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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

#391

Post by JackMorgan »

onethought wrote: post #386
JackMorgan wrote: post #376

This should also be a wakeup call to anyone using closed source tools at all: DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, Azure, AWS, Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc. While some of these tools are best in class, it's borrowed time until the owner decides to change the terms, stop offering it, or raise prices enough to damage your business. Closed source software tools are a liability, and the benefits often ar…

But history has shown them get cheaper and more capable over time for nearly every example you gave.

Survivorship bias. These are the ones that haven't _yet_ gotten worse and are still currently popular. I'm listing them so people won't get blindsided when they do eventually bite their users.

There isn't enough space to list the closed source software tools that didn't make it. Off the top of my head: Adobe Flash, MS Basic, SourceSafe, ActiveDesktop, FoxPro, J#, Oslo, IronRuby, and Silverlight.

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

#392

Post by a_cardboard_box »

galleywest200 wrote: post #264
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…

> Web development is so simple these days because I spend most of my time gluing stuff together, and sanding the edges. This does exist in the gaming industry, it is called "shovelware". "Shovelware" is when you just glue existing assets purchased for cheap and "shovel" them into a game for a quick buck. Usually not very complex games, low effort stories, etc. Also usually very cheap to download.

I assume the parent comment meant gluing parts of the game engine together like renderers and physics engines. You can make shovelware in a monolithic game engine.

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

#393

Post by JackMorgan »

tschellenbach wrote: post #387
JackMorgan wrote: post #376

This should also be a wakeup call to anyone using closed source tools at all: DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, Azure, AWS, Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc. While some of these tools are best in class, it's borrowed time until the owner decides to change the terms, stop offering it, or raise prices enough to damage your business. Closed source software tools are a liability, and the benefits often ar…

While it's true that this can happen to external tools, it doesn't happen very often. Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their products are supported long terms and work well. For in-house developed software it happens frequently that past employees leave the codebase in a state, where new team members end up rewriting it. So it's a bit weird to say you shouldn't use closed source since there is a small…

My alternative is to use battle tested open source software. I don't suggest writing a database in house.

Also, I would say the opposite, it happens all the time. There's only a few closed source software tools that have been around for more than fifteen years, and countless that didn't make it.

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

#394

Post by nylonstrung »

alexvitkov wrote: post #352
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 spent like 6 billion on acquisitions that don't help make their core product better. Literally just don't do that and you'd be in the green right now.

This isn't quite true as those acquisitions are paid for by stock and debt to a large extent

It's not like they bought these with a pile of $6B cash they had lying around

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

#395

Post by hakre »

jehb wrote: post #110
nhinck wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could change the license for future versions and charge for said updates, for the market that godot targets that would be more a little screwing to them. How long would it take for someone to take over the project (if ever).

And it's at exactly this moment the community would fork the project and development of a free version would continue. This is not a real risk for a community-driven project, only for corporate-driven projects where a single entity owns copyright on the on all or close to all of the codebase.

While I'm able to understand your argument, IMHO the MIT license is not displaying that well. Community is plural, and fork with MIT could be like Windows: Closed source. End of the (fork) line.

Given the project itself is still strong, this might not be a problem, but then I see no reason why it has chosen it in the first place if not for that specific option.

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

#396

Post by trinsic2 »

tmpX7dMeXU wrote: post #379
miragecraft wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the surface that is the case, but once you're a publicly traded company you're beholden to your shareholders, not your customers, so your goals and incentives changes drastically and "bad management decisions" gets made. You think the management made a mistake, I think the management (as a result of going public) is the mistake.

That’s a simplistic view. “Beholden to shareholders” does not mean prioritising short-term gain at all costs. That’s not just my ideology, it is how publicly traded companies work a lot of the time, including the one that I work for. To imply that there’s such a stark binary difference between a privately held and publicly held company misses a lot of nuance. Investors can want a quick out or be in for the long game…

Sorry, it sounds like you're defending the system that doesn't empower the public good. I hear reports time and time again that private companies that go publicly are burned by the artificial and unnatural need for constant growth. Going public serves greedy individuals (shareholders) that have no connection to the service or product that real people depend on.

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

#397

Post by intelVISA »

RugnirViking wrote: post #133
Ekaros wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems quite a lot. Compared to game development teams with their own engines which they have kept modern while releasing games...

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

id Tech is pretty solid

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

#398

Post by delfinom »

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…

Not gonna lie, I was looking at their Q10 filing recently and I'm dumbfounded they have spent $450 million for "sales and marketing" so far this year.

ON WHAT AND WHY???

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

#399

Post by minimaul »

1323portloo wrote: post #190
gumballindie wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER For a 5% cut. Add that on top of taxes and steam and you’re basically an employee.

Yes, unless you build everything from the game engine to the distribution channel yourself, there is a cost to doing business. IIRC Epic Games Store offers a more reasonable 88%/12% revenue split, while Steam uses the same rapacious split as Apple and GOG at 70%/30%.

However, Steam offers more eyeballs, and in particular, more eyeballs that actually buy games.

The extra 18% doesn't feel as unreasonable when you get to make a lot more sales.

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

#400

Post by nylonstrung »

aaarrm wrote: post #319
RugnirViking wrote: post #133

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

I know the devs of Hades have a custom engine and they are by no means a large studio

That's a 2D single-player game— it gets way harder if you're trying to emulate the feature set of Unreal/Unity

Source: game dev using unreal

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