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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

#671

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

tracker1 wrote: post #662
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For sure, I bet many projects have too much momentum to switch, but there are likely lots of smaller efforts (mobile-flavor of the month) that are going to be switching stacks as soon as possible.

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

#672

Post by _hypx »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #667
_hypx wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Redfall was an incomplete game. Graphics was the least of its problems.

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

#673

Post by mehlmao »

jakebasile wrote: post #143
mschuster91 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still sad there hasn't been a new Unreal Tournament since 2007. It's all only Fortnite now.

At least we'll always have the first, best UT.

UT99 and all the Unreal games have been delisted from stores and they're shutting down the game's master server. You can still play solo or in LAN but online multiplayer is gone and there's no (legal) way to get new copies.

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

#674

Post by johnnyanmac »

_hypx wrote: post #672
johnnyanmac wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Redfall was an incomplete game. Graphics was the least of its problems.

Gamers are calling a lot of games lately incomplete. It doesn't stop sales if it looks good enough.

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

#676

Post by brightlancer »

flashgordon wrote: post #669
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.

The problem is that this really screws the shareholders, and _obviously_ so.

Most of the value of stock comes from the ability to sell it to someone else who wants to buy it. Who wants to buy stock in a company that has presented a plan to self-immolate?

The current stockholders may see some returns from short term profits, but then they'll be left holding the bag.

This seems like a case where the shareholders are incentivized to oust the board, because the company is going to screw them.

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

#677

Post by maccard »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #550
doctorpangloss wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>If people want to spend their breath agitating for something, it's to get Unity to share the source code for a lower price. while I hate it being gated, it's not that expensive for a medium sized company to get source code access. $3000 + probably some per seat licenses that are orders cheaper than what you pay employees (even significantly underpaid game devs). if you get more than 250k installs you're already payi…

Completely agree. If I had to make a destructible game from scratch I would implement that tech in unreal rather than starting from scratch 10 times over.

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

#678

Post by [deleted] »

autoexec wrote: post #532
gochi wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A duopoly isn't much better

[deleted]

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

#679

Post by tremon »

Gareth321 wrote: post #639
nugget wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How much leverage do you think those developers had to negotiate the terms of the agreement?

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

#680

Post by maccard »

aschearer wrote: post #610
tomtheelder wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Genuine answer (not OP) the easiest way to work with 2d in unreal is to work in 3D and lock an axis, particularly around lighting and collision.

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

Out of the box you have [0]. With about 10 lines of code, or a few blueprint nodes, you can support more advanced snapping.

[0] https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/Basics/Actors/Actor...

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