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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

#631

Post by johnnyanmac »

JackMorgan wrote: post #401
fragsworth wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, Azure, AWS, Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc. At least with these individual tools, it's usually not your entire codebase written around that thing. For instance, you can generally switch from one database to another if they decide to overcharge you. You can even switch from one cloud service to another. In other words, they (usually) don't have you nearly as locked…

Of course you can switch databases, but in practice it is extremely expensive. That's a big reason why it is pretty rare. Why use a closed source tool and take on that risk when great open source ones exist?

>Why use a closed source tool and take on that risk when great open source ones exist?

in the case of servers: because open source servers literally can't support your scale of business. That's one of the few places where Open Source can never truly succeed: when you need a lot of hardware and the operating costs exceed any income coming in.

By that point it is a lot better to roll your own servers. But that is of course crazy expensive. Even other multibillion dollar corporations choose to leave some server management to places like Amazon/Microsoft.

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

#632

Post by johnnyanmac »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #530
fragsworth wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually the only good reason is because you already have developed lot of experience with with it. I'm just saying it's not as bad because it's quite a bit easier to switch a database than to switch a game engine.

Yeah, also that's why the article's Word and Google Docs example strikes me as weird : you shouldn't be using these either, for similar reasons !

Yeah, but LibreOffice is the perfect example on why people pass up on Open Source projects.

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

#633

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

vinceguidry wrote: post #553
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not intending to be defensive (I'm sure there's loads of people on here with more knowledge about licensing terms), but usually a corrective post is something that we can learn from. Just saying something is wrong with no more info seems against the spirit of HN.

Misinformation is more against the spirit.

Well misinformation wasn't my intention.

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

#634

Post by educaysean »

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…

Everything you wrote paints a familiar picture: a company whose leadership made poor financial decisions over and over. I won't judge anyone for mourning the loss of their favorite corporate entity, but I personally find it hard to feel pity knowing that they dug their own grave.

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

#635

Post by johnnyanmac »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #476
JackMorgan wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Survivorship bias. These are the ones that haven't _yet_ gotten worse and are still currently popular. I'm listing them so people won't get blindsided when they do eventually bite their users. There isn't enough space to list the closed source software tools that didn't make it. Off the top of my head: Adobe Flash, MS Basic, SourceSafe, ActiveDesktop, FoxPro, J#, Oslo, IronRuby, and Silverlight.

It rather looks like it depends on who makes the product. One thing to look at is who has established trust and (so far) maintained that trust. For example, AWS has said that their products will get cheaper over time and that they wont deprecate any. The fact that they've managed to do that for 15 years or so means they have a built a lot of trust - which is itself an investment that they would be foolish (financiall…

> which is itself an investment that they would be foolish (financially damaged by) a decision to break that trust.

Yup, Unity also had that same trust for 15 years. Never underestimate greed.

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

#636

Post by nickstinemates »

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…

> I kinda feel bad for Unity.

I don't. They could have sold to Meta and didn't. If they didn't have a plan that didn't involve fucking their users, that's on them.

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

#637

Post by LarsDu88 »

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…

Among Us can't easily be ported to another engine? LOL

I've been making a Unity VR game, and I can assure you, with a bit blood, sweat, tears, and some ChatGPT assistance, it can be done, especially for the vanilla 2d games which represent the majority of Unity games in the wild.

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

#638

Post by bombcar »

hedora wrote: post #585
bombcar wrote: post #569

Every ToS-style contract has a "we can change anything about this at any time, screw you" clause, but they also almost never use it except to change their privacy policy.

There are limits to what sorts of changes are enforceable, though most of those documents also say the vendor gets to choose the arbitration firm that decides what is enforceable.

I suspect it's partially because the lawyers remind them that certain contract terms are not enforceable, and also that shooting yourself in the foot doesn't really help revenues long-term.

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

#639

Post by Gareth321 »

nugget wrote: post #528
philipov wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no revenue ... Not quite. Unity merged with a company that sells mobile ads: ironSource. They are direct competitors of AppLovin, the dominant player in that market. The terms and backroom deals that Unity is offering devs will waive these fees if they use Unity's ad products instead of AppLovin. Thi…

Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use their other (presumably inferior) products. As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course the new fees will remain. They must think the average game developer has…

> They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.

Well if the reports are to be believed, developers were signing agreements with Unity which allowed them to make unilateral changes to fees. If so, devs really do have no business sense.

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

#640

Post by Georgelemental »

jrmg wrote: post #614

A commenter on the Ars article pointed out this from the Unity FAQ ( https://unity.com/pricing-updates ) and I can’t get over it: ——— Will developers be charged the Unity Runtime Fee for subscription-based games? No, in this case the developer is not distributing it so we’re not going to invoice the developer on subscription-based games (e.g. Apple Arcade, Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, Netflix Games, etc.) ——— Su…

I think that means they just won't charge the fee for such titles.
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