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An open letter to our community

blog.unity.com

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Re: An open letter to our community

#201

Post by opyate »

FateOfNations wrote: post #170
opyate wrote: post #138

Tangential: what other downloadable software makes (or, tries to make) money with "revenue share"? I'm aware of these not-downloadable-but-is-digital services/stores/platforms that do: - app stores (Apple takes 30%, Google takes 30%) - content (YouTube keeps 45%, Twitch takes a cut) - e-commerce (Etsy 5% transaction fee; eBay takes a %) - music/podcast (Spotify; SoundCloud) - e-learning (Udemy; Teachable) - gaming (S…

It's best to think about more like a royalty.

Well, in that case, I'm glad it's not common across software, e.g. imagine authors having to pay MS Word or Scrivener a cut for every book sold, or musicians for every song made with Logic Pro or Ableton.

What makes games so special?

Re: An open letter to our community

#202

Post by PoignardAzur »

DonHopkins wrote: post #185
gumballindie wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A part of me thinks that the CEO (and all the other executive morons who decided to make the installation fee) was sitting there thinking "what are they going to do? Move to Godot?" Their CEO gives me the impression of a rich but unsophisticated mba type who can only deliver revenue growth by raising prices. I doubt he even thought about captive customers and lack of what he might have thought alternative engines,…

I know John Riccitiello from when I worked at Maxis/EA on The Sims last century, and when he was involved with investing in Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club, and later when he was involved as CEO of EA in open sourcing SimCity for the One Laptop Per Child. We (including Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation general counsel) explained to him why EA should open source the original SimCity source code under GPL-3, and what…

This is such a weird post. Why the Biden mention?

Re: An open letter to our community

#203

Post by imtringued »

Macha wrote: post #48
intelVISA wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers aren't the ones choosing Unity most of the time...

It feels like any game developer or publisher big enough to be dictating engines top down probably has their own engine?

Do you really think that a 10 person indie shop is going to have every single person choose their own favorite engine?

Re: An open letter to our community

#204

Post by PoignardAzur »

tombert wrote: post #125
rybosworld wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that level it's often just a big club that you don't get to be a part of because you don't have the right connections. Many CEO's (and execs in general) are not extraordinary people in any sense of the word. I think people underestimate just how often a business leader gets to where they are because of nepotism. Many of the biggest companies in the world operate like a royal dynasty, with children inheriting the l…

It wouldn't bother me so much if not for the fact that they get lauded as geniuses for every innovation coming out of their companies. I've seen dozens of people on LinkedIn claiming that Elon Musk invented self-landing rockets, and they get mad at me when respond with "no he fucking didn't! He hired people to figure that stuff out". So I think "Fine, I guess you could make some kind of transitive argument that he hi…

Elon Musk is kind of a special case, and shouldn't used as a representative example of the class "CEOs".

Most CEOs don't micromanage to the level Musk does, most CEOs wouldn't have ran SpaceX the way Musk did, competent engineers or not. If all it took was hiring the right people, Blue Origin would have left them in the dust.

(That said, yes, he should definitely be considered responsible for the failures with Twitter)

Re: An open letter to our community

#205

Post by imtringued »

Applejinx wrote: post #117
gumballindie wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cat’s out of the bag. I gave godot a try and it’s absolutely amazing! It felt great working with open source tools - i could finally read the source when i needed to understand something. Indeed it lacks some features but it is an amazing engine. Unity and their ceo has proven to be untrustworthy. I am getting the sense that open source engines will eat their market share.

I'm curious to see how quickly it gains a performant 3D layer now that people capable of getting performance out of Unity are looking at it. It was interesting seeing some people bounce off it on the grounds of woeful inefficiency. I don't remember the person, but one Unity refugee traced the path of a raycast and Godot more or less needed to treat it as a dynamically typed generic thing, going through a huge rigamar…

>It's possible to hack in more direct access for those who can make sense of it.

>These obstacles could go away really quickly under the right conditions…

I'm not sure why you feel the need to paraphrase this so much but the GDextension API is a thing and it is more efficient but it hasn't been implemented for C#. The blog poster extrapolated from the C# bindings that there are unfixable flaws in the engine when in reality the C# bindings aren't up to date yet.

