[HN Gopher] Unity's new pricing: A wake-up call on the importanc...
___________________________________________________________________
Unity's new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open
source
Author : TMM2K
Score : 655 points
Date : 2023-09-15 08:24 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ramatak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ramatak.com)
| bennyschmidt wrote:
| Everyone told me "use Unity" "the biggest mistake you can make is
| building your own engine". How well did that advice age?
|
| Nobody needs Unity or Unreal.
|
| My most recent game (playshadowvane.com) is built on 100%
| proprietary technology, I built everything in-house down to the
| physics.
|
| Always ignore mainstream game dev advice, they are just trying to
| sell you products. Build as much as you can in-house, it's not
| only better for the look/feel of the game, but no company will be
| able to rug pull you later.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Obviously I won't defend the Unity situation.
|
| Ultimately though it is all about time efficiency, solo or
| small teams have little manpower and since they don't even know
| if their first, second, or fifth game will sell any at all it
| may not make strategic sense to spend months reproducing common
| engine features in order to save a hypothetical percentage of
| revenue that they may never ultimately make. You need to test
| the gameplay concept as cheaply as possible.
|
| Creating a game engine from scratch is FUN, and if game
| development is a fun hobby then full steam ahead. If however it
| is a business that you plan to make money on, you're unlikely
| to recoup the time investment into a bespoke engine just to
| test the market for your games. If the game turned out to be
| successful you could always piecemeal replace the commercial
| engine with bespoke via updates (inc. using money to hire
| people from the success).
| bob1029 wrote:
| > You need to test the gameplay concept as cheaply as
| possible.
|
| There are some edge case concepts that I have found to be
| completely impenetrable on commercial engines.
|
| Multiplayer is the #1 thing in my mind. I've gotten the FPS
| multiplayer examples to "work" for UE and Unity, but the
| confidence I have in these solutions is not great. I've seen
| what Unity _can_ do (BattleBit), but I don 't know how many
| decades of game industry black magic and hackarounds it
| requires to force a commercial engine to behave that well.
|
| I really think the answer is that it depends. If you aren't
| trying to have a "perfect" version of some gameplay aspect
| (i.e. multiplayer in my case), then the commercial engines
| will absolutely be the fastest path to validating your idea.
| Put differently, I think some game ideas are _not possible_
| to validate on commercial engines. But, I don 't think this
| is very common.
| bennyschmidt wrote:
| It took me about 3 days to build the engine, including custom
| physics, gravity/jumping, collision detection including
| raycasting, and about 3 weeks to finalize it and start
| working on the game. Game was released in under a month and
| we already have a small community. It was definitely worth
| spending a little up front time to avoid a service provider,
| and have more control over the mechanics and look/feel of the
| game.
|
| By the way, you re-use a lot of the same code when you build
| in-house, like you said often times your 1st title is not a
| hit, but you improve upon a lot of that engine code and
| release subsequent games. Most AAA developers do this.
| doikor wrote:
| Now try to hire 20 level designers and 5 engineers who know how
| to work with your engine/tools.
|
| Same applies to most software. It isn't that hard to make a new
| programming language or a http framework. But once you make one
| finding other people who know how to use it is a pain in the
| ass.
| [deleted]
| gsuuon wrote:
| They really should have trialed this pricing structure as opt-in
| and then slowly rolled out (if at all) instead of wholesale
| shoveling it on everyone with a quarter's notice.
| bionhoward wrote:
| I was crowing to my game dev buddy about how he (a Unity C-sharp
| developer) ought to check out Bevy and Rust because the Rust type
| system is friggin' awesome!
|
| Code examples: https://bevyengine.org/learn/book/getting-
| started/ecs/
|
| License is Apache 2.0 OR MIT:
|
| Apache 2.0: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/LICENSE-
| APACHE
|
| MIT: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/LICENSE-MIT
| hcks wrote:
| [flagged]
| aabbccddee22 wrote:
| [dead]
| ribit wrote:
| This is a straw man argument. The problem is not closed source
| but lack of regulation and power asymmetry between the large
| company and a small customer. These types of bait and switch one-
| sided contract changes should be illegal. In fact, the way how
| Unity approached this is likely illegal, since they have
| retroactively changed the contract while attempting to hide this
| fact from the customers.
|
| We need to strive towards establishment of fair, enforceable
| legal frameworks that prevent this kind of abuse from large
| players, instead of magically hoping that open source will fix
| everything.
| __loam wrote:
| I agree completely, but open source alternatives like Godot
| make it easier for people to pack up their things and leave,
| and you'll never need to deal with this issue if your business
| uses open source software. Open source can be a part of how we
| hold abusive corporations to account, and it's a way for
| developers to take action without hiring a lawyer.
| everyone wrote:
| How is this tracked though?? It could work like this..
|
| + When you build, Unity secretly adds your Unity account id to
| the build.
|
| + When the game is run for the 1st time it secretly calls home to
| Unity server with your account id
|
| + The server increments # of installs from your account by one..
|
| But couldnt this be overcome by just creating a new Unity account
| for every build?
|
| I really want to know btw. I am a unity dev and have just
| tendered for a contract assuming we'll build it in Unity.
| Switching to Godot will take us time and reduce quality as we are
| not experienced in it.
| [deleted]
| numpad0 wrote:
| No way you'll be changing bundle id/package name on every store
| release!
|
| My guess of the original game plan was likely to just print out
| a list of most installed games, manually work out package names
| to developers, and pick up the phone at Unity's convenience for
| negotiation talks, working out disagreements including knocking
| out dupes and fraudulent counts. That should be technically
| doable.
|
| The real problems are, most devs just don't have the cash flow
| to split for $0.20 per install, nor they believe they have
| leverages to reach into agreement for mutual benefits(special
| 99.9% discount or whatever), nor any viable paths for making
| the full amount even as eventuality(just add those banners at
| the top and bottom of your screen! On the launchers! People
| love clicking those gifs right!? Ads!), and that total dead end
| feeling had traumatized developers enough that they had formed
| impression that Unity is a total showstopper with ropes
| included.
|
| But the part they cast int to dollar isn't the most problematic
| part.
| kypro wrote:
| I kinda feel bad for Unity. The company is in a bad place
| finacially. They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they
| have no good solutions to this. Either they try to increase
| pricing and piss off their customers, or they cut costs (which
| they've been doing with mass layoffs) and risk losing ground to
| other game engineers like Unreal.
|
| For years the only thing really holding the company a float was
| their valuation. So long as investors were willing to give them
| money for growth and future profits they could continue to fund
| their loses. But now their growth is slowing and investors are
| less willing to pay up for growth generally what does Unity do?
|
| I've felt for a while that they'd be a likely victim of this most
| recent tech rut and that seems to be playing out. They have no
| moat, slowing growth and are burning huge amounts of cash. Unless
| the macro changes in their favour it's hard to how they get out
| of this and stay on top.
| cyanfrog wrote:
| That reminds me. How is blender able to stay free. How is their
| approach different?
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Aside from being OSS backed nonprofit, they also have a
| relatively small full time staff:
|
| https://www.blender.org/about/people/
| mnau wrote:
| Blender is GPL2+. It's impossible to have that license and
| not be free. It's also basically impossible to change
| license.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Small nitpick: AIUI it is possible to sell binaries of a
| GPLv2 program, provided you keep providing source for free.
| (I think; IANAL, there's maybe some caveat about exactly
| when you have to give source and to who.) That can actually
| work if your users don't want to compile stuff themselves.
| mnau wrote:
| In theory. Show me one example (not service or support,
| but selling actual software). You have a better chance of
| winning a lottery, happens every day.
|
| In theory, I can just walk through solid wall, using a
| quantum tunneling effect.
|
| The closes thing you will find are things like blender
| release under GPL (i.e. pay me a money to release my
| commercial software under GPL, but that's not selling GPL
| software),
|
| This whole line of thinking is disingenuous.
| maccard wrote:
| Simple mobile tools shows its definitely possible [0].
| Simple gallery pro has 110k reviews, for example.
|
| >You have a better chance of winning a lottery, happens
| every day.
|
| Agreed here, though.
|
| [0] https://www.simplemobiletools.com/
| tapoxi wrote:
| Blender is nonprofit and funded by donations and grants. The
| closest analog to this in the game engine space is Godot.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Blender is also managed exceptionally well for a FOSS
| project, systematically polishing up rough edges and paying
| close attention to the needs and desires of its userbase
| which no doubt inspires larger donations from more donors
| than FOSS projects usually have.
| prox wrote:
| Their biggest marketplace (blendermarket) also directly
| contributes to the the Foundation as well.
| breakingcups wrote:
| It is incredible. Truly incredible. I know of no other
| FOSS project that comes close.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > and they have no good solutions to this
|
| Bought by Apple or Microsoft maybe?
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Unity seem like a very valuable acquisition target. Any of
| the American or Chinese big tech companies could put Unity to
| good strategic use plus a few medium sized tech companies
| like Adobe and Sony.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| My money is on Meta. Unity powers the vast majority of VR
| games and is (was) the favored API for Meta's dev tools, and
| _even Apple_ chose it as their only officially supported 3rd
| party toolkit for the Vision Pro.
|
| Meta seems to enjoy throwing money into the VR space to
| subsidize it at the low-cost end, I could easily see them
| doing a hostile takeover of Unity "for the good of the VR
| space"
| kypro wrote:
| Both Apple and Meta would love buy Unity, but my
| understanding is that regulators likely wouldn't allow it.
|
| If you haven't seen it already:
| https://sriramk.com/memos/zuck-unity.pdf
| raincole wrote:
| > They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no
| good solutions to this.
|
| Unity acquired Weta at 1.6B. The solution is not to do this.
| nick__m wrote:
| Not Weta FX but Digital's Tools, Pipeline, and Engineering.
|
| "Weta Digital's Academy Award-Winning VFX teams will continue
| as a standalone entity known as WetaFX under majority
| ownership by Sir Peter Jackson and helmed by CEO Prem
| Akkaraju."1
|
| 1- https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2021/Unity-
| Com...
| pilchard123 wrote:
| Not even all of Weta - only the digital VFX bit.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| I don't understand their refusal to make games that will make
| them money _and_ showcase Unity 's capabilities.
|
| The only reason Unreal engine has so favorable license
| conditions is because Epic Games earn billions from Fortnite
| and Epic Games Store.
| maccard wrote:
| Unreal has had much more favourable license terms since ue4
| in 2014, which is before Fortnite and the Store. To the best
| of my knowledge, unreals terms have always been "good", which
| is one of the reasons it's so popular.
| cma wrote:
| In some ways this is backwards, you could argue Fortnite was
| a flop and became a success because of their license
| conditions (pivot to cloning licensee PUBG).
| raincole wrote:
| Because to make the next Fortnite takes not just a lot of
| money, but _luck_. What if they made a game and it flopped (a
| techinically impressive game can definitely flop)? People
| will be like "oh see Unity engine is so bad, even the game
| from the first party doesn't sell".
| Already__Taken wrote:
| but why aren't they investing in successes as they find
| them. There was loads of room to invest in ksp1 to try and
| get a chunk for themselves.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I'm still sad there hasn't been a new Unreal Tournament since
| 2007. It's all only Fortnite now.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| They seem to have something in the works:
| https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/en-US/
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I fear that this is the 2014 pre-alpha that got cancelled
| in 2017 due to f..ing Fortnite.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Tournament_(canc
| elled_v...
| jakebasile wrote:
| At least we'll always have the first, best UT.
| mehlmao wrote:
| UT99 and all the Unreal games have been delisted from
| stores and they're shutting down the game's master
| server. You can still play solo or in LAN but online
| multiplayer is gone and there's no (legal) way to get new
| copies.
| ngc248 wrote:
| UT 99 and Quake 3 Arena came out at the same time. But UT
| with its modes and different game types was just amazing.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| as someone who has played so much of these two games:
| both are incredible games, in their own way -
| creating/testing maps, the weapons, the movements, the
| game-modes, the moddability (skins, sounds, etc)...so
| good
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Sadly, there's no way for those on Apple Silicon to play
| it :'(
| [deleted]
| aniforprez wrote:
| Honestly, if they just added revenue share like Unreal does and
| tweaked their subscriptions a little, the backlash wouldn't
| have been nearly as bad. The uproar is a combination of a
| really badly announced system and details that don't seem to be
| ironed out properly leaving devs ripe for abuse. Plus you have
| one of the most tight knit communities of artists who all
| reacted almost as one to this announcement and have experience
| with abuse from gamers in terms of piracy, review bombs, refund
| waves and so on. I guarantee most developers would have
| grumbled but given in to a revenue share
|
| I'm also completely baffled how poorly thought out this whole
| thing has been. Unity has been used by the likes of Nintendo,
| Microsoft and other massive game development studios. Do they
| seriously think a fee applied on retroactive sales and revenue
| numbers would be accepted without issue from them?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Honestly, if they just added revenue share like Unreal does
| and tweaked their subscriptions a little, the backlash
| wouldn't have been nearly as bad.
|
| They ran the numbers. If it was going to work they would have
| gone that route, but I think the problem is that the clear
| majority of Unity-users (indie devs) make no money anyway.
|
| Revenue sharing with someone making $0 in revenue is
| pointless.
| shaftway wrote:
| But they also aren't demanding $0.20 per install on free
| games. So if your game has $0 in revenue and 50,000,000,000
| installs, then they still get $0.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Asking someone making $0 to pay you X per download is even
| more pointless.
| fragmede wrote:
| Okay, but when we're told to share our work for free "for
| the exposure", we're supposed to buy that and just give it
| away? They want _ed_ people to use their product for free
| for the exposure. Changing their mind is one thing, making
| it retroactive is another.
| cfiggers wrote:
| > Do they seriously think a fee applied on retroactive sales
| and revenue numbers would be accepted without issue from
| them?
|
| Unity have not proposed a fee on retroactive sales. They have
| proposed a from-this-point-forward fee that applies to new
| sales/installs of any game made with Unity, including new
| sales/installs of back catalog games.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| This is incorrect. They are basing the numbers in January
| based on previous install numbers, not "from this point
| on."
|
| Note, it's not sales, it's installs. And it's not new
| installs.
|
| That you keep saying sales really means you aren't fully
| informed about the changes and should spend some time
| researching this.
| ooterness wrote:
| Sales and installs don't happen at the same time. If I buy
| a game once on Steam, I might install it on any number of
| unique devices. Per the Unity FAQ, every one of those
| installation events results in an additional bill for the
| game's developer.
|
| In other words: This is absolutely a retroactive rug-pull
| on new installs of old sales.
|
| Update: Because of the way they're rolling this out, the
| only way to avoid the retroactive license change is to
| immediately stop using Unity's development tools. If I were
| running a game studio, that's what I would do.
| Rovoska wrote:
| Only on hacker news will you find someone feeling bad for a
| company, of all things.
| enlyth wrote:
| I wouldn't feel bad for their executives. They are the ones who
| chose the 'growth at all costs' path, and this is what you get.
|
| They could've probably been sustainable and profitable if they
| mainly serviced their core audience of indie developers with a
| smaller amount of employees and a simpler product, but it seems
| they really wanted to brute force themselves into the AAA
| market.
| kypro wrote:
| I suppose. There's quite a few companies in Unity's position
| right now for a reason though.
|
| For better or worse the "growth at all costs" strategy was
| the strategy companies like Unity had to employ for the last
| decade to attract investor capital so I tend to blame the low
| interest rate "easy money" environment more than companies
| like Unity being reckless.
|
| Although that said, it does seem Unity made some stupid moves
| in recent years. I don't follow the company that closely, but
| I'm aware they made some large acquisitions funded in-part
| with debt during the pandemic. It's one thing taking on debt
| if you have a strong balance sheet, but it seems a little
| short-sighted for a company losing billions to use debt to
| fund an acquisition - especially at the elevated prices they
| paid during the pandemic.
| enumjorge wrote:
| > I tend to blame the low interest rate "easy money"
| environment more than companies like Unity being reckless.
|
| As if the founders had no other options in life than to
| start companies relying on business models where you
| capture the market with investor money and then once you're
| customers are locked in, you squeeze them as much as
| possible. Unreal is in the same market. They also took in
| investor money. They're not in the same situation.
|
| The people behind Unity chose to play the game. The c-suite
| is handsomely rewarded, and we praise their business acumen
| when things go right, but if things go wrong suddenly
| they're victims of circumstance.
|
| They can take ownership of their decisions.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| artursapek wrote:
| You can't stay small if you took a lot of investor cash. This
| is why self-funded companies are usually the ones who avoid
| these awful growth/layoff cycles.
| Draiken wrote:
| As far as I can tell that's the most common IPO company cycle
| repeating itself.
|
| The early investors and founders cash out first and the
| public that bought into the unsustainable growth trajectory
| are left with a failing company.
|
| This is so common I truly don't understand why people still
| buy into these companies.
| educaysean wrote:
| Everything you wrote paints a familiar picture: a company whose
| leadership made poor financial decisions over and over. I won't
| judge anyone for mourning the loss of their favorite corporate
| entity, but I personally find it hard to feel pity knowing that
| they dug their own grave.
| alexvitkov wrote:
| They spent like 6 billion on acquisitions that don't help make
| their core product better. Literally just don't do that and
| you'd be in the green right now.
| nylonstrung wrote:
| This isn't quite true as those acquisitions are paid for by
| stock and debt to a large extent
|
| It's not like they bought these with a pile of $6B cash they
| had lying around
| hyperhopper wrote:
| > stock and debt
|
| Yes, and now they are burning tons of money due to that
| debt and having to make ridiculous decisions to appease the
| stockholders. You just stated the exact reason this whole
| thing is a problem.
| JCharante wrote:
| Losing a billion means they spent more than that, but on what?
| I haven't used unity since 2016 and never in a professional
| capacity but I can't imagine anything significant was improved
| or added in the last year.
| chefandy wrote:
| I'm not going to say that they spend their money wisely, but
| game engine development, in general, moves at breakneck
| speed, and unity is no exception.
| cfiggers wrote:
| I'd love to read more about "game engine development, in
| general, moves at breakneck speed," if you happen to know
| of a blog post or something or might be willing to share
| more.
| rozab wrote:
| Maybe they should stop acquiring a continuous stream of
| startups that have nothing to do with their primary mission? I
| would bet only a very small proportion of Unity employees work
| on or even adjacent to the Unity engine.
| superchroma wrote:
| Why feel bad? They're a victim of deliberate bad choices. The
| buck stops at the top. Nobody told Riccitiello to hit the gas
| pedal, nor to enrich himself by selling shares prior to a
| disastrous announcement, he did that all on his own.
|
| I feel much worse for the thousands of developers he's holding
| a metaphorical gun to with this awful policy, who now have to
| stress about swapping engines.
| okamiueru wrote:
| He did? Is insider trading laws in the US non-existant? Wow
| danjoredd wrote:
| Insider trading laws exist, execs just like to ignore them.
| Hopefully, the SEC takes a look into his dealings
| considering how public this is.
| ZekeSulastin wrote:
| Yeah, 2,000 sold (~50,000 over the last year) out of
| ~3,200,000 still held, under a trading plan filed in May.
| delfinom wrote:
| Not gonna lie, I was looking at their Q10 filing recently and
| I'm dumbfounded they have spent $450 million for "sales and
| marketing" so far this year.
|
| ON WHAT AND WHY???
| intelVISA wrote:
| The Unreal thing is that Unity has/had ~8,000 employees last
| year. Sounds like an awful lot for a mobile game engine.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| >...for a mobile game engine.
|
| May I ask you if you ever heard of Rust? The game, not the
| programming language. Online survive game, which has
| thousands of active players every single day since like a
| decade already, full 3D and quite awesome graphics I'd say.
| It's written in Unity.
|
| It's wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(video_game)
|
| A gameplay of a rather popular youtuber that does daily
| uploads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSXCI0rLvHg
| Iulioh wrote:
| Man, Rust is infamous for being reeeeaaaallly badly
| optimized
|
| I would have picked a different game.
|
| I remember the minutes of loading of a new world..
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Loading into a new world takes a long time, but once I'm
| in there, I get great performance.
|
| That said I'm in the "dozens of hours" bracket and not
| the "thousands of hours" one, so maybe I just haven't hit
| that yet.
| crysin wrote:
| While I don't know the Rust code, this isn't necessarily
| solely a Unity problem. Unity's C# API provides a lot of
| footguns that game developers tend to not think about in
| the near term. Lots of code bases I've seen in Unity
| don't do a good job of caching component instances, or
| just never opened the profiler to see their GC is off the
| charts. Unity can run really well if the proper thought
| and care is put into it.
| Ekaros wrote:
| That seems quite a lot. Compared to game development teams
| with their own engines which they have kept modern while
| releasing games...
| RugnirViking wrote:
| How many such game development companies actually are
| there? I see a lot of aging engines out there, and
| companies that jumped to unreal, but I have by no means
| broad knowledge
| devnullbrain wrote:
| >aging engines
|
| Gaming companies get a lot of crap for this - it seems
| unfair. The OS I'm using to write this is a relative
| newcomer at only 30 years old. Obviously, it has changed
| a lot in that time, but so have the engines. Most
| software doesn't get rewritten, it evolves.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Off the top of my head, there's Larian Studios (bg3), and
| Haemimont Games (ja3).
| intelVISA wrote:
| id Tech is pretty solid
| aaarrm wrote:
| I know the devs of Hades have a custom engine and they
| are by no means a large studio
| nylonstrung wrote:
| That's a 2D single-player game-- it gets way harder if
| you're trying to emulate the feature set of Unreal/Unity
|
| Source: game dev using unreal
| hokumguru wrote:
| Certainly not an expert but top studios like Bethesda and
| CDPR maintain their own engines with an order of
| magnitude less employees. They make games too.
| grumple wrote:
| They also produce games that are very similar to their
| other games, with similar mechanics, while Unity has to
| support a far more diverse set of games (basically
| anything 2d or 3d), and presumably has to continually
| offer a wider set of cutting-edge features.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Given the state of Creation Engine, I wouldn't say that
| Bethesda maintains their engine well. CDPR is switching
| to Unreal. CP2077 launch issues were mainly due to their
| engine not being capable of handling such large games.
| derstander wrote:
| CDPR seems to be switching to Unreal.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/03/the-witcher-will-
| retu...
| jasonlotito wrote:
| To be fair, the difference here is that Unity is doing more
| than just an engine for a specific type of game. Rather,
| they are building lots of different tools for lots of
| different games.
|
| For example, Larian (BG3) and Wube (Factorio) each have
| their own engine. They are specially built specifically for
| the games they are making.
|
| Also, you say "have been kept modern" but even that is
| questionable. "Modern?" What does that really mean? It's
| "modern" enough for the game. Starfield was just released,
| and it was released without ray tracing.
|
| And we are just talking about games. Unity and Unreal do
| more than just working on the engine for games. So yes,
| while it's a lot, it's not fair to compare the bespoke
| engine use by game companies and engines like Unity and
| Unreal.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Where did you read that Unity is just a mobile game engine?
|
| Unity supports basically all gaming platforms. Windows,
| Linux, Mac, PS5, Switch, XBox, etc.
|
| There are AAA desktop games that use Unity.
| mcv wrote:
| It's not just a mobile game engine, it's an everything game
| engine. They support (nearly?) every platform. That does take
| some work.
|
| Even so, 8000 employees does sound a lot. And if they're
| losing a billion per year, it sounds like they have no
| revenue at all.
| whatyesaid wrote:
| Epic Games only had about 2,000 in 2020 and they also
| develop games, store front (although really slowly), so
| it's at least a 4x more than they need.
|
| But also their previous monetization seems to try charge
| per professional developer which is a limited audience
| compared to consumers, especially if you want to maintain a
| AAA engine (which it seems Unreal is favoured still) given
| it seems fast pace techniques & improvements. Maybe by
| selling cloud servers for networking, which I think maybe
| they were too expensive compared to alternatives.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Between Unity's headcount and acquisitions it's hard to not
| be reminded of the dril candle tweet.
| RobKohr wrote:
| Mentioning a tweet without quoting it is kinda annoying. It
| isn't like it could be that long.
| grotorea wrote:
| Not not it's an everything engine it's the most popular
| engine on steam by far from a quick search, although it does
| leans towards indie.
| https://infogram.com/1d560b7e-21a1-437a-91f4-198309bf3e25
| https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/game-engines-on-
| steam...
| olig15 wrote:
| I'd probably bet that the majority of games on steam have
| less than 1000 sales, so being a popular game on Steam
| probably doesn't mean much compared to being a popular game
| by daily active users viewing unity ads.
| grotorea wrote:
| The methodology on the site only includes games with a
| minimum popularity, so the long tail of tiny indie games
| isn't included. By the way, since steam has a fee to be
| included, aren't most of those tiny indie games over at
| itch.io anyway?
|
| > Unless stated otherwise, we filtered out unreleased
| games, free games, those that launched with less than a
| $4.99 price point, and those that have fewer than 50
| reviews.
| ryathal wrote:
| Someone dug into this recently, it's over 50% of steam
| games haven't made $1k in sales. The vast majority of
| steam by game count is complete trash.
| 1323portloo wrote:
| That's not their focus at all. They're trying to be an all-
| things-entertainment company, currently, they are focusing on
| movie animation and digital character creation.
| maccard wrote:
| Do feel bad for them but this is a problem of their own making.
| Many parts of their current situation were avoidable.
|
| That doesn't justify what they've tried to do here though. This
| isn't just a price increase, it's a significant price increase,
| and a poorly thought out "revshare" model that applies
| retroactively people who signed deals with them and built a
| business model off of the deal they signed.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| > I kinda feel bad for Unity.
|
| I don't. They could have sold to Meta and didn't. If they
| didn't have a plan that didn't involve fucking their users,
| that's on them.
| grotorea wrote:
| > They have no moat
|
| How easy is for a studio to change engine? Isn't that a decent
| moat?
| yard2010 wrote:
| So they get to hold their current customers hostages and get
| no new customers.
| nylonstrung wrote:
| It's extremely difficult- it's going to break your pipeline
| and all of your programmers and tech artists essentially need
| to learn a new language
|
| If you were switching Unity -> Unreal you'd honestly be
| better off firing your team and hiring Unreal devs
| maccard wrote:
| I think we're about to find out.
| whatyesaid wrote:
| Maybe Godot is similar enough where you'd be able to consider
| this. Otherwise this move is more harmful in the long term of
| Unity and it's about future games and not current ones. Long
| term matters more, always.
|
| It may also make AAA invest away from Unreal as it looks like
| a monopoly now.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Is Unity-2023 version a billion dollars better than Unity-2022,
| or even close to that?
