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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

#411

Post by philipov »

and0 wrote: post #373
philipov wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no revenue ... Not quite. Unity merged with a company that sells mobile ads: ironSource. They are direct competitors of AppLovin, the dominant player in that market. The terms and backroom deals that Unity is offering devs will waive these fees if they use Unity's ad products instead of AppLovin. Thi…

That's fascinating, thanks. None of the various analysis I've read so far have hit on this point but it makes sense.

I think HoegLaw did a good rundown of the legal side of it:

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

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

#412

Post by zoogeny »

I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source.

I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way.

Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a technology is equivalent to supporting it. I'm not immune to this. I just considered how I would feel if React or Golang suddenly changed so that I had to pay to use them. React is supported by Facebook and Golang by Google, both unimaginably massive and wealthy corporations. Even though I have never directly contributed a single thing to either project, I know I would feel some combination of betrayed, angry and frustrated.

But I think about all of it. nginx, haproxy, redis, postgresql, nodejs, python. I don't think I could even write out all of the open source I am using in my projects within the confines of a Hacker News comment. Just trying to wrap my head around how I could even pay for all of that software if I had to is anxiety inducing. I don't mean just the cost, even the logistics of that many micro-transactions. Imagine trying to pay every YouTuber you watch some fair value for the content you consume.

We are no where near an answer on this, I don't believe it will be settled within my lifetime. But the current model to justify the free-lunch we've all been served is crumbling. If the corporations that we expect to bear the cost of our free-lunch start to crumble then we are all in for a rude awakening.

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

#413

Post by _hypx »

miragecraft wrote: post #340

The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn't track for me. The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes…

There is a secondary argument in favor of home-grown engines too. It's been very disappointing to see so many game companies abandon their own rendering technology in favor of Unreal. Terrible licensing rules might drive companies to go back to having their own engines.

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

#414

Post by hyperhopper »

nylonstrung wrote: post #394
alexvitkov wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They spent like 6 billion on acquisitions that don't help make their core product better. Literally just don't do that and you'd be in the green right now.

This isn't quite true as those acquisitions are paid for by stock and debt to a large extent It's not like they bought these with a pile of $6B cash they had lying around

> stock and debt

Yes, and now they are burning tons of money due to that debt and having to make ridiculous decisions to appease the stockholders. You just stated the exact reason this whole thing is a problem.

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

#415

Post by JamesLeonis »

swalsh wrote: post #229

I wish game development wasn't so monolithic. You're either all in on Unity, or all in on Unreal, or all in on GoDot. They are designer forward, code later. Each has a marketplace of sorts, but in my experience it's substandard. Compare that to web development (different beast I know, but there's no reason gaming can't be more componentized). Web development is so simple these days because I spend most of my time glu…

You better understand the value proposition of game engines than you think.

Spin your view a little: NPM is your web development engine. Somebody had to write all of that code that undergirds NPM as an engine as well as the particular library you want to install.

Game engines are no different. They manage a bunch of (mostly boilerplate) game development components (sound, textures, rendering, animation, menus, collisions, physics, resource I/O, etc etc) so game developers can spend time "gluing stuff together, and sanding the edges" of their game. Monolithic engines like Unity have a plugin system for installing 3rd party libraries, and the engine tooling itself acts as its own level, effect, cutscene (etc etc) editor.

At the end of the day games are just like any other programming task. You have a limited amount of effort/time/budget, so you have to make decisions about where you want to optimize. Game engines, even monolithic ones like Godot and Unity (and, really, every 3rd party game development tool) are all designed to let you focus effort/time/budget on the unique aspects of your game.

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

#416

Post by Iulioh »

unnouinceput wrote: post #239
intelVISA wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.y…

Man, Rust is infamous for being reeeeaaaallly badly optimized

I would have picked a different game.

I remember the minutes of loading of a new world..

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

#417

Post by foobarian »

Draiken wrote: post #407
tmpX7dMeXU wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a simplistic view. “Beholden to shareholders” does not mean prioritising short-term gain at all costs. That’s not just my ideology, it is how publicly traded companies work a lot of the time, including the one that I work for. To imply that there’s such a stark binary difference between a privately held and publicly held company misses a lot of nuance. Investors can want a quick out or be in for the long game…

In theory, that's true. But what I see every day is the opposite. It's essentially what people are calling "enshitification". Mostly short term decisions that screw customers up for a quick buck. I do agree that private does not mean good. It all falls under the CEO/Founders in my view. But there seems to be way more greedy short term thinking leaders out there. I can probably count in my hands the amount of companie…

It starts out noble. Once a company goes public, the first few town halls after the shareholder call the CEO or CFO will be like, "Don't worry about the stock price, we're better than all the other short-termist companies, we care about long term quality and blah blah."

But bit by bit, little by little, like Pavlov's dogs the employees get trained to peek at that stock ticker around reporting time. And over time they sync up their decision making with that schedule, and internal planning starts to reflect it. And new initiatives get created and judged by investor reactions. And it's all downhill from there :-(

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

#418

Post by dvngnt_ »

_hypx wrote: post #413
miragecraft wrote: post #340

The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn't track for me. The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes…

There is a secondary argument in favor of home-grown engines too. It's been very disappointing to see so many game companies abandon their own rendering technology in favor of Unreal. Terrible licensing rules might drive companies to go back to having their own engines.

I feel like each year makes it harder as demands increase

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

#419

Post by ryathal »

olig15 wrote: post #290
grotorea wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not not it's an everything engine it's the most popular engine on steam by far from a quick search, although it does leans towards indie. https://infogram.com/1d560b7e-21a1-437a-91f4-198309bf3e25 https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/game-engines-on-steam...

I’d probably bet that the majority of games on steam have less than 1000 sales, so being a popular game on Steam probably doesn’t mean much compared to being a popular game by daily active users viewing unity ads.

Someone dug into this recently, it's over 50% of steam games haven't made $1k in sales. The vast majority of steam by game count is complete trash.
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