breaks. You
| can keep your xcode project updated manually and the mobile
| plugins would no longer need to develop their unity build
| pipeline.
| reitzensteinm wrote:
| Their WebGL export template update broke the loading bar
| (unityProgress callback returning 0% then 100%).
|
| I got into an argument on the Unity forums with a maintainer
| about whether this was a necessary feature. That was surreal,
| and I think spoke volumes as to how it came to be broken in the
| first place.
| [deleted]
| drcode wrote:
| I would add to this:
|
| 1. Their package/plugin system sucks (last I tried it anyway).
| It basically just seems to download a bunch of junk files for
| every plugin without any intelligence, and if the package
| updates you have a big mess on your hands, trying to combine
| your app code with the newest plugin code.
|
| 2. You are pretty much forced to use C#, even though the
| company has more money than god and could easily fund grants to
| allow for great variety of language options. By siloing
| themselves within the C# ecosystem, they will likely never have
| an ecosystem of third party development tools that could
| improve the lives of their users.
| mattnewport wrote:
| The old package system definitely sucks. The new system has
| promise but until it works for asset store assets it's a bit
| limited.
|
| You can actually use F# quite well in Unity, I've done it,
| you just need to develop in a separate visual studio
| solution. Debugging is a bit of an issue too but it is a
| reasonable experience overall.
|
| You can also develop native plugins and doing so with C or
| C++ for certain things isn't uncommon. In this case you
| mostly want to avoid interacting with Unity APIs though and
| just write standalone code that Unity code calls into.
|
| There's lots to complain about with Unity but it's not all
| bad.
| Arwill wrote:
| Custom asset import is also much better than for Unreal,
| even making an asset exporter is easy.
|
| If for example the target is to re-make an old game in a
| modern engine, Unity is the better choice.
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| They could have picked Python or something even worse like
| C++. At least they back-tracked from the absolute worst
| option - JavaScript.
| socialist_coder wrote:
| Agreed about packages - you can no longer make custom updates
| to them to them either if they are installed via the package
| manager. They didn't think through their package manager
| before rolling it out. And now that it's out, it's going to
| be super hard to change it.
| andybak wrote:
| Yes you can. Just copy the files into the Packages
| directory and edit at will.
| mattnewport wrote:
| Yeah, we just did this this week to work around a bug in
| the URP package, it does work.
| sombremesa wrote:
| > If I was Unity, I would setup 2 internal game teams. One team
| building PC & console games, another team building mobile
| games. Build real games, release them on the app stores, and
| keep them updated for 2 years. Who cares if they don't make any
| money, that isn't the point. This is a realistic usage of the
| engine and it would expose problems that Unity doesn't seem to
| know about.
|
| The reason Unity doesn't do this is pretty simple, and it's the
| same reason people get really angry when Amazon begins to
| manufacture high margin products themselves and pushing other
| sellers out of the game.
|
| Epic has no qualms with such things, and it seems like there's
| no end to what they can get away with, so why wouldn't they?
| simion314 wrote:
| >The reason Unity doesn't do this is pretty simple, and it's
| the same reason people get really angry when Amazon begins to
| manufacture high margin products themselves and pushing other
| sellers out of the game.
|
| I think you do not understand why people are angry with
| Amazon. Say there is a dude that discovered that he can make
| money if he sells coffee cups with black cats painted on
| them, Amazon then runs an SQL query or run some ML and find
| all profitable products including the coffee cups and they
| then find where the dude buys the cups , negociate a better
| deal with the manufacturer, make tons of money and the dude
| gets frustrated.
|
| Unity making 2 games would not upset the developers, they
| could make the game "open" for all customers so anyone can
| learn from them.
| sombremesa wrote:
| > Unity making 2 games would not upset the developers
|
| See Epic v. Apple.
|
| Making games is a huge liability if you're a game engine.
| Making a game _store_ even more so.
|
| Unity has made plenty of "demos" as you're suggesting.