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Some of the stuff looks pretty cool that they are adding but
| would probably take a retooling of many workflows to use
| correctly. They had some very compelling items they were
| adding in that would make people pick it over others. But
| with those license terms. That will be a hard pass by many.
| My guess is they are hurting financially but took cues from
| their weta tool stack for installs. Where in that industry
| per install cost is decently normal and just rolled into a
| production budget. But on the games side that is not going to
| fly. As it is a one time cost vs recurring. I feel bad for
| the shops where they are 2 years in with this thing and just
| had the rug pulled on them.
| IdiranVibe wrote:
| Not at all... lots of people still run unity 2021
| somenameforme wrote:
| Unreal is technically orders of magnitude ahead of Unity, and
| they have around 4000 employees spread across multiple
| continents. And I'm referring to the entirety of Epic, so
| that's also the Fortnite teams and everybody else. Unity, by
| contrast, has about 8000 employees. Many companies seem to be
| hiring far more employees than they realistically need - often
| to the point of their own detriment, and I don't entirely
| understand why. Even for successful companies like Google, it
| seems unlikely that they _need_ anywhere remotely near 180k
| employees.
| mrtksn wrote:
| > They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no
| good solutions to this
|
| Maybe they should have something to show for this $1B/year and
| take a cut of this $250B+ industry to cover the costs? They
| appear to have about %30 market share, so they need to capture
| less than %2 of the value created with their tool to break even
| and if they can't do that or they are providing tech for the
| less than average profitable part of the industry they should
| shift focus or reduce costs.
|
| AFAIK it's only natural for businesses to go out of business if
| they can't capture more value than they consume.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| (deleted)
| mrtksn wrote:
| It appears that the video gaming industry size is 242B as
| of this year: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-
| analysis/video-ga...
|
| None of this is attributable to engines, it's the size of
| the products built using the engines and it appears that
| the ad revenues are not included and that appears to be
| another $80B.
|
| The game engine market is the market of supplying the game
| developers with the tech to build their games. That's where
| the game engine makers that spend 1B per year and hold %30
| of the engine market need to charge about %2 of the
| products made using their engines to break even.
| babypuncher wrote:
| They brought this on themselves. They never needed 7700
| employees just to maintain an indie-scale game engine.
|
| Epic maintains their far more advanced engine with 2200 people,
| and they _also_ run a AAA live service game.
| maccard wrote:
| Epic is way more than 2200 people. It was 2000 people when I
| worked there almost 3 years ago.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Why'd ya leave?
| numlock86 wrote:
| > While Unreal engine currently does not have terms like Unity's,
| there's nothing stopping them from doing something similar. In
| fact if Unity manages to get away with this it seems likely they
| will follow suit.
|
| I sense a lack of arguments if people make up pure speculation
| like that without any foundation. Also Unity's business model had
| a negative tendency over the last couple of years already ...
| with Epic having clear statements and an ethical roadmap in
| response. Oh, and by the way: Unreal Engine is open source. The
| more you know.
| adultSwim wrote:
| > Unreal Engine is open source
|
| It doesn't look like it to me. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-
| US/eula/unreal
| numlock86 wrote:
| > The Licensed Technology licensed to you under this
| Agreement includes all Unreal Engine code and related content
| that is copied to your computer when you install Unreal
| Engine.
|
| Have you read it? You literally get read access to their
| entire GitHub repo.
| adultSwim wrote:
| Yes. Having access to the source is not the same as open
| source. I encourage you to re-read it. They also have an
| FAQ clearly outlining the restrictions.
| https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq
|
| "Can I copy and paste Unreal engine code into my own
| project or engine?
|
| If you use any Unreal Engine code in your product (even
| just a little), then your entire product is governed by the
| Unreal Engine EULA, and is subject to 5% royalties when
| your gross lifetime revenues from that product exceed $1
| million USD."
| numlock86 wrote:
| > [...] and is subject to 5% royalties when your gross
| lifetime revenues from that product exceed $1 million
| USD.
|
| That's part of their general license and business model
| anyway, and not specific for source code usage, but the
| engine (parts) itself. How is this relevant?
|
| > I encourage you to re-read it.
| c-cube wrote:
| That's called source available, not open source.
| adultSwim wrote:
| Notice that you can't even access the repo without them
| authorizing you to do so. Notice that there aren't any
| public mirrors for the current version of the code.
|
| They say you can fork but also point out that you can't
| distribute the code without the people you are sharing with
| also having a license.
| numlock86 wrote:
| Whatever floats your boat. I am not here to get into
| Stallman level discussions about what is open and what is
| not. Point is we get to work with the sources if we
| want/have to, tied to a license with all its privileges
| ... and of course restrictions. Just like with any other
| open software sources.
| phkahler wrote:
| Why not charge $1 for your game? Problem solved. If you're making
| a game with a fancy commercial engine I would hope what you're
| offering is worth a buck. Let's get some quality in this world.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| With $1 paid to the developer the player only needs to
| (re)install the game 6 times on their computer to cost the
| developer more than they earned.
|
| This pricing is _per install_ , not per player. Installations
| are an unrestricted functionality which can be abused. If you
| care about quality games: this pricing causes the opposite.
| hcks wrote:
| They literally stated it would not affect reinstalls.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| From their FAQ[0]:
|
| _> We treat different devices as different installs. We
| don't want to track identity across different devices._
|
| This allows malicious actors to fake the device identity,
| which leads to the exact same problem.
|
| _> We are not going to charge a fee for fraudulent
| installs or "install bombing." We will work directly with
| you on cases where fraud or botnets are suspected of
| malicious intent._
|
| This roughly says "trust us bro". They will "work directly
| with you" in cases of fraud? How nice, but that could just
| mean an automated response email with generic advice,
| followed by radio silence. No promise that they will
| resolve the issue, no promise they will work on it before
| your dev studio is bankrupt, this is just a collection of
| words built on trust they don't have right now.
|
| [0] https://unity.com/pricing-updates
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| There is what they say, which is often not exactly what
| they do. And even if the intentions are good, behavior or
| scenarios not conceived may emerge.
| Archipelagia wrote:
| The difference in conversions between free and $1 is not a
| matter of price. The hard part is getting someone to pay in the
| first place.
|
| That's why a model of free game with paid addons/extras/pay-to-
| win/etc. works so well - once someone already tried your game
| and gets invested in it, they're more likely to spend anything.
| Archipelagia wrote:
| And in mobile gaming there's also the matter of looking for
| "whales". Basically, while majority of people will never
| spend anything, there's a minority willing to pay hundreds or
| thousands of dollars. Then, the difficulty comes from showing
| your game to enough people to find whales.
|
| (Whether that model is ethical in the first place is a whole
| different matter. I don't think it is, so maybe eliminating
| it will be a net positive in the world.)
| aabbccddee22 wrote:
| Because mobile games that aren't free do not sell (except
| Minecraft). In mobile F2P space you can end up with tons of
| downloads, with less than 20 cents per download, because
| majority of the players are free casual ones, who play few
| hours or even minutes, and 99% of your revenue comes from the
| so called 'whales' (players who spend a LOT of money). If you
| hate this business model - good for you, I do too and I don't
| do mobile gamedev, but it's a reality there and Unity knows it.
|
| Unity also doesn't give a crap about quality unless by quality
| you mean microtransactions, milking players and ads/adware. The
| engine is associated (partly unfairly) with lagginess, low
| performance, high ram usage, and crappy games and assets flips.
| Unity is famous for how slowly new features come and how buggy
| it is in parts. They also scrapped their own game on Unity that
| was supposed to show how to use Unity right, it's an engine
| company that never made games (unlike Epic or id Software, who
| made games first, engine seconds, and even when being in engine
| business they kept making games). Unity users who just slapped
| few assets together basically created the asset flip genre, the
| opposite of quality. As CEO of EA Riccotello supported always
| online online DRM that shut down singleplayer games on release
| day due to servers dying, as CEO of Unity he said you are a
| "fucking idiot" (direct words) if you don't want to maximize
| your monetary return from your players. Unity bought an adware
| company, Unity has an ad network (and if you use it to put ads
| in your game, they waive the install fee, curious..).
| JackMorgan wrote:
| This should also be a wakeup call to anyone using closed source
| tools at all: DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda,
| Azure, AWS, Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc.
|
| While some of these tools are best in class, it's borrowed time
| until the owner decides to change the terms, stop offering it, or
| raise prices enough to damage your business.
|
| Closed source software tools are a liability, and the benefits
| often are only minor compared to the risks.
|
| I've been on several teams where entire projects with dozens of
| person years of effort had to be thrown out because tools stopped
| being supported or were made prohibitively expensive. This isn't
| about open source posturing. Relying on closed source software
| you can't easily switch off of just isn't worth the risk.
|
| (As an aside, I'm not a purist, I'll use tools like JetBrains,
| because I could easily switch off to open source tools if I had
| to without any disruption to my business)
|
| Edit, I do not suggest writing your own tools, I suggest using
| great open source tools: postgres, apache, Linux, mariadb, open
| source languages, Redis, couchdb, etc.
| fragsworth wrote:
| > DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, Azure, AWS,
| Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc.
|
| At least with these individual tools, it's usually not your
| entire codebase written around that thing. For instance, you
| can generally switch from one database to another if they
| decide to overcharge you. You can even switch from one cloud
| service to another. In other words, they (usually) don't have
| you nearly as locked in.
|
| With Unity, it is a much bigger ordeal to switch to something
| like Godot and Unreal and most people who have already finished
| their games can't even really consider it as an option. This is
| why it was so egregious.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| I've heard (sarcastically) that MongoDB's business model is
| relying on companies who have it entrenched via tech debt and
| can't get out.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| Of course you can switch databases, but in practice it is
| extremely expensive. That's a big reason why it is pretty
| rare. Why use a closed source tool and take on that risk when
| great open source ones exist?
| fragsworth wrote:
| Usually the only good reason is because you already have
| developed lot of experience with with it.
|
| I'm just saying it's not as bad because it's quite a bit
| easier to switch a database than to switch a game engine.
| dan_mctree wrote:
| For a lot of companies, switching databases is
| effectively impossible. Perhaps not quite as impossible
| as switching game engines, but certainly impossible
| enough that it would kill the business. A lot of
| companies use database specific functionality that's far
| from trivial to replicate in another database. A lot of
| that database specific functionality can also be legacy
| that no one really understands anymore. Migrating without
| an option to keep these poorly understood but critical
| systems will set you up for unexpected data loss,
| corruption or availability issues. And that's after
| spending a year on your migration. If Oracle pulls
| anything like Unity here, this will kill off a lot of
| companies
| bgirard wrote:
| It took Amazon several years to migrate away from Oracle:
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-
| amazons-...
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, also that's why the article's Word and Google Docs
| example strikes me as weird : you shouldn't be using
| these either, for similar reasons !
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, but LibreOffice is the perfect example on why
| people pass up on Open Source projects.
| zymhan wrote:
| > it's quite a bit easier to switch a database than to
| switch a game engine
|
| _presses X to doubt_
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Why use a closed source tool and take on that risk when
| great open source ones exist?
|
| in the case of servers: because open source servers
| literally can't support your scale of business. That's one
| of the few places where Open Source can never truly
| succeed: when you need a lot of hardware and the operating
| costs exceed any income coming in.
|
| By that point it is a lot better to roll your own servers.
| But that is of course crazy expensive. Even other
| multibillion dollar corporations choose to leave some
| server management to places like Amazon/Microsoft.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| It is a wake up call, I don't think open source is the only
| solution though. You just need good business practices.
|
| Work with vendors that you trust, vet your dependencies, decide
| how much risk you want to tolerate, pay attention to the
| licenses that you are using.
|
| _Especially_ for something as critical as a game engine is to
| game development companies.
| tombert wrote:
| I agree that it's not the only solution, but it's the only
| way to (somewhat) _guarantee_ a lack of bullshit.
|
| There are companies like The Omni Group that I think are,
| generally speaking, bullshit-free. They make (in my opinion)
| pretty good products, I can buy them once, I get the
| normally-expected number of updates, and it's about as ideal
| a transaction you'd want. I don't mind them charging money
| for a good product, and I'm grateful that products like
| OmniFocus exist.
|
| That said, one thing that continues to bother me is that Omni
| could change things _whenever they want_. They could decide
| to start charging 10x the price if I use OmniFocus for
| anything involving business, or they could make it so that my
| flat-fee purchase of OmniFocus no longer works.
|
| Do I think Omni is going to do that? No, I think they're
| generally pretty decent people, but open source _guarantees_
| that I can always take a snapshot of the "current state" of
| the project, and also guarantee that there's not retroactive
| strings being attached to things I'm making with that
| software.
| manquer wrote:
| > MongoDB, Elasticsearch
|
| > Redis
|
| You suggest that mongo and elastic search are not open source
| and redis is ?
|
| While all three have a company backing them and sell or have
| some restrictions (usually targeted towards cloud providers not
| self hosting ) i would have said all of them are open enough in
| their current versions not to have a vendor lock in risk
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Redis is open core (that is, redis itself is Open Source,
| only extensions aren't), the others are outright not Open
| Source. That's a meaningful difference, depending on whether
| you're using the non-FOSS extensions.
| onethought wrote:
| But history has shown them get cheaper and more capable over
| time for nearly every example you gave.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| Survivorship bias. These are the ones that haven't _yet_
| gotten worse and are still currently popular. I'm listing
| them so people won't get blindsided when they do eventually
| bite their users.
|
| There isn't enough space to list the closed source software
| tools that didn't make it. Off the top of my head: Adobe
| Flash, MS Basic, SourceSafe, ActiveDesktop, FoxPro, J#, Oslo,
| IronRuby, and Silverlight.
| Iulioh wrote:
| The problem is that behind OS software there isn't a lot of
| incentive to develop.
|
| I mean, sute, but there is a reason why really good and
| complex software is usually closed.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| It rather looks like it depends on who makes the product.
| One thing to look at is who has established trust and (so
| far) maintained that trust. For example, AWS has said that
| their products will get cheaper over time and that they
| wont deprecate any. The fact that they've managed to do
| that for 15 years or so means they have a built a lot of
| trust - which is itself an investment that they would be
| foolish (financially damaged by) a decision to break that
| trust.
|
| Meanwhile, Google has firmly established that they will
| destroy any product at any time, and you would be insane to
| build a business on their products.
|
| Adobe and Microsoft make meh products that dominate
| industries, and you are at their whim, and look, these two
| companies provide all your examples. (And to be fair,
| SourceSafe went away because it was not reliable and any
| sane business paying for a VCS switched to perforce before
| eventually moving to git like everyone else).
|
| IBM will sell you anything as long as it's called "Watson"
| so who knows which Watson has been discontinued or not.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > which is itself an investment that they would be
| foolish (financially damaged by) a decision to break that
| trust.
|
| Yup, Unity also had that same trust for 15 years. Never
| underestimate greed.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| While it's true that this can happen to external tools, it
| doesn't happen very often. Companies have a very strong
| incentive to ensure their products are supported long terms and
| work well. For in-house developed software it happens
| frequently that past employees leave the codebase in a state,
| where new team members end up rewriting it.
|
| So it's a bit weird to say you shouldn't use closed source
| since there is a small chance things change in a way we don't
| like, and then your alternative is to use in-house software,
| where maintenance issues in the future are pretty much
| guaranteed.
| Draiken wrote:
| >Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their
| products are supported long terms and work well.
|
| I would say that's not quite accurate. They have only one
| incentive: profit.
|
| Long term supported products are one way of getting money,
| but it's most definitely not the only way. Many times it's
| not the most profitable one either.
|
| Companies don't make shitty decisions because they are
| scheming on how to screw customers up. They do it because
| when push comes to shove, only profit matters.
|
| One guy will plot a chart saying if we screw customers this
| way (with pretty words, of course) we can get X% more profit.
| Then they get promoted and this cycle repeats itself. Or a
| pandemic hits and suddenly your margins decrease drastically.
| Now screwing the customer is back on the table.
|
| Unless your company only plans to be running for a few years,
| those are not as rare as we may think.
| dehrmann wrote:
| If AWS actually tried to abuse its power, it would really
| damage the tech industry. Tech companies would see the risk
| and start treating the cloud as rented machines (EC2), and
| stop realizing all the benefits of their provider managing a
| complex system on their behalf.
|
| If I were AWS, I'd willingly write into contracts that costs
| can go up no faster than the PPI + 5%, barring some sort of
| force majeure. Hardware gets cheaper, so I'd expect costs to
| come down, but this essentially "we're not going to screw
| you" clause.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| If AWS tried to abuse its power, people would switch to
| another CSP.
|
| While certainly, the shift would not be easy, but if AWS
| increased their prices enough, it could still be a savings
| in the long run.
|
| EDIT: On the other hand, publicly traded companies are
| often _extremely_ short-sighted because they have to make
| those quarterly reports, so maybe they would be unwilling
| to spend $X over the course of a year in order to save $X
| every year after that.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| Such a platform should be a co-op owned by all the users,
| designed for the public good. It really is almost like a
| piece of infrastructure.
|
| But AWS is a business, and businesses are there to make
| money. They are there to extract as much money as possible
| from users. I doubt they'll ever do a big change like
| Unity, but I bet they end up with a slow boil of raising
| prices.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| My alternative is to use battle tested open source software.
| I don't suggest writing a database in house.
|
| Also, I would say the opposite, it happens all the time.
| There's only a few closed source software tools that have
| been around for more than fifteen years, and countless that
| didn't make it.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their
| products are supported long terms and work well.
|
| This is only sometimes true. If a company knows their
| product's growth phase is over, they may decide to milk the
| existing customers as much as possible. That's the right
| choice for maximizing profit.
|
| I believe that's what happened with a previous company I
| worked at. Vendor of an old software product started suing
| about licensing violations trying to extract more. They
| couldn't harm future sales, because no one was going to buy
| the thing anymore. A team spent a year replacing it.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| That's great in theory, but most people don't have the funds
| for a rack, let alone a cage, or people to stack and maintain
| it all. The hardware alone to run a proper DB cluster is going
| to be prohibitive for most startups.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| While I support using the open source counterparts, most of the
| time the closed source tools price change doesn't happen
| retroactively. It's usually go together with new version or new
| contacts.
|
| Unity pricing though, happens retroactively in a sense that
| older, released games will be tracked the install numbers too.
| As if when SQL Server having the price changes to gb-based
| pricing happens too to 2005 version and forward. I can assure
| that even government will decline that kind of retroactive
| change.
| pxoe wrote:
| >It's like if Microsoft decided that you had to pay per person
| who read your document made in Word.
|
| funnily enough, isn't that literally what figma does with their
| surprise 'editor fee' charges
| gareth_untether wrote:
| Sets a bad precedent if they can. Even if they backpedal now,
| trust has been broken.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| Eventually Godot will need to find a way to finance its
| development if it gets enough popularity.
|
| I'm in general sketchy about OSS revenue generation if the devs
| don't collect $$ proactively but rely on goodwill.
| Eumenes wrote:
| These platforms just pigeon hole developers into a corner. Yeah I
| get it - it makes game dev 'accessible' but what are we really
| missing out on? I'd take quality of quantity any day. Entire
| generations of programmers are being boxed into being tool
| dependent. Same goes for web frameworks and mobile ecosystems.
| Obviously building a game engine from scratch is a massive work
| of labor and requires vast knowledge in alot of things, but
| outside of AAA studios, is anything building engines from the
| ground up?
| supermatt wrote:
| Is Godot feature comparable with unity? Why would someone choose
| unity over godot?
| wccrawford wrote:
| Until recently, Godot was practically unusable for 3D. They're
| still actively adding features that other engines already have.
| It also exports for consoles, where Godot doesn't.
|
| Having said that, I've been looking at it recently and it looks
| like it has everything I need. I'm definitely going to try it
| out before deciding between it and UE5.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| unity ecosystem is enormous. so many resource packs, assets,
| tutorials, extensions, etc etc etc.
|
| Big network effects
| Havoc wrote:
| I think the art asset library is a big part of the difference
| dgb23 wrote:
| Unity has a large asset and plugin ecosystem.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| To me (not really into gamedev actually so chances are I'm
| completely wrong) it seems like nowadays, when physics and
| reneding is done in hardware and game engines bundle so much
| logic and are shared among so many games, creators will soon be
| able to give up coding (anything except scripts) and concentrate
| on selling pure content. Users will then purchase compatible
| engines from engine developers or use open-source engines.
| [deleted]
| seaourfreed wrote:
| We need nVidia and AMD to help godot engine to get the high end
| things in Unreal engine.
|
| I'd love academics working on 3D to submit things that can roll
| into godot.
| sproketboy wrote:
| [dead]
| adultSwim wrote:
| Games make a lot of money. It makes sense that studios would make
| for the world they profit from. Changing the deal mid-stream
| seems like the big problem here.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I wonder if Apple knew about this, or have been blindsided by
| this - having just teamed up with Unity for Vision (although
| mostly just because they hate Epic).
|
| Either way it's interesting.
| amelius wrote:
| Honestly, the pricing model sounds awfully close to what Apple
| has been doing for years in the app store.
| philipov wrote:
| There is no indication that Unreal would follow suit, and no
| corroboration for such a claim is given in the article. How does
| the author get off saying that?
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| [dead]
| zoogeny wrote:
| I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of
| open source.
|
| I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of
| people complaining about these kind of situations are people who
| want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of
| a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any
| way.
|
| Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a
| technology is equivalent to supporting it. I'm not immune to
| this. I just considered how I would feel if React or Golang
| suddenly changed so that I had to pay to use them. React is
| supported by Facebook and Golang by Google, both unimaginably
| massive and wealthy corporations. Even though I have never
| directly contributed a single thing to either project, I know I
| would feel some combination of betrayed, angry and frustrated.
|
| But I think about all of it. nginx, haproxy, redis, postgresql,
| nodejs, python. I don't think I could even write out all of the
| open source I am using in my projects within the confines of a
| Hacker News comment. Just trying to wrap my head around how I
| could even pay for all of that software if I had to is anxiety
| inducing. I don't mean just the cost, even the logistics of that
| many micro-transactions. Imagine trying to pay every YouTuber you
| watch some fair value for the content you consume.
|
| We are no where near an answer on this, I don't believe it will
| be settled within my lifetime. But the current model to justify
| the free-lunch we've all been served is crumbling. If the
| corporations that we expect to bear the cost of our free-lunch
| start to crumble then we are all in for a rude awakening.
| f33d5173 wrote:
| I don't think anything is "crumbling". Some companies got a
| large amounts of investment and sky high valuations on a
| product they were practically giving away. Now they need to
| figure out how to make those valutions work and return that
| investment. That sucks for them, but that doesn't prove that
| its impossible to sustain an open source business to make a
| certain piece of software.
|
| I use open source software because quality of certain things
| isn't very important to me, and I don't want to pay for them.
| If push really came to shove, I could replace large portions of
| my stack myself using something handrolled. If enough people
| who want something for free and are willing to build it
| themselves come together, they can make something that competes
| with large companies. The large companies in turn can start
| releasing their product for free in order to maintain market
| dominance, or they can let themselves be replaced. There's no
| "free lunch" here, its all simple econmics.
|
| Youtube has largely the same struture: for a while, videos were
| being made by people doing it as a hobby, then by people doing
| it as a job, but alone in their bedroom. Now some of them have
| large production teams and expensive facilities. It sure would
| suck for them if they stopped being able to make payroll, but I
| can go back to watching amateurs anytime. Your business model
| is your problem, not mine.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| Nah, we used and paid for Unity because the licensing structure
| we signed on with made sense. They're literally changing the
| terms on us in a way we cannot push back against. Games made
| years ago are subject to this new fee structure. Games which
| are no longer sold at the same nominal price and a massive
| existing install base who anytime they reinstall our game we
| get the privilege of paying Unity each time forever.
| paulmd wrote:
| > Nah, we used and paid for Unity because the licensing
| structure we signed on with made sense. They're literally
| changing the terms on us in a way we cannot push back
| against. Games made years ago are subject to this new fee
| structure.
|
| and you can still do this with the software codebase released
| before april 3rd, you just don't get ongoing development.
|
| this may, of course, involve rollbacks etc, you need to
| rebase onto the older version not the one that's been out for
| the last 5 months. But the license does explicitly allow you
| to do this.
|
| > Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at
| any time for any reason and without notice (the "Updated
| Terms") and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent
| current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if
| the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect
| to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity
| Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported
| (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to
| the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the
| "Prior Terms"). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your
| use of those current-year versions unless and until you
| update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software
| (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1).
