IPO's are usually the beginning of the end as far as a company being responsive to its customers and producing quality. From the time an IPO is made, the company is responsive only to its shareholders and that's it. Thanks, Bork and Friedman!
The Death of Unity
41–50 of 242 posts
Re: The Death of Unity
#42The thing is it's still far cheaper than Unreal, so unless Unreal is dying too calling it death doesn't make sense.
Maybe? It seems like Unity is charging the fee per install [0], not per unique user.
So when I install my Steam games on my desktop, my laptop and my Steam Deck that's 3 installs. If I reinstall the OS, that'll be another install - or if I clean up my Steam library and reinstall later, etc.
Maybe this is acceptable if your title has microtransactions because you may get some ongoing revenue stream for that user - but otherwise?
And it's entirely unclear to me how this works with Game Pass, streaming, etc.
[0] - https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280
Re: The Death of Unity
#43The decline of Unity is sad. Unity got so many things very right in their pre-IPO years. They made rapid prototyping and development of 3D games much easier than anything that came before. Being able to develop in C# was a huge win, especially for small teams and solo indie, and it made developing for multiple platforms easy, and took away a lot of the pain of native mobile development for Android/iOS. But Unity has…
> the obvious go-to engine choice for indies and mobile developers What do you think has taken it's place?
Nothing has, yet. Even with the current announcement cost terms, switching engines mid-development could be more expensive.
For new projects, Unreal Engine does have interesting terms for indies.
Re: The Death of Unity
#44I believe it when I see it. I would like to see it, but I doubt that a significant enough portion of developers are going to jump ship. For smaller indie studios, there are definitely better alternatives, but when it comes to the big packages, there's really just Unity and Unreal.
This change really only hits the small studios and especially solo game devs, game conglomerates can probably just go "k, that's another 100k on top of a several million budget, raise the unit price by another $5 and call it a day".
Re: The Death of Unity
#45The thing is it's still far cheaper than Unreal, so unless Unreal is dying too calling it death doesn't make sense.
With this new pricing model, it's not cheaper than Unreal for indies since the sale price of an indie game is typically much lower, and you're paying a fee per-install instead of a % of your revenue.
As a comparison point Unreal also has another advantage, which is that they waive the unreal revenue cut for sales on Epic Games Store, so that subset of your revenue (if you release there) is yours to keep. Unity can't offer any deal of that kind, all they can offer is discounts if you use stuff like their ads service (which is only appealing to F2P mobile game developers).
Re: The Death of Unity
#46About time. What makes a game unique in spirit is its engine.
There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine. Every minute spent on re-inventing the wheel for the umpteenth time is time lost on actually writing and polishing the actual game. Tools like Unity were a godsent for small teams and solo devs who just wanted to write and publish games. While libraries like SDL can lighten the burden somewhat, they are…
> There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine.
This is wrong, there are tons of finished games that use custom engines. For example one of the most recent indie games i bought was Zortch which was made by a single person and used a custom engine.
EDIT: actually here is a page that collects some custom engines, ranging from big studios down to one man efforts, all with released games:
https://gist.github.com/raysan5/909dc6cf33ed40223eb0dfe625c0...
Re: The Death of Unity
#47The thing is it's still far cheaper than Unreal, so unless Unreal is dying too calling it death doesn't make sense.
AFAIK, UE is completely free until you make your first $1,000,000 revenue? (then a 5% royalty rate beyond that).
These new Unity per-install fees could hit developers who aren't making money - for example F2P games, free demos, very cheap games (e.g. charity bundles), potentially even pirated copies (if Unity intend to track installs via analytics sent from the runtime?)
In reality, most indies fail and won't hit the 100,000 download threshold or the $100k revenue threshold. But it's a new fee to worry about, and one that gives Unity a lot of 'monetization levers' to pull more aggressively further down the road (tweaking the fees/thresholds)
It's also worth considering that Epic could change the UE pricing model significantly if their sole serious competitor starts to fade into irrelevance...
Re: The Death of Unity
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who’s played a lot of games… I disagree. These days I specifically avoid Unity games because they always feel janky, and yes it absolutely is the engine.
I don’t take it to that extreme, there’s great Unity content (walkabout VR mini golf comes to mind), but recently when I really played an Unreal Engine game again for hours (Satisfactory), I was floored by just how much better optimized it was. A similar, arguably simpler, game in the genre (Oxygen Not Included) is Unity and famously terrible on performance. I had just sort of accepted that was how it had to be. It’s…
Oxygen Not Included is a _significantly_ more complex simulation than Satisfactory is as ONI is doing gas movement & thermal transfer mechanics across a large 2D grid.
Now compare Satisfactory to its actual genre-appropriate competitor, Factorio, and suddenly Unreal looks like a pathic joke. Factorio scales _so_ much better it's absurd, but that's really down to the quality & focus of the simulations being added by the game developer. None of it has anything to do with the engine itself (well, except that Satisfactory is limited by the number of game objects it can place as a result of an Unreal Engine limitation...)
Re: The Death of Unity
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot more indies talking about Unreal, and also Godot. Too early to see how much of that talk will translate to shipping finished games, though. Artists are excited by the potential of UE5, as Unity's rendering tech has stagnated somewhat. But making a UE5 Nanite/Lumen game is likely to be limiting your audience rather a lot, with high hardware requirements.
I've heard a lot about Godot but the last time I really looked into it, years ago at this point, it wasn't quite ready for prime time. Is it ready nowadays? Looking at their showcase it seems I've played a few games using it without knowing.
I’m not sure, I haven’t used it myself in a few years and back then my experience was like yours. However I do know that it has improved a lot since then, especially with the 4.0 and beyond releases.
Is it there yet? I don’t know, but it’s improving constantly and making strides and things like what’s happening with Unity will only gain Godot more support. I think it’s just a matter of time.
Re: The Death of Unity
#50The biggest issue, unfortunely is that all the other engines that offer C# support as the main language, lack the AOT compilation toolchain (including game consoles), the graphical tooling including debugging and profilers, asset store with people living from it, and above all, being fully endorsed by all major game platform owners and VR/AR hardware. So anyone that wants to replace Unity, despite their missteps, has…
C# has had multiple non-Unity AOT solutions [1] for a while. I worked on multiple shipped C# games for the PS4 and PS Vita that didn't use Unity.
1: BRUTE, Mono AOT, and CoreCLR NativeAOT among others