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Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

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11–20 of 84 posts

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#11
It’s a funny one. Major corporations are more likely to feel the hit to their bottom line, and generally are able to take a short term painful decision to make a long term profitable one, like switching or investing in their own engine.

On the flip side, small companies are more likely to be discouraged from ever using Unity because of this.

So who remains using it? Mid-tier companies who can’t afford to switch?

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#12
post #3

Hopefully this will encourage the use and development of Godot and other open source engines. If Unity doesn't back off, I don't see any other possible reality.

OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Just the QA testing budget alone that is required to support all consoles, PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot. What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just…

QA costs could ultimately be paid off by people who actually use the engine, no? If they contribute back or, at least, create an issue things could work out.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#13
post #3

Hopefully this will encourage the use and development of Godot and other open source engines. If Unity doesn't back off, I don't see any other possible reality.

OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Just the QA testing budget alone that is required to support all consoles, PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot. What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just…

What? VC-backed is all about the strategy Unity is employing: capture the market and enshittify afterwards. They literally can't "be an engine company. Period".

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#14
post #10

I could be wrong here, but wasn't it said that it'll be mostly big studios that will face the brunt of the burden here?

Yes, but it is precisely because they are trying to get a slice of the pie from large studios that whatever happens to indie devs with their changes are just collateral damage

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#15
post #3

Hopefully this will encourage the use and development of Godot and other open source engines. If Unity doesn't back off, I don't see any other possible reality.

OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Just the QA testing budget alone that is required to support all consoles, PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot. What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just…

I was about to agree with you. But then I thought about it. Linux kernel handles way more so it's definitely not outright impossible.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#16
post #3

Hopefully this will encourage the use and development of Godot and other open source engines. If Unity doesn't back off, I don't see any other possible reality.

OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Just the QA testing budget alone that is required to support all consoles, PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot. What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just…

I don't understand what QA budget has to do with game engine budget and why the latter needs to be larger. What's the budget of Linux again compared to stuff that runs on top of it?

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#17
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Just the QA testing budget alone that is required to support all consoles, PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot. What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just…

QA costs could ultimately be paid off by people who actually use the engine, no? If they contribute back or, at least, create an issue things could work out.

You can’t risk your business on broken software. An engine company also has to support old releases of the engine for a certain period of time because you can’t just upgrade your shipped game to every new version of an engine that might contain back compat breaking changes — or changes that have too high a cost to port to.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#18
post #3

Hopefully this will encourage the use and development of Godot and other open source engines. If Unity doesn't back off, I don't see any other possible reality.

OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Just the QA testing budget alone that is required to support all consoles, PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot. What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just…

VC backed for profit engine is precisely what Unity is though?

So is Unreal and CryEngine.

Both of which only survive on graphical fidelity, which is not what Unity was touted for.

Unity was for filling that small-to-medium sized games in terms of man power, if you got 15 years of experience then you should know that.

I think it would be more interesting to see a Coop backed engine, where the COOP has to listen to it's customers.

Since my biggest annoyance with proprietary software or in this case game engine is that you can create the most elaborate sub-engine (for example a fully-dynamic RPG) and see it all come crashing down because some dimwit at Epic Games reeeeally wants to push the latest eye candy that breaks your sub-engine.

That's the one thing OSS is far superior at, you can fork the engine form a new developer community or even work with the OG maintainers to incorporate the sub-engine as a module and as such be officially supported both by your team and theirs.

Meanwhile with proprietary software, you're stuck at this particular version with no legal way of ensure the survival of the project, RPGMaker games are the perfect example of this, as soon as you venture past it's originally intended fidelity, you're essentially going to be limited by the engine in terms of performance.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Just the QA testing budget alone that is required to support all consoles, PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot. What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just…

I was about to agree with you. But then I thought about it. Linux kernel handles way more so it's definitely not outright impossible.

Linux kernel doesn’t require signed NDA contracts with console manufacturers.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Just the QA testing budget alone that is required to support all consoles, PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot. What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just…

What? VC-backed is all about the strategy Unity is employing: capture the market and enshittify afterwards. They literally can't "be an engine company. Period".

Unity provides a good example of why it would be a wise strategy. You don’t need a unicorn in this space, just something that can throw off serious cash over time as that 2.5% compounds.
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