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _But I think about all of it. nginx, haproxy, redis,
| postgresql, nodejs, python. I don 't think I could even write
| out all of the open source I am using in my projects within the
| confines of a Hacker News comment._
|
| That seems contradictory to your opening sentence though, no?
| _Eventually_ an open source project will get to the point that
| it 's so good (or even good enough) that a commercial product
| is simply uncompetitive. That will happen with game engines to.
| Decisions like this will only accelerate it.
| dgb23 wrote:
| More often than not, open source licenses are given for very
| practical reasons that aren't directly tied to extracting money
| directly.
|
| Foundational libraries, tools, frameworks etc. is often open
| sourced so people don't have to "reinvent the weel" every time
| they switch jobs and positions. Additionally, large orgs can
| benefit from having a larger talent pool to draw from, because
| there's more people familiar with open source software.
|
| Do you think Oracle is maintaining Java (etc.) for altruistic
| reasons?
|
| OSS is often also a vehicle for marketing, selling expertise or
| ops services.
|
| Stuff is open sourced so it gets used, built upon and to gain
| mindshare, community and to find collaborators etc.
|
| You using or building on the software doesn't in any way
| detract from that value proposition and often adds to it in
| indirect ways.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| >But I think about all of it. nginx, haproxy, redis,
| postgresql, nodejs, python. I don't think I could even write
| out all of the open source I am using in my projects within the
| confines of a Hacker News comment. Just trying to wrap my head
| around how I could even pay for all of that software if I had
| to is anxiety inducing.
|
| Luckily, the licenses of these projects are all such that, the
| minute the maintainer pulls the rug out, you are perfectly free
| to fork the project and move on as if nothing happened. Open
| source protects you.
| tux1968 wrote:
| I think you've completely misunderstood the situation. This
| isn't people feeling entitled, rather it's people feeling
| vulnerable to the whims of a private, self-interested entity.
|
| While it isn't my reason, I think most people advocating for
| open-source, actually see it simply as a way to keep such
| private actors honest, and prevent them from becoming
| corrupted. Like many people have said, this particular
| situation would have been received much differently had the
| changes not been applied retroactively.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| manicennui wrote:
| YouTube Premium is basically the answer to your hypothetical.
|
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7060016?hl=en
| pxoe wrote:
| >the cracks in the utopic vision of open source
|
| what does unity, a proprietary engine that screwed over their
| customers, have to do with this?
| Matl wrote:
| > I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these
| kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the
| tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like
| Unity without contributing or paying in any way.
|
| I just want to point out that the biggest non-contributors to
| open-source are the enterprise companies you either never or
| barely heard about, whose entire stacks run on tons of open
| source and yet it's those end user enterprise shops that are
| making millions.
|
| In many ways, this probably includes Unity themselves.
| paulmd wrote:
| just wrote a reply here that could have been a response to
| this comment ;)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37525456
| brnt wrote:
| It helps to think of FLOSS as an ecosystem, not individual
| components. Also those large companies use many parts of the
| ecosystem and chances are some of your code, just not
| necessarily the component you are using (most). Even only using
| the ecosystem reinforces it for others and in turn the chances
| support existing or publish new tools in it.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic
| vision of open source.
|
| I don't get your logic. A proprietary company screws over
| customers, and that is, to you, an indication that OSS doesn't
| work?
|
| Isn't it exactly the reverse? Anyway watching this saga now
| would be mad to continue with Unity, and would be a little wary
| of closed-source in general.
| [deleted]
| paulmd wrote:
| > I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic
| vision of open source.
|
| we definitely are, and it's the inherent contradiction of "one
| entity pays to maintain it, another entity makes all the money
| from exploiting it". this is why there's such a commotion
| around BSL and dual-licensing schemes.
|
| GPL/AGPL itself is a coherent mechanism for sustaining
| development. BSD/MIT tends to lead to an embrace-extend-
| extinguish model where one company pays to write the software,
| and then Amazon makes it an S3 service, extends and
| extinguishes the original core by adding proprietary features
| they keep to themselves, and public development ceases or
| languishes.
|
| we are lining up for a similar showdown in the CPU space with
| ARM vs RISC-V. When Amazon and Google say they want an open
| ISA, they certainly don't mean they're going to open up _their_
| stuff. They want it to be open to them, they have proprietary
| extensions they bolt on (to all those instruction fields left
| as "vendor-determined") and proprietary accelerators they
| interface, and they will keep all that proprietary and never
| sell it outside the company. And that's the return of this same
| "proprietary vs GPL/AGPL vs MIT" battle. The ability for large
| commercial entities to extract all the value from open-source
| work and pay nothing and contribute nothing.
|
| ARM already very much is a "lowest-common-denominator" company,
| they thrive on designing architectures that are "good enough"
| and then the actual secret sauce goes in the way you customize
| it and what you bolt on alongside. And that's exactly what
| RISC-V will cement, because google and amazon and facebook
| don't compete on how fast they can make the CPU core, they
| compete on how _cheap_ they can make it. Which is why vCPU
| units are still specified in sandybridge-equivalent-cores, and
| why we 're getting zen4c cores instead of faster ones, etc -
| they don't care how fast it is, they care about selling you
| more units, and that means being able to provide more units.
|
| audiovisual (and I am including video games here) is a somewhat
| unique space though because you _will not_ win this battle, the
| effort involved in building unity or unreal from scratch is
| _herculean_ , and all of the parties involved are used to
| exorbitant spends to make the product happen (which I suppose
| is also true of silicon!)
|
| Sometimes this comes into conflict with the GPL community -
| like NVIDIA's inability to open their legacy driver core, or
| AMD's inability to get HDMI 2.1 working on their open driver
| core (which seems to have stalled out again, the dev who said
| "august or september" has gone radio-silent). Because if you
| ask HDMI Forum or Dolby or Fraunhofer or Motion Pictures
| Experts Group to license as GPL they're going to have a
| sensible chuckle while clicking the delete email button. That's
| not how this space works.
|
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417#note_19...
|
| I am actually not opposed to proprietary in general, and
| especially in this space it almost is a necessity given the
| amount of work involved. Someone has to be paid to sit down and
| write engine code all day, and they have to be very skilled and
| specialized. And this applies whether it's Unreal or Unity or
| your own in-house engine.
|
| Companies obviously don't like to write a check, which is why
| they keep doing in-house engines _even though it literally
| keeps killing games_ , like the way frostbite killed ME:A and
| Anthem. They would rather a game tank then to pay 2% of gross
| to buy an off-the-shelf engine (and you best believe if you're
| EA negotiating a license for all your games you're not paying
| list price).
|
| What unity is doing here is insane from a business perspective,
| but they're not wrong either that it's a situation where
| they're doing an equal share of the total work (there are a lot
| of man-hours in an engine) and get paid jack shit. Just like
| open-source software. And when you increase licensing fees
| (like ARM, or like software going BSL/AGPL) then companies
| start looking for the exits. Because they're used to extracting
| all the profit, and at a certain scale it does become viable to
| just do the work yourself anyway, rather than paying someone
| else. And that's why you get ME:A and Anthem and BF2042.
|
| edit: And I wrote all that without knowing that unity is
| currently losing _a billion dollars a year_ , so... yeah.
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| I hoped that some kind of blockchain could solve this, but they
| were too busy getting rich to solve actual problems.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| > By using an open source engine you can be sure that whatever
| that "next thing" is, the engine won't keep you from taking
| advantage of it. Nor would the engine be able to dictate your
| monetization strategy for you.
|
| We really ought to separate the fact that "open" does not always
| mean "free" here. Especially given that it is fairly straight-
| forward to change licenses on a whim.
|
| Imagine you wake up one day and suddenly the company/OSS
| maintainers put out a dual-license on the project. You now have
| to pay $0.20 per install after your app has made $200,000 over
| the past year. Now you're still using open source, but still
| legally held to the terms of that license.
|
| Licenses tend to be permissive enough that if such thing were to
| happen or other factors(discontinued development/support/etc),
| community forks can be created(which has its own set of
| problems).
| macspoofing wrote:
| >You now have to pay $0.20 per install after your app has made
| $200,000 over the past year. ... Now you're still using open
| source, but still legally held to the terms of that license.
|
| You can't retroactively pull an open source license ...
| whatever the new license is, if it forces you to pay, it no
| longer meets the definition of 'open source' [1]
|
| [1]https://opensource.org/osd/
| tpush wrote:
| No, that doesn't work. You can't retroactively change a license
| like that. What _could_ happen is that _future versions_ get
| licensed differently (if either all contributors agree, the
| project used a CLA or is permissively licensed).
|
| Either way however then you could either stop using it or fork
| the project.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Sorry I wasn't clear enough. Yes I meant future use.
| TMM2K wrote:
| That's not possible with something that is open source. If it
| has a "dual license" that means you can pick which license to
| apply. You just pick the one that doesn't make you pay.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| There are a number of projects doing this today with dual-
| license models(Permissive/Commercial). I'm not a lawyer and
| have no idea if they hold up in court/can be enforced but it
| absolutely is a thing today.
|
| https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5599/any-
| succ...
| rossng wrote:
| This is specific to GPL-style licences. You would have to
| meet the terms of the GPL anyway (i.e. provide your
| modified source code under the same licence).
|
| The commercial licence is just an additional option for
| companies willing to pay to not adhere to the GPL terms.
|
| There are certainly cases where maintainers have started
| licensing _new_ versions of a project under different, non-
| open source terms (Terraform, ElasticSearch etc.). But
| you're free to continue using any code that was released
| under the old licence.
|
| There are some badly written licences which make it
| ambiguous whether the licence can be revoked in future
| (e.g. Wizards of the Coast with the OGL), but I have rarely
| seen this raised as a concern in a software context.
|
| (IANAL, this is not legal advice, etc.)
| yMMe2WYE_D wrote:
| It might exist but open-core model (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model ) is much
| more commmn. I went through QT project licensing FAQ and I
| still don't see any situation when I would be forced to pay
| for commercial license when creating commercial software.
| Some SO answers suggest that complying with LGPL is harder
| on mobile OSes. Anyway - if you release something on open
| license, you can't really limit its use, no matter how your
| second license is constructed. That is probably why paid
| add-ons are so popular.
| TMM2K wrote:
| These are a little different. So these "dual licensed"
| products work like this:
|
| You get a GPL version of the code, which is free and nobody
| can charge you for, ever.
|
| If you want to use the software in a way that is not GPL
| compatible you can opt for the other, paid for, license.
|
| This works in some cases, but in the case of Godot
| (assuming we were to do something like this) is the MIT
| license, which already gives you the rights to do whatever
| you want.
|
| And even in the GPL case, if the other license terms became
| too odious you could simply switch to the GPL version, and
| not pay.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Here's an example:
|
| https://github.com/SixLabors/ImageSharp/blob/main/LICENSE
| #L2...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33301518
|
| Again, nothing stops someone from forking and
| maintaining.
|
| Are you saying this is not legally enforceable?
| dcow wrote:
| This essay lost the plot!
|
| There's nothing about the whole situation that open source fixes.
| Your champion open source project can change its license and
| pricing too.
|
| The only way to protect yourself here is to enter into a non-
| ambiguous and non-shitty contract with your vendor.
|
| If the software industry learns anything from this it should be
| that it's not super smart to build your business on a technology
| with variable pricing that you don't have control over (or
| something to that effect).
| mabbo wrote:
| I think at this point, the real question is who in their right
| mind would ever build a game in Unity again?
|
| I'm sure this will make their company a short term gain in
| profits, but in very short order _no more Unity games will be
| made_. Even if you accept the terms they 're proposing, you know
| damn well they are willing to change the rules at any time at
| your expense.
|
| Unity just became an extinction-level-event liability for any
| game company. Who would dare touch it with a ten foot pole?
|
| The leadership will be ousted by their shareholders quickly
| enough, I expect.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Realistically - how locked in are developers to their current
| engine?
|
| I imagine >50% of video game development is art. And I imagine
| some decent percentage of code can be translated without nearly
| as much effort as the original implementation.
|
| Still, I doubt many developers are going to switch engines mid
| or late development.
|
| But a lot of times, developers re-use much from their old games
| in development of their new games.
|
| Is this realistically going to hold developers back from moving
| future development to a new engine?
| dagmx wrote:
| I think you're grossly trivializing the effort needed.
|
| Let's take art as an example. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum.
| It's targeted to explicit engine behaviour. It's symbiotic
| with the code. You can't just go from Unity's universal
| pipeline to Unreals.
|
| And code is even harder. Forget language choice for a second,
| but logic itself is very tied to the engine. Unity's
| monobehaviour architecture is very different to how one would
| write it in Unreal or Godot. That's not even getting into
| engine specific optimization.
|
| what might be fast in one render pipeline will be slow in
| another. Scheduling is different.
|
| Also many developers rely on third party tools that aren't
| engine agnostic either.
| omarqureshi wrote:
| I work for a hedgehog based studio for their supposedly non
| existent mobile games arm albeit I don't work in engineering.
|
| For us, it's a huge deal. It's that people have spent the
| best part of a decade working with Unity, their support and
| enterprise training is very good. Also we have a game out in
| December which is also Unity based.
|
| As of yet we haven't made a decision on what to do but legal
| are looking at it, so, it's business as usual for now.
| willcipriano wrote:
| "I'll be gone, you'll be gone."
|
| The good numbers will be in just in time to calculate the
| bonuses and the bad numbers won't show up until the decision
| makers work somewhere else, after all they are the guys who
| doubled the profitability of Unity, so they will have lots of
| options.
| flashgordon wrote:
| It is very very rarely case (at least in my limited years in
| corporate world) that the leadership is _more_ evil than the
| board (atleast for public for-profit companies. Even more rare
| is the board not having this chat with leadership before the
| announcement.
| brightlancer wrote:
| The problem is that this really screws the shareholders, and
| _obviously_ so.
|
| Most of the value of stock comes from the ability to sell it
| to someone else who wants to buy it. Who wants to buy stock
| in a company that has presented a plan to self-immolate?
|
| The current stockholders may see some returns from short term
| profits, but then they'll be left holding the bag.
|
| This seems like a case where the shareholders are
| incentivized to oust the board, because the company is going
| to screw them.
| makestuff wrote:
| This is going to be an issue for the Vision Pro. I am kind of
| surprised Apple hasn't stepped in and said this will not apply
| to Vision Pro apps or something.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The leadership will be ousted by their shareholders quickly
| enough, I expect.
|
| Wouldn't be _that_ certain... there is a lot of stuff built on
| Unity. The most common theme I heard was that they 're trying
| to capitalize off of Genshin Impact [1], but there's also a ton
| of other highly successful games like Among Us or Untitled
| Goose Game that won't/can't (easily) be ported to another
| engine.
|
| In other words, they want to become the IBM of game engines.
| Rent seekers for sub-par service.
|
| [1] https://www.sportskeeda.com/esports/will-genshin-impact-
| affe...
|
| [2] https://www.create-learn.us/blog/top-games-made-with-unity/
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Is there an easy way to determine what underlying game engine
| is used on Steam or the Apple Store?
|
| I would love to track new releases for the next N months and
| see how it compares vs historical. Does utilization fall off
| a cliff?
| tracker1 wrote:
| Considering game Dev is measured in years, it'll take a
| while.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| For sure, I bet many projects have too much momentum to
| switch, but there are likely lots of smaller efforts
| (mobile-flavor of the month) that are going to be
| switching stacks as soon as possible.
| saladprince wrote:
| People keep bringing up Genshin without even knowing
| anything. I don't even wanna read that sportskeeda article
| because I'm 100% sure they also didn't research and I don't
| want to give them any engagements.
|
| The developers of Genshin is a major shareholders in Unity
| China which is an offshot company based in China which has
| different terms. They are separate entity from Unity
| Technologies.
|
| Source: https://blog.unity.com/news/unity-forms-new-venture-
| to-manag...
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Among Us can't easily be ported to another engine? LOL
|
| I've been making a Unity VR game, and I can assure you, with
| a bit blood, sweat, tears, and some ChatGPT assistance, it
| can be done, especially for the vanilla 2d games which
| represent the majority of Unity games in the wild.
| norwalkbear wrote:
| What engine did you port too?
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Godot
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| This doesn't really address the concerns of the above-- that
| people will not make new games in Unity. Unlike IBM, which
| could arguably sell to large corps subpar product, Unity's
| consumer base are flighty and don't have upper managers that
| can be bribed with nice dinners.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| They have a sizable captive user base and will be milking
| them until they're dry, at which point those responsible
| for this disaster will jump ship with a massive golden
| parachute.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| Yup, my opinion as well. Then there will be massive layoff to
| cut R&D and UnityAds. It might go back to sub 5000 employees
| but essentially IS is going to lead.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > I think at this point, the real question is who in their
| right mind would ever build a game in Unity again?
|
| This is pretty unfortunate, because Unity is partly responsible
| for the surge of Linux gaming over the last 10 years.
| Supporting Linux comes nearly for free on Unity (compared to
| many other engines), and fewer Unity games will likely mean
| fewer Linux games.
| maccard wrote:
| Thankfully due to proton, unreal engine games (and home
| rolled engines) should just work out of the box too.
| bookmark1231 wrote:
| In my experience Proton works so well now that the only games
| that don't work are those with really invasive anti-cheat
| systems
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Depends what they jump _to_ ; godot, for instance, should be
| similar AIUI?
| TylerE wrote:
| Godot is never going to be able to ship for consoles due to
| license incompatibility. That's a pretty big dealbreaker
| for non-hobbyist projects that aren't exclusively targeting
| desktop.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Godot games have been shipped on consoles plenty of times
| TylerE wrote:
| There are paid, non open source forks that support
| console.
|
| Actual godot does not, and never will.
|
| From their own docs:
|
| " 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"
| [deleted]
| kevingadd wrote:
| So your argument breaks down to "once I get access to the
| closed source console SDKs and spend money for devkits, I
| will need to use a closed source fork of Godot to ship my
| closed source app on consoles"? What is the alternative?
| The console vendors do not allow console ports to exist
| in the open.
| TylerE wrote:
| Use Unity, Unreal, or anthoer commerical engine that
| doesn't have a large upfront cost?
| gcr wrote:
| Unity, Unreal, and friends have these similar problems:
| the console SDK isn't open and may require porting work
| to integrate with the engine.
|
| The difference is that lots of Unity and Unreal
| developers go through the trouble to do this.
| bananaboy wrote:
| With unity you get the console version of unity when are
| authorised by the console manufacturer. So it's not like
| you have to do much to make at least the core engine work
| on console. The work is in the game itself which is
| different game to game.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Why would an SDK be secret?
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Because the console manufacturers want to protect their
| proprietary platforms.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Protect them from what?
| TylerE wrote:
| Reputational damage. Big part of the appeal of consoles
| is "it just works". That falls apart of you start letting
| random shovelware devs ship whatever.
| throwaway7679 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983#Lo
| ss_...
|
| TLDR A game market flooded with shovelware crap is a
| disaster for everyone.
|
| Modern day consoles intentionally add
| hurdles/friction/cost to publishing in order to weed out
| the less serious studios.
| kibwen wrote:
| No, that's a different concern entirely. Nintendo could
| (though never will) open up Switch development to
| everyone while still exercising judicious control over
| which games are listed in their own store.
|
| And in the meantime, there's already tons of crap
| shovelware on the Switch storefront. Nintendo doesn't
| filter for quality.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Security through obscurity(which is often enough btw).
| gabereiser wrote:
| Consoles no longer require specialized hardware to
| develop for. There are test kits for ps5 but you can
| compile on your PC. Where are you getting your
| information from? The only requirement is a header or two
| and a code sign. Godot OSS can't support consoles because
| the SDK (those headers) are closed source, but there's
| nothing stopping you from implementing the half dozen
| header functions in Godot source yourself. There's some
| companies trying to provide that support. I'm sure Godot*
| (the company) will as well.
|
| To dismiss Godot because you, a solo hobby dev, can't
| target PS5 is hilarious.
| TylerE wrote:
| That is literally from the godot site.
|
| https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/co
| nso...
| gabereiser wrote:
| Did you read it? It clearly backs what I just said. Godot
| open source doesn't support consoles because console sdks
| are closed source, but there's nothing stopping you from
| publishing on consoles. They literally list a company who
| is doing that, more are following. There's no restriction
| at all other than you having access to the SDKs which you
| get when you sign a contract to publish your game on
| their platform.
| matt3D wrote:
| I think you're conflating two things.
|
| To paraphrase the docs : You can ship games on consoles,
| but the tools required to do so will never be included in
| the open source code.
|
| Eg. Just because you need to buy a tin opener to open
| your can of beans, doesn't mean you don't have any beans
| TylerE wrote:
| You can carve a spoon into a can opener. That doesn't
| make an unmodified spoon a can opener.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Linux doesnt run on consoles though and the comment was
| about linux, which godot supports quite well. Once it
| gains popularity it will also sort out console issues.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| numpad0 wrote:
| My humanGPT hallucination on the situation would be that
| because Unity is proprietary and Godot is open source,
| Unity runtime would be less diverse and more stable. How
| much of this is correct, I don't know though.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| This is no different from Oracle. When tides change you can see
| how a company like Microsoft reacted (make embrace OSS) vs how
| Oracle reacts which is to double down on its expensive out of
| touch offering. It's clear Oracle isnt fully irrelevant now
| because there's a lot of legacy clients who have inertia. It'll
| only be a problem for them a decade from now. Unity's
| leadership likely decided similarly. If they thought about this
| at all that is.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| They may just not care about being the game engine of choice
| for indie gamedevs anymore, or they may even actively want to
| not be that anymore (as a branding thing). The way Unity
| positions itself on their landing page is VERY different from
| what they were doing 5 or 10 years ago, when (indie) games were
| absolutely front and center (and there wasn't much else,
| period).
|
| I think being a AA game engine was just one early part of their
| long term business strategy, and this last move is them
| ejecting that stage of their rocket as a necessary part of
| moving on to the next stage of their strategy.
| codeulike wrote:
| Seems to me, the bit where all these game frameworks get a bit
| tricky is when you want to target iOS. Apple keeps moving the
| goalposts (you must use some version of Xcode, or you must target
| some version of iOS) and so the open-source frameworks have to
| constantly faff about to support the latest apple things. A few
| years ago I was building using LibGDX which used RoboVM to target
| iOS but then Xamarin bought RoboVM and shut it down and etc etc
| etc...
|
| What Unity offers is a solid way to build cross platform and
| target iOS. They're able to offer that because they have the
| resources to keep up with iOS. Open-source alternatives
| understandably struggle to keep on the iOS treadmill.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Which is why we should support open source mobile platforms
| like those built on Linux etc. as well as supporting open
| source hardware.
|
| Not saying it's realistic that those types of things will get
| very far, but the Apple monopoly and their activities is worse
| than DC in some ways.
| jarsin wrote:
| Yup, in fact just 2.5 years ago everyone was switching from
| Unreal to Unity. The reason? Apple threatened to revoke Epics
| dev accounts that it needed in order to support ongoing
| upgrades for ios.
|
| Epic released statements through their attorney's that they
| would consider the public version of Unreal a dead product if
| they lost the ability to maintain ios.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| I would have never thought in a million years iOS was
| considered a large gaming platform.
| saltymug76 wrote:
| Millions of kids and their sticky iPads would like a word.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| My mindset is stuck in 2008 so you're probably right
| danjoredd wrote:
| please tell me you have never had a kid come up to you like
| this
|
| https://i.imgflip.com/5aw95n.jpg
| RobotToaster wrote:
| At least half the problems in the mobile space can be traced to
| apple being apple.
| indymike wrote:
| _" Our terms of service provide that Unity may add or change fees
| at any time... Consent is not required for additional fees to
| take effect." -- Unity spokesperson_
|
| Never do business with a company that thinks this is OK.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _A Wake-Up Call on the Importance of Open Source in Gaming_
|
| This is no "wake-up call" as there was never any doubt that all
| things being equal, FOSS would be a better option.
|
| There are already where plenty of FOSS options to build games.
| The developers who didn't pick them up did it because
| Unity/Unreal give them features and convenience and such they
| don't get from them.
| RunSet wrote:
| In bygone days, I would say:
|
| "In the future, all games will be Quake."
|
| But it was easier for my audience to hear a joke than the truth.
| [deleted]
| jrmg wrote:
| A commenter on the Ars article pointed out this from the Unity
| FAQ (https://unity.com/pricing-updates) and I can't get over it:
|
| ------
|
| _Will developers be charged the Unity Runtime Fee for
| subscription-based games?_
|
| No, in this case the developer is not distributing it so we're
| not going to invoice the developer on subscription-based games
| (e.g. Apple Arcade, Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, Netflix
| Games, etc.)
|
| ------
|
| Surely Unity management can't think this will fly? Surely MS,
| Apple etc. have contracts with developers that say they have the
| _full rights_ to distribute the games under some arranged fee
| structure. Is Unity now just going to go to them and say "Hey,
| those contracts you have actually don't give you the right to
| distribute the parts we own. You'll have to pay us too!". That
| just seems so unrealistic.
|
| And, further, even if that 'works' MS, Apple etc. would surely
| then have a legal case against the developers, who represented
| that they were assigning full distribution rights to the games,
| to make them pay anyway.
|
| This all just seems like a giant ill thought through mess, and I
| think this 'subscription' question and answer is indicative of
| how the entire thing was planned. Is Unity management really so
| naive that they think this will work? Are they just following the
| whims of a CEO with no legal input? Did they just not think this
| through? Are they _trying_ to get all this into litigation?
|
| Usually with things like this, where there's a lot of online
| sound and fury, I can make a 'well, they probably intend for this
| result, that's why they're doing it like this' judgement. But
| this just seems like chaos and I am finding it so hard to
| understand how any of this was decided.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| I think that means they just won't charge the fee for such
| titles.
| unsigner wrote:
| Unity was a dream, or a lie, the lie that you can make games
| without a somewhat competent software team.
|
| Now TFA gives hope to another dream, or a lie, the dream that
| magical open source fairies can let you keep getting away without
| a competent software team. It won't.
|
| Find those programmers, build a team, build a company where this
| team has a place, adjust your business model (i.e. raise your
| prices) to where you can afford to pay them.
| translucyd wrote:
| Excellent take.
|
| People think that making good games is cheap and anyone can do.
|
| Making games, maybe. Good ones? I don't think so.
| zulban wrote:
| Thousands of game studios have collectively made billions of
| dollars using Unity over the past decade. Strange comment,
| friend.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Eh... You aren't supposed to have a competent software team to
| use Unity? That's news.
| makomk wrote:
| Much as I love open source and the Godot engine, this seems more
| like a wake-up call on the importance of corporations not being
| able to unilaterally, retroactively change contracts in ways that
| impose new charges and violate existing contractual commitments
| that others have relied on. If they can do that then open source
| doesn't offer much real protection.
| jcarrano wrote:
| Did they make a commitment in the first place? It is up to the
| developers using the engine to make due diligence and inspect
| the terms of the contracts and licenses of the software they
| use.
|
| I would feel very uneasy if my product was based on a
| framework, where the provider makes no commitment and reserves
| the right to change the licensing terms at any time.
| makomk wrote:
| Unity made a specific committment in their terms that if
| those terms changed in a way that disavantaged existing
| developers, those developers could carry on using the
| existing annual release under the old terms, and also that
| they would notify developers of changes to their terms. They
| then sneakily removed that committment and almost immediately
| imposed this licensing fee for use of the runtime, when one
| of the specific advantages of Unity they promoted was not
| having any such fees, and retroactively applied this to new
| installks of all existing games. It was shameless and some
| company offering open source software could jsut as easily
| retroactively decide it wasn't open source at all.
