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The Death of Unity

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Re: The Death of Unity

#151

Post by stemlord »

kilolima wrote: post #110

Happy to see the end of Unity as a Linux user. The Linux versions of games were very poorly optimized, and instead of native ports we got buggy, slow, unstable games, for years. Also Unity games were mod unfriendly, meaning that those games are mostly dead by now. And I don't know what it was exactly, but Unity games (specifically the RPGs) seemed to lack some sort of gritty realism with character interaction and mov…

Is unreal any better on linux or do you expect foss platforms like godot to significantly increase in useage?

Re: The Death of Unity

#152

Post by __loam »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #65
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,…

GDScript can be made to use static typing: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/g...

Additionally, C# has first class support and community supported languages include stuff like Nim, Rust, and Typescript: https://github.com/Vivraan/godot-lang-support

Compilation is irrelevant to a game engine scripting language. I think Godot does some magic on their end to make the interpreted nature of GDScript not matter from a performance perspective, but don't quote me on that.

Re: The Death of Unity

#153

Post by philistine »

kevingadd wrote: post #61
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 i…

That's true! It means no Unity game can come to Game Pass. Just that is enough to kill this proposal by Unity.

Re: The Death of Unity

#154

Post by jrflowers »

al2o3cr wrote: post #144
jrflowers wrote: post #58

>I know one such developer who is stuck, who's estimating this new scheme will cost them $100,000/month on a free to play game, where their revenue isn't guaranteed. We can assume that this would mean running the game at a loss, because the author didn’t say that.

We can assume that this would mean running the game at a loss, because the author didn’t say that. A better assumption would be that they're likely to clear the $100k/mo, but as they said "not guaranteed" to do so. I suspect that if the author would have intensified the statement to "they would go out of business with the new scheme" if they were certain to lose money.

> A better assumption would be that they're likely to clear the $100k/mo, but as they said "not guaranteed" to do so.

It’s funny that the vague $100k/mo figure is meant to evoke some sort of response from the reader. The implied assumption seems to be that Unity should not charge anyone this fee because free-to-play exists as an optional business model that a developer can choose to maximize revenue.

Like the boogeyman lurking in the closet is that any indie developer could wake up one day and their game is EVE Online

Re: The Death of Unity

#156

Post by bmitc »

pjmlp wrote: post #118
__loam wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And with OSS alternatives like Godot available, it's getting harder to justify using Unity.

Game consoles.

There was a company recently launched by some of the people behind Godot that is specifically aimed at providing game console support in line with what other engines offer.

https://w4games.com/

Re: The Death of Unity

#157

Post by robertjpayne »

gingerrr wrote: post #150
__loam wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worth noting that the unity fee only takes effect once you're making a pretty large amount of revenue, so most devs will be unaffected. Still shitty and I'm glad I made the switch to Godot a few months ago, but not as bad as people are making it out to be.

The fee isn't revenue-based, it's install-based - and not based on hard numbers. Also, demo installs apparently count against that threshold https://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/1701717971016790508 (their original reply https://twitter.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607 )

The fees don't kick in until you get to a certain number of lifetime installs. Once you start paying the install fees the price per install drops quite rapidly too.

The fees are also PER-GAME so one popular game wont cause your new game to cost a bunch immediately.

It sounds way less bad than what people are making out to be (still not free, but should anything be?)

Re: The Death of Unity

#158

Post by rexpop »

kevingadd wrote: post #55
rexpop wrote: post #15

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…

Fine, "Infiniminer's revolutionary voxel engine."

Re: The Death of Unity

#159

Post by boppo1 »

bluescrn wrote: post #11
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the obvious go-to engine choice for indies and mobile developers What do you think has taken it's place?

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.

Can UE5 be used to make lightweight games? Is it possible to target wrak hardware if you don't use Nanite or Lumen?

Re: The Death of Unity

#160

Post by boppo1 »

stemlord wrote: post #151
kilolima wrote: post #110

Happy to see the end of Unity as a Linux user. The Linux versions of games were very poorly optimized, and instead of native ports we got buggy, slow, unstable games, for years. Also Unity games were mod unfriendly, meaning that those games are mostly dead by now. And I don't know what it was exactly, but Unity games (specifically the RPGs) seemed to lack some sort of gritty realism with character interaction and mov…

Is unreal any better on linux or do you expect foss platforms like godot to significantly increase in useage?

Fwiw it wasn't very hard to get Unreal Editor to compile on Ubuntu. No issues running example files. I haven't really sunk my teeth in too far yet though, so I guess we'll see.
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