Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

404media.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 170 posts

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

#161

Post by dathinab »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #123
dgb23 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retroactively in terms of previous installs or in terms of already published games?

It applies to new installs (from 01/24) of all games, regardless of when they were published.

EDIT: It seems that while some article say they retroactively apply this other state they expliticly do not do so. Through they seem to have removed previous clauses which would allow developers to stay on the version they started developing with which hadn't had that terms jet. Which is scummy (because it relies on "tricking" companies into those terms) but might be legal.

put new installs are not newly published products, i.e. they don't involve the publisher bundling in a new version of unity they got from the vendor

so while the installs are new the contract between the producer publisher distributor unity is not

which means it's uniliteraly retroactively changing a contract

which sounds like very much not very legal

if you consider that the other contract partner is somewhat dependent on unity (switching is expensive) it might also involve other laws not necessary racketeering but something in that direction

and while unity might be able to terminate the contract with the publisher (by their lawyers sending them a letter, not automatic) this is between the publisher and them i.e. it shouldn't affect already sold products

but they explicitly want additional fees from distributor or publishers for _already sold products they have no control over_ which is just tbh. ridiculous

and even if it only affects newly sold products it's still affecting already produced product retroactively which still is highly questionable

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

#162

Post by devoice »

echelon wrote: post #157
CornishPasty wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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=3665848…

Someone who needs to start developing right now should use Fyrox right now. I tested the same project in both, and can echo the sentiment that Fyrox is further along and much more similar to classical engines like Godot, Unity or a number of further-along C++ engines.

Bevy breaks things every minor release and is missing key features. If more people supported the Fyrox effort, then the rust gamedev ecosystem would be less vulnerable to a change in bevy's pricing structure just as this Unity change has impacted the wider game dev ecosystem.

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

#163

Post by littlekey »

philistine wrote: post #154
harimau777 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For what it's worth, I think Hearthstone in particular very much qualifies as "ginormous".

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

#164

Post by everforward »

numpad0 wrote: post #151
fragmede wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

> Nowadays I'm sure it will be scripts on GitHub, botnets of IoT appliances, and volunteered GPU farms for PoW algorithms.

I'd be surprised if it's anywhere near that exotic. It'll just be a webpage with a list of games you can pick, input a number of "installs" to fake, and it'll fire the requests off with Javascript. Or maybe a browser extension if they feel the need to distribute the requests. Half the gamers will install it at some point when their favorite absurdly over-hyped game flops.

There's not much need to run an optimized and complicated tool like JMeter when each request costs the other side $0.20. I wouldn't be surprised if a browser extension could get out something in the ballpark of 100 requests/second.

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

#165

Post by LarsDu88 »

viccuad wrote: post #129
Kiro wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment worries me. I'm making games that usually rely heavily on multithreading and I'm looking at using Godot for my next game. Are you saying that would be a bad idea?

A good architecture for fully parallel, deterministic, thread-safe, serializable and extensible games is the Entity-Component-System pattern. I'm sure that Godot has one or a way to integrate a library that implements it. I think Unity doesn't come with ECS anyways.

This is why I feel an engine like Bevy will one day beat them all. ECS, rust, memory safety, thread safety.

It just needs an editor (or even a gameplan for what an editor would look like), animation, halfway decent rendering pipeline... it's a very long way from production ready.

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

#166

Post by viccuad »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #165
viccuad wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good architecture for fully parallel, deterministic, thread-safe, serializable and extensible games is the Entity-Component-System pattern. I'm sure that Godot has one or a way to integrate a library that implements it. I think Unity doesn't come with ECS anyways.

This is why I feel an engine like Bevy will one day beat them all. ECS, rust, memory safety, thread safety. It just needs an editor (or even a gameplan for what an editor would look like), animation, halfway decent rendering pipeline... it's a very long way from production ready.

Agree here. I long for an open source combat flight sim, and Bevy, with ECS, rust, wasm capabilities, thread safety, etc sounds quite apt.

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

#167

Post by nomercy400 »

kalleboo wrote: post #141
nomercy400 wrote: post #134

How does this work retroactively on released products? Say five years ago, I paid a company to build a house, who hired a contractor to build it and it was completed in a year. Nowadays, I open the door daily. Now the contractor goes to the company, saying that from January 1st, every time I open the door, the company has to pay a small fee to the contractor, because they built the house with the door five years ago.…

It works legally since you didn't buy Unity. You don't own anything. You're licensing the right to use it on an ongoing basis. It's like how I can't buy a Rolling Stones CD and then play it on the radio for millions of people without paying them. I never bought the music, just the right to listen to it privately.

In your example, it feels more like the distributor of the CD now has to pay the copyright holder 1ct everytime you play the CD, from January 1st next year.

But it is license based? Wow, that is quite a risk to take as a gamedev, to tightly-couple your game with a third-party company's tooling, who can change their terms at will, so you can no longer use their tooling.

I understand that you buy a license, but surely you can buy a permanent or fixed license for a lot more money, to take away the risks of having to pull your game from distribution due to licensing restrictions.

It sounds like a dumb move from unity, to create so much uncertainty.

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

#168

Post by the_gipsy »

kevinmgranger wrote: post #160
the_gipsy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Godot isn't yet another game engine.

Can you elaborate?

It's open source. You can be pretty much 100% sure that they won't do a bait & switch.

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

#169

Post by LarsDu88 »

viccuad wrote: post #166
LarsDu88 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I feel an engine like Bevy will one day beat them all. ECS, rust, memory safety, thread safety. It just needs an editor (or even a gameplan for what an editor would look like), animation, halfway decent rendering pipeline... it's a very long way from production ready.

Agree here. I long for an open source combat flight sim, and Bevy, with ECS, rust, wasm capabilities, thread safety, etc sounds quite apt.

I'm making a VR combat flight sim (of sorts) https://roguestargun.com

I went into it thinking I needed a bunch of ECS multithreading to make it run on an Oculus Quest 2, but honestly, it's completely unnecessary. Vanilla essentially single threaded Unity C# with careful asset optimization, and I get get ~60+ rigidbody running on a mobile chip at 72 fps. I haven't been able to survive a dogfight against more than 12 enemy ai fighters

Tim Sweeney was right, ECS for optimization purposes is overkill for most games and is best relegated to fancy particle systems (which is the route Unreal went)

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

#170

Post by philistine »

littlekey wrote: post #163
philistine wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For what it's worth, I think Hearthstone in particular very much qualifies as "ginormous".

By the way, I learned that the latest Pokémon games, Shining Pearl and the other one are made with Unity. That is a 1000% ginormous.

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/11/looks-like-pokemon...

Post reply on HN