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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

#601

Post by EatingWithForks »

mschuster91 wrote: post #595
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…

> The leadership will be ousted by their shareholders quickly enough, I expect. Wouldn't be that certain... there is a lot of stuff built on Unity. The most common theme I heard was that they're trying to capitalize off of Genshin Impact [1], but there's also a ton of other highly successful games like Among Us or Untitled Goose Game that won't/can't (easily) be ported to another engine. In other words, they want to…

This doesn't really address the concerns of the above-- that people will not make new games in Unity. Unlike IBM, which could arguably sell to large corps subpar product, Unity's consumer base are flighty and don't have upper managers that can be bribed with nice dinners.

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

#602

Post by majormajor »

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…

That assumes that the motivations won't ever change for Epic, like how they changed for Unity.

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

#603

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #595
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…

> The leadership will be ousted by their shareholders quickly enough, I expect. Wouldn't be that certain... there is a lot of stuff built on Unity. The most common theme I heard was that they're trying to capitalize off of Genshin Impact [1], but there's also a ton of other highly successful games like Among Us or Untitled Goose Game that won't/can't (easily) be ported to another engine. In other words, they want to…

Yup, my opinion as well. Then there will be massive layoff to cut R&D and UnityAds. It might go back to sub 5000 employees but essentially IS is going to lead.

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

#604

Post by patmorgan23 »

flangola7 wrote: post #596
TylerE wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are paid, non open source forks that support console. Actual godot does not, and never will. From their own docs: “ Godot does not officially support consoles (save for XBox One via UWP) currently. The reasons for this are: To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. Godot, as an open source project, does not have such a legal figure. Console SDKs are secret, and protected by non-disclosure agre…

Why would an SDK be secret?

Because the console manufacturers want to protect their proprietary platforms.

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

#605

Post by [deleted] »

TylerE wrote: post #588
kevingadd wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Godot games have been shipped on consoles plenty of times

There are paid, non open source forks that support console. Actual godot does not, and never will. From their own docs: “ Godot does not officially support consoles (save for XBox One via UWP) currently. The reasons for this are: To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. Godot, as an open source project, does not have such a legal figure. Console SDKs are secret, and protected by non-disclosure agre…

[deleted]

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

#606

Post by willcipriano »

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'll be gone, you'll be gone."

The good numbers will be in just in time to calculate the bonuses and the bad numbers won't show up until the decision makers work somewhere else, after all they are the guys who doubled the profitability of Unity, so they will have lots of options.

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

#607

Post by shaftway »

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.

But they also aren't demanding $0.20 per install on free games. So if your game has $0 in revenue and 50,000,000,000 installs, then they still get $0.

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

#608

Post by mschuster91 »

EatingWithForks wrote: post #601
mschuster91 wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The leadership will be ousted by their shareholders quickly enough, I expect. Wouldn't be that certain... there is a lot of stuff built on Unity. The most common theme I heard was that they're trying to capitalize off of Genshin Impact [1], but there's also a ton of other highly successful games like Among Us or Untitled Goose Game that won't/can't (easily) be ported to another engine. In other words, they want to…

This doesn't really address the concerns of the above-- that people will not make new games in Unity. Unlike IBM, which could arguably sell to large corps subpar product, Unity's consumer base are flighty and don't have upper managers that can be bribed with nice dinners.

They have a sizable captive user base and will be milking them until they're dry, at which point those responsible for this disaster will jump ship with a massive golden parachute.

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

#609

Post by eestrada »

robertlagrant wrote: post #576
eestrada wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we ended up here. I think that says a lot. I've been thinking a lot about private versus public companies. Most of my favorite products come out of privately held companies. There is something about the incentives for publicly traded companies that encourages them to make poor choices. I think it is because there are effectively two forms of revenue: selling pr…

It just depends on the business in question, and the external pressures on the business. Jeff Bezos managed to not pay dividends for years by focusing on value, but also by zooming ahead of the pack in a greenfield environment that was ludicrously profitable. Low margin businesses, private or public, will struggle and have to do something to offer value for money; e.g. make a smaller chocolate bar that's the same pri…

In the USA, corporations just do stock splits or run a corporate vote to issue more shares. Also many large tech companies use stock as total compensation for employees, so the "selling" of stock can be indirect as a form of revenue. Instead of paying employees cash, they pay in stock, which frees up more cash for other things. Thus they don't need to have as high of true revenue margins to pay employees well. Big corporations understand that a lot of paper value is fungible one way or another.

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

#610

Post by aschearer »

tomtheelder wrote: post #545
doctorpangloss wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And what I am saying is that they absolutely are not designed to do different things any more. That used to be the case, but Unreal has fully eaten Unity’s lunch here in a technical sense. The engine’s roots are in AAA first person, but they have grown it far, far beyond that. It is now a fully capable general purpose engine for anything from 2D puzzlers to AAA FPSes. There just are not games any more for which Unity…

Genuine question, how is Unreal's support for:

- Tilemaps generally

- Tilemap with rule-based brushes

- "Sprite shapes" basically free-form 2D polygon sprite created via a shape editor

- 2D collision with polygon colliders (bonus points if the two can work in tandem)

- 2D lighting

- Snapping things to a grid? Like moving props in a scene on a grid. Or editing a shape to snap to a grid?

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