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

ramatak.com

251–260 of 733 posts

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

#251

Why not charge $1 for your game? Problem solved. If you're making a game with a fancy commercial engine I would hope what you're offering is worth a buck. Let's get some quality in this world.

Because mobile games that aren't free do not sell (except Minecraft). In mobile F2P space you can end up with tons of downloads, with less than 20 cents per download, because majority of the players are free casual ones, who play few hours or even minutes, and 99% of your revenue comes from the so called 'whales' (players who spend a LOT of money). If you hate this business model - good for you, I do too and I don't do mobile gamedev, but it's a reality there and Unity knows it.

Unity also doesn't give a crap about quality unless by quality you mean microtransactions, milking players and ads/adware. The engine is associated (partly unfairly) with lagginess, low performance, high ram usage, and crappy games and assets flips. Unity is famous for how slowly new features come and how buggy it is in parts. They also scrapped their own game on Unity that was supposed to show how to use Unity right, it's an engine company that never made games (unlike Epic or id Software, who made games first, engine seconds, and even when being in engine business they kept making games). Unity users who just slapped few assets together basically created the asset flip genre, the opposite of quality. As CEO of EA Riccotello supported always online online DRM that shut down singleplayer games on release day due to servers dying, as CEO of Unity he said you are a "fucking idiot" (direct words) if you don't want to maximize your monetary return from your players. Unity bought an adware company, Unity has an ad network (and if you use it to put ads in your game, they waive the install fee, curious..).

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

#252
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epic is mainly owned by its founder. They are not primarily corporate though they are influenced by it. They are 100% more trustworthy than Unity or other corporate game companies.

I find your innocence touching. EDIT: To elaborate, this is an article about a company fucking users over after an aggressive growth / dumping business model phase. Your response is yes but this other company would never fuck users over after an aggressive growth / dumping business model phase.

> Your response is yes but this other company would never fuck users over after an aggressive growth / dumping business model phase.

Well, Epic didn't do that when it went through it's aggressive growth and the last time it dumped it's business model. Instead, they changed their licensing to lower fees, and when you look at what they did across the board, made things better for customers and game developers.

So, all evidence is to the contrary.

Edit: Also, nice strawman.

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

#253
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…

> Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license.

I thought the unity TOS had this too?

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

#254
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epic is mainly owned by its founder. They are not primarily corporate though they are influenced by it. They are 100% more trustworthy than Unity or other corporate game companies.

I find your innocence touching. EDIT: To elaborate, this is an article about a company fucking users over after an aggressive growth / dumping business model phase. Your response is yes but this other company would never fuck users over after an aggressive growth / dumping business model phase.

Watching this industry for a long time, I've learned that I can never trust a company. Companies are made up of people but the people within them change, and their incentives change. This is very much the case with Unity.

People, on the other hand, I can trust. Not often, but in cases where a person has made a long series of decisions over a decade or more, you can get a feel for what their value system is. Tim Sweeney is in this category. He was involved in Unreal back when I was in undergrad, more than 20 years ago. So I sort of put him in the same category as Gabe Newell and John Carmack: relatively enlightened game business leaders that understand the true value that gamers and developers derive from the ecosystem. None of them are in to make another dollar in the next quarter: they are focused on long term success and the are passionate about games themselves.

So it's not that you're wrong, it's just that your argument applies cynicism uniformly, and I'm not sure that's fair given the history of those involved.

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many such game development companies actually are there? I see a lot of aging engines out there, and companies that jumped to unreal, but I have by no means broad knowledge

Certainly not an expert but top studios like Bethesda and CDPR maintain their own engines with an order of magnitude less employees. They make games too.

CDPR seems to be switching to Unreal.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/03/the-witcher-will-retu...

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

#256
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a complete falsehood. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

In your haste to defend the idiocy of shareholder causing constant enshittification, you accidentally forgot to read the comment you’re replying to. Businesses are legally bound to act in the best interest of their shareholders. This is quite an open ended precedent.

"Best interests" is deliberately vague. Is it in their "best interests" that you fire the CEO and call the cops because he raped an intern? Or maybe that you agree to accelerate his $40M "bonus" if he agrees to resign without saying why? Or maybe it's in their "best interests" that you pay PIs to develop evidence that the intern has a drug habit and "leak" this "shocking revelation" to the media if they go public?

You can argue almost anything meets this criterion, in some egregious scenarios a court won't buy it, but they will give you enormous leeway.

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

#257
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.

Amazon's game engine is also open source under the name O3DE.

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

#258
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…

> Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. I thought the unity TOS had this too?

That was removed.

Epic's still remains. Yes, if Epic removes this feature of the license, we can be concerned. But, Epic's license means I can remain on the previous license that has these more favorable terms.

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

#259
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…

> 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 this.

Isn't part of the current furore that unity used to have similar terms and they removed them?

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

#260
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like which?

AFAIK in Germany the TL;DR is that if there's anything in the EULA which violates "German Civil Code (BGB)", then either parts or all of the EULA are invalid. I remember that in Germany an EULA cannot prohibit reselling the software to somebody else, or making your own backup copy (kinda tricky nowadays though where everything is just a "service").

"AFAIK in Germany the TL;DR is that if there's anything in the EULA which violates "German Civil Code (BGB)", then either parts or all of the EULA are invalid. "

There is nothing unique about German law here. The same is true in the USA and most other countries. If a EULA or any other contract (whether agreed verbally, signed physically, digitally, or via a "click") violates the law, it can be considered invalid/unenforceable. It has nothing to do with how the agreement was agreed to, but with what the agreement contains. (There may be some legal theory that may carry some weight that a contract agreed to via a "click" is more likely to be unconscionable that one agreed to with a physical signature, but that does not automatically make all "click" agreements unenforceable.)

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