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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

#401

Post by JackMorgan »

fragsworth wrote: post #390
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…

> DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, Azure, AWS, Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc. At least with these individual tools, it's usually not your entire codebase written around that thing. For instance, you can generally switch from one database to another if they decide to overcharge you. You can even switch from one cloud service to another. In other words, they (usually) don't have you nearly as locked…

Of course you can switch databases, but in practice it is extremely expensive. That's a big reason why it is pretty rare. Why use a closed source tool and take on that risk when great open source ones exist?

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

#402

Post by kdfjgbdfkjgb »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #354
miragecraft wrote: post #340

The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn't track for me. The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes…

I don't think this is a problem of company structure. It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened. But if you hire the former CEO of EA - a guy with no low level industry experience and who left his last job because of poor financial performance - then this whole fiasco se…

I saw a reddit comment from a Unity developer that alleged that Unity told them not to worry about the changes because this dev used ironSource for their ads. ironSource merged with Unity last year and other commenters were speculating that this whole thing is a play to try to coerce the huge amount of mobile games that are made with Unity to switch to ironSource.

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

#403

Post by Iulioh »

miragecraft wrote: post #384
tmpX7dMeXU wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the insight. So I guess the conclusion is that Unity was fucked pre-IPO?

The fact that the CEO was slowly selling millions of shares was an indication

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

#404

Post by nylonstrung »

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?

It's extremely difficult- it's going to break your pipeline and all of your programmers and tech artists essentially need to learn a new language

If you were switching Unity -> Unreal you'd honestly be better off firing your team and hiring Unreal devs

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

#405

Post by mnau »

Kiro wrote: post #30

I've been watching a few gamedev streamers port their games to Godot and it's clear that it's not there yet in terms of feature parity. The good thing is that the Godot devs are in the chats, posting (unreviewed) PRs that could be used as workarounds but some major things (profiling?) are miles off still.

Some hints where? YT's got nothing useful.

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

#406

Post by darklycan51 »

miragecraft wrote: post #340

The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn't track for me. The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes…

"who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split"

Yeah, I wonder why, almost like they're trying to slowly gain market share lead to then have a monopoly.

Arguing that just because right now there's alternatives that don't seem like they'll do that, right now. Is not a good argument against open source.

if any of those engines can retroactively destroy your livelihood, or make games unavailable forever for users because of $ reasons, then that is a huge enough reason to simply drop the engine.

Unreal will get eventually damage from this unity move as well, if I was a game dev I would seriously consider Godot right now, luckily I am a software dev not a game dev, only game dev I do is modding warcraft 3 so I don't have to bother about that stuff

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

#407

Post by Draiken »

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…

In theory, that's true. But what I see every day is the opposite. It's essentially what people are calling "enshitification". Mostly short term decisions that screw customers up for a quick buck.

I do agree that private does not mean good. It all falls under the CEO/Founders in my view. But there seems to be way more greedy short term thinking leaders out there.

I can probably count in my hands the amount of companies I follow that are not prioritizing the short-term. Maybe I just don't follow that many companies and I'm biased, but that's the impression I get.

Public companies seem to have an even higher rate of short-term profit seeking though.

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

#408

Post by fragsworth »

JackMorgan wrote: post #401
fragsworth wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, Azure, AWS, Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc. At least with these individual tools, it's usually not your entire codebase written around that thing. For instance, you can generally switch from one database to another if they decide to overcharge you. You can even switch from one cloud service to another. In other words, they (usually) don't have you nearly as locked…

Of course you can switch databases, but in practice it is extremely expensive. That's a big reason why it is pretty rare. Why use a closed source tool and take on that risk when great open source ones exist?

Usually the only good reason is because you already have developed lot of experience with with it.

I'm just saying it's not as bad because it's quite a bit easier to switch a database than to switch a game engine.

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

#409

Post by Iulioh »

JackMorgan wrote: post #391
onethought wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that behind OS software there isn't a lot of incentive to develop.

I mean, sute, but there is a reason why really good and complex software is usually closed.

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