| nhinck wrote:
| They don't though, if any developer had the means to take it to
| court it is incredibly likely that Unity would lose.
|
| While TOS are rarely worth the toilet paper they could be
| printed on, I'm curious about whether arguments could be made
| about whether existing subscribers from 2019 could now sue for
| breach of contract and costs associated with (re)development.
| isaiahg wrote:
| Do you have the money to fight it because I sure don't
| zulban wrote:
| That's what class actions are for.
| mcv wrote:
| That's the big issue. This is going to hurt smaller
| developers more because they can't afford to fight it.
|
| The big question is: to what extent to Unity games need to
| be able to talk to Unity's servers? If they're looking at
| number of installs (and apparently that includes pirated
| copies even?), serve ads, and probably provide other
| services, that sounds like the games need a connection to
| the server. In which case they may be able to disable your
| game if you don't pay. And then even if you could sue them,
| the real damage is already done.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Copyright laws are all completely out of balance and stupid. As
| a rule, corporations can not retroactively change contracts. If
| this one is legal (I wouldn't try to guess), it will be because
| of the EULA rules.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| I am absolutely sure that the EULA stated they reserve the
| right to make this sort of pricing change. Every EULA does.
| TMM2K wrote:
| Open source is that protection. There's no way for an open
| source project to change their terms that drastically. The
| whole hasicorp disaster is a prime example of that. Terraform
| is forked and continues on like normal, users are not impacted.
|
| For programming platforms (like game engines) this is even MORE
| of an advantage, as with something like terraform you could
| conceivably rewrite your stuff in a matter of weeks if you have
| reasonable testing. For a game that is not possible.
|
| Nobody can take away your rights under the MIT license, there's
| no legal mechanism to do that. You are protected, fully, from
| shit like this.
| Spivak wrote:
| > Terraform is forked and continues on like normal, users are
| not impacted.
|
| That's a _massive_ overstatement of the current state of
| OpenTF right now. Plus they 're still dependent on
| Hashicorp's hosting which also changed their license terms in
| response to the project.
|
| You're right that because it's OSS you can do this kind of
| thing where it wouldn't be possible at all in a proprietary
| system but "just fork" requires a community to organize
| around it. Without a bunch of backing orgs this wouldn't have
| happened.
| ahoka wrote:
| "There's no way for an open source project to change their
| terms that drastically."
|
| Like going from GPLv2 to GPLv3 or straight to AGPL, so now
| you are stuck with an old version forever? Yeah, that would
| never happen!
| pxc wrote:
| That's only a problem for you if you yourself have a
| business model that depends on curtailing the freedom of
| your users. Playing the victim when a license prevents you
| from victimizing your own customers and users in the way
| that has happened in this incident is pretty rich.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Contrast "you are stuck with an old version forever" with
| "you can't use the program at all anymore, not even old
| versions of it".
| Takennickname wrote:
| You're not stuck with an old version forever, that's very
| hyperbolic and you purposefully ignored OP's example of
| Hashicorp and Terraform and instead responded with sarcasm.
| johncolanduoni wrote:
| Nobody can take away your rights if the contract you sign
| with the engine developer doesn't allow it, as people have
| been pointing out is the case for other engines. IIRC
| Unreal's contract gives you access to a particular version of
| the engine in perpetuity, with source and the permission to
| make your own additions/changes to that source. It doesn't
| guarantee updates, but neither does the MIT license.
| mattdesl wrote:
| Apparently this is exactly what is happening with Unity[1],
| where the TOS previously said that you can continue using
| an old version, but now they are walking this back and
| trying to apply fees retroactively. Whether this is legal
| or not might be debatable, but unless users mount a legal
| challenge they are probably stuck paying or finding another
| engine.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37499731
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Honestly, the first thing I thought when I heard the
| story was "sounds like a lawsuit."
| simion314 wrote:
| The problem is today everything has ToS, you get a ToS update
| in the email and if you do not like it you have to stop using
| the product, and lot of software this days require an account ,
| and has online features or requirements.
|
| I got burned by Steam, I have a super old laptop with some old
| games on it, Half Life, so one day I got the laptop out, Steam
| updates and f** itself, the old system is no longer supported
| but they had to f** things up s the games won't work.
|
| I agree, open source is not required, but we need to own our
| software not rent it.
| Woodi wrote:
| > I agree, open source is not required, but we need to own
| our software not rent it.
|
| That's just a start but also require freezing your OS and
| have lots of spare hardware or have rights to emulate it :)
|
| And same with data - buyed songs for example :) Big industry
| already is killing media you can own - cd, dvd, blueray
| depends on outdated cpu, pendrives decay before becoming
| usefull backup media...
|
| In the age of asholess open sources and resources are best.
| Let's bring more viral licenses then GPL !
| isilofi wrote:
| It is a wakeup-call also to do due dilligence and risk
| management when entering contracts. And yes, clicking "agreed"
| in the installer is very often a contract that you should run
| by your legal advisors. Or at least think very hard about.
|
| _Some_ kinds of Open Source might help there, since _some_ open
| source licenses are very easy to comply with and very business-
| friendly. On the other hand, all the game studios now
| complaining would also howl and whine when forced to be GPL-
| compliant and release their source code.
|
| And even with business-friendly take-what-you-want-and-never-
| give-back Open Source licenses, there is always the risk that
| the project you are using does what Hashicorp did with
| Terraform and stuff: Change the license for all future releases
| to something you won't like, cutting you off from your
| necessary updates and fixes. Maybe there will be a community
| maintaining a fork, maybe there won't.
| TMM2K wrote:
| Godot is MIT licensed though, there's very little we can do
| to screw our users if we wanted to, which we do not :)
| nhinck wrote:
| You could change the license for future versions and charge
| for said updates, for the market that godot targets that
| would be more a little screwing to them.
|
| How long would it take for someone to take over the project
| (if ever).
| jehb wrote:
| And it's at exactly this moment the community would fork
| the project and development of a free version would
| continue. This is not a real risk for a community-driven
| project, only for corporate-driven projects where a
| single entity owns copyright on the on all or close to
| all of the codebase.
| hakre wrote:
| While I'm able to understand your argument, IMHO the MIT
| license is not displaying that well. Community is plural,
| and fork with MIT could be like Windows: Closed source.
| End of the (fork) line.
|
| Given the project itself is still strong, this might not
| be a problem, but then I see no reason why it has chosen
| it in the first place if not for that specific option.
| isilofi wrote:
| The important distinction isn't who owns copyright. It is
| rather that there needs to be a community opposed to the
| license change and able and willing to do the work.
|
| One could even imagine scenarios like an originally MIT-
| licensed software splitting into a commercial company
| offering commercial paid licenses, plus a community (or
| even the company itself) offering a GPL-licensed fork. Of
| course one could then still maintain an additional MIT-
| licensed fork, but if the rest of the community is happy
| with GPL and all the development just happens there, your
| MIT fork will "starve"...
| j-bos wrote:
| >clicking "agreed" in the installer is very often a contract
| that you should run by your legal advisors.
|
| The law often makes use of the reasonableness standard. I'm
| hard pressed to believe that carefully reading the hundreds
| of TOS and EULA's hoisted upon us is reasonable.
|
| If you're reading my comment you must have read the TOS/EULA
| for ycombinator, firefox (or chrome), your wireless or ISP,
| the keyboard app on your phone, odds are you have an email,
| perhaps a google account, remember the OS licence. Ever
| listened to a music streaming service, watched youtube?
| Messaged using an app? Banked online? Have some managed
| passwords? Like games, how many? For the common people, what
| about social media?
|
| That's about a dozen "contracts" and that's lowballing it,
| multiplied by each update to the "agreement" (pray they don't
| alterate further) multiplied by the requirement to also read
| and acknowledge the privcy policy. All this for services that
| have become when not essential ubiquitous and constantly
| shift under you. You'd need 8 figures to run that by a
| lawyer, or a part time job to carefully consider. That's not
| a reasonable arrangement.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| to be more charitable to the above, we're not talking about
| consumer software. if you're starting a company selling
| something there is a fair bit more reasonableness in asking
| you to read a contract
| isilofi wrote:
| Exactly. This isn't about Joe Blow not reading the ToS
| for his eleventieth browser toolbar. This is about a
| business not reading the ToS for an essential, integral
| component that will cost you dearly to replace and might
| bankrupt the business.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| What you are proposing is literally impossible. If I were
| to comb through every ToS and EULA and every other legal
| text related to tools I use as a developer, I would not
| have any hours left in the day for, you know, actual
| development. Even then, I wouldn't have time to read and
| comprehend all of the legal contracts. Hell, if I stopped
| sleeping entirely and spent 24 hours a day combing
| through legal contracts, I still wouldn't have enough
| time to go through all of them.
|
| So, no, your request is not reasonable.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| The Unity TOS doesn't take a full day to read. And if you
| have trouble with it, you can hire a lawyer.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Are you implying that one needs a crystal ball to predict
| _which_ companies will screw you over with ToS changes in
| the future, and using that crystal ball in the present
| time, we can then skip reading ToS for all those other
| companies, which will not screw you over, and only read
| the ToS for the one company that will screw you over?
| isilofi wrote:
| > The law often makes use of the reasonableness standard.
| I'm hard pressed to believe that carefully reading the
| hundreds of TOS and EULA's hoisted upon us is reasonable.
|
| Yes, but there are two sides to "resonableness": The "what"
| side and the "who" side. "What" is the thing that should be
| resonable. But the overall resonableness just as much
| depends on the question: "for whom is this reasonable?".
| While a consumer cannot possibly be expected to really read
| all the ToS everywhere, a business maybe can be expected to
| do so. Especially for things that are very critical and
| integral to the business, like the license of that one
| framework you are building all your software upon. So I do
| think requiring a business to read and understand the Unity
| ToS is totally resonable.
| jarsin wrote:
| Wall St. Analyst are coming out with positive notes and upgrades
| on this pricing change.
|
| $U upgraded to Buy from Neutral @ BofA; PT raised to $56
| Havoc wrote:
| Doesn't matter what your pricing is if you no longer have
| clients
| hcks wrote:
| Absolutely. Remember last summer when everyone fled Reddit
| because of the API price hike and they shutdown?
| grumple wrote:
| That was this summer, not last summer. It's seems that
| there's a lot of discussion even today about usage going
| down: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/16icvv2/
| 1_month... . I have noticed a continuing decrease in
| quality on reddit for many years (as it attracts more
| people), like all sites that grow and depend on ad revenue,
| and activity seems to have gone down substantially lately
| in the few subreddits I still watch.
|
| Developers / professionals are more judicious in where they
| spend their time / money / effort than most people. When I
| select a technology for professional use, I look at the
| long term prospects for the company. Open source is always
| a positive, as I don't have to worry about a company
| raising rates and trying to extract more money from us.
| Feature completeness can be a concern, as is ease of use,
| but we really only need our needs met and a path to meet
| our future needs.
| Havoc wrote:
| The users aren't the ones paying and the apps do seem to be
| gone
|
| Apollo, Sync for Reddit, BaconReader etc
| hotstickyballs wrote:
| Finally I can choose a game engine and start learning game
| development
| gdsdfe wrote:
| How can they do that retroactively tho ?!? Is that even legal?
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| This is written based on my quite poor understanding of the game
| business. I am sincerely wanting to learn more about how it works
| and how the new license structure impact developers.
|
| My questions below might be idiotic. (but not intentionally so)
|
| I have no idea how many apps reach above 200.000 installs total
| or $200.000 income per year.
|
| How common is it for apps to meet the minimum requirements when
| the fees kick in?
|
| I would guess that if you base the application on a subscription
| model that this will not be a major problem?
|
| Also doesn't Apple App Store or Google Pay charge far more than
| this on income?
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Take Marvel Snap for example:
|
| https://unity.com/case-study/marvel-snap
|
| > Generated $100M+ revenue and 21M+ downloads on Android and
| iOS since October 2022
|
| At $0.20 per install after meeting both conditions that would
| be a lot of money.
|
| Note: I don't know the full terms but just took what most
| articles are reporting on.
|
| i.e. $4,160,000 USD (# of total downloads - 200k * $0.20)
| whatyesaid wrote:
| They would probably qualify under enterprise pricing of $0.01
| or $0.02 on Pro. To release a game without Unity branding you
| also need at least 1 year of Pro subscription. They also
| would count more than 21M maybe e.g. multiple devices.
|
| They also charge more at less scale and can't detect things
| like pirated installs, bypass Steam DRM, and you're still
| gonna hit the Unity servers. It's just checking device HWIDs.
|
| But Marvel Snap is a card game and like many others has
| terrible monetisation, you can't keep up with card releases
| at all without paying. It's more like the pay to win games.
| zulban wrote:
| One way way to put this into perspective is salaries. 200k usd
| means any game studio with at least 2-4 employees must earn
| that yearly to break even, so they are affected.
| qwytw wrote:
| > reach above 200.000 installs total or $200.000 income per
| year
|
| No developers/companies who made more than $200k per year
| (overall revenue of the company, not per game) were even
| allowed to the use the Personal/Plus tiers and were required to
| upgrade to pro (which has 1 million install/revenue limits).
|
| I don't think the itself cost would be unreasonable for at
| least 90-95% of all developers and if you average it out across
| everyone the proportion of revenue Unity get's would be still
| pretty low (not much more than 1% or so).
|
| Most people seem to be upset because how they applied these
| changes retroactively on currently released games and because
| the whole model seems way to convoluted and not really thought
| trough.
| Hamcha wrote:
| The problem here is that most platform tax your income, not
| your userbase size. If you think of big free to play Unity
| games like Genshin Impact (or even smaller stuff like VRChat)
| the amount of paying user is probably in the single digit
| percentage, yet with Unity terms you are on the hook for
| everyone who installs your game.
| progx wrote:
| Look at the millions of free to play games in the App-Stores.
| Normally you have 98% of free playing users paying nothing, 2%
| pay.
|
| Imagine now you have 1 million installs. 2% (20.000) pay you
| 200.000 / year. 980.000 players pay nothing. Now Unity want
| 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000, you made ZERO with your game...
| crazy. That is an uncalculatable risk for a small company.
| JCharante wrote:
| So maybe it'll force companies to stop making freemium trash
| that only targets the 2% whales and actually make good games?
| alpaca128 wrote:
| No, it will make companies switch to Godot (where they have
| to pay nothing, ever) or Unreal (where they pay 5% for
| payments above a $1M threshold).
|
| For many developers it is now cheaper to switch the engine
| than to pay for Unity.
| qwytw wrote:
| > For many developers it is now cheaper to switch the
| engine than to pay for Unity.
|
| Only for a (possibly very) small minority.
|
| I find the the fact that they had no qualms about
| retroactively applying this to already released game much
| more infuriating (if they did this, what can they do
| next?). The pricing itself seems fairly reasonable if
| make more $1.5-2 or so per user (compared to Unreal
| anyway).
| qwytw wrote:
| You'd only pay above a million user and need to have above in
| 1 million revenue.
|
| Previously you weren't even allowed to use Pro/Personal if
| you made over $200k (not just per game).
|
| > Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000,
|
| Not saying the whole price model is not stupid but only those
| developers who are very bad at basic math would pay this.
| Everyone else would upgrade to pro.
|
| > Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000
|
| Again, not really. Even in this case only a subset of user
| would pay 20 cent.
|
| Another example demonstrating the incompetence of Unity's
| marketing department, they should've understood that most
| people can't really memorize more than a single number or be
| expected to spend over 30 seconds reading something (now I'm
| not saying that this change overall was not a terrible
| decision but even a significant proportion of people
| commenting here don't seem to understand how their per
| install pricing is going to work).
| jarsin wrote:
| Even if you do reach 200k in revenue all you have to do is pay
| 2k a year and then you now pay nothing else until you reach $1m
| in revenue.
|
| I personally think its dumb for Unity to even have the $200k
| install pricing. It's created a ton of bad examples and drama.
|
| Should just be upgrade to pro at $200k revenue then only after
| $1m do they do install pricing.
| aabbccddee22 wrote:
| [dead]
| pelasaco wrote:
| As Game developer myself, and unity user, I was concerned about
| the new pricing model, however, actually reading the actual
| changes[1], you see that 99% of the developers are not affected,
| and in some cases, for those affected, still cheaper to go with
| Unity than with Unreal: There is a video explaining it well
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENoVL68z9PU
|
| For sure an open source solution would be more than welcome, but
| sounds like impossible, because either those out there are half-
| backed, or are just finding a way to monetize it too..
|
| [1] https://unity.com/pricing-updates
| pelasaco wrote:
| To downvote and not discuss, it typical from the new
| generation...
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Disregard
| otterley wrote:
| Isn't promissory estoppel typically used as a fallback theory
| when a legal contract does not exist?
| singleshot_ wrote:
| My reading is that the article skips a step in its analysis.
| Note that I did not watch the linked video with the video
| game lawyer and whatever he says is probably more
| contextually useful than what I say:
|
| I'd be more apt to call this an illusory contract where one
| party reserves the ability to choose how it performs. This
| destroys the mutuality of agreement in which the contract
| rests. In some circumstances this might get you to a win
| simply by escaping the contract. But not if you want damages;
| in this situation an equitable remedy that does not presume
| the existence of the contract would be exactly what you would
| want.
|
| On the other hand all of these clickwrap licenses seem to
| reserve the right to change at any time. I think the only
| reason that they are not adjudicated as illusory is the
| existence of mandatory arbitration clauses but I'm not sure.
| I'd be interested in being set straight if someone reading
| this is more knowledgeable.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Yes it does, on page 3;
|
| > A developer who wanted to pursue that kind of claim in court
| could argue using the concept of promissory estoppel, or the
| "notion that you can't just change the deal if somebody else
| relied upon it," as Hoeg put it.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/wait-is-unity-allowed...
| dang wrote:
| Once your comment has a reply, please don't edit it in a way
| that removes the context for readers! Instead, it's fine to add
| something to the end preceded by "Edit:" or similar.
| ajkjk wrote:
| ... It does mention it.
| NotGMan wrote:
| >> While Unreal engine currently does not have terms like
| Unity's, there's nothing stopping them from doing something
| similar. In fact if Unity manages to get away with this it seems
| likely they will follow suit.
|
| Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their
| engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So the author
| didn't fully research this. It is true that for NEWER version
| Epic can change this.
|
| Tim Sweeney explicitly mentioned this often + the fact that they
| are trying to break the Gplay/Apply monopoly shows that the Epic
| games leadership are not corporate piranhas like Unity's.
|
| But what about Godot? He says as if "it's open source so no
| issue". Yeah but what if the devs stop supporting it? This
| "community will continue to work on it" is BS: in reality it's
| usually one or two guys who actually do the actual work.
|
| So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a project
| with zero support. Good luck developing it further instead of
| focusing on your game.
|
| The same goes for his very own product.
| mijoharas wrote:
| > Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of
| their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So
| the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for
| NEWER version Epic can change this.
|
| Isn't part of the current furore that unity used to have
| similar terms and they removed them?
| prmoustache wrote:
| > So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a
| project with zero support. Good luck developing it further
| instead of focusing on your game. > > The same goes for his
| very own product.
|
| The same goes for Unity and Unreal.
| mcv wrote:
| But without the option to continue development. In the case
| of Godot, the rest of the community would probably fork it
| and continue development.
| prmoustache wrote:
| You can even do it yourself without waiting for someone
| else to do it for you.
| theknocker wrote:
| [dead]
| mcv wrote:
| > Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of
| their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So
| the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for
| NEWER version Epic can change this.
|
| If I understand correctly, Unity had that too. And then they
| changed it anyway.
|
| I don't know the details, but apparently Unity maintained their
| license in a git repository for the explicit purpose that
| everybody could easily track changes to their license. Just
| before the license changes, they removed that repository, and
| later put it up again, but without the clause that you could
| always use an old version forever without new restrictions
| applying to you.
| manvillej wrote:
| > Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of
| their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So
| the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for
| NEWER version Epic can change this.
|
| so did unity, until they removed that clause
| icemelt8 wrote:
| > Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of
| their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license.
|
| Unity also had a similar clause in their ToC, they removed that
| now and retroactively applied the new pricing model on ALL
| previous versions of Unity. Unreal can do it too.
| jzl wrote:
| This still seems to be an unresolved legal question. Unity
| will almost certainly be getting sued for this by parties
| still using versions that shipped with that clause.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Any product can end up no longer having work done on it, or the
| work can start getting bad. Such is life. With open source at
| least you have an option, if you run into one bug or missing
| feature, there is a chance you can patch it yourself and get
| the game done. In the distant past I wanted to use Unity and
| ran into a breaking bug in the particle system that wasn't
| fixed for at least 2 years, if ever.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of
| their engine FOREVER
|
| For a 5% cut. Add that on top of taxes and steam and you're
| basically an employee.
| 1323portloo wrote:
| Yes, unless you build everything from the game engine to the
| distribution channel yourself, there is a cost to doing
| business. IIRC Epic Games Store offers a more reasonable
| 88%/12% revenue split, while Steam uses the same rapacious
| split as Apple and GOG at 70%/30%.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Cool, that's why godot and open source are much more
| reasonable paths moving forward.
| minimaul wrote:
| However, Steam offers more eyeballs, and in particular,
| more eyeballs that actually buy games.
|
| The extra 18% doesn't feel as unreasonable when you get to
| make a _lot_ more sales.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a
| project with zero support.
|
| Lol you can literally pay people to keep supporting it if the
| code is Free.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Why would you need godot to be "developed further"? If your
| game is shipped, it's developed. You can continue doing this.
| When the source is private and behind a license you are forced
| to agree to the new terms when the old ones expire, or if you
| can't agree to them then you can no longer ship the game. These
| are not equivalent circumstances.
| bsza wrote:
| > if Godot devs stop working on it
|
| Then others can take it from where they left off, since it's
| open source. As long as it has a user base, it is guaranteed to
| live on. Unlike Unreal.
| [deleted]
| charcircuit wrote:
| People are free to fork Unreal. People can continue working
| on Unreal even if Epic stops devoting reosurces to work on
| it.
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| They are not free to fork Unreal as it is not open source,
| only code available.
| charcircuit wrote:
| That doesn't matter. The fork will just not be an open
| source fork.
| prmoustache wrote:
| You cannot fork it and change its licence unless orig
| unreal license permits you to do it. Does it?
|
| edit: it doesn't unless Epic Games grants you a specific
| license to do that. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-
| US/eula/unreal
|
| source:
|
| > 4. How You Can Share the Licensed Technology When It
| Isn't Part of a Product > You may only Distribute
| Licensed Technology (including as modified by you)
| outside of a Product as expressly permitted by this
| Section 4.
|
| > a. Sharing of Engine Code
|
| > i. Sharing Engine Code with Another Licensee You may
| Distribute Engine Code (including as modified by you) in
| Source Code or object code to a third party who is
| separately licensed by us to use the same version of the
| Engine Code that you are Distributing.
|
| >Any public Distribution of Engine Tools (e.g., intended
| generally for third parties who are separately licensed
| by us to use the Engine Code) must take place through a
| marketplace operated by Epic such as the Unreal Engine
| Marketplace (e.g., for Distributing a Product's modding
| tool or editor to end users) or through a fork of Epic's
| GitHub UnrealEngine Network (e.g., for Distributing
| Source Code).
| charcircuit wrote:
| >You cannot fork it and change its licence
|
| You can't do that for Godot either.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It does matter, since the license of the fork you can
| make has a huge effect on the long-term sustainability of
| that fork.
|
| If Unreal screws you, then you can fork it to build some
| features you need for your current project. If Godot
| screws you, then you can fork it to build some features
| you need for your current project, cooperate with others
| on the features _they_ need which also help you, and
| start a community for Engine-formerly-known-as-Godot-v2
| and invest in it as a thriving basis for projects 10
| years down the road.
| charcircuit wrote:
| If Unreal screws you, you don't lose access to the
| engine. You are still free to work on your own fork with
| others.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| How? Unreal is not FOSS. You have access to the code, but
| the license doesn't allow changing it legally afaik
| charcircuit wrote:
| >How?
|
| By hitting the fork button on github.
|
| >but the license doesn't allow changing it legally afaik
|
| It does allow you to make own changes to it and share it
| with other licensees of the version you forked from.
| nokiz wrote:
| As long as I know, Unreal is not open source, so no, people
| can't fork it.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Forking is not limited to open source software
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Are there any examples of proprietary forks?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Nvidia maintains a fork of unreal engine which integrates
| with RTX for ray tracing support with their cards.
| ekianjo wrote:
| But free distribution of the fork is
| charcircuit wrote:
| Moving the goal posts
| danaris wrote:
| > Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of
| their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license.
|
| Even if this is 100% legally true, they can absolutely _say_
| that they are revoking all old licenses, and then if you used
| one, it 's up to you to take Epic to court to prove that they
| can't.
| amitmathew wrote:
| I'm less concerned about Unreal pulling a Unity. The bigger
| issue is just a lack of attention. The last numbers I saw was
| that Unreal was pulling in $100m a year for Epic. That's a drop
| in the bucket compared to what Epic makes off of Fortnite. In
| my experience, products that matter a lot to the consumer but
| not the company tend to stagnate. Just look at Google outside
| of search.
| [deleted]
| r053bud wrote:
| Yeah if Godot stops being maintained, at least I have the
| source! At least I'm allowed to fork it and move forwards.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| >>>"""But what about Godot? He says as if "it's open source so
| no issue". Yeah but what if the devs stop supporting it? This
| "community will continue to work on it" is BS: in reality it's
| usually one or two guys who actually do the actual work.?"""
|
| Exactly.
|
| We like to hate corporate greed and lionize the open source
| developers. I also hold open source devs in high regard.
|
| BUT.
|
| Open Source Dev have to eat too.
|
| If we want to keep the Open Source ecosystem moving, we do need
| to find a way to pay them. Even today, a lot of open source
| projects are supported by individual corporations that keep the
| devs on payroll to give them time, but that can also lead to
| influence and lock in, and even abandonment if desired.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| > use one version of their engine FOREVER
|
| In an age of locked down mobile OSes and forever changing
| graphics drivers and such, I don't think "FOREVER" is very long
| any more.