| initplus wrote:
| Why is it a liability? It's how every other commercially
| licensed engine was built in the past. Unity is actually
| unusual in that respect.
|
| See id, valve, unreal, crytek.
| sombremesa wrote:
| Because you're competing with the businesses who decide
| your fate as an engine. If you're Valve, you want games
| to be on Steam - and you'll push for that when games use
| your engine, even if it isn't explicitly stated or even
| intentional. This doesn't make Sony and Microsoft happy,
| obviously. You might argue that the platforms are
| different, but that continues to become more and more
| irrelevant as it becomes easier to release the same game
| on many platforms and crossplay becomes more commonplace.
|
| As a result, these marketplaces will try and favor some
| other engine, such as Unity.
|
| I think it's tough for the average techie on here to
| really grasp the nuances of business (mostly due to lack
| of direct XP), so I'm not going to belabor the point.
| socialist_coder wrote:
| In theory you have a valid point, but in practice it just
| hasn't been an issue. See the previous commenter who
| pointed out that _every_ engine company, with the
| exception of Unity, has always released games on their
| own engine. I have literally never seen any complaints
| about that.
| [deleted]
| initplus wrote:
| I understand that there is potential a conflict of
| interest involved... but Unity's customers also want an
| improved product. It's a competitive disadvantage
| compared to unreal that they don't dogfood their own
| product.
|
| Direct product flaws in Unity are more likely to push
| customers away to a competitor compared to nebulous
| business relations conflicts.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Sony, Nintendo, Google and Microsoft, give tier 1 preference to
| Unity anyway, so this will hardly matter for those that actually
| get to be allowed to rent a devkit.
|
| Not everyone that wants to develop for consoles gets the
| privilege to do so anyway, only when the game manages to win the
| hearts of publishers, and the company has a sound financial
| history to ensure being able to deliver the game.
| 41209 wrote:
| This is a pretty moot point.
|
| Realistically no one can develop for a console without having a
| significant amount of funding.
|
| Microsoft had an indie storefront a while ago , but it's
| essentially gone. I wasted hours , and 25$ trying to get my Unity
| game to build for Xbox S. The tools Microsoft has for hobby devs
| are just completely broken.
|
| Looking on the bright side with Steamdeck we might see even more
| great handheld PC games.
|
| I wish Godot was anywhere near Unity, but it's not. UDK melts my
| computer and I've never been able to do anything with it.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| 1800/person/seat is a pretty minimal cost, at least in the US.
| Even if you're paying your people 40k per year, it's a 5%-ish
| increase in costs, at most. Probably much less once you factor
| everything else in.
|
| I'd be interested to know how many non-hobbyist devs are
| seriously affected by this.
| everyone wrote:
| You only need one seat I think also. Just for when you're
| building to console (At least that's the way it used to be when
| you could only build to certain platforms on pro) Eg. If I was
| doing a build I'd just use the seat and if my colleague had it
| i'd ask him to relinquish it.)
| qwytw wrote:
| The license doesn't allow doing that, you can't really mix
| free and pro on the same project (also if you work with
| multiple people probably the company has > 100k revenue). Of
| course Unity doesn't really have any good way to enforce
| this...
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Not everywhere pays their people as well as the US :). For a
| lot of countries with many Devs this is a fortune
| anigbrowl wrote:
| As a ps3 owner who was considering that it might be fun to make
| a simple game or utility it's a total non-starter.
|
| Of course I can make a game for free on my desktop, laptop or
| phone and have many options available. But I was literally just
| last night thinking about making something for use with a
| controller on the sofa and bookmarked Unity for further
| consideration. I'd rather use Godot but I don't think that
| works with consoles at all.
|
| It sounds like this still works for older versions of Unity? I
| am not imagining anything elaborate/commercial. The ps3 is not
| the best computer (or even console) I own, but it's one I like
| and use daily, even if just for a few minutes to play an old
| game or watch streaming video.
