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The Death of Unity

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Re: The Death of Unity

#61

Post by kevingadd »

hitpointdrew wrote: post #51

>Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar. Not only that, but with this predatory practice of taking any percent (steam, apple) or fix dollar value, makes just having a game up a potential liability. If you need to refund anyone you are re…

It's also catastrophic for services like Game Pass where the developer gets a flat fee regardless of how many people install the game. You can take a flat fee that seems reasonable based on an expectation of 100k installs, but then your game turns out to be a smash hit and it gets a million installs. Now you're on the hook for a massive amount of money to Unity but the money you got is barely enough to cover it, if it covers it at all.

Re: The Death of Unity

#62

Post by kevingadd »

byyoung3 wrote: post #59
hitpointdrew wrote: post #51

>Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar. Not only that, but with this predatory practice of taking any percent (steam, apple) or fix dollar value, makes just having a game up a potential liability. If you need to refund anyone you are re…

[flagged]

In no universe is Unity responsible for 90% of the game. Their tech simply does not do that much for you.

Re: The Death of Unity

#63

Post by chaostheory »

mdtrooper wrote: post #4

Well, I write one thing: https://godotengine.org/

You beat me to it. I don’t understand the licensing changes unless Roccitiello isn’t aware of both the existence of Godot AND its new C# support.

There will always be someone to say that an open source project can’t replace a mature, proprietary one since it doesn’t match all the features or ecosystem. Historically, this changes really fast once you make the licensing terms bad enough to make a large chunk of your customers and prospective customers leave and take a good risk with said open source project.

Roccitiello was also shortsighted when he was CEO of EA. It’s sad that history repeats itself.

Re: The Death of Unity

#64

Post by hnthrowaway0328 »

bluescrn wrote: post #47
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #30

The 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…

There are also lower limits of revenue and installs your games have to break through before Unity starts charging you $$.

Re: The Death of Unity

#65

Post by diego_sandoval »

mdtrooper wrote: post #4

Well, I write one thing: https://godotengine.org/

The thing that I like the most about Godot is that the binary weighs less than 200 MiB, compared to the several GiBs of Unity, and that you don't need to deal with any account, registration or license BS like you do in Unity.

However, one thing I don't like about Godot is their choice of a dynamically-typed, scripting language as their main programming language, instead of a statically-typed, compiled language which, in my humble opinion, would have been better.

Re: The Death of Unity

#66

Post by TylerE »

kllrnohj wrote: post #48
ianlevesque wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Now imagine Factorio in Unity. Do you expect that to be better or worse than factorio on unreal?

Re: The Death of Unity

#67

Post by bluescrn »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #31
bluescrn wrote: post #11

Earlier 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.

Open source and consoles are a difficult mix, due to NDA issues. Not necessarily a showstopper, though:

https://w4games.com/2023/02/28/godot-support-for-consoles-is...

Re: The Death of Unity

#68

Post by badsectoracula »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #31
bluescrn wrote: post #11

Earlier 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.

> Is it ready nowadays?

What does "ready" mean?

Re: The Death of Unity

#69

Post by TylerE »

educaysean wrote: post #25
TylerE wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

Having played a lot of games isn't really much of a qualification, is it? I'm curious about your claim that Unity games "always feel janky". Which games gave you this impression?

Basically every famous unity game? Like Cities Skyline has always been a complete disaster. So is Kerbal Space Program and in Dyson Sphere Program there are all kind of issues where once your map reaches a certain complexity the game just falls over, and save files bloat to hundreds of megabytes.

Re: The Death of Unity

#70

Post by Ekaros »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #44
MenhirMike wrote: post #38

I 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".

Medium and big devs have much better rates... This actually really hits hardest the solo and tiny devs that make reasonably successful game. 200k revenue is not that much in over a few years or split between couple people.
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