Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

gamedeveloper.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 84 posts

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#51

Post by miragecraft »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #5
GaggiX wrote: post #3

Hopefully this will encourage the use and development of Godot and other open source engines. If Unity doesn't back off, I don't see any other possible reality.

OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Just the QA testing budget alone that is required to support all consoles, PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot. What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just…

Console port support for Godot would rely on commercial/proprietary offerings due to the fact that you can’t open source those code (as you have to incorporate vendor code).

So that aspect would not be OSS.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#53

Post by fidotron »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #5
GaggiX wrote: post #3

Hopefully this will encourage the use and development of Godot and other open source engines. If Unity doesn't back off, I don't see any other possible reality.

OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Just the QA testing budget alone that is required to support all consoles, PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot. What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just…

I spent some time in the trenches on this, and concluded what is needed is some sort of agreed module/integration mechanism and an ecosystem of open and proprietary modules. (Quite similar to how many large game devs operate already).

No “open engine” will ever be enough, by definition, as the games people will pay for will be those which were hard to make, and tech advantage is one well proven way to do that.

The tech industry is beginning to learn that barriers to entry, such as those Nintendo created in the 1980s or existed in the early days of the App Store, actually helped the market function to create much better results. Apparently Atari will be repeated again and again.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#54

Post by qwytw »

physicsguy wrote: post #11

It’s a funny one. Major corporations are more likely to feel the hit to their bottom line, and generally are able to take a short term painful decision to make a long term profitable one, like switching or investing in their own engine. On the flip side, small companies are more likely to be discouraged from ever using Unity because of this. So who remains using it? Mid-tier companies who can’t afford to switch?

> feel the hit to their bottom line

Which will likely be very insignificant if they are actually making any money on their games. Nobody besides those making about $1.2-2 million and who have very low revenue per user will be really affected financial that much.

The fact that Unity randomly imposed fees their clients hadn't agreed on for install of games which are already released and the whole install tracking issue itself seems like a much bigger issue than the actual cost.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#55

Post by [deleted] »

lelandfe wrote: post #22
0dayz wrote: post #10

I could be wrong here, but wasn't it said that it'll be mostly big studios that will face the brunt of the burden here?

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat... I'd wager it won't affect most small studios, since most games never get close to the prerequisite $200k revenue in a year. But the thought that if you finally do see success you have to start paying danegeld to Unity...? Far worse is that Unity apparently has the ability and desire to do things like this. What's to stop them in the future from altering…

[deleted]

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#56

Post by qwytw »

lelandfe wrote: post #22
0dayz wrote: post #10

I could be wrong here, but wasn't it said that it'll be mostly big studios that will face the brunt of the burden here?

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat... I'd wager it won't affect most small studios, since most games never get close to the prerequisite $200k revenue in a year. But the thought that if you finally do see success you have to start paying danegeld to Unity...? Far worse is that Unity apparently has the ability and desire to do things like this. What's to stop them in the future from altering…

> $200k revenue in a year. But the thought that if you finally do see success you have to start paying danegeld to Unity

You already had to upgrade to Pro if your company (now it's per game which in theory might be a significant discount) had more than $200k in revenue. So yes, but you still had to earn over 1 million per game and the fees are not that bad with Pro (since you get 1 mill for free).

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#57

Post by BlueTemplar »

physicsguy wrote: post #11

It’s a funny one. Major corporations are more likely to feel the hit to their bottom line, and generally are able to take a short term painful decision to make a long term profitable one, like switching or investing in their own engine. On the flip side, small companies are more likely to be discouraged from ever using Unity because of this. So who remains using it? Mid-tier companies who can’t afford to switch?

Yeah, I'm particularly thinking of Microsoft-Activision-Blizzard being able to jump ship with a Hearthstone 2, while Hasbro-Wizards of the Coast is probably now stuck paying Unity the money for Magic the Gathering Arena for at least a decade. (And even there, they are lucky, they were just mentioning that they were now thinking about going beyond the 1vs1, PvP focus of Arena just this summer !)

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#58

Post by qwytw »

stuckinhell wrote: post #45
0dayz wrote: post #10

I could be wrong here, but wasn't it said that it'll be mostly big studios that will face the brunt of the burden here?

Most big studio's have the power to switch engines, which they will eventually. It's not uncommon to hire teams to port games to other engines.

> which they will eventually

Unity will still likely be much cheaper than Unreal. Zero respect for customers and unpredictability (what they might pull off next?) would seem like much better incentives and cost for most.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#59

Post by BlueTemplar »

ketzu wrote: post #42

I wonder, if godot becomes the defacto successor, will we see posts of the sort in a few years we see about cloud open source these days? People complaining about the redistributors (cloud companies/game studios) not giving back to the open source software they use to make their money? Because a lot of the posts I've seen on reddit around this whole thing sound alergic to the idea of paying for a game engine.

Not necessarily, consider how big companies are paying Sqlite just to be certain that it keeps being supported, even despite it literally being in the public domain.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#60

Post by lelandfe »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #47
lelandfe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Indie," or indepedent, just refers to the studio. Indie studios can work on ambitious titles. Subnautica is a good Unity example, but there are others

As I have been pointing out for years, and this clusterfuck shows yet again, if you rely on any platform, you are not indie. Some people also say that indie also means small, otherwise the most indie studios out there would be the likes of Valve and (Microsoft-)Activision-Blizzard.

Independent, i.e. not working with a large publisher, like Microsoft, Sony, etc. That precludes those publishers themselves, of course!
Post reply on HN