Re: An open letter to our community

#206

Post by DonHopkins »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #202
DonHopkins wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know John Riccitiello from when I worked at Maxis/EA on The Sims last century, and when he was involved with investing in Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club, and later when he was involved as CEO of EA in open sourcing SimCity for the One Laptop Per Child. We (including Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation general counsel) explained to him why EA should open source the original SimCity source code under GPL-3, and what…

This is such a weird post. Why the Biden mention?

Because Biden endorsed Unity so many times in his inaugural address. It was a such refreshing departure and contrast from Trump's obsession with Unreal lies and propoganda.

The 41 most Unreal Donald Trump quotes of 2018:

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/20/politics/trump-lines-of-t...

JANUARY 20, 2021: A National Day of Unity

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...

President Joe Biden 2021 Inaugural Address:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlbyOeMCL0g

Inaugural Address by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...

To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul and to secure the future of America – requires more than words.

It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy:

Unity.

Unity.

With Unity we can do great things. Important things.

I know speaking of Unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy.

History, faith, and reason show the way, the way of Unity.

For without Unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury.

This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and Unity is the path forward.

And together, we shall write an American story of hope, not fear.

Of Unity, not division.

Re: An open letter to our community

#207

Post by ajvs »

gumballindie wrote: post #155
Applejinx wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to see how quickly it gains a performant 3D layer now that people capable of getting performance out of Unity are looking at it. It was interesting seeing some people bounce off it on the grounds of woeful inefficiency. I don't remember the person, but one Unity refugee traced the path of a raycast and Godot more or less needed to treat it as a dynamically typed generic thing, going through a huge rigamar…

> it gains a performant 3D layer It already is pretty darn performant - but without the many convenience features unity and unreal have. Also it does lack means to modify vertex buffers directly on the GPU - a feature I liked in Unity ( https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Mesh.GetVertexBuffe... ). However, I think godot shouldn't try and implement everything - the project should focus on getting core functionali…

> I hope the game dev world wont take the web dev world path where code is in oversupply and there are little options to monetise.

Very beneficial for the consumer however. Right now the bar to create a good videogame is rather high, and this leads to the current hellscape where so many videogames are plagued with lootboxes, season passes and other microtransactions to make up for the multiple years in dev time required with many employees.

If the tooling gets better to the point that it takes less time and less devs to create good games that don't require the insane levels of monetisation, then this trend is more likely to be reversed.

Re: An open letter to our community

#208

Post by imtringued »

rhtgrg wrote: post #90
tombert wrote: post #77

If they are willing to retroactively change the TOS once, why wouldn't they do it again once the smoke has settled? I don't make games, I have nothing at stake in this fight, but this just feels like PR damage control and to be completely honest, I don't think most software engineers are so absolutely dependent on (proper noun) Unity to risk this company doing shady stuff again, and I suspect this entire ordeal will…

> If they are willing to retroactively change the TOS once, why wouldn't they do it again once the smoke has settled? I haven't seen any evidence they did that, it's mostly been FUD from Godot supporters. The initial communication was messy, but where are actual TOS changes that are being touted so loudly? https://unity.com/legal/terms-of-service https://unity.com/legal/terms-of-service-legacy

Why would "Godot supporters" care about what Unity is doing? It's not like they are on payroll and more users means more bug reports and feature requests for the maintainers without necessarily gaining more capacity to implement them. An open source project doesn't need an exodus of users from another project, it needs to get parity with its competitors and then quietly take over the market with little resistance.

Re: An open letter to our community

#209

Post by bigstrat2003 »

johnfernow wrote: post #160
Macha wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like any game developer or publisher big enough to be dictating engines top down probably has their own engine?

For a lot of studios, even very large ones, that's not the case anymore, and even those that have their own engines don't use them for everything. Nintendo has several engines, but Pokémon Go is made in Unity, as was Mario Kart Tour and Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl. miHoYo has over 5000 employees but they still use Unity for Genshin Impact and some of their other games. Blizzard surely had the…

On the topic of Square Enix, what's bizarre to me is that FF7R is the odd one out among recent games. FF15 and FF16 were on two different internally developed engines! I wonder if the reason FF7R used UE is because it was originally being developed outside, before Square was unhappy with how development was going and brought it back in house.
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