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“This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

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Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#151

Post by numpad0 »

fragmede wrote: post #118
loupol wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does look like there is a lot of potential for abuse, depending on how installs are tracked. If it's some DRM system, pirated copies might or might not be counted, and of course "install bombs" would potentially be possible in theory. Which means a need to find ways to potentially exclude those installs from counting towards the count. This introduces crazy complexity when really you could have simple revenue shar…

I mean, there's going to be a web endpoint that gets hit to count one installation. That is definitely going to remain a secret, so no one could possibly run wget in a loop to say their steam account installed it a million times.

Back in the days in parts of the Internet I've seen, though I've never joined those groups, it used to be a webapp stress testing tool called Apache JMeter. Participants(legit criminals, in hindsight!) were encouraged to download scenario files, referred to as "ammunition", through equivalents to Mega/mediafire at the time and join coordinated attacks. Nowadays I'm sure it will be scripts on GitHub, botnets of IoT appliances, and volunteered GPU farms for PoW algorithms.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#152

Post by [deleted] »

dgb23 wrote: post #105
jdougan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best part is you can bet people who don't like the developer of a game (for whatever reason) will "install bomb" the game.

This may seem weird for outsiders. But it’s one of the first things that come to mind if you know about that subset of entertainment consumer culture. The target of this kind of hostility is _usually_ mainstream media, but nobody is safe. It’s a weird mix of entitlement and hate that drives this.

[deleted]

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#153

Post by philistine »

pech0rin wrote: post #94
dathinab wrote: post #17

> but the fact they are applying this retroactively to every game every made in Unity that also seems like it should not be legal no matter what you put in your TOS, at least in some jurisdictions it probably isn't (in the same way that e.g. conditional auto-termination contracts are no actually auto-terminating in many jurisdictions even if it's written in the contract)

Not sure you read the article. Unity explicitly states they are NOT applying this retroactively.

The article has information from the later clarification Unity did. Initially it was crystal clear it applied to every download ever made with Unity.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#154

Post by philistine »

harimau777 wrote: post #150
nomercy400 wrote: post #137

Why did/can game companies not protect themselves against this possible change of contract? I mean, if you spend millions on developing a game, taking two-three years to develop, surely you try to tackle any risks that might endanger the project. For example, by fixing the price on the foundation of your game, i.e. the game engine. This is a huge change in the way this game engine will be considered for new games. If…

A lot of games don't cost millions to develop. In particular, I associate Unity more with indy games rather than AAA. Those sorts of devs don't have a lot of leverage.

Cities: Skyline, Rust, Hearthstone, Cuphead, Disco Elysium, Kerbal Space Program. Those might not be the ginormous games you're thinking of but Unity is far from exclusively used by very small studios.

Utlimately, I guess it's a question of definition: can you point me to a commonly agreed industry definition of AAA and indie?

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#155

Post by lwkl »

RantyDave wrote: post #146
Aerroon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you lose that much money? How does Unity Technologies employ 7700 people?! For comparison: Epic Games employs about 3700 people. That includes the people working on Fortnite and the Epic Games store. Edit: the stats might be a bit questionable though.

There's a big chunk of "technically unity" that used to be Weta.

According to Wilipedia only 275 employees became part of Unity theough this acquisition.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#156

Post by [deleted] »

stefs wrote: post #88
auxermen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows

i doubt that's correct. i can install windows as often as i like, i just have to pay for the key and afaik i can only use the key in one active install at a time (as a private user). so it's very different.

[deleted]

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#157

Post by echelon »

CornishPasty wrote: post #78
echelon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Bevy, if you're into Rust: https://bevyengine.org/

I would say Bevy isn't really similar to Unity. Something like Fyrox - https://fyrox.rs/ - would be more similar. Bevy is more low level and lacks an editor (as of now, it's planned)

Fyrox is a one-person show. It's quite impressive, but it doesn't have the same massive community around it that Bevy does.

Bevy has a very stable ECS architecture and is being intelligently designed and built for the long run.

Bevy's lead developer is working on the editor now and it's getting closer to landing [1, 2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35998538

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36658488

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#158

Post by LarsDu88 »

echelon wrote: post #43
LarsDu88 wrote: post #3

Switching to Godot, even though I'm a hobbyist who will never hit those thresholds

Bevy is getting better every quarter. If you're into Rust, you should check it out.

I am into Rust, and I did check out Bevy. I made a little demo WASM game called StarRust which you can play at the bottom of the page: https://dublog.net/blog/rust-2/

TLDR: Bevy is in no ways ready for prime time. It's at least 3 years away from getting anywhere near where Godot 4.1 currently is and light years away from Unity in usability.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#159

Post by LarsDu88 »

datavirtue wrote: post #10
LarsDu88 wrote: post #3

Switching to Godot, even though I'm a hobbyist who will never hit those thresholds

Let us know how you deal with the threading model in Godot.

Compared to Unity DOTS and Bevy, Godot's architecture is not scalable to multicore architectures.

For 99% of games and hobby gamedev's though it's good enough (just like Unity). Given enough time and funding Bevy will get there, but such performance is becoming more and more irrelevant every year tbh.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#160

Post by kevinmgranger »

the_gipsy wrote: post #89
rollcat wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alternative engine (no matter how good) doesn't solve vendor lock-in. Gamedev is a cutthroat business. You can't afford a rewrite. Even for new productions, you can't throw away engine experience and start retooling. I expect backlash.

Godot isn't yet another game engine.

Can you elaborate?
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