|
| Edit: after looking around Unity's website it seems they're
| just not catering to hobbyists at all any more which I guess
| makes sense from their business perspective. Oh well.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Yes, the price is very affordable for even small independent
| studios knowing that engine licensing costs are one of your
| biggest non-labor expenses, but the price is also set high
| enough that an individual will easily have it out of budget.
|
| Only hardware is marginally more expensive, and only
| sometimes.
|
| I find their pricing very well calibrated.
| dmytroi wrote:
| Unity is completely irrelevant here, your first question
| should be "Will Sony give me the software and the hardware to
| make a PS3 game/software?" and answer in 2021 will most
| likely be hard no because PS3 is so old at this point
| (remember that retail console is not a devkit nor a testkit).
| Which only leaves homebrew toolchains to explore, and they
| are not supported by any of big engines today.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I already knew the answer to that, but up until recently
| the free/cheap tier Unity let you output for ps3.
| andybak wrote:
| But how do you install on the actual hardware without an
| official dev kit? If you're just previewing on PC then
| nothing has changed.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| The PS3 security is completely broken at this point so
| that's a moot point. You don't need a dev kit.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I don't think this answers the question.
|
| Is there actually a guide showing anyone having been able
| to click build in a recent version of Unity and run the
| output on a PS3?
|
| Because I'd be shocked if that actually worked, back in
| the PS3 days I'm pretty sure Sony was shipping modified
| builds of Unity just like Nintendo
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Looks like the dream isnot completely dead:
| https://wololo.net/2019/09/24/a-look-at-udk-ultimate-a-
| modif...
|
| (Also, talk about putting the whole story in the URL...)
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Basically zero, but it's definitely awful marketing to devs who
| imagine themselves successful.
|
| Unity sure is encouraging folks to move to Unreal or Godot
| lately.
|
| If you're porting to consoles and making at least 100k/yr then
| this is a drop in the bucket.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Thats a ton of money for something an indie dev won't even own
| or be able to possess once the subscription is up.
|
| Indie dev is super saturated. It's hard to make money without a
| ton of promo and virality.
|
| Yet another predatory subscription licensing model. Thank god
| Unreal Engine is open-source.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| UE is source available but it is not open source. You owe
| royalties if your game makes over a million. It's a nice
| model though.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Seems like these types of devs go to PC first anyway, since
| the cost of getting started there is so much less than
| consoles. I doubt anyone in the industry will be too broken
| up about it.
| ngold wrote:
| I do some mobile unity game development. Personally I would
| expect it to cost more to get games on console.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Eek.. will this apply to Oculus Quest too? That's also kinda a
| closed platform
| binarynate wrote:
| No, Oculus Quest uses Unity's Android player and doesn't
| require a specialized console player.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I was about to use Unity for a project (for a larger
| organization) and had considered biting the bullet and buying
| Unity Pro... but I didn't want to have my work turn to ash as
| soon as my side project ran out of funding and the license
| expired. Permanent licenses that you have to buy are one thing,
| but... Being forced into buying a subscription service (& legally
| being prevented from using the "community" version) just makes me
| way too hesitant to want to use the Unity environment. Especially
| for side projects (and if you can't use it for side projects, you
| will be less likely to use it for main projects). If the project
| has a delay (pandemics happen, could have a medical problem,
| etc), then I risk running out of money for subscription.
|
| If it was just paying for maintenance, or for memory limitations,
| CPU count, or compilation speed, that's one thing. But if all
| your work turns to ash if you don't pay the fee... that's just
| not an ecosystem I want to invest time and money in.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| That reasoning is precisely why we switched form Autodesk 3ds
| max to Houdini. And then we were positively surprised by its
| power and have never looked back.
| numbsafari wrote:
| Interesting point of comparison to, say, iOS development, which
| costs $99/yr, full stop, not per-seat.
