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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

#191

Post by Proziam »

somenameforme wrote: post #163
SXX wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They tried to take sustainable B2B middleware business and make new Google out of it. And they keep failing, but still paying exorbitant amounts to their execs. According to their SEC fillings their staff almost tripled in just 4 years > Dec 31, 2022 7,703 > Dec 31, 2021 5,245 > Dec 31, 2020 4,001 > Dec 31, 2019 2,715 Development of game engine is costly and take a lot of resources, but they already had a successful…

It's relevant to also add that the entirety of Epic Games is less than 4,000 people worldwide. That's not only for a vastly more advanced game engine, but also for numerous projects like Fortnite, a game store, just absurd amounts of educational material being published, and so on. I don't really get why companies keep hiring themselves to death. It clearly does not translate to meaningful productivity gains, yet sen…

Companies don't hire themselves to death. Managers hire themselves towards promotions and kill the company in the process.

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

#192

Post by breezeTrowel »

angry_octet wrote: post #190
breezeTrowel wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is retroactive. The license is accepted via the Unity engine. The games include a Unity runtime and this fee applies to new copies of all existing games. How is this not retroactive? The games were bundled with the runtime in the past. Plus the new license applies to all previous versions of the Unity engine that have already been installed. This is 100% retroactive.

They say that the new licence does not apply to existing installs. However, those installs are counted for determining if you cross the new sales threshold. That is a prospective change. You're complaining that the licence for runtime instances should be locked to the one that was in existence when you wrote the game (using the editor). This is entirely reasonable, but not a right you have under the old or the new li…

You had that right under the old license before it was changed and the repo tracking the ToS was deleted. This is a retroactive change. If people are downloading your installer that was published a year ago, people running that installer after January 1st will now cost you money.

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

#193

Post by bathtub365 »

Proziam wrote: post #191
somenameforme wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's relevant to also add that the entirety of Epic Games is less than 4,000 people worldwide. That's not only for a vastly more advanced game engine, but also for numerous projects like Fortnite, a game store, just absurd amounts of educational material being published, and so on. I don't really get why companies keep hiring themselves to death. It clearly does not translate to meaningful productivity gains, yet sen…

Companies don't hire themselves to death. Managers hire themselves towards promotions and kill the company in the process.

Managers need budget and headcount to hire against. This is given to them by the company with the goal of growing.

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

#194

Post by angry_octet »

breezeTrowel wrote: post #192
angry_octet wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say that the new licence does not apply to existing installs. However, those installs are counted for determining if you cross the new sales threshold. That is a prospective change. You're complaining that the licence for runtime instances should be locked to the one that was in existence when you wrote the game (using the editor). This is entirely reasonable, but not a right you have under the old or the new li…

You had that right under the old license before it was changed and the repo tracking the ToS was deleted. This is a retroactive change. If people are downloading your installer that was published a year ago, people running that installer after January 1st will now cost you money.

The license text being deleted doesn't change the contract, it is still extant, and hence nothing retroactive about it.

You should absolutely disable installations in the future. Pull all binaries from the web and replace them with ones that require an activation key.

If you have made a best effort to comply with the new terms, they cannot come at you for people running an old installer.

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

#195

Post by poulpy123 »

mightyham wrote: post #112

I'm still not fully convinced that Unity's new pricing is unfair. The retroactive aspect of it is certainly troubling and I've seen some fair points about how policy implementation will likely be messy. Moving onto the pricing itself, I've only seen it brought up on a couple occasions that the actual stores these games are being sold on are taking a way larger cut in most cases then what Unity is asking for (For refe…

The backlash wasn't against the new pricing but against the absurd metric and the retroactivity of the change. It broke the trust in the company

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

#196

Post by maccard »

nottorp wrote: post #188
gamblor956 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In both cases, that's literally just a flag for the in-game camera.

Yeah but how about infinite tiles dynamically loaded, for example, like in any ARPG? I have no idea, just thinking FPS roots means they're designed for discrete levels.

> Yeah but how about infinite tiles dynamically loaded, for example, like in any ARPG?

Yes, see [0]. As for procedural generation and that sort of thing, there is a new feature that supports it out of the box in 5.3 but before that you were able to write your own procedural generation (just as you would in unity, or your own custom engine ), and spawn actors.

> I have no idea, just thinking FPS roots means they're designed for discrete levels.

It's been a long time since that's all UE was suitable for. There's been JRPGs, third person shooters, racers, MOBAs, puzzlers, platformers, made in unreal in the last decade.

[0] https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.1/en-US/world-partition-in-u...

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

#197

Post by Proziam »

bathtub365 wrote: post #193
Proziam wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies don't hire themselves to death. Managers hire themselves towards promotions and kill the company in the process.

Managers need budget and headcount to hire against. This is given to them by the company with the goal of growing.

In almost every large company the incentive structure is such that hiring is a "win" for everyone involved. It's a win for the HR team doing the hiring, often they have quotas. It's a win for the manager getting more headcount under their umbrella, adds perceived value and status which leads to promotions. It's a win all the way up the ladder, because it adds perceived growth (remember how many VCs used to tell startups to hire and spend fast?).

The decision maker at the top is usually too disconnected from the rank and file to see the bloat. And the ones that aren't tend to be ruthless about headcount.

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

#198

Post by RHSeeger »

angry_octet wrote: post #90
RHSeeger wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not software you can (reasonably) swap out later. Once you've developed your product, it's part of your deliverable. It's like a company changing terms on their engine once you've already built a car around it, and sold them to someone.

Unless your licence says otherwise, each sale is newly licencing the Unity runtime. The plus side from this will hopefully be people reading contracts more closely before basing their income stream on it.

> The plus side from this will hopefully be people reading contracts more closely before basing their income stream on it.

I thought the point of all this was that they changed the license. So you sign a license to use the product and spent time and money to develop your product... then they change the license so it's no longer profitable for you to sell it.

So I guess the only reasonable solution to prevent that type of thing is for the license to include wording that you have the right to continue to license it under the same conditions (and presumably price limited) perpetually.

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

#199

Post by purpleflame1257 »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #185
teamonkey wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 U…

The baffling thing is that the new monetization scheme seems especially designed to destroy the freemium/mobile market, which is exactly the market they've been so actively courting the last few years. If you told me that Unity was going to try and monetize through some strange approach, I would have guessed that the scheme would have favored the freemium approach, not turned it into an extremely risky gamble.

They were going to waive the fee for anyone switching to Ironsource from applovin. They just got too much backlash.

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

#200

Post by purpleflame1257 »

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #179
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.

I think the best argument you could make to say steam is a monopoly is to say that their plan is roughly: 1. Make a platform gamers love to use so much that they will still use it even if other stores are literally giving the games away for free 2. Build a brand that your target audience recognizes worldwide and trusts with their entire game collection. 3. "Exploit" the fact that your audience loves your product and…

I have EGS installed literally because they give away free games. But their storefront/launcher is extremely slow and buggy in comparison to Steam's.
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