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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

#481

Post by doctorpangloss »

tomtheelder wrote: post #477
doctorpangloss wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They simply serve very different audiences of both developers and end users. Their coexistence is evidence of how different they are from one another, not how fungible they are.

They really don’t at this point. Unreal has reached a point where it’s a better choice than Unity for nearly every single project. There’s still these pervasive beliefs that Unity is better for 2D or better for small teams, and it just isn’t true. The one exception is junk mobile games, and even then I think Unreal is a completely reasonable choice. Unity has been well and truly left behind with the gap widening ever…

I am saying that only from the point of view of someone who has made and published a lot of games, in roles including developer and director, on a lot of platforms and dealt with a lot of engines. But I really hate making this about me. The outrage-driven discourse that people hitch onto to promote their shit is the worst excess of cultural materialism.

The most succinct explanation for the difference is that Unreal gets your game financed, Unity gets your game made.

> There’s still these pervasive beliefs that Unity is better for 2D or better for small teams, and it just isn’t true.

You're coming at this like a feature box checking sort of deal. There are so many bigger picture things going on with the differences between the two engines. I'm actually not saying that one person should use one or the other - they are simply made to do and make fundamentally different things. For example, if you're aspiring to make a top-ranked Steam game, it makes a lot of sense to use Unreal, because those are all multiplayer FPSes; and it also is telling you that you need a team of 10-100 people and at least an $8-$100m budget, because that's how much it costs to "enter" that space and build on Unreal. Your takeaway shouldn't be "for small teams" or whatever, because you're looking at the wrong stage in the pipeline.

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

#482

Post by numlock86 »

> 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.

I sense a lack of arguments if people make up pure speculation like that without any foundation. Also Unity's business model had a negative tendency over the last couple of years already ... with Epic having clear statements and an ethical roadmap in response. Oh, and by the way: Unreal Engine is open source. The more you know.

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

#483

Post by nirvdrum »

linuxftw wrote: post #425
mnau wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then consoles all but killed arcades because it turns out no one really wanted to keep feeding quarters (and then dollars) into an unfair game even if that turned out to be cheaper than buying a game outright. Removing that monetization strategy improved the quality and diversity of games as well. I'm not keen on rolling back the clock to that version of yesteryear.

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

#484

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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…

> and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth

Why is "growth" always interpreted as "higher headcount" and not "higher profits"?

Certainly a company that has continually growing profits without increasing costs would be seen as more valuable than a company that constantly increases their costs with revenue?

Does Unity hiring more Engineers actually increase revenue?

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

#485

Post by wilsonnb3 »

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…

It is a wake up call, I don't think open source is the only solution though. You just need good business practices.

Work with vendors that you trust, vet your dependencies, decide how much risk you want to tolerate, pay attention to the licenses that you are using.

Especially for something as critical as a game engine is to game development companies.

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

#486

Post by crysin »

Iulioh wrote: post #416
unnouinceput wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...for a mobile game engine. May I ask you if you ever heard of Rust? The game, not the programming language. Online survive game, which has thousands of active players every single day since like a decade already, full 3D and quite awesome graphics I'd say. It's written in Unity. It's wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(video_game) A gameplay of a rather popular youtuber that does daily uploads: https://www.y…

Man, Rust is infamous for being reeeeaaaallly badly optimized I would have picked a different game. I remember the minutes of loading of a new world..

While I don't know the Rust code, this isn't necessarily solely a Unity problem. Unity's C# API provides a lot of footguns that game developers tend to not think about in the near term. Lots of code bases I've seen in Unity don't do a good job of caching component instances, or just never opened the profiler to see their GC is off the charts. Unity can run really well if the proper thought and care is put into it.

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

#488

Post by fredsmith219 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #473
kdfjgbdfkjgb wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To parent's opinion, I'd respond that bad management is a possibility in any company. However, a broken revenue model misaligns incentives and makes user-bad decisions a certainty . Laying it at the feet of management is blaming the messenger -- the root cause was revenue and expectations being strategically unbalanced. It's surprising how many people watch companies make "dumb" moves and gnash their teeth over "how…

Since management sets the expectations, laying the blame at their feet is correct. Who else would you hold accountable for management decisions?

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

#489

Post by gochi »

kdfjgbdfkjgb wrote: post #402
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…

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.

You would be right, they have informally stated if developers switch to ironSource/Unity Ads, they would have their runtime fee slashed.

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

#490

Post by adultSwim »

numlock86 wrote: post #482

> 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. I sense a lack of arguments if people make up pure speculation like that without any foundation. Also Unity's business model had a negative tendency over the last couple of years already ... with Epic having…

> Unreal Engine is open source

It doesn't look like it to me. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal

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