|
| It's like a perpetual license to a specific version of
| JetBrains Rider. It's sold as if I own a general purpose tool
| FOREVER and can opt out of an endless subscription but no, it
| doesn't mean much at all. It will not work with the next
| runtime update and past runtimes are obsoleted after a couple
| of years. They have managed to outsource their subscription
| lock-in as the release cycles of a third parties while
| pretending to be holier than thou. If they shipped the volatile
| parts as open source plug-ins, I would feel differently.
| withinboredom wrote:
| > I don't think "FOREVER" is very long any more.
|
| I can still run my first 3d engine from 2003 on Windows.
| Windows actually does a really good job with backwards
| compatibility.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| What's the alternative? That they keep giving people updates
| free forever after they buy it?
| Fluorescence wrote:
| I gave you the alternative: plug-ins that could be
| maintained by the community. They already have the module
| system but all the version sensitive .net features are in
| the core.
|
| For Unreal, I don't think there is a solution to closed
| platforms if it requires a large/sophisticated team to
| maintain compatibility. We can only point out that any
| notion of "forever" is a fiction - you have got in bed with
| a commercial dependency you may come to regret if they
| choose to change the rules.
| gustavus wrote:
| > So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a
| project with zero support. Good luck developing it further
| instead of focusing on your game.
|
| Exactly I'm glad someone is pointing out the problems with
| these piddly open source projects. Companies are too reliant on
| open source software, I mean it's not like open source tooling
| has ever taken off. Except for Emacs, and Vim, and VS Code, and
| maven, and ...
|
| But seriously though the over reliance people have on open
| source projects is staggering, I mean really what happens when
| the guy who maintains Linux gets bored and wanders off,
| everyone is boned.
|
| Therefore I agree with OP all open source projects are
| inevitably doomed to failure and can never work.
|
| Glad to see someone else who sees reason.
| blibble wrote:
| > Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of
| their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license.
|
| I thought the unity TOS had this too?
| jasonlotito wrote:
| That was removed.
|
| Epic's still remains. Yes, if Epic removes this feature of
| the license, we can be concerned. But, Epic's license means I
| can remain on the previous license that has these more
| favorable terms.
| felipesoc wrote:
| Unity had the same in its license. But they changed it without
| notifying and when you updated the engine the new license
| applies even if it's a minor version so Unreal can do the same
| thing.
| brookst wrote:
| > the fact that they are trying to break the Gplay/Apply
| monopoly shows that the Epic games leadership are not corporate
| piranhas
|
| That's a very unique take. I would call a company that lets
| others take startup a buildout risks and the uses the courts
| and regulators to swoop in with a low cost competitor a
| pirhana.
|
| It's a good strategy (for Epic), but it is extremely predatory.
| It's no secret they have their eyes on the console market next;
| let HW makers popularize platforms using a business model of
| low margin HW and high margin SW, then get governments to
| mandate alternative stores so Epic can undercut the SW.
|
| Low risk, low effort, high return. It's a solid business
| strategy but if it's not pirhanic, I don't know what is.
| distantsounds wrote:
| >Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of
| their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So
| the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for
| NEWER version Epic can change this.
|
| Maybe _you_ didn't research how Unity had this same exact
| clause and decided to just... remove it. The author is implying
| Unreal could do the same at any point in time.
| TMM2K wrote:
| You're contradicting your own points. If it is not a problem
| that Unreal can change their license for next versions because
| you can use the old one (which is now unsupported and not
| worked on) that is fine.
|
| For Godot, if we were to stop developing it (and I'd like to
| note that Godot is one of the most active projects on Github
| right now) you would still have the version you have now.
|
| What is the difference between Epic not working on a game
| engine you use or an open source project not working on a game
| engine you use? Except that with Godot at least you could work
| on it yourself if you wanted to.
| chii wrote:
| > Except that with Godot at least you could work on it
| yourself if you wanted to.
|
| let me play the devil's advocate - unreal's source is
| available (despite it not being actual opensource licensed).
| This means if Epic ever abandons unreal, you could
| theoretically also just make the changes you need to support
| whatever your project required - as long as you didn't
| distribute those changes (except perhaps the run-time? Not
| quite sure how unreal engine and the runtime are licensed).
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| See but with Godot you can share your updates and receive
| others updates. You aren't dependent on any single
| organization for the project to continue.
| orly01 wrote:
| If unreal decides to abandon all older versions support and
| development, to just focus on something new that requires
| payment, I don't think you can keep fixing or updating the
| old unsupported code, even if you have the source
| doikor wrote:
| Yes you can.
|
| You just can't redistribute the source to anyone else but
| using it internally for your own projects to build
| executable that you share (and sell as long as you pay
| the royalties to Epic) is fine.
|
| The last UE3 game released in 2021. UE4 came out in 2014
| and UE5 in 2020.
|
| Unreal Engine license are per engine version and
| perpetual. This is something Sweeney has been pointing
| out for years. And again a few days ago when Unity
| started this shit storm. And as Sweeney points out the
| big studios/publishers usually negotiate even better
| terms.
|
| https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/170161922085161
| 792...
| j_maffe wrote:
| Yes you can. But unless you're a AAA developer studio,
| it's ridiculously infeasible. At least for Godot, there
| would be a community effort to maintain it. Such a
| community would be impossible with any closed-source
| (even if readable) engine.
| doikor wrote:
| In general one very rarely upgrade engines after release.
| Even during development you usually don't upgrade if
| there isn't a new feature in the new version you really
| need.
|
| Really it is only an issue for new projects and at that
| point if the license of the newest version is not to your
| liking pick a different engine.
|
| Also the last UE3 game I know of (Them and Us in 2021)
| was made by a small indie studio not some big AAA studio
| with massive publishers backing. At that point the engine
| had been in "end of life" state for 5+ years.
| nflfojfb wrote:
| [dead]
| ekianjo wrote:
| Source available means you cant do shit at the end of the
| day before going in legal trouble
| isaiahg wrote:
| Except you can because of unreal's perpetual license.
| You'd just have to use the same pricing attached to the
| version of source you use
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| If you'd amended the source, then it wouldn't be the same
| version and the license would be invalid. If you want to
| use the perpetual license, you can't do anything with the
| source.
| doikor wrote:
| Except that is what the Unreal Engine license allows you
| to do
|
| https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal
|
| > 2. How You Can Use the Licensed Technology
|
| > Epic grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-
| sublicensable license to privately use, reproduce,
| display, perform, and modify the Licensed Technology in
| accordance with the terms of this Agreement (the
| "License"). This means that as long as you are not
| violating this Agreement or applicable law, you can
| privately use the Licensed Technology however you want.
| If you want to share the Licensed Technology or anything
| you make with it, Sections 3 and 4 below address when and
| how you can do that.
|
| In section 3/4 it goes to that you can compile your game
| and give the output to outsiders if you pay the roylaties
| when applicable or share them royalty free on epics
| github (basically you make a pr to merge your stuff
| upstream) or on unreal marketplace (sell it)
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Well, you can always modify source code and use it
| privately - you hardly need a license for that.
|
| The additional sections that allow distribution are the
| important bits and I guess the devil is in the details.
| xeromal wrote:
| The point is that if you're a game company. You have a
| way to legally make modifications to the engine even if
| Epic goes belly up.
| hx8 wrote:
| > Well, you can always modify source code and use it
| privately - you hardly need a license for that.
|
| You do need a license to modify the source, use it
| internally, and then sell a binary you've produced with
| the modified source.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| It's the "sell a binary" bit that introduces the need for
| a license.
| nflfojfb wrote:
| [dead]
| dcow wrote:
| No you cant.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Who could stop you and how would they know about it?
| cdash wrote:
| Why is there so much misinformation around this. None of
| what you said is true.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Possibly because people like you respond with no actual
| information in your post that people could learn from?
| vinceguidry wrote:
| I am less impressed with the defensiveness you're
| responding with when ignorance is pointed out than I am
| with the people pointing out the ignorance.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I'm not intending to be defensive (I'm sure there's loads
| of people on here with more knowledge about licensing
| terms), but usually a corrective post is something that
| we can learn from. Just saying something is wrong with no
| more info seems against the spirit of HN.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Misinformation is more against the spirit.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Well misinformation wasn't my intention.
| [deleted]
| worble wrote:
| >This means if Epic ever abandons unreal, you could
| theoretically also just make the changes you need to
| support whatever your project required - as long as you
| didn't distribute those changes
|
| No it doesn't, you still don't own the code so you can't
| just modify it and use it to develop games.
| batty_alex wrote:
| Except you can modify it and use it to develop games,
| it's licensed that way
| cdash wrote:
| Completely, wrong. That is the entire reason why the
| source is available in Unreal. To allow you to modify it
| and make games.
| Zambyte wrote:
| IANAL but I am fairly certain you are legally allowed to
| modify the source code of proprietary software and use
| that modified version, so long as you do not distribute
| it (as you couldn't distribute the unmodified version
| either).
|
| The key difference between proprietary and Free Software
| is not actually that you can or cannot modify the source,
| it's that you are _guaranteed_ access to the source in
| order to modify it or not. Since you usually cannot
| access the source of proprietary software, you usually
| have no legal way to modify the source for your
| computing.
| dcow wrote:
| It all depends on the license. There's no umbrella
| ability to modify the source code of a software binary,
| open-source or proprietary, unless explicitly allowed.
| echelon wrote:
| > So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a
| project with zero support. Good luck developing it further
| instead of focusing on your game.
|
| There's zero risk of this happening.
|
| Godot is going to become Blender for gaming and eventually eat
| into Tim's margins. (Unreal isn't even his cash cow.)
|
| Unreal might be significantly ahead now, but when Google,
| Amazon, Apple, etc. contribute to Godot, it's game over.
| raincole wrote:
| My estimation is about 10 ~ 15 years for open source engine
| to catch up Unreal. (both feature and popularity)
|
| Amazon did make a game engine. It shows "Amazon money"
| doesn't magically solve every problem in the world.
|
| > Godot is going to become Blender for gaming
|
| Exactly. Blender still isn't the first choice for most
| animation and VFX jobs.
| atoav wrote:
| I have lived from my VFX freelance work for 4 years and
| worked soley with Blender for the 3D and much of the 2D
| part.
|
| Blender has some parts where it is the best (the tracker
| for example easily beats all commercial trackers I have
| ever used) and other parts where it doesn't shine as much
| (e.g. fluid simulation -- which is a non-issue because it
| integrates well with other tools).
|
| I have been coming from 3dsMax and Maya and never have been
| looking back. Blender also has been getting so much in the
| past 5 years it feels ridiculous and makes you wonder what
| the likes of Adobe and Xo are doing with all their money.
| worble wrote:
| > Exactly. Blender still isn't the first choice for most
| animation and VFX jobs
|
| And it doesn't need to be, it just needs to be a viable
| alternative. Everyone always looks at these projects like
| it's a winner takes all scenario, but it's not. There can
| be multiple programs that accomplish the same thing, some
| open-source, some not, so long as they're sustainable and
| have something unique to offer that's not a problem.
|
| Sure, if we were living in my ideal fantasy all software
| would be fully open and free, but in this reality I'm just
| happy we have alternatives that are actually sustainable
| and don't feel like you're actively gimping yourself.
| danaris wrote:
| Please abandon this idea (that so many have) that the
| _only_ thing worth aspiring to is "being the first
| choice"/dominating an entire industry.
|
| We need standards, sure, but we _desperately_ need better
| competition between high-quality products.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Exactly. Blender still isn't the first choice for most
| animation and VFX jobs.
|
| It doesn't really need to be; being self-sustaining _while
| being open-source_ beats Unity 's model of _being funded to
| cover operations while being closed-source_.
|
| TBH, it's only a matter of time before Blender is a choice
| for most animation and VFX, and then only a little more
| time before it's the first choice.
| TMM2K wrote:
| Depends on the market, for making the next pixar movie
| probably not (yet). However blender usage is way, way up
| and my game studio (Prehensile Tales) has no difficulty
| finding extremely talented blender users.
|
| An open source project doesn't have to be the very most
| used thing from the beginning in order to eventually eat
| everyone's lunch :)
| Akronymus wrote:
| That's an interesting name for a game studio. What's the
| story behind it?
| TMM2K wrote:
| I love monkeys, and I like making video games with
| stories in them. So "prehensile tales" is a somewhat
| oblique way of saying "gripping tales"
|
| Also, it let me have a cute monkey as a logo :
| https://prehensile-tales.com :) (I'm not selling anything
| there, but you can see the logo)
| imaltont wrote:
| Amazon's game engine is also open source under the name
| O3DE.
| Maken wrote:
| Amazon "just" bought the rights to the Crytech engine and
| forked it. Not even they were crazy enough to build their
| own tech from the ground up.
| FullGarden_S wrote:
| I'm afraid not. Its not as simple as that. We have a heavy
| competition in automobile industry but when it comes to
| gaming industry, it is(I mean was) mostly unreal or unity
| despite decades of technological advancement. The reason for
| this is because using a game engine to make games is no where
| as simple as driving a vehicle. It takes a lot of skill,
| knowledge(sometimes things are engine specific only to make
| things even more annoying) and the time to attain both of
| them with the engine they are working on to make good games.
|
| You are grossly underestimating the complexity involved in
| game engines. It is not like a web app where devs don't have
| to worry about constraints like memory or frame rate and
| chill. Things need to happen in real time. A delay of even
| half a millisecond is not acceptable. And these "Things"
| involve changing of 3d objects' position w.r.t player's
| movement, calculating zero or tens or hundreds of NPC AI
| characters' position and finalizing their animation state,
| calculating the lighting on all the objects and a lot more.
| All this just to finally render and present one frame. Yes,
| hardware has gotten better over the years and memory
| constraints might not seem like an issue but that is not the
| case for games. Improved hardware only helps with improving
| the overall quality of the game. Game now will be able to
| afford to look better and do more things than games from 2003
| and that's it. Games still need heavy optimizations.
|
| Thanks for the better hardware, making 2D games now is
| neither expensive nor hard. So, Godot being more friendly
| than unity for making 2D games is quite possible to happen.
| But that is not the case when it come to comparing Godot with
| unreal. Unreal is already at a league of its own. I don't
| think Godot can integrate something like nanite or lumen
| inside its engine anytime soon. In the past few years, only
| unreal has been introducing ground breaking computer graphics
| tech inside a game engine. Unity is having a hard time to
| even keep up with unreal's tech like meta human. It doesn't
| matter how many google, amazon or apple contribute to godot,
| it'd be a big surprise if Godot is at least able to hold its
| ground against O3DE IMHO.
| objclxt wrote:
| > the fact that they are trying to break the Gplay/Apply
| monopoly shows that the Epic games leadership are not corporate
| piranhas like Unity's.
|
| Epic is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart,
| they're doing it because it is beneficial to them. Epic is a
| multi-billion dollar corporation part owned by a massive
| conglomerate.
|
| > BS: in reality it's usually one or two guys who actually do
| the actual work.
|
| Over the last week, Godot had 32 authors pushing 52 commits.
| Over the last month it had 135 authors. This is not "one or two
| guys".
|
| > So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a
| project with zero support.
|
| Guess what, if a closed-source company decides to stop working
| on their product you're _also_ stuck, but now you 're even more
| stuck because you don't have access to the source to make your
| own changes!
| pdpi wrote:
| > Epic is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart
|
| Tim Sweeney founded Epic and wrote the Unreal engine himself.
| John Riccitiello's whole career is in management. Even if
| they're both entirely motivated by profit, they have
| different perspectives on how to get there.
|
| Also, Unity is a public company, while Epic is private. Even
| though Tencent owns a considerable share of the company,
| Sweeney still holds over 50% ownership. That gives them very
| different incentives.
|
| Sometimes we forget that executives are people too and they
| have their own personalities. Tim Cook famously[0] told
| climate change denialists in a shareholder meeting that "If
| you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get
| out of this stock". Sure enough, shareholders are _also_ not
| solely motivated by profit, and voted with Cook on that
| occasion. It's useful to remember that cynicism isn't the
| same thing as realism.
|
| 0. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/03/tim-
| cook...
| 40yearoldman wrote:
| Eh. Part of apples brand is "doing the right thing" and
| "being the good guy". I would wager Apple's brand would be
| hurt more by not being a green company. ROI is more
| complicated than simple fist level cost. Going green and
| doubling down on recycling has generated a much larger ROI
| than doing nothing.
|
| Further more, Tim is bound by law to do what is best for
| the shareholders. Simply put, if Tim favored environmental
| concerns over profit he would be removed.
| techdragon wrote:
| It's a private company... to whatever theoretical extent
| he's beholden to the majority of the shareholders with
| potential board of directors and shareholder meeting
| shenanigans ... that majority of shareholders is
| _himself_ ... and I'm pretty sure he's ok with his own
| decisions...
| Pannoniae wrote:
| "Further more, Tim is bound by law to do what is best for
| the shareholders."
|
| This stupid meme needs to die already. There is no such
| obligation, he only has a fiduciary duty to not trash the
| company and spend the earnings on cocaine. "companies are
| legally forced to maximise profit" has never been true
| and this piece of misinformation has been going around
| for ages now.
| re-thc wrote:
| > "companies are legally forced to maximise profit" has
| never been true
|
| It's more like too hard to be proven in any way. Unless
| you live in an simulator it's really hard to say which
| set of decisions is better than another. People often say
| it is obvious or in hindsight but fact is there are no
| such hard proofs.
| vel0city wrote:
| Even then, if the shareholders approve of trashing the
| company with ice cream parties (had to get rid of the
| illegality of cocaine for this point) there's nothing
| inherently wrong or illegal with that.
|
| As long as the executives are behaving generally how the
| shareholders want, it's not a problem.
| sambeau wrote:
| There's still argument about this. The oft mentioned
| Dodge v. Ford Motor Company 1919 covers much the argument
| for and against. But it's clearly not straightforward.
|
| My (IANAL) reading of it is that maximising shareholder
| value is probably the law, but it's practically
| unenforcible. Being practically unenforcible doesn't stop
| CEOs and boards from using it as a guiding principle.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Dodge v. Ford Motor Company was a Michigan State
| decision, so even if one thinks it means maximizing
| shareholder value is the law (it really didn't say that,
| broadly), it only applies in Michigan.
| pdpi wrote:
| > There is no such obligation
|
| And, insofar as such an obligation to "maximise
| shareholder value" might exist, that obligation doesn't
| necessarily translate into "maximise profit".
|
| The shareholders of a theatre company might care more
| about breaking even while getting an interesting
| assortment of plays produced with a great cast than they
| do about making a bunch of money out of the venture, so
| an executive who makes a bunch of money by running
| productions of uninspired cash grab shows won't actually
| be maximising value. Likewise, I'm sure that Rob
| McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds care more about Wrexham
| AFC's managers getting good athletic results than they do
| about making a bunch of money.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> And, insofar as such an obligation to "maximise
| shareholder value" might exist, that obligation doesn't
| necessarily translate into "maximise profit"._
|
| And even where it does translate into "maximise profit"
| because it's what shareholders of a particular company
| may want, there is no timeframe for it, and there is no
| way to tell whether any particular decision by the CEO
| runs contrary to the goal of eventually maximising
| profits.
|
| Companies can spend all their revenues plus a constant
| stream of new capital on growing market share or revenue,
| on charitable activities or the happiness of employees,
| on huge research and development projects or on
| restructuring after restructuring and still credibly
| claim that all of it is ultimately meant to maximise
| profits.
|
| The point where CEOs and CFOs have to be careful is when
| the company faces solvency issues. That's where legal
| limits of freewheeling decision making kick in, because
| it's where it's no longer about shareholders but about
| creditors.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Cook _isn 't_ bound by that true enough, because he
| remains the majority stakeholder, but that is
| increasingly not the case as it becomes more and more
| regular that companies bring in new CEOs from entirely
| different companies if not entirely different industries,
| who _do not own that much stake._ In those cases, the
| board and shareholders can and do exert a lot of
| influence, up to and including firing them if they do not
| do their jobs correctly, which to shareholders is
| invariably some form of "make line go up."
|
| And that's just civil influence, there _are_ legal
| mechanisms indeed in place if a CEO "trashes a company"
| and what that means is different depending on the
| company.
| HardlyCognizant wrote:
| They are liable and there is precedent, as I understand
| it.
|
| eBay v Newmark
|
| https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/cases/3472
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/basr.1210
| 8
| j_maffe wrote:
| This is a complete falsehood.
| https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-
| are-co...
| wredue wrote:
| In your haste to defend the idiocy of shareholder causing
| constant enshittification, you accidentally forgot to
| read the comment you're replying to.
|
| Businesses are legally bound to act in the best interest
| of their shareholders. This is quite an open ended
| precedent.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| People write this sentence seeming to imply it means
| "CEOs and management have a responsibility to be as
| ruthless and sociopathic as possible to deliver the
| highest returns, and any consideration of the people or
| communities they trample beyond legal requirements is
| itself borderline illegal."
|
| There is a lot - A LOT - of room for ambiguity and debate
| on the specifics of shareholder value and "best
| interests." The "legal constraints to act in the best
| interest" is not some set of corporate rules and KPIs
| codified into our legal code write large. It's not about
| maximizing a specific KPI over a fixed timeframe.
|
| Not to mention Sweeney _is_ the majority shareholder in
| Epic 's case.
| danaris wrote:
| This is incorrect.
|
| Businesses are legally bound to follow the official
| decisions of shareholders at official meetings. Anything
| beyond that is merely "a good idea".
| jibe wrote:
| _Businesses are legally bound to act in the best interest
| of their shareholders_
|
| If they are legally bound, there must be either a law or
| contract, can you cite either?
| tialaramex wrote:
| "Best interests" is deliberately vague. Is it in their
| "best interests" that you fire the CEO and call the cops
| because he raped an intern? Or maybe that you agree to
| accelerate his $40M "bonus" if he agrees to resign
| without saying why? Or maybe it's in their "best
| interests" that you pay PIs to develop evidence that the
| intern has a drug habit and "leak" this "shocking
| revelation" to the media if they go public?
|
| You can argue almost anything meets this criterion, in
| some egregious scenarios a court won't buy it, but they
| will give you enormous leeway.
| jorvi wrote:
| The same Tim Cook that tries to make iPhones as
| unrepairable as possible? :)
|
| Don't fall for feelgood greenwashing.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Is that why iFixit rated the iPhone 14 repairability as
| 7/10?
|
| https://www.ifixit.com/News/64865/iphone-14-teardown
| SSLy wrote:
| Still better CO2 footprint than anything else on the
| market
| bannedbybros wrote:
| [dead]
| agentgumshoe wrote:
| What?
| cornstalks wrote:
| iPhones have long support cycles. iOS 17 supports the
| iPhone XS/XR, which were released 5 years ago. So iPhone
| users don't have to replace their phone as much, reducing
| environmental impact. Plus with the recycling and other
| stuff used to make iPhones in the first place, their
| environmental impact is going to be lower than some other
| options on the market. Combine these two things together
| (longer device life, smaller impact for making a new
| device) and I can believe iPhones have the smallest CO2
| footprint.
| pdpi wrote:
| If Tim Cook had calmly said what he did, I'd believe it
| was just toeing the party line. The fact that he actually
| got angry, though? He doesn't strike me as the sort of
| person who'd fake that, I don't think that's the image he
| wants if nothing else.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| He doesn't have to fake it. Dude probably believes that
| there's no connection between right to repair,
| unsustainable consumption, and planetary destruction.
| That might be worse than faking it.
| freedomben wrote:
| [flagged]
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| Pretty sure repairability has been getting dramatically
| better the last couple generations. The entire back panel
| is replaceable on 15s
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Because people are pushing right to repair laws and Apple
| wants to do just enough to reduce the desire for those.
| kaliqt wrote:
| Epic is mainly owned by its founder. They are not primarily
| corporate though they are influenced by it. They are 100%
| more trustworthy than Unity or other corporate game
| companies.
| andrepd wrote:
| I find your innocence touching.
|
| EDIT: To elaborate, this is an article about a company
| fucking users over after an aggressive growth / dumping
| business model phase. Your response is yes but _this_ other
| company would never fuck users over after an aggressive
| growth / dumping business model phase.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > Your response is yes but this other company would never
| fuck users over after an aggressive growth / dumping
| business model phase.
|
| Well, Epic didn't do that when it went through it's
| aggressive growth and the last time it dumped it's
| business model. Instead, they changed their licensing to
| lower fees, and when you look at what they did across the
| board, made things better for customers and game
| developers.
|
| So, all evidence is to the contrary.
|
| Edit: Also, nice strawman.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Watching this industry for a long time, I've learned that
| I can never trust a company. Companies are made up of
| people but the people within them change, and their
| incentives change. This is very much the case with Unity.
|
| People, on the other hand, I can trust. Not often, but in
| cases where a person has made a long series of decisions
| over a decade or more, you can get a feel for what their
| value system is. Tim Sweeney is in this category. He was
| involved in Unreal back when I was in undergrad, more
| than 20 years ago. So I sort of put him in the same
| category as Gabe Newell and John Carmack: relatively
| enlightened game business leaders that understand the
| true value that gamers and developers derive from the
| ecosystem. None of them are in to make another dollar in
| the next quarter: they are focused on long term success
| and the are passionate about games themselves.
|
| So it's not that you're wrong, it's just that your
| argument applies cynicism uniformly, and I'm not sure
| that's fair given the history of those involved.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Until Tim Sweeney sells the company, or dies, or whatever.
| Enter any contract you like, but know that those contracts
| outlast the people who executed them.
| isaiahg wrote:
| > Epic is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart,
| they're doing it because it is beneficial to them. Epic is a
| multi-billion dollar corporation part owned by a massive
| conglomerate.
|
| Holy straw man! And there's certainly no self-interest
| involved with me using their engine without giving them a cut
| under 1 mill right?
|
| You can make this argument about literally anything.
|
| Godot must have no self-interest in releasing their engine
| for free and making $30k a month to develop their project.
|
| Who cares what the motivation is if it gives real benefits to
| devs. If anything it tells me they've picked a business model
| that's mutually beneficial unlike Unity
| Mechanical9 wrote:
| While you can make this argument about literally anything,
| it seems apt to make it about a multi-billion dollar
| company chasing a trillion dollar company.
|
| It's fine to support them while they are the underdog and
| are saying and doing the right thing, but don't pretend
| like they will say and do the right thing forever.
| gameman144 wrote:
| I don't think the parent was ever saying they'll be good
| forever. More that if they _do_ become evil, their
| licensing lets you continue using a revenue structure
| that made sense at the time you chose it (even if new
| versions have super awful terms).
