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Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

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

#71

Post by lordfrito »

phmqk76 wrote: post #69
delusional wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try kagi.com. I'm a very happy customer myself.

Maybe I’m an outlier, but I blow right past their limits on any reasonably-priced tier. I use my search bar for all sorts of inquiries, serious and frivolous, including basic addition and subtraction. I tried it for a month and found that my usage far exceeded what I was willing to pay, which was about $10 a month. If they can get the costs down, I’d happily subscribe, I think the results were very good. Google’s res…

Search is dying. The quality of search I mean, which doesn't bode well as civilization pretty much runs based on our ability to search the web for commercial/ government / political work.

It's a problem. Whoever control search will control what we see hear and read. Dangerous times. Hoping that somebody can build a subscription search that works and returns real competitive-ness to the information marketplace

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

#72

Post by aleph_minus_one »

lordfrito wrote: post #39
floydnoel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think VC-backed engines can avoid enshittification. Unity is really demonstrating that now. OSS is the only way.

Yeah it seems like enshitification during the long tail is the point of the VC model across all industries. Give product away for free, figure out how to screw the install base later on. Can't blame the VCs for trying this model, but they've played society for suckers. We let them get away with this for too long, becoming dependent on their "free" offerings. At this point I'd be willing to get rid of my free stuff al…

> Yeah it seems like enshitification during the long tail is the point of the VC model across all industries. Give product away for free, figure out how to screw the install base later on.

It needs two sides for this to work:

1. a company attempting to "fish" customers with this approach

2. customers who fall for this trap, and did not create an emergency/backup plan when the respective company becomes "evil"/untenable.

Every company sooner or later becomes "evil" (and be it because of ownership changes because the original founders die or want to retire). Having made no "backup plan" for such a situation to happen is in my opinion gross negligence.

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

#74

Post by qwytw »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #68
qwytw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $10mm is a rounding error And you wont manage to achieve anything with that. Maybe Unity could spinoff its ad business (together with some major liabilities like Ricitelo and other execs) and then MS could buy the engine part.

$10mm each. $30mm backing and you could get a pretty solid tech base to build a game on. Especially since there are some great new libs out there for things like physics. The Horizon Zero Dawn lead programmer has an OSS MIT engine that is very advanced and less bloated than PhysX.

> $30mm backing

Realistically that would still only be enough to get something you can make a cool looking demo and that only run on desktop.

Building a general purpose engine that is suitable for many different workflows and run on pretty much every singe platform like Unity is very trick and takes a lot of time (and trial an error). Dev UX, APIs, platform integration, QA, all the third party packages and infrastructure are much harder to solve than shiny graphics or advanced physics. Whatever you come up with that $30mm is only likely to cover a small subset of use cases.

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

#75

Post by 0dayz »

wayfinder wrote: post #40
0dayz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VC backed for profit engine is precisely what Unity is though? So is Unreal and CryEngine. Both of which only survive on graphical fidelity, which is not what Unity was touted for. Unity was for filling that small-to-medium sized games in terms of man power, if you got 15 years of experience then you should know that. I think it would be more interesting to see a Coop backed engine, where the COOP has to listen to it…

Well most games usually get built once on one version so it doesn’t matter if the engine changes.

That used to be a lot more true back when game studios treated a finished game as almost immutable.

These days it's quite common to see new patches and even new content for single player games.

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

#76

Post by bradleyishungry »

marcodiego wrote: post #33
hesdeadjim wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> blender [...] supports two platforms Windows, Mac and Linux; that's three, right? And it supported many Unix variants while their marketshare was significant. Where does your "two platforms " come from? >> I’ve been doing this for 15 years Most commenters here don't have 15 years of gamedev experience, but many here watched Blender turn into a tool among the leaders coming from a "very weird UI" in about that same…

Blender has been around for 29 years, to be fair it’s only been open source for 21, but still it took an extremely long time to get to a point that was comparable to other tools. It’s still definitely not as used as Maya. I do genuinely feel Godot can be adopted widely because it’s better than any other open source game engine that has been around, but blender took an absurdly long time to be competitive.

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

#77

Post by GaggiX »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #25
GaggiX wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't source available go against "support all consoles" as the SDK of these platforms are under NDA? Also Blender officially support more than two platforms but I don't know how it's in topic here.

Source available for consoles would be gated on your company having the same NDA.

So okay it doesn't really matter if the engine is open source or source available, I see.

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

#78

Post by Spastche »

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…

Valve seems like the only company that would do this reasonably. but they've got better money makers to deal with

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

#79

Post by rowanG077 »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #67
metabagel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In exchange for what? What does that give Unity access to which Godot doesn’t have access to?

In exchange to access the sdk and hardware. OSS Godot doesn’t have access. Only their newer for-profit arm does, so now… not OSS?

I'm not sure what you are saying here. Having a "for-profit" arm does not exclude a piece of software from being OSS.
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