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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

#201

Post by vintermann »

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…

> Can’t blame private equity for this one.

Yup, it's Epic which is the private equity rollup. They're innocent, unless there are some Stephen Elop-style shenanigans going on.

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

#202

Post by vintermann »

raincole wrote: post #64
xbmcuser wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are making a billion dollars loss a year. So with no vc cash available they need to get profitable if they want to survive. You can argue this is wrong way to go about it but they do need to get profitable.

Unity had 7000+ employees before layoff. Valve maintains one of the biggest platforms, and their own game engine. Valve also developed CSGO, TF2, and Dota, all popular online games that need constant maintenance (and even big content updates sometimes). Valve also invested in VR and sells hardware. Valve has 1200 employees. To me it's easy to see why Unity lose money.

I'm betting that Unity's customers, which includes a horde of mobile app developers, are a bit more demanding to have (and keep) than the few - if any? - outside Valve who license Source 2.

It would be great if you could be Valve. Everyone wants to be Valve. But you are not Valve. Especially not if you're publicly traded or a private equity rollup - things Valve has stubbornly resisted becoming.

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

#203

Post by vintermann »

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…

> What gamer doesn't begrudgingly have Origin and at least one of EGS or the Blizzard/battlenet launcher installed alongside steam?

That's me! Not that I could have had any of those, as far as I'm aware. When it comes to Linux support, Steam isn't just the best, the others are actively bad.

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

#204

Post by vintermann »

ambyra wrote: post #96
qwytw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Massive over hiring and random acquisitions are there main reasons why are they here. If they hadn't increased their headcount by 5k and continued focusing on their core products the company would already be profitable (even if revenue would be lower). At this point it's too late to significantly cut costs, so yeah seems like they pushed themselves into a corner. The sad part is that it was already perfectly obvious…

Seems like they’re trying to fund their unprofitable acquisitions by harming their profitable core. They could have spent that money making unity better/more stable. I hope they make it out of this. The unity editor is pretty great.

> They could have spent that money making unity better/more stable.

Public shareholders don't like that. It's not good enough.

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

#205

Post by JohnFen »

chaostheory wrote: post #178
JohnFen wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you’re going to inevitably have convention wars. Only if you choose to. Most developers use whatever convention they personally prefer when working on their own code. When you're working on other people's code, you use whatever convention was already in use. If you're working for someone else, you follow the convention of your employer. Simples. No fighting necessary.

Yeah, that’s true in an ideal world. Unfortunately, we don’t live in one.

My point is that each of us chooses whether or not to participate in arguments. Especially when it comes to programming holy wars, which are rarely of actual importance, we can choose not to.

It takes two to tango. No ideal world is needed.

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

#206

Post by qwytw »

vintermann wrote: post #204
ambyra wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like they’re trying to fund their unprofitable acquisitions by harming their profitable core. They could have spent that money making unity better/more stable. I hope they make it out of this. The unity editor is pretty great.

> They could have spent that money making unity better/more stable. Public shareholders don't like that. It's not good enough.

It's not at all obvious to me investors who bought their stock after they IPO wanted any of this.

The board and upper management together with their VC backers (they also gave Unity a significant loan to fund the IronSource acquisition which will be exchanged to stock in a few years) seem to be the main driving force behind this.

The only way most public shareholders can express their approval is by buying or selling stock and looking at the share price over the last 1.5 years they don't seem to approve that much.

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

#207

Post by qwytw »

plagiarist wrote: post #66
usrusr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to run a publicly traded company like a VC bonfire - what could possibly go wrong.

Why would they even IPO if they are bleeding money as fast as they were? Was it one of those SPAC pyramid scams just to get fresh money from people?

Well because profitability was just a few years away according to their prospectus.

Which to be fair wasn't that inaccurate. Had they stopped expanding like crazy for a year or so the company would've been profitable (with minimal damage to their core product, if not the other way around).

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

#208

Post by consoomer »

mratsim wrote: post #129
Snafuh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Godot actually has a bit of an issue with too many PRs. Lots of them are just small changes, usability or documentation changes, but they still have to be reviewed. They need steady funding to have a team of capable full time devs. Their fund seems a step into this direction.

Wait until Hacktoberfest

submits four PRs with spelling fixes for comments

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

#209

Post by angry_octet »

RHSeeger wrote: post #198
angry_octet wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 typ…

You got it. But I'd go further -- what use is thousands of dollars in engine-specific assets for an unmaintained engine version? You should have the right to use new releases of the engine with the existing licence, and maintain feature parity and get security and bug fixes.

I'm sure someone at Unreal is working on asset conversation and API shims to allow porting Unity games, but it's a big change and costly for the developer.

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

#210

Post by JuanPosadas »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #29
andybak wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rather dampened by enthusiasm for Godot: https://sampruden.github.io/posts/godot-is-not-the-new-unity... It's carrying a lot of performance baggage and there seems to be no sense of urgency in fixing it.

Yeah, it's true that raw performance doesn't seem like a major priority for the Godot community. If it was, GDScript probably wouldn't be the default language. There also seems to be a lot of defensiveness around GDScript's weaknesses. Personally, I found that signals were very slow for communicating node to node, was dropping information because it could take longer than a frame.

GDScript is much faster in Godot 4.
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