| chrisBob wrote:
| That is obviously not a fair comparison. Apple's developer fee
| is there to create a little bit of a filter and to help
| reinforce the legal agreement for getting access to pre-release
| stuff, and running code on your own hardware. The fee probably
| doesn't even cover the overhead on the program. Apple makes
| their money through the App Store and selling hardware. Unity
| is getting all of their money from licensing their software.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| It doesn't really do any of those things, though. It's an
| arbitrary fee. Look at Google's Play Store fee by comparison.
|
| While I agree it's not a fair comparison, the Unity fee at
| least provides substantially more value than Apple's, like
| covering the publishing process for multiple console
| platforms, which is almost always relatively expensive.
| qwytw wrote:
| Google doesn't really do a manual review of every submitted
| app (I don't know how many minutes/hours they spend on a
| single submission but I guess the cost of this alone might
| add up to more than $100 if the account is used to submit a
| lot of apps/new versions per year)
| Macha wrote:
| $99/yr + 15% of first $1,000,000 + 30% of any revenue above
| that
| munk-a wrote:
| Which, just to do the math out - means that Apple is
| guaranteed to be cheaper as long as you make less than 12k.
| That math, of course, ignores platform hosting fees (i.e.
| Steam/EGS/GoG will take a chunk of profits as well on PC -
| and I have no idea what console fees are like).
|
| Assuming you're not doing it as a hobby the flat cost is far
| more economical unless you release a lemon in which case the
| scaling cost does minimize the losses at least.
| kipchak wrote:
| >and I have no idea what console fees are like
|
| According to Apple's Powerpoint in Epic v Fortnite [1] 30%
| is more or less standard, for consoles as well as on PC.
| Microsoft was supposedly also going to 88/12 though that
| seems like it might have been dropped.
|
| 1. https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22417725/apple-vs-
| epic-ful... (slide 15)
| josephcsible wrote:
| Which platform is Unity Pro the only way to ship apps for?
| traspler wrote:
| I'm not a game dev but we used it for an AR feature where I
| worked. We only needed 2 seats, so not a big customer. There have
| been some stupid interactions with Unity:
|
| - Pestering us for weeks about urgently needing to arrange a call
| with us and repeatedly refusing to tell us what it is about over
| Email, turns out one of devs didn't activate his seat and another
| user created an account with his work email an they thought we
| were abusing the license.
|
| - Back then they offered build server licenses but there was
| nearly nothing in the docs about it, only ,,call us". So we did
| and we had to arrange a call with one of their partners advising
| us on our use use (dynamically generating assets over an API).
| All of this boiled down to: 5 Instance license for the price of a
| normal seat.
|
| Why all of this required hours of my and my co-workers time in
| calls is beyond me. All if this could have been done with like 4
| mails max.
|
| It's not only Unity's issue. I can't even create an AWS account
| anymore without someone calling me to talk about my ,,use-cases".
| This insistence on personal calls and account managers is such a
| drag. Just feature your contact points prominently on your page
| and explain your offer publicly. I'd rather have someone
| competent answer my mails than talk to someone who is just going
| to schedule another 3 calls because they are only sales people.
| carlosrg wrote:
| Does this applies to UWP games (the ones you can run on Xbox with
| the Creators Program)? I was considering learning and doing some
| hobbyist games with Unity and Xbox.
| vincentpants wrote:
| Sounds like this is specifically for the switch. Which I'm
| finding to be a great platform for indie devs IMO.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I really don't understand why Microsoft hasn't bought Unity
| halo wrote:
| This feels attempted shakedown of the console manufacturers to
| get them to pay for Unity for their licensees. Looks like Sony
| and Nintendo have coughed up while Microsoft have not. Not sure I
| can blame Microsoft for not wanting to pay.
| [deleted]
| literallyaduck wrote:
| When you hitch your wagon to someone else's horse you can't get
| mad when it goes in a direction you don't like.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Well, you _can_ get mad, but your only real recourse is to
| unhitch your wagon. Most unity users won 't do that, they don't
| have the resources or ability to make their own engines, and
| many are not even able to effectively use the reasonable
| competing engines like Unreal.
|
| Unity users are pretty much a captive market at this point.
| Really good business for Unity, probably not so good a
| situation for Unity users long term.
