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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

#181

Post by cfiggers »

chefandy wrote: post #157
JCharante wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Losing a billion means they spent more than that, but on what? I haven’t used unity since 2016 and never in a professional capacity but I can’t imagine anything significant was improved or added in the last year.

I'm not going to say that they spend their money wisely, but game engine development, in general, moves at breakneck speed, and unity is no exception.

I'd love to read more about "game engine development, in general, moves at breakneck speed," if you happen to know of a blog post or something or might be willing to share more.

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

#182

Post by PM_me_your_math »

nottorp wrote: post #130
ThatPlayer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bribing implies an illegal act. Giving money in exchange for goods and services is completely normal: I don't bribe a restaurant for food. Exclusivity is just a way of competing for games, a sign of a good competitive market. Kickstarter is kickstarter. Half of them probably don't fulfill all their promises. That's the risk you're taking, and why it's not a preorder. Epic don't have gambling. They've even removed gam…

> Bribing implies an illegal act. Giving money in exchange for goods and services is completely normal: I don't bribe a restaurant for food. Exclusivity is just a way of competing for games, a sign of a good competitive market. It doesn't have to be illegal, merely immoral. > Kickstarter is kickstarter. Half of them probably don't fulfill all their promises. That's the risk you're taking, and why it's not a preorder.…

[dead]

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

#183

Post by PM_me_your_math »

hcks wrote: post #170
alpaca128 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With $1 paid to the developer the player only needs to (re)install the game 6 times on their computer to cost the developer more than they earned. This pricing is per install , not per player. Installations are an unrestricted functionality which can be abused. If you care about quality games: this pricing causes the opposite.

They literally stated it would not affect reinstalls.

There is what they say, which is often not exactly what they do. And even if the intentions are good, behavior or scenarios not conceived may emerge.

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

#184

Post by SanderNL »

hcks wrote: post #166
koolala wrote: post #119

If you don't own your engine then you don't own your game. Games are unique like that - music and other art is interoperable - software isn't.

Companies also have to pay for Microsoft Excel. Does it mean they don’t own their businesses?

Say MS decided to lock down your access to Excel and all your business is nicely tucked away in those beautifully handcrafted sheets.

It's not a binary thing and we can argue semantics, but MS is definitely holding some keys here.

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

#185

Post by Maken »

raincole wrote: post #13
echelon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a project with zero support. Good luck developing it further instead of focusing on your game. There's zero risk of this happening. Godot is going to become Blender for gaming and eventually eat into Tim's margins. (Unreal isn't even his cash cow.) Unreal might be significantly ahead now, but when Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. contribute to Godot, it's game over.

My estimation is about 10 ~ 15 years for open source engine to catch up Unreal. (both feature and popularity) Amazon did make a game engine. It shows "Amazon money" doesn't magically solve every problem in the world. > Godot is going to become Blender for gaming Exactly. Blender still isn't the first choice for most animation and VFX jobs.

Amazon "just" bought the rights to the Crytech engine and forked it. Not even they were crazy enough to build their own tech from the ground up.

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

#186

Post by artursapek »

enlyth wrote: post #19
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 wouldn't feel bad for their executives. They are the ones who chose the 'growth at all costs' path, and this is what you get. They could've probably been sustainable and profitable if they mainly serviced their core audience of indie developers with a smaller amount of employees and a simpler product, but it seems they really wanted to brute force themselves into the AAA market.

You can’t stay small if you took a lot of investor cash. This is why self-funded companies are usually the ones who avoid these awful growth/layoff cycles.

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

#187

Post by nerdjon »

For the record, I am not a game developer but I don't think that changes my opinion on open source technology.

Open Source software is great, but that also comes at the cost of support when you are running into a problem. Particularly if you are on a critical timeline, especially if trying to fix a bug after something is released.

You are at the mercy of the community being able to help (and most likely only being able to give them a limited amount of information) vs the possibility of the company you are licensing from sending you engineers to actually help you fix the problem.

For business critical this is an important thing that needs to be looked at, and from what I can tell there is not anything like this for GoDot (I don't see an enterprise option similar to redhat).

This is not in any way shape or form defending Unity, what they are doing is horrible and will likely (hopefully) cause a migration to Unreal. But just saying open source is not a cut and dry option either. Especially not for something as critical as the engine.

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

#188

Post by hokumguru »

RugnirViking wrote: post #133
Ekaros wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems quite a lot. Compared to game development teams with their own engines which they have kept modern while releasing games...

How many such game development companies actually are there? I see a lot of aging engines out there, and companies that jumped to unreal, but I have by no means broad knowledge

Certainly not an expert but top studios like Bethesda and CDPR maintain their own engines with an order of magnitude less employees. They make games too.

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

#189

Post by wccrawford »

troupo wrote: post #116
TMM2K wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think clicking the EULA is?

"Clicking EULA" might not be enforceable in many countries.

In which case you have no license to the code. So either way, you'd have no rights.

You're still welcome to contact them directly and try to get some kind of contract directly if you can't agree to the EULA for access.

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

#190

Post by 1323portloo »

gumballindie wrote: post #173
NotGMan wrote: post #4

>> While Unreal engine currently does not have terms like Unity’s, there’s nothing stopping them from doing something similar. In fact if Unity manages to get away with this it seems likely they will follow suit. Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for NEWER version Epic can change…

> Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER For a 5% cut. Add that on top of taxes and steam and you’re basically an employee.

Yes, unless you build everything from the game engine to the distribution channel yourself, there is a cost to doing business. IIRC Epic Games Store offers a more reasonable 88%/12% revenue split, while Steam uses the same rapacious split as Apple and GOG at 70%/30%.
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