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > Who cares what the motivation is if it gives real
| benefits to devs.
|
| Motivations matter, because they will decide in which
| direction a project moves over time, or if situations
| change. Epic is the "good guy" now, but only because they
| are an underdog. If they become the dominator, they might
| become the predator which Unity tries to be at the moment.
|
| But if we are honest, such uncertain possibilities don't
| matter if they are so far in the future. This might be a
| problem for future games, 10, 20 years down the river..
| 3seashells wrote:
| [flagged]
| doikor wrote:
| > Epic is a multi-billion dollar corporation part owned by a
| massive conglomerate.
|
| More then 50% of the shares/votes is owned by a single
| person. The founder and CEO Tim Sweeney.
| objclxt wrote:
| Yes, that's why I said "part owned". 40% of Epic is owned
| by Tencent.
| re-thc wrote:
| > Yes, that's why I said "part owned".
|
| Which doesn't really matter unless you'll lose control.
| If 1 entity has >50% it's pretty safe.
| plagiarist wrote:
| It's hilarious that their arguments for the commercial engine
| are somehow both "you can use one version forever" and "you
| might be forced to use one version of something else
| forever."
| Libcat99 wrote:
| Doubly so, since the "something else" is able to be updated
| by you, if necessary.
| isaiahg wrote:
| If you understood the problem then you'd know that their
| argument is about how Unity's new pricing change is
| retroactive, affecting all Unity versions and charging fees
| to devs for games made years ago.
|
| Unreal uses perpetual licenses for their versions meaning
| this kind of bullshit behavior is not possible
| plagiarist wrote:
| Perhaps it is you who doesn't understand. We all get that
| part, and it makes sense in isolation. Yes, that is
| better.
|
| Then it's goofy af to say Godot might make a license
| change that necessitates using one version in perpetuity-
| except a version you and others are allowed to modify and
| distribute.
| darkwater wrote:
| In opensource, you can use that version _and add more
| changes to it_ after the original author changed the
| license.
| cableshaft wrote:
| > Over the last week, Godot had 32 authors pushing 52
| commits. Over the last month it had 135 authors. This is not
| "one or two guys".
|
| Yeah, right now (and I hope it keeps increasing thanks to the
| Unity news).
|
| I got burnt once (and almost twice) from this in the past.
| cocos2d-iPhone used to be huge, and Zynga even contributed to
| it. I released two games using it, and started another one.
| And then it stopped getting updated (and Apple keeps breaking
| things like Apple likes to do), so it died on the vine and I
| had to port to something else.
|
| Currently making a game in Monogame, and while it did get a
| significant update a little over a year ago, it's had very
| little activity on it since then and no other releases
| besides a hotfix shortly after, and zero communication about
| what's going on with any of their official channels at least.
| Not great especially since there seems to be spotty support
| for .Net 6 outside of Windows still, and I keep running into
| various issues with its 3D support (which it is mainly
| supposed to be a 2D game, but it does support 3D to a certain
| extent).
|
| Also while it claims to support platforms like PS4 and
| Switch, I see almost no documentation on it, and very little
| documentation on getting Steamworks working with it (I have
| some basic things working, but I'm having to figure things
| for Unity first and then porting that knowledge over). Also
| most of its multiplayer libraries seem outdated, at least the
| ones I looked up. And the forums/Discord still have some
| activity on them, but not a ton. Also I'd love to make a game
| that supported VR (almost switched to Unity just for that
| alone).
|
| I actually compared its Github activity to Godot a week ago,
| and Godot looks SO much better supported than Monogame at
| this point, that I was already considering either porting or
| making my next game in Godot before this Unity news was
| announced. But maybe that's just me hopping onto another
| platform that will have the same problem in 5 years after
| I've gotten pretty invested into it.
|
| I also know Unity (worked on a game professionally years
| back) and considered switching to that for my game too, but
| that mostly got killed by this announcement.
|
| Personally I prefer code-based development (I don't like
| using an editor too much), so if Monogame was better
| supported and had much better 3D support I'd probably just
| stick with it. I thought I was going to when I first started
| using it seriously three years ago. But I hesitate to keep
| dumping time into it if they don't maintain it.
|
| Also I made a small game with Phaser.js and was going to do
| more with that, but even that creator is pretty much the only
| one maintaining it and they got sidelined by life for about
| six months (which is fine, but get someone to help keep it
| going if you can! I know that's hard though). Phaser at least
| is already close to what I want from it, and doesn't seem to
| need much else for the foreseeable future.
| troupo wrote:
| > Guess what, if a closed-source company decides to stop
| working on their product you're also stuck
|
| Isn't Unreal's source open?
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Unreal is source available
| TMM2K wrote:
| You can access the source code to unreal engine when you
| get a license, but the terms are not by any stretch of the
| imagination open source. You wouldn't be able to freely
| share your modifications for instance.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| You don't have to get a "license" (at least in the sense
| of paying anything), IIRC you just connect your EGS
| account to your Github account, accept an EULA (which
| technically is a "license" I guess) and then have read
| access to the Unreal Engine GH repositories.
|
| (currently there seem to be around half a million users
| with access)
| TMM2K wrote:
| What do you think clicking the EULA is?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I'm hailing from an era where "getting a game engine
| license" involved several in-person meetings between top-
| level management of both companies, followed by multiple
| technical meetings between engineers from both companies,
| followed by exhaustive due diligence investigations from
| both sides, followed by intense haggling and shady
| backroom deals for several months, and finally signing a
| proper "contract", handing over absurd amounts of money
| upfront and then paying equally absurd amounts of
| royalties after release.
|
| That's basically what I understand as "getting a license
| for a game engine" (this is also why Unity got popular in
| the first place, because they skipped all this nonsense).
|
| OTH I accept probably 5..10 EULAs a week without thinking
| or even reading the text (most of them are not
| enforceable anyway).
| troupo wrote:
| "Clicking EULA" might not be enforceable in many
| countries.
| gruez wrote:
| Like which?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| AFAIK in Germany the TL;DR is that if there's anything in
| the EULA which violates "German Civil Code (BGB)", then
| either parts or all of the EULA are invalid. I remember
| that in Germany an EULA cannot prohibit reselling the
| software to somebody else, or making your own backup copy
| (kinda tricky nowadays though where everything is just a
| "service").
| ensignavenger wrote:
| "AFAIK in Germany the TL;DR is that if there's anything
| in the EULA which violates "German Civil Code (BGB)",
| then either parts or all of the EULA are invalid. "
|
| There is nothing unique about German law here. The same
| is true in the USA and most other countries. If a EULA or
| any other contract (whether agreed verbally, signed
| physically, digitally, or via a "click") violates the
| law, it can be considered invalid/unenforceable. It has
| nothing to do with how the agreement was agreed to, but
| with what the agreement contains. (There may be some
| legal theory that may carry some weight that a contract
| agreed to via a "click" is more likely to be
| unconscionable that one agreed to with a physical
| signature, but that does not automatically make all
| "click" agreements unenforceable.)
| troupo wrote:
| There are multiple reasons why an EULA may be viewed as
| unenforceable in the EU due to unfair terms:
| https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-
| treat...
|
| Interestingly, Unity runs afoul of many of those.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| That's just standard contract law in any country.
| wccrawford wrote:
| In which case you have _no license_ to the code. So
| either way, you 'd have no rights.
|
| You're still welcome to contact them directly and try to
| get some kind of contract directly if you can't agree to
| the EULA for access.
| Maken wrote:
| That's still not open source. Try cloning their repo and
| making it public.
| maccard wrote:
| > You wouldn't be able to freely share your modifications
| for instance.
|
| Have you read the unreal engine license agreement? [0].
| Section 3.a covers modifications
|
| [0] https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal
| dcow wrote:
| Section 3.a covers products you've made with the licensed
| technology. I don't see any language about modifications
| to the licensed technology.
|
| Edit: I see some language covering this further up.
| maccard wrote:
| I used to work for Epic so I have some inside knowledge,
| but modifying the engine and sharing it with other
| licensees (via the UDN forum usually) Its actively
| encouraged too.
| dkersten wrote:
| > when you get a license
|
| I was going to comment that it's viewable by anyone on
| their GitHub, but you are correct: you have to be part of
| the Epic GitHub organisation to access the repo. Getting
| access is easy, but you do have to agree to their
| licensing terms to do so. So yes, what you said.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| There are already well over one or two Godot devs working on
| the engine. The community funding is already enough that it
| supports multiple full time devs salaries. If the current devs
| quit, this funding would be used to hire new devs. At this
| point, I think the Godot community is already well over the
| tipping point where it will continue no matter what the
| original devs decide to do.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > There are already well over one or two Godot devs working
| on the engine. The community funding is already enough that
| it supports multiple full time devs salaries. If the current
| devs quit, this funding would be used to hire new devs. At
| this point, I think the Godot community is already well over
| the tipping point where it will continue no matter what the
| original devs decide to do.
|
| Yeah. They've reached critical mass to, from this point on,
| be self-sustaining.
|
| I don't think Unity ever got to that point.
| lolinder wrote:
| The worst case scenario for Godot is the same as the worst case
| scenario for Unity: you can keep using the last release that
| worked for you. As far as I can tell Unreal has no concept of
| an LTS version, so if you don't like the new license you're not
| getting any updates at all.
|
| This is where FOSS comes in: If support ends, you can keep
| using the latest version just like with proprietary software,
| but you can _also_ fork it and fix pressing issues. It 's not
| even a question of relying on the community continuing to
| create major new releases. If that fails, your org could fork
| it alone and patch any blocking bugs.
|
| My company already does this for several pieces of legacy
| software that we haven't had the time to migrate away from. We
| don't make any major changes, but we can and do fix things that
| get in our way. We'd get no such benefit from proprietary
| software that changes its terms to be unfavorable.
| croes wrote:
| >So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a
| project with zero support
|
| Isn't that valid for any software including Unity or Unreal?
|
| With open source at least you can try it yourself
| raincole wrote:
| What if Unreal changes its term?
|
| Your answer: you can use the old version.
|
| What if Godot stops the development?
|
| Your answer: good luck (???)
| nokiz wrote:
| > What if Godot stops the development?
|
| You can also use the old version. Also others can take it
| from where they left off, since it's open source, as it's has
| been pointed.
| raincole wrote:
| And this is exactly my point.
| okamiueru wrote:
| The sarcasm wasn't obvious.
| hahn-kev wrote:
| You can also use the old version, it's not like an old
| unsupported version of something is any different for open
| and closed source
| kgwxd wrote:
| They are different, open source is obviously better in that
| scenario.
| carstenhag wrote:
| Except Unreal is also open source in the sense of them
| providing you full source code access & documentation on
| how to build it.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| That isn't what open source means. Open source means that
| you can make changes to the source code and distribute
| it.
| nottorp wrote:
| > the Epic games leadership are not corporate piranhas like
| Unity's.
|
| the Epic games leadership are bribing developers for
| exclusivity, including kickstarters where i was promised steam
| or gog
|
| the Epic games leaderhip makes money from free to play
| grinding/gambling simulators
|
| the Epic games leadership also comes from Tencent that made all
| their gaming money before trying to get into the western market
| from asian gacha
|
| The only reason their terms are more reasonable now is because
| they're the underdog and throwing a lot of money made from free
| to play crap at fixing that.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Bribing implies an illegal act. Giving money in exchange for
| goods and services is completely normal: I don't bribe a
| restaurant for food. Exclusivity is just a way of competing
| for games, a sign of a good competitive market.
|
| Kickstarter is kickstarter. Half of them probably don't
| fulfill all their promises. That's the risk you're taking,
| and why it's not a preorder.
|
| Epic don't have gambling. They've even removed gambling from
| Rocket League after purchasing them too.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Bribing implies an illegal act. Giving money in exchange
| for goods and services is completely normal: I don't bribe
| a restaurant for food. Exclusivity is just a way of
| competing for games, a sign of a good competitive market.
|
| It doesn't have to be illegal, merely immoral.
|
| > Kickstarter is kickstarter. Half of them probably don't
| fulfill all their promises. That's the risk you're taking,
| and why it's not a preorder.
|
| I don't expect them to finish a project when i back them. I
| expect them to deliver my fucking GoG key when they finish
| the project and ask me what do I want it on and i say GoG!
| I don't expect them to say "Epic paid us a ton of money and
| you can get it on their gacha financed store".
|
| True story. So long, Julian Gollop.
|
| > Epic don't have gambling. They've even removed gambling
| from Rocket League after purchasing them too.
|
| They're free to play. That means the game is designed to
| keep you playing forever and keep you buying IAPs. It is
| not designed to entertain you.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Releasing on a store is not immoral. Is not releasing on
| GoG what you believe to be immoral? Even GoG has paid for
| exclusives, they charge store fees like everyone else.
| They're a business too at the end of the day.
|
| That sounds like an unfinished feature to me then.
|
| Why are you playing games forever that aren't
| entertaining?
| nottorp wrote:
| > Why are you playing games forever that aren't
| entertaining?
|
| Did I say I play endless games? I said free to play games
| have to be endless to get you to pay.
| kowbell wrote:
| Do you have a moral issue with games that are free and
| also "endless"?
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| [dead]
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| > Tim Sweeney explicitly mentioned this often + the fact that
| they are trying to break the Gplay/Apply monopoly shows that
| the Epic games leadership are not corporate piranhas like
| Unity's.
|
| Haha this made me laugh. If you think epic isn't piranha then
| you're living in a bubble.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Godot is completely free but I still suggest trying to write your
| own small frameworks. A lot of Unity's code is third party. All
| their 2d rigid body physics is Erin Catto's Box2D.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| Yup, I always believe writing a simple 2d engine gives a lot of
| insights about why commercial engines do this or that.
|
| Even as simple as a tile based Ultima-spinoff engine, it's
| still a lot of work.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| Valve needs to capitalize off this and get Source 2 out
| esskay wrote:
| Not only get it out but actively promote it as an opensource
| project instead of proprietary and make revenue through an
| asset store. Theres so few games that use source that theres no
| way its commercially viable on its own.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| Valve doesn't do it that way. Instead of some crummy asset
| store with generic and terrible looking assets they literally
| just let you use the assets from their games. See Garry's
| Mod, Sven Co-op and Insurgency for an example of this.
| mnau wrote:
| Valve is not interested in games, only steam. DOTA 2 (2013) was
| their last mentionable game.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| Half-Life Alyx*
| bombcar wrote:
| Every ToS-style contract has a "we can change anything about this
| at any time, screw you" clause, but they also almost never use it
| except to change their privacy policy.
| hedora wrote:
| There are limits to what sorts of changes are enforceable,
| though most of those documents also say the vendor gets to
| choose the arbitration firm that decides what is enforceable.
| bombcar wrote:
| I suspect it's partially because the lawyers remind them that
| certain contract terms are not enforceable, and also that
| shooting yourself in the foot doesn't really help revenues
| long-term.
| miragecraft wrote:
| The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar
| as Unity doesn't track for me.
|
| The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their
| own game store and is courting developers aggressively with
| generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with
| developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it
| presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal
| Engine utiltizes makes less money than this so-called runtime
| fee.
|
| I beg to differ, I think the only reason Unity went this route is
| because they don't want to be seen to publicly break the promise
| of no revenue share/royalty pledge they had earlier, and
| ironically came up with an even worse monetization scheme.
|
| In my opinion, the only reason this whole fiasco happened is
| because Unity the company has too many headcounts and has too
| much expense, and the reason for that is they grew too big, and
| the reason they grew too big is because they took the company
| public and in that sphere success is measured in growth, even if
| the company is much healthier if it had stayed smaller.
|
| Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we ended
| up here. I think that says a lot.
| darklycan51 wrote:
| "who operates their own game store and is courting developers
| aggressively with generous revenue split"
|
| Yeah, I wonder why, almost like they're trying to slowly gain
| market share lead to then have a monopoly.
|
| Arguing that just because _right now_ there 's alternatives
| that don't seem like they'll do that, right now. Is not a good
| argument against open source.
|
| if any of those engines can retroactively destroy your
| livelihood, or make games unavailable forever for users because
| of $ reasons, then that is a huge enough reason to simply drop
| the engine.
|
| Unreal will get eventually damage from this unity move as well,
| if I was a game dev I would _seriously_ consider Godot right
| now, luckily I am a software dev not a game dev, only game dev
| I do is modding warcraft 3 so I don 't have to bother about
| that stuff
| gochi wrote:
| Epic will never have a monopoly as long as Steam exists. They
| aren't complete fools here, they realize this but are aware
| that even having a slice of that massive pie is enough to
| fuel numerous positions in the future.
| darklycan51 wrote:
| When I was talking about monopoly, I was talking about 3rd
| party engines, not storefronts.
| autoexec wrote:
| A duopoly isn't much better
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's actually a lot better. At least the two companies
| check and balance each other naturally. Not ideal, but
| better.
|
| The big issue is if those two companies collude, but for
| storefronts there's less incentive than other industries.
| [deleted]
| harles wrote:
| I think this comes down to ambitions. Unity wanted to be an
| advertising company and when that goal started slipping away,
| they did something drastic. Epic wants to be a store and a
| virtual production platform. Who knows what they'll do if those
| goals seem impossible.
|
| It's also worth remembering that Epic isn't the good guy here.
| When incentives align, most corporations are capable of some
| pretty awful stuff. With Epic specifically they made accidental
| purchases in Fortnite very easy and then intentionally buried
| the refund button outside the store under an obscure settings
| page [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
| releases/2022/12/...
| autoexec wrote:
| > Unity wanted to be an advertising company and when that
| goal started slipping away, they did something drastic. Epic
| wants to be a store and a virtual production platform.
|
| Epic "being a store" just happens to allow them to collect a
| ton of personal data and push a whole lot of ads. Seems like
| they want to be in advertising too.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Unity didn't always want to be an advertising company. Epic
| didn't always want to be a store and virtual product
| platform.
|
| Ambitions change. And you're subject to the whims of the
| ambitions of those with more power.
| ubertaco wrote:
| The question is not "do we _suppose_ that it's _likely_ that
| they _would_ do something similar?", but rather "is it
| _possible_ that they _can_ do something similar?"
|
| If you're using a proprietary engine made by a for-profit
| company, the answer to that second question is always "yes",
| and the answer to that first question is always subject to
| change.
|
| If you're using an open-source engine, the answer to the second
| question is "no" (because in the worst-case you can fork it to
| buy yourself time), and the answer to the first question is
| totally moot, because the first question is no longer a thing.
|
| It's about risk management: optimism is not a strategy.
| Mitigation by removing the attack vector _is_ a strategy.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| > In my opinion, the only reason this whole fiasco happened is
| because Unity the company has too many headcounts and has too
| much expense, and the reason for that is they grew too big, and
| the reason they grew too big is because they took the company
| public and in that sphere success is measured in growth, even
| if the company is much healthier if it had stayed smaller
|
| This can be simplified to:
|
| "The only reason are MBAs"
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > and the reason they grew too big is because they took the
| company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth
|
| Why is "growth" always interpreted as "higher headcount" and
| not "higher profits"?
|
| Certainly a company that has continually growing profits
| without increasing costs would be seen as more valuable than a
| company that constantly increases their costs with revenue?
|
| Does Unity hiring more Engineers actually increase revenue?
| bmer wrote:
| Perhaps because it is generally well accepted that you can
| maintain stable profit margins with a fixed employee count,
| but increasing profits with a fixed employee count is not
| possible beyond the maximum potential of that fixed set of
| employees?
|
| (Not sure, this is an amateur's guess on my part.)
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| very generalized answer here but it comes down to:
|
| 1. you want to make sure product A is profitable
|
| 2. at some point Product A will reach a steady state (in some
| utopic future, but let's pretend). i.e. Product A will hit a
| point where its excitement will taper off.
|
| 3. How do you get that explosive growth back? New product.
| But you want to maintain old product.
|
| 4. hire more people to work on Product B. Have it launch, big
| growth!
|
| 5. then recession hits and it turns out you need stability.
| Product A is fine, everyone on Product B is fired
|
| profits are important, but it's not the end all be all for
| how the stock market works. It may not even be the most
| important factor. You want to build excitement and become the
| thing big thing, even if it turns out to be a check you can't
| cash. So in that lens, Unity hires (or hired) more engineers
| or acquires companies to increase excitement, not necessarily
| to increase profits. "Product A" is ads, and right now even
| that isn't very stable for them, so I guess they are trying
| to find a new Product A.
|
| Back in the old days, Game studios used to simply make games
| to build this excitement. It has a set track, a big time to
| announce and release for spikes, and your existing teams
| works on the next game. But more studios want to get that
| "Product A", so even games are investing more in GaaS for
| that steady income. It's what ended up happening to Epic with
| Fortnite, where their "Product B" is actually announcing
| exciting engine features.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > 2. at some point Product A will reach a steady state (in
| some utopic future, but let's pretend). i.e. Product A will
| hit a point where its excitement will taper off.
|
| > 4. hire more people to work on Product B. Have it launch,
| big growth!
|
| Why is the answer "hire more people to work on Product B"
| and not "Move people from A to B and shrink the product A
| team to focus on bug fixes and security fixes"
|
| I would think that the desire to hire a whole new team
| rather than move staff is what keeps Zawinski's Law [0]
| around.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's not mutually exclusive. But it depends on Product B,
| and oftentimes these kinds of tech companies want to grow
| in completely different areas.
|
| Take Amazon, for example: they have great engineers, but
| probably not too many game developers (or those
| interested in moving from current SWE positions to the
| game division). And they almost certainly had no artists
| on board, among other disciplines needed for a game. So
| when making Amazon Games they would have to mostly hire
| new staff. Not the best example given how they floundered
| for a decade, but I think that was a management issue
| over a talent issue.
| somenameforme wrote:
| There's another strong argument in favor of this point. This
| [1] is from Unreal's license:
|
| ---
|
| "7. The Agreement Between You and Epic a. Amendments If we make
| changes to this Agreement, you are not required to accept the
| amended Agreement, and this Agreement will continue to govern
| your use of any Licensed Technology you already have access to.
|
| However, if we make changes to this Agreement, you will not be
| allowed to access certain Epic services or download the
| Licensed Technology unless you have accepted the amended
| Agreement. If we make changes, we will provide you with notice,
| such as by sending an email or giving you notice when you next
| log into an Epic service."
|
| ---
|
| So in other words, if they do a bait and switch, you're free to
| keep using the old license for older versions of the engine.
| The reason I think this is telling is because they did this in
| the day and age where basically every EULA comes down to "We
| can do anything at any time, for any reason, and you can do
| nothing." For them to actually have this in their terms is a
| tremendous display of good faith.
|
| [1] - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal
| das_keyboard wrote:
| If you go to this Unity blogpost from 2019 [1] it states:
|
| > When you obtain a version of Unity, and don't upgrade your
| project, we think you should be able to stick to that version
| of the TOS.
|
| > Moving forward, we will host TOS changes on Github to give
| developers full transparency about what changes are
| happening, and when.
|
| The link to the mentioned GitHub repo just recently became
| dead :/
|
| [1]: https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-
| service-an...
| somenameforme wrote:
| Nothing's ever dead. [1]
|
| ---
|
| "8. Modifications.
|
| Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at
| any time for any reason and without notice (the "Updated
| Terms") and those Updated Terms will apply to the most
| recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided
| that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights,
| you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions
| of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long
| Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year
| release) according to the terms that applied just prior to
| the Updated Terms (the "Prior Terms"). The Updated Terms
| will then not apply to your use of those current-year
| versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year
| version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1).
| If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity
| will endeavor to notify you of the modification. If a
| modification is required to comply with applicable law, the
| modification will apply notwithstanding this section.
| Except as explicitly set forth in this paragraph, your use
| of any new version or release of the Unity Software will be
| subject to the Updated Terms applicable to that release or
| version. You understand that it is your responsibility to
| maintain complete records establishing your entitlement to
| Prior Terms."
|
| ---
|
| EDIT: Oh wow. How sketchy. That page on Github is only
| their "additional terms". When you go to their terms page
| itself you find [2]
|
| ---
|
| "1.4 Modification
|
| Unity reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to
| modify, discontinue or terminate the Services. Unity may
| also modify the Agreement at any time and without prior
| notice. If we modify the Agreement, we will post the
| modification on the Site or otherwise provide you with
| notice of the modification. We will also update the "Last
| updated" date at the top of these Terms. By continuing to
| access or use the Services after we have provided you with
| notice of a modification, you indicate that you agree to be
| bound by the modified Terms. If the modified Terms are not
| acceptable to you, your only recourse is to cease using the
| Services.
|
| Notwithstanding this Section 1.4, any modification of the
| Unity Software Additional Terms is subject to Section 8 of
| the Unity Software Additional Terms."
|
| ---
|
| There is some serious lawyerizing going on there that makes
| this largely incomprehensible to me at least, probably by
| design.
|
| [1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20201111183311/https://gi
| thub.co...
|
| [2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20200814002539/https://un
| ity3d.c...
| janosdebugs wrote:
| Mentioning it in a blog post is not the same as putting it
| in the TOS themselves and you can keep using the old
| version with the old agreement.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I can't see how anything less favorable to the devs would not
| be instantly rejected in court, especially in the EU ?
|
| Speaking of which, I don't see why the Unity using devs can't
| just keep using the old version of Unity, and therefore never
| have to accept the new license ?
|
| (Of course I assume that Unity would have made it extra-
| annoying, because these changes don't just come out like
| that, but the point here is to give themselves time to find
| an alternative to Unity.)
| pxoe wrote:
| people trusted in unity for years, enough to build their
| products and careers on it and around it, and something like
| this still happened. was it foreseeable? even if it was, well
| what then, 'great, i have no options besides sucking it up or
| switching, since i built upon this'. what guarantees do
| epic/unreal customers have?
