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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

#681

Post by saladprince »

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…

People keep bringing up Genshin without even knowing anything. I don't even wanna read that sportskeeda article because I'm 100% sure they also didn't research and I don't want to give them any engagements.

The developers of Genshin is a major shareholders in Unity China which is an offshot company based in China which has different terms. They are separate entity from Unity Technologies.

Source: https://blog.unity.com/news/unity-forms-new-venture-to-manag...

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

#682

Post by [deleted] »

tremon wrote: post #679
Gareth321 wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

[deleted]

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

#683

Post by maccard »

mnau wrote: post #668
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Simple mobile tools shows its definitely possible [0]. Simple gallery pro has 110k reviews, for example.

>You have a better chance of winning a lottery, happens every day.

Agreed here, though.

[0] https://www.simplemobiletools.com/

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

#684

Post by maccard »

0xDEF wrote: post #16
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 don't understand their refusal to make games that will make them money and showcase Unity's capabilities. The only reason Unreal engine has so favorable license conditions is because Epic Games earn billions from Fortnite and Epic Games Store.

Unreal has had much more favourable license terms since ue4 in 2014, which is before Fortnite and the Store. To the best of my knowledge, unreals terms have always been "good", which is one of the reasons it's so popular.

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

#685

Post by maccard »

babypuncher wrote: post #372
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…

They brought this on themselves. They never needed 7700 employees just to maintain an indie-scale game engine. Epic maintains their far more advanced engine with 2200 people, and they also run a AAA live service game.

Epic is way more than 2200 people. It was 2000 people when I worked there almost 3 years ago.

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

#686

Post by shrimp_emoji »

maccard wrote: post #685
babypuncher wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They brought this on themselves. They never needed 7700 employees just to maintain an indie-scale game engine. Epic maintains their far more advanced engine with 2200 people, and they also run a AAA live service game.

Epic is way more than 2200 people. It was 2000 people when I worked there almost 3 years ago.

Why'd ya leave?

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

#687

Post by TylerE »

flangola7 wrote: post #675
patmorgan23 wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the console manufacturers want to protect their proprietary platforms.

Protect them from what?

Reputational damage. Big part of the appeal of consoles is “it just works”. That falls apart of you start letting random shovelware devs ship whatever.

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

#688

Post by gabereiser »

TylerE wrote: post #627
gabereiser wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consoles no longer require specialized hardware to develop for. There are test kits for ps5 but you can compile on your PC. Where are you getting your information from? The only requirement is a header or two and a code sign. Godot OSS can’t support consoles because the SDK (those headers) are closed source, but there’s nothing stopping you from implementing the half dozen header functions in Godot source yourself. T…

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

Did you read it? It clearly backs what I just said. Godot open source doesn’t support consoles because console sdks are closed source, but there’s nothing stopping you from publishing on consoles. They literally list a company who is doing that, more are following. There’s no restriction at all other than you having access to the SDKs which you get when you sign a contract to publish your game on their platform.

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

#689

Post by bananaboy »

gcr wrote: post #625
TylerE wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use Unity, Unreal, or anthoer commerical engine that doesn't have a large upfront cost?

Unity, Unreal, and friends have these similar problems: the console SDK isn't open and may require porting work to integrate with the engine. The difference is that lots of Unity and Unreal developers go through the trouble to do this.

With unity you get the console version of unity when are authorised by the console manufacturer. So it’s not like you have to do much to make at least the core engine work on console. The work is in the game itself which is different game to game.

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

#690

Post by nitwit005 »

tschellenbach wrote: post #387
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 it's true that this can happen to external tools, it doesn't happen very often. Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their products are supported long terms and work well. For in-house developed software it happens frequently that past employees leave the codebase in a state, where new team members end up rewriting it. So it's a bit weird to say you shouldn't use closed source since there is a small…

> Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their products are supported long terms and work well.

This is only sometimes true. If a company knows their product's growth phase is over, they may decide to milk the existing customers as much as possible. That's the right choice for maximizing profit.

I believe that's what happened with a previous company I worked at. Vendor of an old software product started suing about licensing violations trying to extract more. They couldn't harm future sales, because no one was going to buy the thing anymore. A team spent a year replacing it.

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