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

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

#341

Post by baobabKoodaa »

jasonlotito wrote: post #323
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are proposing is literally impossible. If I were to comb through every ToS and EULA and every other legal text related to tools I use as a developer, I would not have any hours left in the day for, you know, actual development. Even then, I wouldn't have time to read and comprehend all of the legal contracts. Hell, if I stopped sleeping entirely and spent 24 hours a day combing through legal contracts, I sti…

The Unity TOS doesn't take a full day to read. And if you have trouble with it, you can hire a lawyer.

Are you implying that one needs a crystal ball to predict which companies will screw you over with ToS changes in the future, and using that crystal ball in the present time, we can then skip reading ToS for all those other companies, which will not screw you over, and only read the ToS for the one company that will screw you over?

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

#342

Post by varelse »

kypro wrote: post #103
enlyth wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't feel bad for their executives. They are the ones who chose the 'growth at all costs' path, and this is what you get. They could've probably been sustainable and profitable if they mainly serviced their core audience of indie developers with a smaller amount of employees and a simpler product, but it seems they really wanted to brute force themselves into the AAA market.

I suppose. There's quite a few companies in Unity's position right now for a reason though. For better or worse the "growth at all costs" strategy was the strategy companies like Unity had to employ for the last decade to attract investor capital so I tend to blame the low interest rate "easy money" environment more than companies like Unity being reckless. Although that said, it does seem Unity made some stupid move…

[dead]

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

#343

Post by a_cardboard_box »

popmatrix wrote: post #82

The author seems to misunderstand the new pricing model (as did many others; this is Unity's fault) [1] The $0.20 is not retroactive, nor do you need to hope your users see 10 and impressions to cover a cost to the game developer -- you need to earn $200,000 _and_ have 200,000 installs. A free game would not be charged, and if you don't believe you can muster 10 ad impressions per user (to cover the unity install cos…

Unity is saying they can send developers a bill for whatever they want, and if it's not paid their game can't be installed.

Unity has published what "whatever they want" currently is. It doesn't matter if people get the details wrong on that because Unity can change its mind.

That being said, you're still more wrong than the author on the details. The change is retroactive in that it applies to existing applications. The author was very clear what they meant by "retroactive":

> this change will be done retroactively on existing applications as well.

This is true.

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

#344

Post by tapoxi »

cyanfrog wrote: post #324
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…

That reminds me. How is blender able to stay free. How is their approach different?

Blender is nonprofit and funded by donations and grants. The closest analog to this in the game engine space is Godot.

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

#345

Post by PurpleRamen »

isaiahg wrote: post #97
objclxt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that they are trying to break the Gplay/Apply monopoly shows that the Epic games leadership are not corporate piranhas like Unity's. Epic is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart, they're doing it because it is beneficial to them. Epic is a multi-billion dollar corporation part owned by a massive conglomerate. > BS: in reality it's usually one or two guys who actually do the actual work. Over t…

> Epic is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart, they're doing it because it is beneficial to them. Epic is a multi-billion dollar corporation part owned by a massive conglomerate. Holy straw man! And there’s certainly no self-interest involved with me using their engine without giving them a cut under 1 mill right? You can make this argument about literally anything. Godot must have no self-interest in r…

> Who cares what the motivation is if it gives real benefits to devs.

Motivations matter, because they will decide in which direction a project moves over time, or if situations change. Epic is the "good guy" now, but only because they are an underdog. If they become the dominator, they might become the predator which Unity tries to be at the moment.

But if we are honest, such uncertain possibilities don't matter if they are so far in the future. This might be a problem for future games, 10, 20 years down the river..

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

#346

Post by freedomben »

bannedbybros wrote: post #329
pdpi wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Tim Cook had calmly said what he did, I’d believe it was just toeing the party line. The fact that he actually got angry, though? He doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who’d fake that, I don’t think that’s the image he wants if nothing else.

He doesn't have to fake it. Dude probably believes that there's no connection between right to repair, unsustainable consumption, and planetary destruction. That might be worse than faking it.

[flagged]

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

#347

Post by patmorgan23 »

chii wrote: post #41
TMM2K wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're contradicting your own points. If it is not a problem that Unreal can change their license for next versions because you can use the old one (which is now unsupported and not worked on) that is fine. For Godot, if we were to stop developing it (and I'd like to note that Godot is one of the most active projects on Github right now) you would still have the version you have now. What is the difference between Ep…

> Except that with Godot at least you could work on it yourself if you wanted to. let me play the devil's advocate - unreal's source is available (despite it not being actual opensource licensed). This means if Epic ever abandons unreal, you could theoretically also just make the changes you need to support whatever your project required - as long as you didn't distribute those changes (except perhaps the run-time? N…

See but with Godot you can share your updates and receive others updates. You aren't dependent on any single organization for the project to continue.

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

#348

Post by Someone1234 »

bennyschmidt wrote: post #321

Everyone told me "use Unity" "the biggest mistake you can make is building your own engine". How well did that advice age? Nobody needs Unity or Unreal. My most recent game (playshadowvane.com) is built on 100% proprietary technology, I built everything in-house down to the physics. Always ignore mainstream game dev advice, they are just trying to sell you products. Build as much as you can in-house, it's not only be…

Obviously I won't defend the Unity situation.

Ultimately though it is all about time efficiency, solo or small teams have little manpower and since they don't even know if their first, second, or fifth game will sell any at all it may not make strategic sense to spend months reproducing common engine features in order to save a hypothetical percentage of revenue that they may never ultimately make. You need to test the gameplay concept as cheaply as possible.

Creating a game engine from scratch is FUN, and if game development is a fun hobby then full steam ahead. If however it is a business that you plan to make money on, you're unlikely to recoup the time investment into a bespoke engine just to test the market for your games. If the game turned out to be successful you could always piecemeal replace the commercial engine with bespoke via updates (inc. using money to hire people from the success).

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

#349

Post by danjoredd »

okamiueru wrote: post #213
superchroma wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why feel bad? They're a victim of deliberate bad choices. The buck stops at the top. Nobody told Riccitiello to hit the gas pedal, nor to enrich himself by selling shares prior to a disastrous announcement, he did that all on his own. I feel much worse for the thousands of developers he's holding a metaphorical gun to with this awful policy, who now have to stress about swapping engines.

He did? Is insider trading laws in the US non-existant? Wow

Insider trading laws exist, execs just like to ignore them. Hopefully, the SEC takes a look into his dealings considering how public this is.

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

#350

Post by Someone1234 »

cyanfrog wrote: post #324
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…

That reminds me. How is blender able to stay free. How is their approach different?

Aside from being OSS backed nonprofit, they also have a relatively small full time staff:

https://www.blender.org/about/people/

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