|
| oh wait, this isn't about 'what worth does 'trust in company'
| even have', but more like 'public companies bad'
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > was it foreseeable?
|
| Has Unity ever said anything about turning their software
| into a platform, for instance asking for monthly/yearly
| subscriptions instead of a one time fee ?
|
| If they did, _that 's_ when the devs (and especially teachers
| of future devs !) should have dropped it as soon as feasible.
| pxoe wrote:
| platform isn't just about subscriptions, subscriptions
| don't really make a platform, and overall it'd be kind of a
| poor tell of whether it's time to jump ship. epic/unreal is
| kind of a platform (there's a bunch of stuff in their
| ecosystem that plugs in, etc.), so what, should people jump
| ship from unreal now
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| I get that you're writing stylized speculations but in my
| experience in the games industry, every single point is wrong.
| It is the most upvoted comment because it touches on a bunch of
| first-principles-know-nothing boogeymen, but so it goes with
| Hacker News nowadays. You can keep reading to find out why, or
| whatever, my dog in this race is (1) I use Unity (2) I don't
| think they're going to change anything about these terms except
| maybe the installs issue (3) and the vast majority of people
| will continue to be unaffected by these pricing changes.
|
| If people want to spend their breath agitating for something,
| it's to get Unity to share the source code for a lower price.
| That would actually help me make better games. At the scale
| where Unity pricing matters, the engine costs will take away
| from marketing spend.
|
| > ...the only reason Unity went this route is because they
| don't want to... break the promise of no revenue share/royalty
| pledge... too many headcounts... privately held [is good and
| public is bad]... says a lot.
|
| Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an
| engine. You can certainly believe there is. It's a complex
| piece of software and target platforms and technology are
| always changing, so it's understandable that it is expensive to
| develop.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an
| engine.
|
| Depends on the game - the majority of Unity games can be done
| in Godot, as far as I can tell, because they're simple indie
| games with fire-sale assets (or even free assets) from itch.
|
| Unity is not making the revenue they need, because their
| "popularity" is on free-as-in-beer games which no one is
| going to pay for anyway. It's just an added sword into their
| side that the majority of devs who use unity can switch to
| Godot with almost no difference to their (devs) revenue.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| If there isn't right now, after news like this, someone will
| start making one.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >If people want to spend their breath agitating for
| something, it's to get Unity to share the source code for a
| lower price.
|
| while I hate it being gated, it's not that expensive for a
| medium sized company to get source code access. $3000 +
| probably some per seat licenses that are orders cheaper than
| what you pay employees (even significantly underpaid game
| devs). if you get more than 250k installs you're already
| paying more than that to begin with with the new plan.
|
| >Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an
| engine.
|
| maybe for you, but to pretend there are zero alternative
| tools because you don't like shows more arrogance than the
| post you are criticizing.
|
| >I'm actually not saying that one person should use one or
| the other - they are simply made to do and make fundamentally
| different things.
|
| it's a tool at the end of the day. you can make Unreal engine
| 5 run Undertale and you can make Gamemaker run Crysis if you
| are determined enough. Most people here will be talking about
| the technical aspects of the engine, not the
| political/historical roles each engine has made.
|
| I can kind of see where you are coming from but I disagree
| with the angle that Unity/Unreal are fundamentally different
| skillsets. they are ubiquitous enough and feature filled
| enough that the limitations come a lot from the team rather
| than the engine, with a few special edge cases.
|
| To name one: Unity and Unreal are awful for games with mass
| destructible environments for example. People CAN still make
| those, but that's the one case where it may be worth rolling
| your own tech. Essentially, you make your game separate from
| the actual unity layer and use Unity purely as a renderer,
| not for its game framework. I know Unity games that do this,
| and I think UE can do the same but I lack the knowledge
| there.
| maccard wrote:
| Completely agree. If I had to make a destructible game from
| scratch I would implement that tech in unreal rather than
| starting from scratch 10 times over.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| >Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an
| engine.
|
| How can you say that when unreal exists? They are dominant in
| PC and even used in many large mobile games.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| They simply serve very different audiences of both
| developers and end users. Their coexistence is evidence of
| how different they are from one another, not how fungible
| they are.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| They really don't at this point. Unreal has reached a
| point where it's a better choice than Unity for nearly
| every single project. There's still these pervasive
| beliefs that Unity is better for 2D or better for small
| teams, and it just isn't true.
|
| The one exception is junk mobile games, and even then I
| think Unreal is a completely reasonable choice.
|
| Unity has been well and truly left behind with the gap
| widening every day and they know it.
|
| Their coexistence is a legacy of a time where Unreal had
| not widened its viable use cases beyond triple A style 3D
| games, but that hasn't been the case for years now. It's
| just taking a whole for developers to catch up, and
| obviously there's a lot of inertia with Unity projects
| and experience.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| I am saying that only from the point of view of someone
| who has made and published a lot of games, in roles
| including developer and director, on a lot of platforms
| and dealt with a lot of engines. But I really hate making
| this about me. The outrage-driven discourse that people
| hitch onto to promote their shit is the worst excess of
| cultural materialism.
|
| The most succinct explanation for the difference is that
| Unreal gets your game financed, Unity gets your game
| made.
|
| > There's still these pervasive beliefs that Unity is
| better for 2D or better for small teams, and it just
| isn't true.
|
| You're coming at this like a feature box checking sort of
| deal. There are so many bigger picture things going on
| with the differences between the two engines. I'm
| actually not saying that one person should use one or the
| other - they are simply made to do and make fundamentally
| different things. For example, if you're aspiring to make
| a top-ranked Steam game, it makes a lot of sense to use
| Unreal, because those are all multiplayer FPSes; and it
| also is telling you that you need a team of 10-100 people
| and at least an $8-$100m budget, because that's how much
| it costs to "enter" that space and build on Unreal. Your
| takeaway shouldn't be "for small teams" or whatever,
| because you're looking at the wrong stage in the
| pipeline.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| And what I am saying is that they absolutely are not
| designed to do different things any more. That used to be
| the case, but Unreal has fully eaten Unity's lunch here
| in a technical sense. The engine's roots are in AAA first
| person, but they have grown it far, far beyond that. It
| is now a fully capable general purpose engine for
| anything from 2D puzzlers to AAA FPSes.
|
| There just are not games any more for which Unity offers
| any legitimate advantages over Unreal. Unity has been
| incredibly stagnant as an engine for pretty much a
| decade, while Unreal has expanded its capabilities and
| feature set to now virtually fully encompass those of
| Unity. The idea that they are designed for different
| things is just out of date.
|
| In 2023 I think the only legitimate reason to pick Unity,
| and this is a very good reason for what it's worth, is
| experience with the engine. I say this as someone who
| published games in Unity in the past and has transitioned
| to Unreal. They are both general purpose game engines
| serving the same teams and the same games, with the
| exception that Unity cannot support truly top end games.
| aschearer wrote:
| Genuine question, how is Unreal's support for:
|
| - Tilemaps generally
|
| - Tilemap with rule-based brushes
|
| - "Sprite shapes" basically free-form 2D polygon sprite
| created via a shape editor
|
| - 2D collision with polygon colliders (bonus points if
| the two can work in tandem)
|
| - 2D lighting
|
| - Snapping things to a grid? Like moving props in a scene
| on a grid. Or editing a shape to snap to a grid?
| maccard wrote:
| Genuine answer (not OP) the easiest way to work with 2d
| in unreal is to work in 3D and lock an axis, particularly
| around lighting and collision.
|
| > Snapping things to a grid? Like moving props in a scene
| on a grid. Or editing a shape to snap to a grid?
|
| Out of the box you have [0]. With about 10 lines of code,
| or a few blueprint nodes, you can support more advanced
| snapping.
|
| [0] https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-
| US/Basics/Actors/Actor...
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Nothing against Epic, but they have a strategic incentive to
| encourage people to use their store. Getting a discount to use
| the engine in exchange for a store "exclusive" is a cost that I
| see developers not really appreciating. There is no free lunch.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| I don't think that's unusual. When Valve announced Source 2
| for free, there was a similar discount to use the engine: the
| game must release on Steam. Maybe that has changed in the 8
| years of no news about the release of Source 2 for developer
| though.
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/source-2-will-be-free-wont-ask-
| for-r...
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| I don't think this is a problem of company structure. It's
| solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to
| their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane
| person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have
| happened. But if you hire the former CEO of EA - a guy with no
| low level industry experience and who left his last job because
| of poor financial performance - then this whole fiasco seems
| like it was inevitable.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had
| listened to their users or their own developers, or any
| remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this
| wouldn't have happened
|
| TBH I think the growth argument is better. Ricetellio isn't
| some especially bad CEO, and I'm sure 50 other CEOs woulda
| done the exact same thing if it wasn't him. Which is exactly
| why every other tech company was also hit with massive
| layoffs this year.
|
| It's not some standout, it's the 20th consequence of actions
| every other public company pursued. Look at all the
| industries Unity tried to branch out into in 4-5 years and
| you see why they became balooned to 7K employees:
| https://i.imgur.com/3Ume4Qm.png
| miragecraft wrote:
| On the surface that is the case, but once you're a publicly
| traded company you're beholden to your shareholders, not your
| customers, so your goals and incentives changes drastically
| and "bad management decisions" gets made.
|
| You think the management made a mistake, I think the
| management (as a result of going public) _is_ the mistake.
| tmpX7dMeXU wrote:
| That's a simplistic view. "Beholden to shareholders" does
| not mean prioritising short-term gain at all costs. That's
| not just my ideology, it is how publicly traded companies
| work a lot of the time, including the one that I work for.
|
| To imply that there's such a stark binary difference
| between a privately held and publicly held company misses a
| lot of nuance. Investors can want a quick out or be in for
| the long game in either case. The controlling parties pre-
| IPO have plenty of knobs they can turn to limit drive-by
| influence if they choose. If a company gets fucked by going
| public, it was already fucked before it went public,
| because the people behind the float either didn't care
| about protecting the company, or didn't know how.
| Draiken wrote:
| In theory, that's true. But what I see every day is the
| opposite. It's essentially what people are calling
| "enshitification". Mostly short term decisions that screw
| customers up for a quick buck.
|
| I do agree that private does not mean good. It all falls
| under the CEO/Founders in my view. But there seems to be
| way more greedy short term thinking leaders out there.
|
| I can probably count in my hands the amount of companies
| I follow that are not prioritizing the short-term. Maybe
| I just don't follow that many companies and I'm biased,
| but that's the impression I get.
|
| Public companies seem to have an even higher rate of
| short-term profit seeking though.
| lancesells wrote:
| Public companies see their stock rise when they fire
| thousands of people even though they are profitable. The
| entire system is perverse.
| foobarian wrote:
| It starts out noble. Once a company goes public, the
| first few town halls after the shareholder call the CEO
| or CFO will be like, "Don't worry about the stock price,
| we're better than all the other short-termist companies,
| we care about long term quality and blah blah."
|
| But bit by bit, little by little, like Pavlov's dogs the
| employees get trained to peek at that stock ticker around
| reporting time. And over time they sync up their decision
| making with that schedule, and internal planning starts
| to reflect it. And new initiatives get created and judged
| by investor reactions. And it's all downhill from there
| :-(
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Sorry, it sounds like you're defending the system that
| doesn't empower the public good. I hear reports time and
| time again that private companies that go publicly are
| burned by the artificial and unnatural need for constant
| growth. Going public serves greedy individuals
| (shareholders) that have no connection to the service or
| product that real people depend on.
| miragecraft wrote:
| Thanks for the insight.
|
| So I guess the conclusion is that Unity was fucked pre-
| IPO?
| Iulioh wrote:
| The fact that the CEO was slowly selling millions of
| shares was an indication
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I would expect any CEO to continuously sell shares as
| they are awarded. Diversifying investments is a very
| recommended and common investment choice.
| giobox wrote:
| The CEO's role though is to help make the stock
| attractive to other investors, not just optimize for
| their own personal finances. I personally would expect
| most CEOs to hold a significant portion of their stock
| awards as a show of confidence in the future value of the
| company - if the CEO won't hold the investment, why
| should anyone else?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > if the CEO won't hold the investment, why should anyone
| else?
|
| I don't think you understand how many shares a CEO has.
| There are directors at Unity throwing around hundreds of
| thousands of shares and I'm sure the C execs have an
| order of magnitude more than that. You never want all
| your eggs in one basket, if only because you don't want
| everything to be beholden to the power of your country's
| economy (something even a CEO can't control).
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Surely the CEO has both interests, and securing resources
| for themselves is of higher priority than securing them
| for others. They might be expected to hold proportionally
| more of it than others, but I also would not expect any
| half intelligent person to put all their eggs in one
| basket just for the benefit of others.
| mnau wrote:
| A CEO under who EA introduced lootboxes. A person that
| proposed that when player runs out of ammo could make an easy
| instant payment for a quick reload.
|
| Unity engine seems to flounder under him, despite rather
| insane headcount (7,703), acquisition spree laden Unity
| Technologies with significant debt...
|
| I am not impressed, not with his ideas and even less with his
| results.
|
| For comparison, Larry Elisson (Oracle) has distasteful
| business practices, but very profitable.
| bmitc wrote:
| It is amazing how easy some people make falling upwards
| look.
| kibwen wrote:
| It is easy, all you need to do is be a member of the
| executive class.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like
| an arcade, which is how video games became commercially
| successful in the first place.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| A key difference is that you paid nothing up front to
| play an arcade game compared to Battlefield 2024 (or
| whatever). There's decades of expectations/inertia not
| having microtransactions on home games, but I understand
| that is what publishers are trying to fight against.
|
| It's worth noting that the death of the golden age of
| arcade games was due to no small part of the rise of
| console games. People didn't want to pump quarters into a
| machine to keep playing, they wanted to buy a game once
| and play it forever.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| Then consoles all but killed arcades because it turns out
| no one really wanted to keep feeding quarters (and then
| dollars) into an unfair game even if that turned out to
| be cheaper than buying a game outright. Removing that
| monetization strategy improved the quality and diversity
| of games as well. I'm not keen on rolling back the clock
| to that version of yesteryear.
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| > Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot
| like an arcade
|
| Any chance you have an example? I can't recall an arcade
| game that had you pay per bullet.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I don't think that's a thing in arcade games. There are
| pay to continue in arcades, and pay to win in regulated
| gambling that are light on gaming aspect, but never seen
| one in arcades.
|
| Maybe it's similar to how there are "Dungeons and
| Something" || "Something and Dragons" but somehow never
| both?
| 0xabe wrote:
| This was my impression: running out of ammo leads to
| death leads to paying for continue credits.
| autoexec wrote:
| I remember there were arcade games where your health
| continuously drained and inserting another quarter would
| heal you. That's worse than a per-bullet price because
| you were losing even when there were no enemies on the
| screen. I don't remember the titles because I played
| those kinds of games exactly once and never again. Total
| rip off.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| It sounds like you're talking about Gauntlet Dark Legacy.
| I also remember guides about how to leave levels with
| more health than you entered them (there _were_ ways to
| regain health). It 's hard to single this series out as
| "a total ripoff" among all kinds of arcade games designed
| to extract quarters out of you. You can't expect someone
| to stay on a screen or backtrack forever. Some games use
| a timer, some throw an endless amount of mobs at you. The
| nature of the game (which was built in part around
| exploration) was that they used the health amount as HP +
| timer.
| kyteland wrote:
| This guy wasn't proposing anything as crazy as pay-per-
| bullet. There's lots of games with limited ammo and you
| find more in the environment. Even in Doom you might run
| out of ammo for your favorite gun and need to put it away
| until you found another ammo pack in the level. This is
| why Valorant has a knife you can switch to, because if
| you waste gun ammo you run out on your main weapon. In
| Fortnite you have to find ammo and weapons in chests,
| etc. This guy was proposing an option to pay to refill
| your inventory immediately. But people heard "reload" and
| assumed something completely different.
|
| The real problem with his proposal is it quickly falls
| apart if you think about it for even a minute. It's a
| classic pay-to-win mechanic. And once something is pay-
| to-win it becomes a slippery slope and a race to the
| bottom for the game makers. Every game has some amount of
| edge cases where you're playing only to realize "Damn,
| I'm out, this sucks. I'd pay a buck right now to refill."
| But once you add in some options to pay in those
| scenarios, the game maker has a perverse incentive to no
| longer make it an edge case. Some PM will realize if they
| make the rare event 10x more likely they'll make 10x more
| $$$$ and they're off to the races. They start messing
| with the ammo drop rates to create "pinch points" and now
| your super fun game really does require you to be "paying
| to reload" and it's not fun anymore.
|
| This guy was trying (and failing) to present it as a
| player benefit but the reality is he know exactly where
| this road lead. It's the same place EA games with loot
| boxes landed in the end.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Arcades in the 90s used the countdown clock,more lives
| type buy in. You bought time, or they would make the game
| so seriously hard you had to feed it quarters to keep the
| game going. Paying on an instant 'hey you could use more
| ammo for 50cents' at a exploitive time is something I am
| surprised we did not see as a mechanic in arcades. But
| they probably would have if they had thought of it. But
| the idea of feed more quarters in to keep playing was
| most certainly there.
| sixothree wrote:
| Gauntlet is a very specific example of this but with
| health and not ammo.
| chambored wrote:
| But imagine having to do that if you owned the arcade
| game.
| linuxftw wrote:
| If there's an EULA, do you really own it?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| How much of it is enforceable ?
| turndown wrote:
| Except this was in connection with Battlefield 3, a title
| you'd have to buy. So it's more like buying the arcade
| machine but somebody still takes quarters from you
| anyway.
| degreesoffun wrote:
| I have a few friends that work or have worked at Unity.
| This is purely anecdotal but from what I've heard it sounds
| like the place is fairly dysfunctional at this point. A lot
| of the dysfunction that exists now wasn't there even 3-4
| years ago.
| kdfjgbdfkjgb wrote:
| I saw a reddit comment from a Unity developer that alleged
| that Unity told them not to worry about the changes because
| this dev used ironSource for their ads. ironSource merged
| with Unity last year and other commenters were speculating
| that this whole thing is a play to try to coerce the huge
| amount of mobile games that are made with Unity to switch to
| ironSource.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| To parent's opinion, I'd respond that bad management is a
| possibility in any company.
|
| However, a broken revenue model misaligns incentives and
| makes user-bad decisions a _certainty_.
|
| Laying it at the feet of management is blaming the
| messenger -- the root cause was revenue and expectations
| being strategically unbalanced.
|
| It's surprising how many people watch companies make "dumb"
| moves and gnash their teeth over "how could they be so
| stupid?"
|
| They're not being stupid... they're looking at the cards
| they have in their hand, what they need to win, and playing
| it the best way they can.
|
| As people have quipped elsewhere in the comments, there
| were no ways Unity could deliver the financial performance
| that was expected of them, with a developer-friendly
| business model.
| fredsmith219 wrote:
| Since management sets the expectations, laying the blame
| at their feet is correct. Who else would you hold
| accountable for management decisions?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Majority shareholders for choosing an ownership model
| that their operating model couldn't service.
|
| Unity going public was like .org's PIR being sold to PE.
| gochi wrote:
| You would be right, they have informally stated if
| developers switch to ironSource/Unity Ads, they would have
| their runtime fee slashed.
| eestrada wrote:
| > Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we
| ended up here. I think that says a lot.
|
| I've been thinking a lot about private versus public companies.
| Most of my favorite products come out of privately held
| companies. There is something about the incentives for publicly
| traded companies that encourages them to make poor choices. I
| think it is because there are effectively two forms of revenue:
| selling products/services and selling stock. And those two
| things often conflict with eachother to the detriment of the
| customer. However, with a privately held company, the loyalty
| is primarily to the customer. Thus the products are better
| because they need to be to keep the company afloat.
|
| I don't think that means that public companies shouldn't exist,
| but I wonder how an individual can structure their publicly
| traded company to avoid having the company misalign its
| incentives with those of the actual paying customer.
|
| My current theory is to focus more on revenue sharing instead
| of stock price. For example, dividend stocks. I don't think it
| completely solves the problem, but it at least moves things in
| the right direction.
| corethree wrote:
| >My current theory is to focus more on revenue sharing
| instead of stock price. For example, dividend stocks. I don't
| think it completely solves the problem, but it at least moves
| things in the right direction.
|
| This can't be directly enforced. You can't make laws for what
| people to "focus" on.
|
| Though there is a way to indirectly push this notion:
| Restrict all stock ownership to be a minimum of 10 years.
| This indirectly puts more focus on dividends.
|
| It also puts more focus on the core misalignment you're
| alluding at but failed to see explicitly: The misalignment
| between short term gains and long term gains.
|
| In the end whether private or public they care about profit
| over customer. But private owners tend to care about
| customers because customers represent an overall bigger gain
| in the longer term and private owners are playing the long
| game.
|
| If all stocks had a minimum 10 year ownership requirement it
| will change all corporations to focus on long term gains. I
| believe this one change can fundamentally fix the problem we
| have with corporations.
|
| Maybe we can test this.
|
| The other thing that needs to be changed is public
| responsibility. If a company dumps illegal nuclear waste in
| some river, directly ask for minimum fines from all shared
| holders. First divide the fine by the shareholder amount,
| charge each shareholder. Then if it's below a 500 dollar
| minimum add the remaining amount to get it up to 500.
|
| Pissed off share holders paying 500 will definitely get
| corporations to stop doing random crap. Maybe even funnel
| jail time to board members or C-level execs. If a corporation
| is responsible for deaths it's justice to place actual people
| responsible rather then giving "jail time" to a corporate
| entity that doesn't actually exist.
| eestrada wrote:
| I apologize for not being clear in my comment. None of my
| musing was meant to allude to public policy or law. It was
| about what an individual (or group of individuals) could
| choose to do with a corporation to avoid perverse
| incentives in the future. I'm not really interested in
| directly enforcing anything.
|
| To make a play on an old programming joke:
|
| Once there was an individual who noticed there was a
| problem with society. He said to himself "I'll use the
| State to change things!" Now there were two problems.
| corethree wrote:
| True. Two things.
|
| The first part of my comment doesn't require a state
| change. I'm sure you can issue securities with a 10 year
| clause.
|
| The second part of my statement is that while I largely
| agree with you we Still have state controlling things in
| the world and it's largely a good thing. You don't want a
| world without the State controlling an aspect of the free
| market.
|
| It's not that you don't like the State, it's just that
| adding additional controls can lead to large
| unanticipated side effects. Especially sweeping changes
| like some of the ones I proposed. Totally get this.
|
| That doesn't mean it won't work. Like UBI, these ideas
| need to experimented on and data needs to be gathered to
| verify whether it will work. You can't dismiss the fact
| that that changing public policy Won't work because it
| currently DOES work.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It just depends on the business in question, and the external
| pressures on the business. Jeff Bezos managed to not pay
| dividends for years by focusing on value, but also by zooming
| ahead of the pack in a greenfield environment that was
| ludicrously profitable. Low margin businesses, private or
| public, will struggle and have to do something to offer value
| for money; e.g. make a smaller chocolate bar that's the same
| price, and a larger chocolate bar that costs more.
|
| On selling stock: I think this is a bit silly. A company
| can't just sell its stock as a viable strategy. What happens
| when it runs out? And who would buy it anyway?
| eestrada wrote:
| In the USA, corporations just do stock splits or run a
| corporate vote to issue more shares. Also many large tech
| companies use stock as total compensation for employees, so
| the "selling" of stock can be indirect as a form of
| revenue. Instead of paying employees cash, they pay in
| stock, which frees up more cash for other things. Thus they
| don't need to have as high of true revenue margins to pay
| employees well. Big corporations understand that a lot of
| paper value is fungible one way or another.
| binarymax wrote:
| Epic/Valve are privately held _now_ , but if you build a team
| and game series on a proprietary platform, you are at the whim
| of the platform owner. It might be a low risk now given they
| are looking to scoop up teams ditching Unity, but nobody knows
| what will happen in 2 or 3 years.
| _hypx wrote:
| There is a secondary argument in favor of home-grown engines
| too. It's been very disappointing to see so many game companies
| abandon their own rendering technology in favor of Unreal.
| Terrible licensing rules might drive companies to go back to
| having their own engines.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| I feel like each year makes it harder as demands increase
| _hypx wrote:
| Never every game needs to have insane graphics. For a lot
| of games, "good enough" graphics is fine.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| you're asking for consumers to temper their expectations.
| Just look at how much crap they threw at Redfall, and
| that was likely a game many people played on Gamepass for
| "free".
|
| It sucks but part of that "need" for insane graphics is
| consumer driven. Even though Nintendo games get a lot of
| flack for how "weak" the Switch is, but their big IPs do
| cirlcles around the industry, all on one platform without
| even relying on MTX. But I guess Nintendo appealing to
| more than just the core gamers helps a lot. Come to think
| of it, it's surprising how few "family" AAA games there
| are these days.
| _hypx wrote:
| Redfall was an incomplete game. Graphics was the least of
| its problems.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Gamers are calling a lot of games lately incomplete. It
| doesn't stop sales if it looks good enough.
| gochi wrote:
| It's not just graphics, it's everything. Look at
| Frostbite for example from EA. While a good shooter
| engine, they had to make significant changes over the
| years to adapt the engine to other genres of games, and
| that significantly bloated timelines. Jason Schreier has
| reporting on this if you're interested.
|
| We kind of forget that a lot of custom engines aren't
| universal ones like Unity or Unreal that can adapt to
| anything you throw at it. Custom engines are largely
| hyper specific to the type of game they were making with
| it, everything else is experimental, untested,
| undocumented, or non-existent!
| _hypx wrote:
| Frostbite is a weird example because they focused heavily
| on graphics over gameplay. It is also an FPS engine that
| was forced into powering an RPG, and without any real
| input from the developers in question.
|
| I'm sure most larger gamedev companies can make a decent
| game engine on their own if extreme performance is not
| needed. The recent Baldur's Gate is a good example.
| autoexec wrote:
| Honestly I prefer games with a strong sense of style over
| those with high quality graphics but a bland/generic
| look.
| akhosravian wrote:
| I think it is unlikely Epic or Valve will adopt something as
| overtly hostile to business users in their ecosystems as long
| as they are controlled by Tim Sweeney and Gabe Newell
| (respectively).
|
| I think it's anyone's guess what will happen when that stops
| being true, but anyone under the age of 40 or so should
| recognize they will almost certainly outlive those individuals.
| Closed source means you are beholden to what their successor's
| decide even if you (like me) are confident their current
| leadership will make good decisions.
| philipov wrote:
| > I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they
| don't want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no
| revenue ...
|
| Not quite. Unity merged with a company that sells mobile ads:
| ironSource. They are direct competitors of AppLovin, the
| dominant player in that market. The terms and backroom deals
| that Unity is offering devs will waive these fees if they use
| Unity's ad products instead of AppLovin. This is clearly an
| attempt to abuse their position in one market (game engines) to
| bolster their position in another market (mobile ads).
| nugget wrote:
| Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and
| deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and
| then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use
| their other (presumably inferior) products.
|
| As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to
| 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course
| the new fees will remain.
|
| They must think the average game developer has no business
| sense whatsoever.
|
| Based on the backlash, my prediction is that Unity either
| quickly reverses course (damaging their brand a little and
| perhaps costing the CEO his job) or stubbornly doubles down
| (damaging their brand a lot and giving Godot and others an
| opening to eventually rival them).