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| You just have to write your own engine nowadays. Yup. Maybe
| even make your own console. But don't write in someone else's
| language. This is the "deserved to be shot" argument of things.
| You just aren't allowed to complain somehow? Why not?
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > But don't write in someone else's language. This is the
| "deserved to be shot" argument of things.
|
| Amen.
|
| Remember all those closed and proprietary "4GL" programming
| languages throughout the 1990s? And all the business software
| titles built using them? All gone now.
|
| History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Sure you can.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| The other day I got angry at my dog food bowl when I kicked
| it in the dark-- and I'm the one who left it in the wrong
| place!
| teekert wrote:
| I'm calling the cops.
| theknocker wrote:
| Cool, unreal 5 is shaping up great.
| animanoir wrote:
| Great publicity for Godot which i believe will get as heavy and
| important as Blender.
| p1necone wrote:
| Why do you think this will give Godot more attention and not
| Unreal?
| seph-reed wrote:
| Especially given the tech demos coming out for the next
| unreal. I forget the name of the system they're using for
| lighting or texture detail... but it's pretty friggin
| impressive.
| pjmlp wrote:
| You still need to pay for a devkit even with Godot, and be on
| good terms with Sony, Nintendo, Google and Microsoft, which
| give tier 1 preference to Unity.
| everyone wrote:
| Unity is the only 3rd party engine that can build to Nintendo
| switch (At least it was quite recently, not sure if its still
| the case)
| boterock wrote:
| UE4 has been able to export to switch for a long time
| (Snake Pass notably released on switch, before any other
| console, 4 years ago) For Godot, there are companies that
| do the porting (presumably they developed their own
| interfacing layer), these services seem to be not very
| expensive, and one of the Godot founders runs one of these
| companies IIRC.
| CraneWorm wrote:
| solar2d is on the way to achieve this goal too
| vivty wrote:
| Yoshi's Crafted World which appeared on March 29, 2019 was
| built using the UE4
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshi%27s_Crafted_World).
| djmips wrote:
| And support isn't free. Unity must be paying Sony, Nintendo,
| Microsoft to give support on console. So maybe Unity just
| decided to pass on the cost to the developer a bit and also
| filter out a bunch of newbs that drive the cost higher.
| qwytw wrote:
| At least in the past Microsoft and Nintendo (not sure about
| Sony) used to actually pay Unity to implement/maintain
| support for their consoles. IIRC, when you had to buy
| licenses for each platform separately, developers who had
| the Nintendo SDK used to get the engine support for free
| (can't remember if they had to pay for the editor license
| themselves).
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Nintendo used to provide a Pro build of the latest Unity
| that didn't rely on your existing licenses in any way to
| function.
|
| IIRC you could even use it to make a release PC game
| builds, but I'm sure Unity could figure out what you were
| doing if you actually shipped with it as a workaround for
| buying your own license.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Godot is a toy engine compared to Unity, for consoles it's not
| even a dicussion.
| boterock wrote:
| Having the source code available is much better as an
| investment. Unity support (forums, answers, whatever) is a
| joke.
|
| It is very sad that whatever gamedev question you have, if
| you search in google and add "Unity" the answers quality
| degrades a lot.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| I want to like Godot, I just dislike too many of the design
| choices. I don't like the signal pattern at all. GDScript is
| fine for small games. C# integration is an afterthought and
| shows with the rough api; especially working with signals.
| NonContro wrote:
| "Godot does not officially support consoles (save for XBox One
| via UWP) currently.
|
| The reasons for this are:
|
| To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company.
| Godot, as an open source project, does not have such a legal
| figure.
|
| Console SDKs are secret, and protected by non-disclosure
| agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not
| publish the code as open-source.
|
| Consoles require specialized hardware to develop for, so
| regular individuals can't create games for them anyway."
|
| Copied from:
| https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...
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