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Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

ramatak.com

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Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#31
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still sad there hasn't been a new Unreal Tournament since 2007. It's all only Fortnite now.

They seem to have something in the works: https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/en-US/

I fear that this is the 2014 pre-alpha that got cancelled in 2017 due to f..ing Fortnite.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Tournament_(cancelled_v...

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#32
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My estimation is about 10 ~ 15 years for open source engine to catch up Unreal. (both feature and popularity) Amazon did make a game engine. It shows "Amazon money" doesn't magically solve every problem in the world. > Godot is going to become Blender for gaming Exactly. Blender still isn't the first choice for most animation and VFX jobs.

Depends on the market, for making the next pixar movie probably not (yet). However blender usage is way, way up and my game studio (Prehensile Tales) has no difficulty finding extremely talented blender users. An open source project doesn't have to be the very most used thing from the beginning in order to eventually eat everyone's lunch :)

That's an interesting name for a game studio. What's the story behind it?

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#33
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a project with zero support. Good luck developing it further instead of focusing on your game. There's zero risk of this happening. Godot is going to become Blender for gaming and eventually eat into Tim's margins. (Unreal isn't even his cash cow.) Unreal might be significantly ahead now, but when Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. contribute to Godot, it's game over.

My estimation is about 10 ~ 15 years for open source engine to catch up Unreal. (both feature and popularity) Amazon did make a game engine. It shows "Amazon money" doesn't magically solve every problem in the world. > Godot is going to become Blender for gaming Exactly. Blender still isn't the first choice for most animation and VFX jobs.

> Exactly. Blender still isn't the first choice for most animation and VFX jobs

And it doesn't need to be, it just needs to be a viable alternative. Everyone always looks at these projects like it's a winner takes all scenario, but it's not. There can be multiple programs that accomplish the same thing, some open-source, some not, so long as they're sustainable and have something unique to offer that's not a problem.

Sure, if we were living in my ideal fantasy all software would be fully open and free, but in this reality I'm just happy we have alternatives that are actually sustainable and don't feel like you're actively gimping yourself.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#34
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the market, for making the next pixar movie probably not (yet). However blender usage is way, way up and my game studio (Prehensile Tales) has no difficulty finding extremely talented blender users. An open source project doesn't have to be the very most used thing from the beginning in order to eventually eat everyone's lunch :)

That's an interesting name for a game studio. What's the story behind it?

I love monkeys, and I like making video games with stories in them. So "prehensile tales" is a somewhat oblique way of saying "gripping tales"

Also, it let me have a cute monkey as a logo : https://prehensile-tales.com :) (I'm not selling anything there, but you can see the logo)

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#35
post #10
post #2

Much as I love open source and the Godot engine, this seems more like a wake-up call on the importance of corporations not being able to unilaterally, retroactively change contracts in ways that impose new charges and violate existing contractual commitments that others have relied on. If they can do that then open source doesn't offer much real protection.

It is a wakeup-call also to do due dilligence and risk management when entering contracts. And yes, clicking "agreed" in the installer is very often a contract that you should run by your legal advisors. Or at least think very hard about. _Some_ kinds of Open Source might help there, since _some_ open source licenses are very easy to comply with and very business-friendly. On the other hand, all the game studios now…

Godot is MIT licensed though, there's very little we can do to screw our users if we wanted to, which we do not :)

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#36
post #9
post #4

>> While Unreal engine currently does not have terms like Unity’s, there’s nothing stopping them from doing something similar. In fact if Unity manages to get away with this it seems likely they will follow suit. Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for NEWER version Epic can change…

What if Unreal changes its term? Your answer: you can use the old version. What if Godot stops the development? Your answer: good luck (???)

> What if Godot stops the development?

You can also use the old version. Also others can take it from where they left off, since it’s open source, as it's has been pointed.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#37
post #3
post #2

Much as I love open source and the Godot engine, this seems more like a wake-up call on the importance of corporations not being able to unilaterally, retroactively change contracts in ways that impose new charges and violate existing contractual commitments that others have relied on. If they can do that then open source doesn't offer much real protection.

Open source is that protection. There's no way for an open source project to change their terms that drastically. The whole hasicorp disaster is a prime example of that. Terraform is forked and continues on like normal, users are not impacted. For programming platforms (like game engines) this is even MORE of an advantage, as with something like terraform you could conceivably rewrite your stuff in a matter of weeks…

“There's no way for an open source project to change their terms that drastically.”

Like going from GPLv2 to GPLv3 or straight to AGPL, so now you are stuck with an old version forever? Yeah, that would never happen!

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#38
> By using an open source engine you can be sure that whatever that “next thing” is, the engine won’t keep you from taking advantage of it. Nor would the engine be able to dictate your monetization strategy for you.

We really ought to separate the fact that "open" does not always mean "free" here. Especially given that it is fairly straight-forward to change licenses on a whim.

Imagine you wake up one day and suddenly the company/OSS maintainers put out a dual-license on the project. You now have to pay $0.20 per install after your app has made $200,000 over the past year. Now you're still using open source, but still legally held to the terms of that license.

Licenses tend to be permissive enough that if such thing were to happen or other factors(discontinued development/support/etc), community forks can be created(which has its own set of problems).

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#39
post #7
post #4

>> While Unreal engine currently does not have terms like Unity’s, there’s nothing stopping them from doing something similar. In fact if Unity manages to get away with this it seems likely they will follow suit. Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for NEWER version Epic can change…

> So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a project with zero support. Good luck developing it further instead of focusing on your game. There's zero risk of this happening. Godot is going to become Blender for gaming and eventually eat into Tim's margins. (Unreal isn't even his cash cow.) Unreal might be significantly ahead now, but when Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. contribute to Godot, it's game over.

I'm afraid not. Its not as simple as that. We have a heavy competition in automobile industry but when it comes to gaming industry, it is(I mean was) mostly unreal or unity despite decades of technological advancement. The reason for this is because using a game engine to make games is no where as simple as driving a vehicle. It takes a lot of skill, knowledge(sometimes things are engine specific only to make things even more annoying) and the time to attain both of them with the engine they are working on to make good games.

You are grossly underestimating the complexity involved in game engines. It is not like a web app where devs don't have to worry about constraints like memory or frame rate and chill. Things need to happen in real time. A delay of even half a millisecond is not acceptable. And these "Things" involve changing of 3d objects' position w.r.t player's movement, calculating zero or tens or hundreds of NPC AI characters' position and finalizing their animation state, calculating the lighting on all the objects and a lot more. All this just to finally render and present one frame. Yes, hardware has gotten better over the years and memory constraints might not seem like an issue but that is not the case for games. Improved hardware only helps with improving the overall quality of the game. Game now will be able to afford to look better and do more things than games from 2003 and that's it. Games still need heavy optimizations.

Thanks for the better hardware, making 2D games now is neither expensive nor hard. So, Godot being more friendly than unity for making 2D games is quite possible to happen. But that is not the case when it come to comparing Godot with unreal. Unreal is already at a league of its own. I don't think Godot can integrate something like nanite or lumen inside its engine anytime soon. In the past few years, only unreal has been introducing ground breaking computer graphics tech inside a game engine. Unity is having a hard time to even keep up with unreal's tech like meta human. It doesn't matter how many google, amazon or apple contribute to godot, it'd be a big surprise if Godot is at least able to hold its ground against O3DE IMHO.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#40
post #36
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if Unreal changes its term? Your answer: you can use the old version. What if Godot stops the development? Your answer: good luck (???)

> What if Godot stops the development? You can also use the old version. Also others can take it from where they left off, since it’s open source, as it's has been pointed.

And this is exactly my point.
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