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive
| and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime
| Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee
| if you use their other (presumably inferior) products.
|
| I looked into it a bit more and unless I did some bad maths
| or misread their terms, the whole Runtime Fee looks like a
| badly disguised sales funnel to me:
| https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/unity-runtime-fee-a-look-
| at...
|
| The Personal and Plus tiers in particular now need to
| basically find additional 50 or so cents per install
| (factoring in platform fees and publisher fees), whereas
| for Pro and Enterprise tiers that figure is closer to under
| 10 cents).
|
| In other words, once you start having to pay the Platform
| Fee on the Personal or Plus tier, it very quickly becomes
| cheaper to just get a Pro subscription and have the
| Platform Fee go away for 800'000 more installs on Pro (on
| top of the 200'000 you get without the platform fee on
| Personal/Plus).
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| How are you calculating .50 cents personal vs .10 cents
| pro?
| KronisLV wrote:
| Closest to 50 cents and 10 cents was at around 1'600'000
| installs I think (some graphs at the bottom of this
| comment).
|
| Let's see how I got there, let's take their Runtime Fee
| rates: https://unity.com/runtime-fee
|
| For Personal tier you start paying after 200'000 installs
| (threshold), whereas with the Pro tier you start paying
| after 1'000'000 installs (threshold).
|
| That gives us 1'400'000 installs that we need to pay for
| with the Personal tier and 600'000 installs that we need
| to pay for with the Pro tier, for which the runtime fee
| will be calculated and which are above the corresponding
| thresholds.
|
| For the Personal tier, which has a fixed rate, the
| platform costs are then: 1'400'000 * 0.20
| = 280'000 USD
|
| For the Pro tier, with the volume discounts, the platform
| costs are then: 100'000 * 0.15 = 15'000
| USD 400'000 * 0.075 = 30'000 USD 100'000 *
| 0.03 = 3'000 USD TOTAL: 15'000 + 30'000 + 3'000 =
| 48'000 USD
|
| (they're lower for emerging markets, but using the main
| prices here)
|
| With 1'600'000 units sold, the overhead per a single unit
| then becomes: Personal: 280'000 /
| 1'600'000 = 0.175 USD Pro: 48'000 / 1'600'000 =
| 0.03 USD
|
| If we assume that a publisher might take around 50% (just
| an example value in the spreadsheet I used; though in
| practice can be as low as 20%), then that figure becomes:
| Personal: 1/(1-0.5) * 0.175 = 0.35 USD Pro:
| 1/(1-0.5) * 0.03 = 0.06 USD
|
| On top of that, there are also the platform fees (like
| Steam might take 30% of your revenue straight off the
| bat, other platforms might take less), so the figure then
| becomes: Personal: 1/(1-0.3) * 0.35 = 0.5
| USD Pro: 1/(1-0.3) * 0.06 = 0.085 USD
|
| Sanity check (doing the same in reverse):
| Personal full cost (overhead): 0.5 USD Personal
| after 30% platform cut: 0.5 - (0.3 * 0.5) = 0.5 - 0.15 =
| 0.35 USD Personal after 50% publisher cut: 0.35 -
| (0.5 * 0.35) = 0.35 - 0.175 = 0.175 USD Pro
| full cost (overhead): 0.085 USD Pro after 30%
| platform cut: 0.085 - (0.3 * 0.085) = 0.085 - 0.0255 =
| 0.0595 USD Pro after 50% publisher cut: 0.0595 -
| (0.5 * 0.0595) = 0.0595 - 0.02975 = 0.02975 USD (close
| enough to 0.03 USD)
|
| While the exact percentages might change, Unity asking
| for say 0.20 USD per copy (or effectively 0.175 USD in
| the example, because the first 200'000 don't have the
| runtime fee) means that you'll need to make _more_ gross
| revenue per copy than that, because your publisher and
| the platform will both take some of that for themselves.
|
| Here's the graphs that I came up with, first how the
| total runtime fee changes based on the tier:
| https://blog.kronis.dev/images/1/4/-/u/n/14-unity-
| pricing-gr...
|
| Also, approximately how the runtime fee overhead changes
| with publisher/platform fees included (with the example
| percentages above):
| https://blog.kronis.dev/images/1/6/-/f/e/16-fee-per-
| install-...
| maccard wrote:
| > As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced
| to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of
| course the new fees will remain.
|
| I think you've got this wrong. Unity is (multiple really,
| but for the purposes of this) two products - the engine and
| unity ads. Unity ads is the money maker, this is an attempt
| at bridging that gap. Ultimately unity don't care how they
| pay you, they just want to know that if you're building a
| successful game off their products, they're going to get
| paid. They can't do a revshare (because for some insane
| reason they talked themselves out of that a few years
| back), so they're left with something that quacks like a
| revshare, but won't negatively impact their most profitable
| customers and force them to reconsider.
|
| Ultimately, I think that's as far as they got with the
| analysis and failed to consider well... everything else.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| > They must think the average game developer has no
| business sense whatsoever.
|
| Well if the reports are to be believed, developers were
| signing agreements with Unity which allowed them to make
| unilateral changes to fees. If so, devs really do have no
| business sense.
| tremon wrote:
| And how much leverage do you think those developers had
| to negotiate the agreement terms?
| [deleted]
| kibwen wrote:
| _> They must think the average game developer has no
| business sense whatsoever._
|
| Any game whose monetization strategy is "ads" is uniformly
| trash-quality shovelware. They're not here for the long
| haul, they're here to optimize short-term profit and dump
| as much garbage on the app store as they can.
| antonjs wrote:
| Kind of feels like this is the Boeing--McDonnell Douglas of
| game engine acquisitions.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I could see that, but based on the massive stock unloads from
| numerous high level execs right before hand, it seems more
| likely to me that it's just another company that's going to
| be cratered inside of a year, stir up tons of controversy and
| legal problems with stupid decisions, and then everyone
| responsible will leave after the bankruptcy up millions of
| dollars. And another perfectly viable business will be
| stripped and sold for parts on the market because that looks
| better on balance sheets than just making and selling a
| product these days.
| and0 wrote:
| That's fascinating, thanks. None of the various analysis I've
| read so far have hit on this point but it makes sense.
| philipov wrote:
| I think HoegLaw did a good rundown of the legal side of it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGMrebXypJo
| glenstein wrote:
| That all hinges on a motley combination of rationalizing,
| squinting, guesstimation of intentions and projecting future
| behavior of unpredictable third parties. One could have with
| equal plausibility made an assessment that Unity would not
| proceed with self-inflicted wounds, yet here we are.
|
| Just like the "I've got nothing to hide" argument fallaciously
| depends on assumptions about the coherence of motives on the
| part of people violating your privacy, "I've got nothing to
| worry about" depends on assuming reasonable motives from
| private actors. It is a lot less strenuous to reason from a
| place that is agnostic about future intentions of third
| parties.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| >hinges on the premise that Epic ... is willing to burn their
| bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit
|
| Bahaha. Epic would eat their own grandmother if it got them an
| increase in profit. You better hope the Epic never becomes the
| only game in town, because then you will see what happens to
| who takes home what revenue.
| danaris wrote:
| The problem is, this isn't a question of, "Will Epic do
| something like this tomorrow?"
|
| It's "Will Epic do something like this at any point in the
| foreseeable future?"
|
| Will Epic's leadership decide to IPO in hopes of more money?
|
| Will they take a lucrative private buyout from some other
| billionaire with more money than sense, like Musk?
|
| Will they hire new upper management that persuades them they
| need to do something like this for Serious Business Reasons?
|
| Will they retire and be replaced by people who do the same?
|
| The problem is, if you build your game on Unreal, you're
| essentially betting _all_ its future commercial success on one
| for-profit company 's decision to remain Less Of An Asshole
| Than The Other Guy. The choice of what engine you use has
| suddenly become about much more than just "what features does
| it offer?" "How many developers know how to use it?" or even
| "What's the pricing structure _today_? " You have to worry
| about whether they'll get it into their heads, _for whatever
| reason_ , to retroactively change their pricing structure in a
| way that ruins you financially.
|
| On the other hand, if you build your game on Godot, or some in-
| house engine, you know you'll _never_ need to worry about that.
|
| Also worth noting: If the gaming industry, and the public at
| large, send a clear enough signal to Unity _now_ that this is
| unacceptable, that makes it much, _much_ less likely that
| anyone else will try to pull bullshit like this in the future.
| and0 wrote:
| Bingo re: Unity going public. Once you have a stock price (and
| assuming your early investors aren't the most aggressive type
| in the first place) the goal then shifts to infinite growth,
| and lately tech companies (even Google Netflix etc) have had to
| make user-unfriendly decisions to justify ever growing
| valuations in the face of rate hikes. Unity isn't the first,
| but it has maybe done it the worst.
|
| One of the "analysis" threads by a VC on Twitter mentioned the
| engine not making as much money as the ad business as
| "unsustainable". But it's the same nonsense Musk spouted with
| Twitter not being sustainable or "making a profit" -- it made a
| profit but not given the market realities deliberately hoisted
| upon it.
| majormajor wrote:
| That assumes that the motivations won't ever change for Epic,
| like how they changed for Unity.
| raincole wrote:
| Just became a Bevy sponsor. I'll try to convince our studio to
| donate a % of profit to open source project.
|
| No mater how slim the chance Bevy actually becoming a mainstream
| engine is.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| If developers signed agreements to that effect, yes, in America.
| There are fairness tests in many other countries.
|
| What is blowing my mind is that developers have been signing
| agreements which effectively gave Unity the right to take any
| revenue they wish, at any time. At that point the developers
| don't own their company anymore. Unity does. Always have a lawyer
| check your agreements before you sign them. If your business
| relies on an agreement to function, make sure the other party
| can't make unilateral changes.
| swalsh wrote:
| I wish game development wasn't so monolithic. You're either all
| in on Unity, or all in on Unreal, or all in on GoDot. They are
| designer forward, code later. Each has a marketplace of sorts,
| but in my experience it's substandard.
|
| Compare that to web development (different beast I know, but
| there's no reason gaming can't be more componentized). Web
| development is so simple these days because I spend most of my
| time gluing stuff together, and sanding the edges.
|
| Game development has concepts like this, and I have no doubt I'll
| get replies showing me some nifty component system, or talk about
| how I just don't understand ECS etc, but they seem tacked on to a
| monolithic walled garden. There's something magical about "npm
| install x" and adding a whole feature to your app.
|
| Maybe it's because "it's art" and game development is just a
| passion project.
| danjoredd wrote:
| The problem is, that making a 3D engine is extremely tough, and
| most 3D engines are completely proprietary as a result. There
| are plenty of 3D libraries that make 3D game development for
| small games easy, but when you compare a Python library next to
| a system that includes a 3D engine, a level editor, a file
| management system, and the ability to easily compile for
| different systems, its no contest for game companies. A fully-
| fledged development environment scales better for these multi-
| million dollar projects than a singular library.
|
| It's why in the 90s every game was mostly built on an engine
| specifically designed for that game, and in the 2000s they
| switched to prebuilt game engines. Saves a lot of time AND
| money.
| maccard wrote:
| I fundamentally disagree about unreal being design first. What
| do you think the teams of programmers implement features in
| unreal games are doing?
| galleywest200 wrote:
| > Web development is so simple these days because I spend most
| of my time gluing stuff together, and sanding the edges.
|
| This does exist in the gaming industry, it is called
| "shovelware". "Shovelware" is when you just glue existing
| assets purchased for cheap and "shovel" them into a game for a
| quick buck. Usually not very complex games, low effort stories,
| etc. Also usually very cheap to download.
| a_cardboard_box wrote:
| I assume the parent comment meant gluing parts of the game
| engine together like renderers and physics engines. You can
| make shovelware in a monolithic game engine.
| omoikane wrote:
| > I wish game development wasn't so monolithic.
|
| If you are thinking about why the game engines aren't broken
| down into finer reusable components (e.g. one module for
| rendering and another for physics, etc.), it probably has to do
| with how these things are tightly integrated, and how every
| game engine has a different design philosophy on how the world
| should be organized. The different organizations might also
| mean that you have to design the games to fit a specific game
| engine, which is unfortunate.
|
| Maybe you are lamenting why the marketplaces or asset stores
| are so closely tied to the game engines? For some plugins, they
| have to be tailored to the specific engines. But for arts and
| sounds, there are many free and paid options to choose from,
| although not necessarily of the same quality and cost as one
| might get from the asset stores that are sponsored by the game
| engines (e.g. Unreal Megascans).
|
| There are still various tools associated with game development
| (e.g. Blender for 3D, your favorite text editor for scripting),
| and those aren't tied to specific game engines.
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| You better understand the value proposition of game engines
| than you think.
|
| Spin your view a little: NPM is your _web development engine_.
| Somebody had to write all of that code that undergirds NPM _as
| an engine_ as well as the particular library you want to
| install.
|
| Game engines are no different. They manage a bunch of (mostly
| boilerplate) game development components (sound, textures,
| rendering, animation, menus, collisions, physics, resource I/O,
| etc etc) so game developers can spend time "gluing stuff
| together, and sanding the edges" of their game. Monolithic
| engines like Unity have a plugin system for installing 3rd
| party libraries, and the engine tooling itself acts as its own
| level, effect, cutscene (etc etc) editor.
|
| At the end of the day games are just like any other programming
| task. You have a limited amount of effort/time/budget, so you
| have to make decisions about where you want to optimize. Game
| engines, even monolithic ones like Godot and Unity (and,
| really, every 3rd party game development tool) are all designed
| to let you focus effort/time/budget on the unique aspects of
| your game.
| raytopia wrote:
| It's not as monolithic as you'd think. There are lots of
| engines out there but their communities aren't very vocal
| compared to Unity, Unreal, and especially Godot's community.
|
| Take a look at: https://itch.io/game-development/engines/most-
| projects
|
| And
|
| https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-generous-space-of-al...
|
| If you look at both of these you'll see just how many engines
| there are and neither of these cover everything. There are
| plenty of engines popular in the Python community that no one
| outside of it are aware of. Such as Arcade [0], Python-Tcod
| [1], Ursina [2], UPBGE [3], and Panda3D [4]. But based on your
| description you'd really like https://gdevelop.io/. It embraces
| exactly what you're describing where you can build a game but
| just installing entire features others have made and put online
| into your game.
|
| [0] Beginner friendly 2D library:
|
| [1] Rougelike: https://python-tcod.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
|
| [2] Beginner friendly 3D engine (built on Panda3D):
| https://www.ursinaengine.org/
|
| [3] Blender Game Engine Fork: https://upbge.org/
|
| [4] Highly flexible code first 3D engine: https://panda3d.org/
| TheRoque wrote:
| No, it's not because it's art, it's because it's okay if all
| websites look the same, but regarding games, mostly 1 or 2 or
| its kind will survive, the others have to innovate or will be
| seen as sub-copies. On top of that, the complexity of making a
| game makes it so that it's more "coupled" to the hardware, so
| it's harder to generalize. If you want more component, then you
| can use the assets store, but at some point you will have to
| put in some work if you want your game to not be considered as
| a shovelware
| leecommamichael wrote:
| Perhaps you're thinking of a particular kind of game-dev as
| being monolithic? Many top-grossing studios/titles do not use
| the engines you've listed.
|
| What do you mean by monolithic?
| ireallywantthat wrote:
| switch to godot(http://godotengine.org/), gamedevs. you reap what
| you sow. it's better to support open source projects like godot
| instead of unity whose control lies with the company whose
| actions probably might not lie with you/your companies' interest.
| There are hundreds of instances in the past where open source
| projects replaced corporate projects(ex: blender, git). so,
| better use godot imo.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| Is Godot capable of making 3D FPS games?
| ZekeSulastin wrote:
| I know Cruelty Squad was made in Godot, but I'm not sure it's
| quite the best game to showcase general 3D FPS viability ;)
| grumple wrote:
| Looks like a yes, but it was hard to find this example:
| https://www.blendernation.com/2020/10/23/behind-the-
| scenes-f...
|
| All other 3d games I found made with Godot look like they
| came from the 90s. 2d capabilities look great though. There's
| probably also some selection bias, it's probably not the
| first choice for most who want to make a 3d fps.
| raytopia wrote:
| Yes. Truth be told for any engine you'll be more limited by
| the size of your art team then anything else.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| So to summarize the answer to the title: Probably, unless a dev
| used an older version that had language around being able to keep
| the old terms, in which case it'll be for the courts to decide.
|
| And of course "is that legal" may or may not quickly play second
| fiddle to "is anyone going to use them ever again after this
| stunt".
| hedora wrote:
| Note that, "older" means before April 2023. The language that
| existed then said you could continue to use the calendar year
| version that was available at the time, so presumably, you can
| use 2023 releases of their software as long as you were using
| it (started development? started training?) before April,
| assuming the courts rule that the old Software ToS applies.
|
| I can't imagine anyone will start using them now, so there's a
| good chance that the new ToS will only apply to whatever new
| customers they signed on between April 2023 and Sept 2023, and
| people that voluntarily update to the 2024 release.
|
| Still, it's a shame. They just threw out millions of developer
| hours (minimum), and it doesn't seem likely they'll be able to
| come back from their mistake.
| Kiro wrote:
| I've been watching a few gamedev streamers port their games to
| Godot and it's clear that it's not there yet in terms of feature
| parity. The good thing is that the Godot devs are in the chats,
| posting (unreviewed) PRs that could be used as workarounds but
| some major things (profiling?) are miles off still.
| mnau wrote:
| Some hints where? YT's got nothing useful.
| popmatrix wrote:
| The author seems to misunderstand the new pricing model (as did
| many others; this is Unity's fault) [1]
|
| The $0.20 is not retroactive, nor do you need to hope your users
| see 10 and impressions to cover a cost to the game developer --
| you need to earn $200,000 _and_ have 200,000 installs. A free
| game would not be charged, and if you don't believe you can
| muster 10 ad impressions per user (to cover the unity install
| cost of $0.20), the base cost of the game can be increased by <
| $0.01 across your 200,000+ sales starting next year when the
| policy takes effect on new installs.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/unity/status/1702077049425596900
| Daedren wrote:
| I think when most people are, in this context, talking about
| the "retroactive" part, it's about if it will affect existing
| games. The pricing structure will be applicable to everyone
| starting next year.
|
| The other issue is how they measure "installs", as it has been
| a constant problem in the mobile community for years on end (a
| problem especially affecting the ad industry as you may
| imagine). I personally don't see how they will accurately
| measure the cases mentioned in the tweet without forcing
| everyone to have some authentication.
| TMM2K wrote:
| It is retroactive, games that are already made today and
| already exist today on the various app-stores will be impacted.
|
| 10 ad impressions per user might not sound like much, but
| you're going to get a lot of people installing your app, not
| liking it, and uninstalling it. The way the mobile game
| business works the "install count" means almost nothing, you
| need many, many, many installs to start making any money at all
| because so few people 'stick around' to actually make you any
| money.
|
| Regardless of how they spin it, this model is very bad for the
| FtP games, which is the vast majority of games now.
| rhtgrg wrote:
| Looks like you know a lot about F2P games, can you help me
| understand this fee in the context of other variables such as
| cost of customer acquisition? Is that usually a much lower
| amount than 20 cents? What about 2 cents, which would be the
| cost on a pro license, which most successful F2P devs would
| assuredly be able to afford?
|
| I'm hoping you can answer these with concrete data. If that's
| not possible, could you share your references?
| fenomas wrote:
| > What about 2 cents, which would be the cost on a pro
| license,
|
| 2 cents with the pro-license only applies after the first
| 1M installs, tallied _per month_. If a game is under 100K
| installs per month, a pro license only lowers the install
| fee from 20 cents to 15.
| rhtgrg wrote:
| I see. And this error explains why I'm being downvoted
| and don't deserve any other answers?
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Basing the fee on number of installs instead of number of
| buyers is a problem, it's an unpredictable cost that developers
| have no control over as it also counts repeated installing of
| the game. Their FAQ suggests that malicious "install bombing"
| is something they cannot prevent automatically but instead have
| to resolve via their support. In other words you depend on them
| having good support while they profit from bad support, all
| while their CEO is the kind of manager who wanted Battlefield
| players to pay for each weapon reload.
|
| If Unity just counted number of buyers they wouldn't have to
| deal with malicious installs and users of their engine would
| have more predictable costs. But for some reason they don't
| want that, and that alone is suspicious.
| gausswho wrote:
| Install bombing sounds like a way to smother out this install
| fee policy. Especially if installing could be automated.
| reedf1 wrote:
| No, it is different - and it crosses line. There is DRM built
| into the Unity engine that informs Unity (the company) of an
| install, and companies pay via this Unity derived number. Not
| reported game sales, or even self reported game installs.
| thefurdrake wrote:
| They'd get one ad impression from me before I closed the
| application and uninstalled it from my computer.
|
| This sales model will ruin indie devs who aren't so eager to
| swallow adtech's shaft that they're content with rolling out
| malware to their users.
| a_cardboard_box wrote:
| Unity is saying they can send developers a bill for whatever
| they want, and if it's not paid their game can't be installed.
|
| Unity has published what "whatever they want" currently is. It
| doesn't matter if people get the details wrong on that because
| Unity can change its mind.
|
| That being said, you're still more wrong than the author on the
| details. The change _is_ retroactive in that it applies to
| existing applications. The author was very clear what they
| meant by "retroactive":
|
| > this change will be done retroactively on existing
| applications as well.
|
| This is true.
| erremerre wrote:
| If I got 3 ads impression the moment I install and open and
| app. I can promise you that I will never know if the app has 3,
| 4, 10 or 100 ads impressions.
|
| No matter what is the app.
| koolala wrote:
| If you don't own your engine then you don't own your game. Games
| are unique like that - music and other art is interoperable -
| software isn't.
| hcks wrote:
| Companies also have to pay for Microsoft Excel. Does it mean
| they don't own their businesses?
| esskay wrote:
| not quite an apples to apples comparison when your document
| can be open and read by other spreadsheet applications. You
| cant take a unity game and run it on unreal.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Not if you're making use of VBA.
| [deleted]
| SanderNL wrote:
| Say MS decided to lock down your access to Excel and all your
| business is nicely tucked away in those beautifully
| handcrafted sheets.
|
| It's not a binary thing and we can argue semantics, but MS is
| definitely holding some keys here.
| [deleted]
| imchillyb wrote:
| Software is a recipe, literal instructions on how to fabricate a
| result.
|
| Recipes are patentable.
|
| Software should be no different.
| nerdjon wrote:
| For the record, I am not a game developer but I don't think that
| changes my opinion on open source technology.
|
| Open Source software is great, but that also comes at the cost of
| support when you are running into a problem. Particularly if you
| are on a critical timeline, especially if trying to fix a bug
| after something is released.
|
| You are at the mercy of the community being able to help (and
| most likely only being able to give them a limited amount of
| information) vs the possibility of the company you are licensing
| from sending you engineers to actually help you fix the problem.
|
| For business critical this is an important thing that needs to be
| looked at, and from what I can tell there is not anything like
| this for GoDot (I don't see an enterprise option similar to
| redhat).
|
| This is not in any way shape or form defending Unity, what they
| are doing is horrible and will likely (hopefully) cause a
| migration to Unreal. But just saying open source is not a cut and
| dry option either. Especially not for something as critical as
| the engine.
| mijoharas wrote:
| > vs the possibility of the company you are licensing from
| sending you engineers to actually help you fix the problem.
|
| How often do you think that happens for unity? _Maybe_ for some
| massive developers, but I don't think this would be very common
| for most customers.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Not sending engineers, but when I worked for a smaller dev
| studio we did need to contact Unity and get support a couple
| times when we got stuck on something. I think we ended up
| paying for access to the source code and the development
| manager ended up making a couple of changes in the source
| code to get something working better as well (I don't
| remember the specifics, I was working in Unity but on a
| different game at the time).
|
| This was like 10 years ago though. That guy worked on
| multiple arcade games in Assembly back in the day too (you've
| likely played games he worked on if you've played more than a
| handful of popular arcade games), he was no slouch.
| grotorea wrote:
| Not really in a position to say anything conclusively either
| but I don't think you are at the mercy of the community. First,
| it's open source, so your company can look and fix the code
| themselves. If it's restaurant software this is likely
| complicated but for gamedev it is much more likely the company
| already has the expertise to do that. Second, Godot doesn't
| have a formalized process but one of the developers can be
| willing to offer paid support.
|
| > While we don't have a formal structure for offering
| commercial support, many Godot developers can already help you,
| work per hour, or relocate to your company. For such inquiries,
| contact support@godotengine.org. Let us know about your needs
| and we'll try to find the right person for you.
| ED_Radish wrote:
| https://w4games.com/ seems to be trying to provide an
| enterprise option for Godot
| RobotToaster wrote:
| > the possibility of the company you are licensing from sending
| you engineers to actually help you fix the problem.
|
| Have you ever tried to use Microsoft "support"?
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