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OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

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Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#141

Post by rideontime »

angry_octet wrote: post #135
breezeTrowel wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's retroactive. https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packa... Q: Are these fees going to apply to games that have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones. A: Yes, assuming the ga…

It isn't. Look at the words you quote: "Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024." The new installs are new instances of the Unity runtime. I'm really sorry they are screwing you but words have meanings, and this is not retroactive. One legal scholar writes: "A retroactive statute is one that operates as of a time prior to its enactment. A retrospective statute is one th…

"One legal scholar"?

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#143

Post by hesdeadjim »

chess_horse_L wrote: post #53

Yeah, and everyone will be back to Unity in a month. People need to make a living, y'know. They need to make games/assets NOW, not in 3 years once those engines are ready. For example, I see my Twitter timeline full of people slowly realizing that Godot is not Unity 2, and complaining about the UX, GDScript, C# and performance problems. So, they either have to live on that hill and contribute to Godot (And sometimes…

Yep, Unity wants 4% from me if that’s what they change? So be it. I can’t use Unreal for my studio and Godot is a pile of garbage for anything serious. Unity knows this.

https://sampruden.github.io/posts/godot-is-not-the-new-unity...

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#144

Post by HlessClaudesman »

0xAFFFF wrote: post #105
Aurornis wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but somehow I suspect that private equity Unity is publicly traded: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U Can’t blame private equity for this one. > crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry. More realistically, they crunched the numbers and saw that they aren’t making enough money to keep the company going forever. It’s not a secret, because it’s a public company: They need to make more money to…

I don't think that people realistically oppose monetization going up. The main complaint is adding retroactively a new form of monetization with a unverifiable metric that is not bound to revenue. Sure people wouldn't have been happy with higher fees, but current clusterfuck is an order of magnitude worse.

Charging per install would have been the death of free to play gaming, or just the death of Unity as a mobile games engine.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#145

Post by bootloop »

chess_horse_L wrote: post #53

Yeah, and everyone will be back to Unity in a month. People need to make a living, y'know. They need to make games/assets NOW, not in 3 years once those engines are ready. For example, I see my Twitter timeline full of people slowly realizing that Godot is not Unity 2, and complaining about the UX, GDScript, C# and performance problems. So, they either have to live on that hill and contribute to Godot (And sometimes…

Look, Unity did have performance improvements in some aspects over the years but their output / productivity was really really really poor in the last 3 years related to their core product, the Engine.

This is the reason people were already fed up with it, this license change just pushed some over the top.

The trajectory of this project is not good at the moment and that is as much of a problem for users as the recent events.

I started a project 3 years ago and none of the features I based it on shipped with production quality in the meanwhile (and that was the assumption when going in back then, that this will eventually be fixed while development of the game was going on).

Godot is certainly not optimal, that is what people are discussing. The C# and expert userbase was missing. But the fact that people are raising these points meens that they see it worth to comment on. If Godot leadership takes the hint, they might bring their project to a trajectory which allows serious projects to give it a shot. So this time now will be critical. For both, Unity and their competitors.

I think none of the conversations and comments put out there are surprising. But I would argue that if people already had the motivation to switch, they might just go to Unreal if Godot gives them not enough performance. Or stay with Godot if their project is simple enough to be not effected.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#146

Post by livrem »

peremptor wrote: post #6

Im not well versed in game programming, however I have some knowledge on how to properly structure your software architecture in other domains. In regards to third party dependencies I agree with what Uncle Bob says, which is to keep them as far away from your stuff as possible. Only introduce a hard dependency if you have to. In my current project I have been doing that and I enjoy the flexibility that this gives me…

This worried me as well when I started looking at Godot. It seems like it is, like other game engines, designed to not really allow you to separate your code from the engine code in any meaningful way.

The only things I have thought of, or seen others do, is to separate the game into a native library, or even a separate server process, that handles the game-world part of the game, and then use Godot as the front-end (client) gui only. But you will miss out on many of the engine's features since a lot of it is built around mixing on-screen objects with game-world objects. There isn't really any separation at all between what happens "in the game" and what is rendered to the screen.

But building the game from the ground up using Godot nodes, with a bit of GDScript here and there to tie things together, is definitely easy and very tempting to do. It pushes you towards that easy way of doing things.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#147

Post by bannedbybros »

Aurornis wrote: post #95
courseofaction wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purely conjecture, but somehow I suspect that private equity has crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry.

> but somehow I suspect that private equity Unity is publicly traded: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U Can’t blame private equity for this one. > crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry. More realistically, they crunched the numbers and saw that they aren’t making enough money to keep the company going forever. It’s not a secret, because it’s a public company: They need to make more money to…

[dead]

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#148

Post by pierat »

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #144
0xAFFFF wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that people realistically oppose monetization going up. The main complaint is adding retroactively a new form of monetization with a unverifiable metric that is not bound to revenue. Sure people wouldn't have been happy with higher fees, but current clusterfuck is an order of magnitude worse.

Charging per install would have been the death of free to play gaming, or just the death of Unity as a mobile games engine.

That would have been a good thing, to not see "free" services, due to anti-competitive reasons.

Companies subsidize "free" by redirecting money from successful areas to fund new or unsuccessful areas. And in this case of "free" (advert, data collections) games, is basically a anticompetitive dumping ground and is a common trend with monopolists.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#149

Post by [deleted] »

andybak wrote: post #86
badsectoracula wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW from the comments i've seen on Reddit it seems that some of the reasons he brought up for wanting to do so many raycasts are already covered by Godot's functionality (in C++). Also IMO unless you want to share C++ plugins with others (via GDExtension), if you are making a game with it you'd want to modify the engine itself for any non-trivial functionality anyway. Again, the situation he describes sounds like it…

I read that thread too and he just seems like a bunch of people denying there's a problem. The sibling reply here rather contradicts your point as do several others replies in the Reddit thread.

[deleted]

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#150

Post by teamonkey »

raincole wrote: post #117
teamonkey wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just find it really strange to think of Valve's 30% cut to be value, when its main advantage is being an oligopoly, but Unity's 4% cut to be rent-seeking, when it's the foundation and toolset for the software being made.

It's both rent-seeking. But I can't help but feel you're willing to twist the facts to defend Unity. I'll list some facts for the readers: 1. The 4% cut is a rumor at this point. It's not confirmed. 2. Unity didn't just announce a 4% cut at the first place. They announced a fee per install. It's an unprecedented business model. No other semi-popular game engine does that, ever.

I'm not defending Unity, I'm just not defending Valve/Steam (also App Store, Play), which is a much, much bigger drain on revenue.

The Unity pricing structure is complicated and badly managed. The fees were previously uncapped, and it allows for edge cases where the fees look like they could exceed revenue. It causes problems for givaways, bundles and Gamepass deals.

Still, for many situations the math works out so Unity is cheaper than Unreal, even before this 4% rumour. You wouldn't want to accidentally hit one of those edge cases though.

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