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Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

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

#31

Post by beefychops »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #5
GaggiX wrote: 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…

Ah yes, the only way to make fun and successful games is to introduce corporate greed. History has proven your 15 years of experience wrong many times.

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

#32

Post by hesdeadjim »

loveparade wrote: post #16
hesdeadjim wrote: post #5

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 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?

First off, you can’t OSS consoles. The manufacturers require an NDA and arpproval to gain access to the hardware and SDKs. This costs real money.

Second, every console and to a lesser degree mobile are constantly changing their SDKs and that requires a lot of testing to ensure that your engine works across a huge permutation of platforms. Throw in the need to support an LTS version of your engine and it balloons in cost.

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

#33

Post by marcodiego »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #5
GaggiX wrote: 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…

>> blender [...] supports two platforms

Windows, Mac and Linux; that's three, right? And it supported many Unix variants while their marketshare was significant. Where does your "two platforms " come from?

>> I’ve been doing this for 15 years

Most commenters here don't have 15 years of gamedev experience, but many here watched Blender turn into a tool among the leaders coming from a "very weird UI" in about that same amount of time. Why can't the same happen to Godot?

>> PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot.

We heard the same about GNU, GCC, Linux, Apache... look back at what happened to most closed source Unixes of the 90's. Yes, game engines are a different market but your argument is the same we heard other times.

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

#34

Post by hypercube33 »

dash2 wrote: post #4

What's interesting here is the economics of F2P mobile - which, as the article describes it, incentivize the creation of maximally addictive games that drain the user's wallet.

I used to be a heavy palm pilot gamer so I was excited for the future when Android hit the scene. instead, I get a lot of "free" games that are fun for an hour -- just long enough to get you invested and having fun -- to have the game time wall you and ask to pay to get passed it. I'd happily pay $1-15 for a fun mobile game but I haven't found one yet, honestly.

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

#35

Post by vvanders »

0dayz wrote: post #18
hesdeadjim wrote: post #5

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…

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…

> 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.

Uf, feel that one. If the engine isn't designed with your genre in mind you may be making some significant structural changes(which will be interesting to see how open source engines handle that).

Even if they don't take the engine a different direction the up-leveling cost of getting new features/bug fixes is significant. Back when I was working in industry we had one person who's almost fulltime job was to merge -> fix compile errors -> fix runtime issues -> checkin change and uncover more edge cases that got broken -> repeat process, it was brutal.

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

#36

Post by csense »

I would think the fee would be even worse for F2P games because they rely on a huge install base. If 5% of the installs generate any revenue at all, they'd have to generate 20x the fee in revenue on average in order to break even.

Also, doesn't the whole trust issue apply equally to F2P games? A supplier increasing prices is one thing. If your supplier is Darth Vader and goes around saying things like "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further" -- even if it's within the letter of the law and the EULA (and that "if" is still somewhat in doubt, especially in the EU), doesn't that make you...rather nervous about the possibility of future surprise changes to your unit economics, even if this particular change to your unit economics doesn't put you out of business?

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

#37

Post by juunpp »

GaggiX wrote: 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.

It is certainly amusing to see people think they can build a "community" around a corporation and proprietary software and then learn the lesson the hard way.

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

#38

Post by qwytw »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #5
GaggiX wrote: 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…

> 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity

I'm sure Unity would be fine with that. I don't see how could they hope to collect more than 0.5-2% if averaged out over their all customers even with the new pricing.

I guess the problem is that revenue share is very hard to enforce, by adopting something like that you'll be probably giving up on a significant proportion (if not the majority) of fees you could get from developer in China (and some other countries in similar situations). Install fee (while a bizarre idea) should be easier to enforce.

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

#39

Post by lordfrito »

floydnoel wrote: post #8
hesdeadjim wrote: post #5

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 don’t think VC-backed engines can avoid enshittification. Unity is really demonstrating that now. OSS is the only way.

Yeah it seems like enshitification during the long tail is the point of the VC model across all industries. Give product away for free, figure out how to screw the install base later on.

Can't blame the VCs for trying this model, but they've played society for suckers. We let them get away with this for too long, becoming dependent on their "free" offerings.

At this point I'd be willing to get rid of my free stuff altogether and pay a subscription for products I like/use as it would incentivize the companies to add features that benefit me.

For example, search on the web is dying. I would absolutely pay money to replace Google with a search engine I trust and that works for me.

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

#40

Post by wayfinder »

0dayz wrote: post #18
hesdeadjim wrote: post #5

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…

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…

Well most games usually get built once on one version so it doesn’t matter if the engine changes.
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