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> Heard from inside Unity that the blog post was reviewed for weeks and internal concerns about poor / confusing messaging, Game Pass, etc, were all ignored. It's resignation time for some folks.[1]
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dispute-between-unity-improba...
[1] https://twitter.com/georgebsocial/status/1701678249086992478
The 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…
The 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…
Even if you go crazy and install the game 10 times, that 10cents is less than the 25 cents unreal would charge assuming your game is $5.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
That situation sounds horrible, is that actually a thing? Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place?
Game giveaways like Game Pass and Epic Games Store's free games are generally based on a flat advance. I think PlayStation Plus's free games are also a flat advance, but I can't personally attest to it. There are tables out there of how much money Epic handed specific developers for their games and how many copies were installed that I think leaked during the Apple lawsuit, and in some cases developers earned much less than Unity's 20 cents per copy due to the number of installs.
Ideally this flat advance model would have been widely protested by the industry, but there is a huge audience of struggling indie game devs for whom a flat advance is a desperately needed lifeline, so it's been successful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
That situation sounds horrible, is that actually a thing? Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place?
What kind of protest do you expect to see? The change was announced just now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Godot is missing the game that shows this engine is a viable alternative to Unity at large. I mean look at the showcase: https://godotengine.org/showcase/ It all looks amateur. All the mobile dev work on Unity so you better have good reasons to change the entire pipeline.
so nobody wants to make a fancy looking game because nobody's made a fancy looking game... hmm...
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,…
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!
A thought occurred to me a few weeks ago... it was another Hacker News thread, forget which, but someone had mentioned the specific case law which cemented this fact. Maybe it was Ford himself? The details escape me, but afterwards, companies were forced to prioritize shareholders above all else. But legislators aren't exactly forbidden from creating new types of companies. As ignorant as I am of most things business…
> This being the case, why not a new type of corporation that was somewhere in the middle? Able to distribute profits (perhaps even with limitations on when they can withhold them, like so many of the big tech companies). Ones where the shareholders still get some (statutorily defined, so that case law can't come in and fuck it up) priority, but that when shareholders are acting only in short term interest, they can be overruled by those in charge of managing it.
There are of course alternate ways of structuring companies that prioritize the needs of groups of people besides shareholders like worker co-ops. The issue with these is that it can be difficult to raise capital to start or grow these businesses because there's less incentives for investors to give you their money.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What an absurdly facile perspective. While it's true that developers like Valve develop games only to take advantage of or exhibit new engine developments and Minecraft's revolutionary voxel engine likewise enabled a game that could not be built otherwise, you seem to be suggesting that eg all UE games throughout the last thirty years are undifferentiated "in spirit" because they share an engine. What an insult to wr…
Minecraft's engine wasn't remotely revolutionary, it was basically a 1:1 riff on an XNA game called Infiniminer that predated it. And its engine wasn't especially good. Minecraft's success is almost entirely due to its accessibility and the fundamental strength of its design - both things that are possible in any game engine. These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the origina…
> And its engine wasn't especially good.
It was good enough. It's non trivial to do, despite appearances.
> These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the original Java version, because it's really not about the engine.
But is the Bedrock version even the majority? It's been out for years and adoption is very slow. If it was not for game consoles it might not have taken off at all. And the main reason is mods. Which are not part of the "engine" as you put it, and were enabled by the technology choice.