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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

#491

Post by gochi »

_hypx wrote: post #430
dvngnt_ wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not just graphics, it's everything. Look at Frostbite for example from EA. While a good shooter engine, they had to make significant changes over the years to adapt the engine to other genres of games, and that significantly bloated timelines. Jason Schreier has reporting on this if you're interested.

We kind of forget that a lot of custom engines aren't universal ones like Unity or Unreal that can adapt to anything you throw at it. Custom engines are largely hyper specific to the type of game they were making with it, everything else is experimental, untested, undocumented, or non-existent!

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

#492

Post by raytopia »

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…

It's not as monolithic as you'd think. There are lots of engines out there but their communities aren't very vocal compared to Unity, Unreal, and especially Godot's community.

Take a look at: https://itch.io/game-development/engines/most-projects

And

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-generous-space-of-al...

If you look at both of these you'll see just how many engines there are and neither of these cover everything. There are plenty of engines popular in the Python community that no one outside of it are aware of. Such as Arcade [0], Python-Tcod [1], Ursina [2], UPBGE [3], and Panda3D [4]. But based on your description you'd really like https://gdevelop.io/. It embraces exactly what you're describing where you can build a game but just installing entire features others have made and put online into your game.

[0] Beginner friendly 2D library:

[1] Rougelike: https://python-tcod.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[2] Beginner friendly 3D engine (built on Panda3D): https://www.ursinaengine.org/

[3] Blender Game Engine Fork: https://upbge.org/

[4] Highly flexible code first 3D engine: https://panda3d.org/

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

#493

Post by kyteland »

DeepYogurt wrote: post #462
linuxftw wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like an arcade Any chance you have an example? I can't recall an arcade game that had you pay per bullet.

This guy wasn't proposing anything as crazy as pay-per-bullet. There's lots of games with limited ammo and you find more in the environment. Even in Doom you might run out of ammo for your favorite gun and need to put it away until you found another ammo pack in the level. This is why Valorant has a knife you can switch to, because if you waste gun ammo you run out on your main weapon. In Fortnite you have to find ammo and weapons in chests, etc. This guy was proposing an option to pay to refill your inventory immediately. But people heard "reload" and assumed something completely different.

The real problem with his proposal is it quickly falls apart if you think about it for even a minute. It's a classic pay-to-win mechanic. And once something is pay-to-win it becomes a slippery slope and a race to the bottom for the game makers. Every game has some amount of edge cases where you're playing only to realize "Damn, I'm out, this sucks. I'd pay a buck right now to refill." But once you add in some options to pay in those scenarios, the game maker has a perverse incentive to no longer make it an edge case. Some PM will realize if they make the rare event 10x more likely they'll make 10x more $$$$ and they're off to the races. They start messing with the ammo drop rates to create "pinch points" and now your super fun game really does require you to be "paying to reload" and it's not fun anymore.

This guy was trying (and failing) to present it as a player benefit but the reality is he know exactly where this road lead. It's the same place EA games with loot boxes landed in the end.

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

#494

Post by lelanthran »

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 we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source.

I don't get your logic. A proprietary company screws over customers, and that is, to you, an indication that OSS doesn't work?

Isn't it exactly the reverse? Anyway watching this saga now would be mad to continue with Unity, and would be a little wary of closed-source in general.

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

#495

Post by gochi »

darklycan51 wrote: post #406
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 liveli…

Epic will never have a monopoly as long as Steam exists. They aren't complete fools here, they realize this but are aware that even having a slice of that massive pie is enough to fuel numerous positions in the future.

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

#496

Post by raytopia »

_chu1 wrote: post #224
ireallywantthat wrote: post #117

switch to godot( http://godotengine.org/ ), gamedevs. you reap what you sow. it's better to support open source projects like godot instead of unity whose control lies with the company whose actions probably might not lie with you/your companies' interest. There are hundreds of instances in the past where open source projects replaced corporate projects(ex: blender, git). so, better use godot imo.

Is Godot capable of making 3D FPS games?

Yes. Truth be told for any engine you'll be more limited by the size of your art team then anything else.

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

#497

Post by somenameforme »

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…

Unreal is technically orders of magnitude ahead of Unity, and they have around 4000 employees spread across multiple continents. And I'm referring to the entirety of Epic, so that's also the Fortnite teams and everybody else. Unity, by contrast, has about 8000 employees. Many companies seem to be hiring far more employees than they realistically need - often to the point of their own detriment, and I don't entirely understand why. Even for successful companies like Google, it seems unlikely that they need anywhere remotely near 180k employees.

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

#498

Post by steveklabnik »

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..

Loading into a new world takes a long time, but once I'm in there, I get great performance.

That said I'm in the "dozens of hours" bracket and not the "thousands of hours" one, so maybe I just haven't hit that yet.

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

#499

Post by [deleted] »

tux1968 wrote: post #427
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 wo…

[deleted]

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

#500

Post by lelanthran »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #453
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 get that you're writing stylized speculations but in my experience in the games industry, every single point is wrong. It is the most upvoted comment because it touches on a bunch of first-principles-know-nothing boogeymen, but so it goes with Hacker News nowadays. You can keep reading to find out why, or whatever, my dog in this race is (1) I use Unity (2) I don't think they're going to change anything about these…

> Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine.

Depends on the game - the majority of Unity games can be done in Godot, as far as I can tell, because they're simple indie games with fire-sale assets (or even free assets) from itch.

Unity is not making the revenue they need, because their "popularity" is on free-as-in-beer games which no one is going to pay for anyway. It's just an added sword into their side that the majority of devs who use unity can switch to Godot with almost no difference to their (devs) revenue.

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