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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

#421

Post by Draiken »

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…

>Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their products are supported long terms and work well.

I would say that's not quite accurate. They have only one incentive: profit.

Long term supported products are one way of getting money, but it's most definitely not the only way. Many times it's not the most profitable one either.

Companies don't make shitty decisions because they are scheming on how to screw customers up. They do it because when push comes to shove, only profit matters.

One guy will plot a chart saying if we screw customers this way (with pretty words, of course) we can get X% more profit. Then they get promoted and this cycle repeats itself. Or a pandemic hits and suddenly your margins decrease drastically. Now screwing the customer is back on the table.

Unless your company only plans to be running for a few years, those are not as rare as we may think.

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

#423

Post by berkle4455 »

zoogeny wrote: post #412

I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source. I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way. Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a technology is equivalen…

Nah, we used and paid for Unity because the licensing structure we signed on with made sense. They’re literally changing the terms on us in a way we cannot push back against. Games made years ago are subject to this new fee structure. Games which are no longer sold at the same nominal price and a massive existing install base who anytime they reinstall our game we get the privilege of paying Unity each time forever.

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

#424

Post by itsoktocry »

zoogeny wrote: post #412

I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source. I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way. Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a technology is equivalen…

>But I think about all of it. nginx, haproxy, redis, postgresql, nodejs, python. I don't think I could even write out all of the open source I am using in my projects within the confines of a Hacker News comment.

That seems contradictory to your opening sentence though, no? Eventually an open source project will get to the point that it's so good (or even good enough) that a commercial product is simply uncompetitive. That will happen with game engines to. Decisions like this will only accelerate it.

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

#425

Post by linuxftw »

mnau wrote: post #367
sigmoid10 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A CEO under who EA introduced lootboxes. A person that proposed that when player runs out of ammo could make an easy instant payment for a quick reload. Unity engine seems to flounder under him, despite rather insane headcount (7,703), acquisition spree laden Unity Technologies with significant debt... I am not impressed, not with his ideas and even less with his results. For comparison, Larry Elisson (Oracle) has di…

Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like an arcade, which is how video games became commercially successful in the first place.

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

#426

Post by _chu1 »

esskay wrote: post #238
_chu1 wrote: post #227

Valve needs to capitalize off this and get Source 2 out

Not only get it out but actively promote it as an opensource project instead of proprietary and make revenue through an asset store. Theres so few games that use source that theres no way its commercially viable on its own.

Valve doesn't do it that way. Instead of some crummy asset store with generic and terrible looking assets they literally just let you use the assets from their games. See Garry's Mod, Sven Co-op and Insurgency for an example of this.

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

#427

Post by tux1968 »

zoogeny wrote: post #412

I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source. I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way. Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a technology is equivalen…

I think you've completely misunderstood the situation. This isn't people feeling entitled, rather it's people feeling vulnerable to the whims of a private, self-interested entity.

While it isn't my reason, I think most people advocating for open-source, actually see it simply as a way to keep such private actors honest, and prevent them from becoming corrupted. Like many people have said, this particular situation would have been received much differently had the changes not been applied retroactively.

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

#428

Post by manicennui »

zoogeny wrote: post #412

I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source. I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way. Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a technology is equivalen…

YouTube Premium is basically the answer to your hypothetical.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7060016?hl=en

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

#429

Post by pxoe »

zoogeny wrote: post #412

I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source. I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way. Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a technology is equivalen…

>the cracks in the utopic vision of open source

what does unity, a proprietary engine that screwed over their customers, have to do with this?

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

#430

Post by _hypx »

dvngnt_ wrote: post #418
_hypx wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a secondary argument in favor of home-grown engines too. It's been very disappointing to see so many game companies abandon their own rendering technology in favor of Unreal. Terrible licensing rules might drive companies to go back to having their own engines.

I feel like each year makes it harder as demands increase

Never every game needs to have insane graphics. For a lot of games, “good enough” graphics is fine.
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