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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

#231

Post by croes »

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…

>So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a project with zero support

Isn't that valid for any software including Unity or Unreal?

With open source at least you can try it yourself

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

#232

Post by thefurdrake »

popmatrix wrote: post #82

The author seems to misunderstand the new pricing model (as did many others; this is Unity's fault) [1] The $0.20 is not retroactive, nor do you need to hope your users see 10 and impressions to cover a cost to the game developer -- you need to earn $200,000 _and_ have 200,000 installs. A free game would not be charged, and if you don't believe you can muster 10 ad impressions per user (to cover the unity install cos…

They'd get one ad impression from me before I closed the application and uninstalled it from my computer.

This sales model will ruin indie devs who aren't so eager to swallow adtech's shaft that they're content with rolling out malware to their users.

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

#233

Post by doikor »

j_maffe wrote: post #215
doikor wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you can. You just can't redistribute the source to anyone else but using it internally for your own projects to build executable that you share (and sell as long as you pay the royalties to Epic) is fine. The last UE3 game released in 2021. UE4 came out in 2014 and UE5 in 2020. Unreal Engine license are per engine version and perpetual. This is something Sweeney has been pointing out for years. And again a few da…

Yes you can. But unless you're a AAA developer studio, it's ridiculously infeasible. At least for Godot, there would be a community effort to maintain it. Such a community would be impossible with any closed-source (even if readable) engine.

In general one very rarely upgrade engines after release. Even during development you usually don't upgrade if there isn't a new feature in the new version you really need.

Really it is only an issue for new projects and at that point if the license of the newest version is not to your liking pick a different engine.

Also the last UE3 game I know of (Them and Us in 2021) was made by a small indie studio not some big AAA studio with massive publishers backing. At that point the engine had been in "end of life" state for 5+ years.

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

#234

Post by ZekeSulastin »

okamiueru wrote: post #213
superchroma wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why feel bad? They're a victim of deliberate bad choices. The buck stops at the top. Nobody told Riccitiello to hit the gas pedal, nor to enrich himself by selling shares prior to a disastrous announcement, he did that all on his own. I feel much worse for the thousands of developers he's holding a metaphorical gun to with this awful policy, who now have to stress about swapping engines.

He did? Is insider trading laws in the US non-existant? Wow

Yeah, 2,000 sold (~50,000 over the last year) out of ~3,200,000 still held, under a trading plan filed in May.

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

#235

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

doikor wrote: post #176
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you'd amended the source, then it wouldn't be the same version and the license would be invalid. If you want to use the perpetual license, you can't do anything with the source.

Except that is what the Unreal Engine license allows you to do https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal > 2. How You Can Use the Licensed Technology > Epic grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license to privately use, reproduce, display, perform, and modify the Licensed Technology in accordance with the terms of this Agreement (the “License”). This means that as long as you are not v…

Well, you can always modify source code and use it privately - you hardly need a license for that.

The additional sections that allow distribution are the important bits and I guess the devil is in the details.

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

#236

Post by throwaway2990 »

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…

> Tim Sweeney explicitly mentioned this often + the fact that they are trying to break the Gplay/Apply monopoly shows that the Epic games leadership are not corporate piranhas like Unity's.

Haha this made me laugh. If you think epic isn’t piranha then you’re living in a bubble.

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

#237

Post by yard2010 »

grotorea wrote: post #199
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…

> They have no moat How easy is for a studio to change engine? Isn't that a decent moat?

So they get to hold their current customers hostages and get no new customers.

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

#238

Post by esskay »

_chu1 wrote: post #227

Valve needs to capitalize off this and get Source 2 out

Not only get it out but actively promote it as an opensource project instead of proprietary and make revenue through an asset store. Theres so few games that use source that theres no way its commercially viable on its own.

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

#239

Post by unnouinceput »

intelVISA wrote: post #42
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…

The Unreal thing is that Unity has/had ~8,000 employees last year. Sounds like an awful lot for a mobile game engine.

>...for a mobile game engine.

May I ask you if you ever heard of Rust? The game, not the programming language. Online survive game, which has thousands of active players every single day since like a decade already, full 3D and quite awesome graphics I'd say. It's written in Unity.

It's wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(video_game)

A gameplay of a rather popular youtuber that does daily uploads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSXCI0rLvHg

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

#240

Post by IdiranVibe »

PeterisP wrote: post #151
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…

Is Unity-2023 version a billion dollars better than Unity-2022, or even close to that?

Not at all... lots of people still run unity 2021
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