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

"In the future, all games will be Quake."

But it was easier for my audience to hear a joke than the truth.

As if the founders had no other options in life than to start companies relying on business models where you capture the market with investor money and then once you’re customers are locked in, you squeeze them as much as possible. Unreal is in the same market. They also took in investor money. They’re not in the same situation.

The people behind Unity chose to play the game. The c-suite is handsomely rewarded, and we praise their business acumen when things go right, but if things go wrong suddenly they’re victims of circumstance.

They can take ownership of their decisions.

Yeah, right now (and I hope it keeps increasing thanks to the Unity news).

I got burnt once (and almost twice) from this in the past. cocos2d-iPhone used to be huge, and Zynga even contributed to it. I released two games using it, and started another one. And then it stopped getting updated (and Apple keeps breaking things like Apple likes to do), so it died on the vine and I had to port to something else.

Currently making a game in Monogame, and while it did get a significant update a little over a year ago, it's had very little activity on it since then and no other releases besides a hotfix shortly after, and zero communication about what's going on with any of their official channels at least. Not great especially since there seems to be spotty support for .Net 6 outside of Windows still, and I keep running into various issues with its 3D support (which it is mainly supposed to be a 2D game, but it does support 3D to a certain extent).

Also while it claims to support platforms like PS4 and Switch, I see almost no documentation on it, and very little documentation on getting Steamworks working with it (I have some basic things working, but I'm having to figure things for Unity first and then porting that knowledge over). Also most of its multiplayer libraries seem outdated, at least the ones I looked up. And the forums/Discord still have some activity on them, but not a ton. Also I'd love to make a game that supported VR (almost switched to Unity just for that alone).

I actually compared its Github activity to Godot a week ago, and Godot looks SO much better supported than Monogame at this point, that I was already considering either porting or making my next game in Godot before this Unity news was announced. But maybe that's just me hopping onto another platform that will have the same problem in 5 years after I've gotten pretty invested into it.

I also know Unity (worked on a game professionally years back) and considered switching to that for my game too, but that mostly got killed by this announcement.

Personally I prefer code-based development (I don't like using an editor too much), so if Monogame was better supported and had much better 3D support I'd probably just stick with it. I thought I was going to when I first started using it seriously three years ago. But I hesitate to keep dumping time into it if they don't maintain it.

Also I made a small game with Phaser.js and was going to do more with that, but even that creator is pretty much the only one maintaining it and they got sidelined by life for about six months (which is fine, but get someone to help keep it going if you can! I know that's hard though). Phaser at least is already close to what I want from it, and doesn't seem to need much else for the foreseeable future.