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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

#661

Post by TylerE »

matt3D wrote: post #659
TylerE wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is literally from the godot site. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...

I think you're conflating two things. To paraphrase the docs : You can ship games on consoles, but the tools required to do so will never be included in the open source code. Eg. Just because you need to buy a tin opener to open your can of beans, doesn't mean you don't have any beans

You can carve a spoon into a can opener. That doesn’t make an unmodified spoon a can opener.

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

#662

Post by tracker1 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #629
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…

Is there an easy way to determine what underlying game engine is used on Steam or the Apple Store? I would love to track new releases for the next N months and see how it compares vs historical. Does utilization fall off a cliff?

Considering game Dev is measured in years, it'll take a while.

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

#663

Post by ThatPlayer »

georgeecollins wrote: post #552
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…

Nothing against Epic, but they have a strategic incentive to encourage people to use their store. Getting a discount to use the engine in exchange for a store “exclusive” is a cost that I see developers not really appreciating. There is no free lunch.

I don't think that's unusual. When Valve announced Source 2 for free, there was a similar discount to use the engine: the game must release on Steam. Maybe that has changed in the 8 years of no news about the release of Source 2 for developer though.

https://www.pcgamer.com/source-2-will-be-free-wont-ask-for-r...

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

#664

Post by johnnyanmac »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #657
johnnyanmac wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very generalized answer here but it comes down to: 1. you want to make sure product A is profitable 2. at some point Product A will reach a steady state (in some utopic future, but let's pretend). i.e. Product A will hit a point where its excitement will taper off. 3. How do you get that explosive growth back? New product. But you want to maintain old product. 4. hire more people to work on Product B. Have it launch,…

> 2. at some point Product A will reach a steady state (in some utopic future, but let's pretend). i.e. Product A will hit a point where its excitement will taper off. > 4. hire more people to work on Product B. Have it launch, big growth! Why is the answer "hire more people to work on Product B" and not "Move people from A to B and shrink the product A team to focus on bug fixes and security fixes" I would think tha…

It's not mutually exclusive. But it depends on Product B, and oftentimes these kinds of tech companies want to grow in completely different areas.

Take Amazon, for example: they have great engineers, but probably not too many game developers (or those interested in moving from current SWE positions to the game division). And they almost certainly had no artists on board, among other disciplines needed for a game. So when making Amazon Games they would have to mostly hire new staff. Not the best example given how they floundered for a decade, but I think that was a management issue over a talent issue.

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

#665

Post by numpad0 »

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?

Security through obscurity(which is often enough btw).

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

#666

Post by fendy3002 »

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…

While I support using the open source counterparts, most of the time the closed source tools price change doesn't happen retroactively. It's usually go together with new version or new contacts.

Unity pricing though, happens retroactively in a sense that older, released games will be tracked the install numbers too. As if when SQL Server having the price changes to gb-based pricing happens too to 2005 version and forward. I can assure that even government will decline that kind of retroactive change.

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

#667

Post by johnnyanmac »

_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.

you're asking for consumers to temper their expectations. Just look at how much crap they threw at Redfall, and that was likely a game many people played on Gamepass for "free".

It sucks but part of that "need" for insane graphics is consumer driven. Even though Nintendo games get a lot of flack for how "weak" the Switch is, but their big IPs do cirlcles around the industry, all on one platform without even relying on MTX. But I guess Nintendo appealing to more than just the core gamers helps a lot. Come to think of it, it's surprising how few "family" AAA games there are these days.

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

#668

Post by mnau »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #650
mnau wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender is GPL2+. It's impossible to have that license and not be free. It's also basically impossible to change license.

Small nitpick: AIUI it is possible to sell binaries of a GPLv2 program, provided you keep providing source for free. (I think; IANAL, there's maybe some caveat about exactly when you have to give source and to who.) That can actually work if your users don't want to compile stuff themselves.

In theory. Show me one example (not service or support, but selling actual software). You have a better chance of winning a lottery, happens every day.

In theory, I can just walk through solid wall, using a quantum tunneling effect.

The closes thing you will find are things like blender release under GPL (i.e. pay me a money to release my commercial software under GPL, but that's not selling GPL software),

This whole line of thinking is disingenuous.

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

#669

Post by flashgordon »

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…

It is very very rarely case (at least in my limited years in corporate world) that the leadership is more evil than the board (atleast for public for-profit companies. Even more rare is the board not having this chat with leadership before the announcement.

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

#670

Post by c-cube »

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.

That's called source available, not open source.
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