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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

#561

Post by LordDragonfang »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #94
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…

> and they have no good solutions to this Bought by Apple or Microsoft maybe?

My money is on Meta. Unity powers the vast majority of VR games and is (was) the favored API for Meta's dev tools, and even Apple chose it as their only officially supported 3rd party toolkit for the Vision Pro.

Meta seems to enjoy throwing money into the VR space to subsidize it at the low-cost end, I could easily see them doing a hostile takeover of Unity "for the good of the VR space"

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

#562

Post by adultSwim »

numlock86 wrote: post #503
adultSwim wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unreal Engine is open source It doesn't look like it to me. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal

> The Licensed Technology licensed to you under this Agreement includes all Unreal Engine code and related content that is copied to your computer when you install Unreal Engine. Have you read it? You literally get read access to their entire GitHub repo.

Notice that you can't even access the repo without them authorizing you to do so. Notice that there aren't any public mirrors for the current version of the code.

They say you can fork but also point out that you can't distribute the code without the people you are sharing with also having a license.

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

#563

Post by mabbo »

I think at this point, the real question is who in their right mind would ever build a game in Unity again?

I'm sure this will make their company a short term gain in profits, but in very short order no more Unity games will be made. Even if you accept the terms they're proposing, you know damn well they are willing to change the rules at any time at your expense.

Unity just became an extinction-level-event liability for any game company. Who would dare touch it with a ten foot pole?

The leadership will be ousted by their shareholders quickly enough, I expect.

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

#564

Post by chimeracoder »

mabbo wrote: post #563

I think at this point, the real question is who in their right mind would ever build a game in Unity again? I'm sure this will make their company a short term gain in profits, but in very short order no more Unity games will be made . Even if you accept the terms they're proposing, you know damn well they are willing to change the rules at any time at your expense. Unity just became an extinction-level-event liabilit…

> I think at this point, the real question is who in their right mind would ever build a game in Unity again?

This is pretty unfortunate, because Unity is partly responsible for the surge of Linux gaming over the last 10 years. Supporting Linux comes nearly for free on Unity (compared to many other engines), and fewer Unity games will likely mean fewer Linux games.

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

#565

Post by jonplackett »

lelanthran wrote: post #505
aniforprez wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if they just added revenue share like Unreal does and tweaked their subscriptions a little, the backlash wouldn't have been nearly as bad. The uproar is a combination of a really badly announced system and details that don't seem to be ironed out properly leaving devs ripe for abuse. Plus you have one of the most tight knit communities of artists who all reacted almost as one to this announcement and have e…

> Honestly, if they just added revenue share like Unreal does and tweaked their subscriptions a little, the backlash wouldn't have been nearly as bad. They ran the numbers. If it was going to work they would have gone that route, but I think the problem is that the clear majority of Unity-users (indie devs) make no money anyway. Revenue sharing with someone making $0 in revenue is pointless.

Asking someone making $0 to pay you X per download is even more pointless.

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

#568

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

chimeracoder wrote: post #564
mabbo wrote: post #563

I think at this point, the real question is who in their right mind would ever build a game in Unity again? I'm sure this will make their company a short term gain in profits, but in very short order no more Unity games will be made . Even if you accept the terms they're proposing, you know damn well they are willing to change the rules at any time at your expense. Unity just became an extinction-level-event liabilit…

> I think at this point, the real question is who in their right mind would ever build a game in Unity again? This is pretty unfortunate, because Unity is partly responsible for the surge of Linux gaming over the last 10 years. Supporting Linux comes nearly for free on Unity (compared to many other engines), and fewer Unity games will likely mean fewer Linux games.

Depends what they jump to; godot, for instance, should be similar AIUI?

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

#570

Post by bastardoperator »

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…

That's great in theory, but most people don't have the funds for a rack, let alone a cage, or people to stack and maintain it all. The hardware alone to run a proper DB cluster is going to be prohibitive for most startups.
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