Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by BlueTemplar » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

lotsoweiners wrote: post #23

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’m not a game developer nor do I plan to become one but the thing that seems strange to me is all of this talk of revenue sharing with the development tools. If I create a successful app or website using Visual Studio, Microsoft isn’t going to take a percentage of my revenue. Even Apple won’t take a percentage to use Xcode and only charges to publish on their platform. Why is game development different?

Because that is the business model that Epic and Unity figured out for their engines, and poor game developers saw as preferable than paying once upfront, which might or might not have been a mistake.

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

#42

Post by ketzu » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 3:37 PM UTC

I wonder, if godot becomes the defacto successor, will we see posts of the sort in a few years we see about cloud open source these days? People complaining about the redistributors (cloud companies/game studios) not giving back to the open source software they use to make their money?

Because a lot of the posts I've seen on reddit around this whole thing sound alergic to the idea of paying for a game engine.

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

#43

Post by janosdebugs » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

aflag wrote: post #12

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…

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'll have a ratio of thousands of users to one contributor. Even less if you count useful contributions. Game engines are complex beasts.

Source: I have an OSS project that's vastly less complex than a game engine and worked on dozens of other OSS projects.

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

#44

Post by juunpp » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

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…

"VC-backed" seems like a naive opinion at best. Also, doesn't UE already do everything you describe? Why is another one needed?

Half the Unity games are complete and utter garbage anyway. Most people don't need the complexity of a full-blown engine for the kinds of games they put out there.

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

#45

Post by stuckinhell » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

0dayz wrote: 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?

Most big studio's have the power to switch engines, which they will eventually. It's not uncommon to hire teams to port games to other engines.

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

#46

Post by qwytw » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

hesdeadjim wrote: post #24

floydnoel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depends on who the backers are I guess. Perhaps not the classic kind — like say, convince MS, Apple, and Sony to pony up $10mm each. It’s a good play for them to not be caught in this Unity fiasco and $10mm is a rounding error.

> $10mm is a rounding error

And you wont manage to achieve anything with that. Maybe Unity could spinoff its ad business (together with some major liabilities like Ricitelo and other execs) and then MS could buy the engine part.

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

#47

Post by BlueTemplar » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

lelandfe wrote: post #9

gorjusborg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Indie and big games in the way you mean are pretty much mutually eclusive.

"Indie," or indepedent, just refers to the studio. Indie studios can work on ambitious titles. Subnautica is a good Unity example, but there are others

As I have been pointing out for years, and this clusterfuck shows yet again, if you rely on any platform, you are not indie.

Some people also say that indie also means small, otherwise the most indie studios out there would be the likes of Valve and (Microsoft-)Activision-Blizzard.

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

#48

Post by lotsoweiners » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 3:40 PM UTC

hesdeadjim wrote: post #26

lotsoweiners wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a game developer nor do I plan to become one but the thing that seems strange to me is all of this talk of revenue sharing with the development tools. If I create a successful app or website using Visual Studio, Microsoft isn’t going to take a percentage of my revenue. Even Apple won’t take a percentage to use Xcode and only charges to publish on their platform. Why is game development different?

Microsoft and Apple get their cut by charging 30% on their game platforms.

I know. So if you use unity to create a game that is being published on iOS or the Microsoft game platform, are you not being charged 30% from Apple/Microsoft and then a per install charge from Unity. That doesn’t sound sustainable whether you are a small or large developer.

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

#49

Post by janosdebugs » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 3:41 PM UTC

lotsoweiners wrote: post #23

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’m not a game developer nor do I plan to become one but the thing that seems strange to me is all of this talk of revenue sharing with the development tools. If I create a successful app or website using Visual Studio, Microsoft isn’t going to take a percentage of my revenue. Even Apple won’t take a percentage to use Xcode and only charges to publish on their platform. Why is game development different?

You are also not shipping 5-7 digit lines of code from the dev tool in your project.

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

#50

Post by 0dayz » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 3:41 PM UTC

vvanders wrote: post #35

0dayz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

>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.

And here I thought industry is that one programming market with no awful grinds. I do sympathize though, webdev frontend+backend is just hellish (but you do have some tools to alleviate the pain, but when you have to rewrite the app 6+ times it really breaks you).