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

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

ramatak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 733 posts

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

#271

Post by danaris »

wredue wrote: post #245
j_maffe wrote: post #205

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.

This is incorrect.

Businesses are legally bound to follow the official decisions of shareholders at official meetings. Anything beyond that is merely "a good idea".

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

#272

Post by jibe »

wredue wrote: post #245
j_maffe wrote: post #205

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.

Businesses are legally bound to act in the best interest of their shareholders

If they are legally bound, there must be either a law or contract, can you cite either?

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

#273

Post by maccard »

grotorea wrote: post #199
kypro wrote: post #12

I kinda feel bad for Unity. The company is in a bad place finacially. They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no good solutions to this. Either they try to increase pricing and piss off their customers, or they cut costs (which they've been doing with mass layoffs) and risk losing ground to other game engineers like Unreal. For years the only thing really holding the company a float was their valuation…

> They have no moat How easy is for a studio to change engine? Isn't that a decent moat?

I think we're about to find out.

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

#274

Post by TheRoque »

swalsh wrote: post #229

I wish game development wasn't so monolithic. You're either all in on Unity, or all in on Unreal, or all in on GoDot. They are designer forward, code later. Each has a marketplace of sorts, but in my experience it's substandard. Compare that to web development (different beast I know, but there's no reason gaming can't be more componentized). Web development is so simple these days because I spend most of my time glu…

No, it's not because it's art, it's because it's okay if all websites look the same, but regarding games, mostly 1 or 2 or its kind will survive, the others have to innovate or will be seen as sub-copies. On top of that, the complexity of making a game makes it so that it's more "coupled" to the hardware, so it's harder to generalize. If you want more component, then you can use the assets store, but at some point you will have to put in some work if you want your game to not be considered as a shovelware

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

#275

Post by gustavus »

NotGMan wrote: 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.

Exactly I'm glad someone is pointing out the problems with these piddly open source projects. Companies are too reliant on open source software, I mean it's not like open source tooling has ever taken off. Except for Emacs, and Vim, and VS Code, and maven, and ...

But seriously though the over reliance people have on open source projects is staggering, I mean really what happens when the guy who maintains Linux gets bored and wanders off, everyone is boned.

Therefore I agree with OP all open source projects are inevitably doomed to failure and can never work.

Glad to see someone else who sees reason.

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

#276

Post by ensignavenger »

NotGMan wrote: 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…

There are already well over one or two Godot devs working on the engine. The community funding is already enough that it supports multiple full time devs salaries. If the current devs quit, this funding would be used to hire new devs. At this point, I think the Godot community is already well over the tipping point where it will continue no matter what the original devs decide to do.

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

#277

Post by Havoc »

hcks wrote: post #169
Havoc wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t matter what your pricing is if you no longer have clients

Absolutely. Remember last summer when everyone fled Reddit because of the API price hike and they shutdown?

The users aren’t the ones paying and the apps do seem to be gone

Apollo, Sync for Reddit, BaconReader etc

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

#278

Post by xeromal »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #235
doikor wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that is what the Unreal Engine license allows you to do https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal > 2. How You Can Use the Licensed Technology > Epic grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license to privately use, reproduce, display, perform, and modify the Licensed Technology in accordance with the terms of this Agreement (the “License”). This means that as long as you are not v…

Well, you can always modify source code and use it privately - you hardly need a license for that. The additional sections that allow distribution are the important bits and I guess the devil is in the details.

The point is that if you're a game company. You have a way to legally make modifications to the engine even if Epic goes belly up.

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

#279

Post by danjoredd »

swalsh wrote: post #229

I wish game development wasn't so monolithic. You're either all in on Unity, or all in on Unreal, or all in on GoDot. They are designer forward, code later. Each has a marketplace of sorts, but in my experience it's substandard. Compare that to web development (different beast I know, but there's no reason gaming can't be more componentized). Web development is so simple these days because I spend most of my time glu…

The problem is, that making a 3D engine is extremely tough, and most 3D engines are completely proprietary as a result. There are plenty of 3D libraries that make 3D game development for small games easy, but when you compare a Python library next to a system that includes a 3D engine, a level editor, a file management system, and the ability to easily compile for different systems, its no contest for game companies. A fully-fledged development environment scales better for these multi-million dollar projects than a singular library.

It's why in the 90s every game was mostly built on an engine specifically designed for that game, and in the 2000s they switched to prebuilt game engines. Saves a lot of time AND money.

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

#280

Post by atoav »

raincole wrote: post #13
echelon wrote: 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.

I have lived from my VFX freelance work for 4 years and worked soley with Blender for the 3D and much of the 2D part.

Blender has some parts where it is the best (the tracker for example easily beats all commercial trackers I have ever used) and other parts where it doesn't shine as much (e.g. fluid simulation — which is a non-issue because it integrates well with other tools).

I have been coming from 3dsMax and Maya and never have been looking back. Blender also has been getting so much in the past 5 years it feels ridiculous and makes you wonder what the likes of Adobe and Xo are doing with all their money.

Post reply on HN