Despite all that’s happened, at least one source told the outlet they don’t think Unity’s moves were made out of complete malice. “They need to do something to make more money. Sadly, it wasn’t delivered well, but the need to make more money is still there.”
And that’s why every dev (who can) should run as far away from Unity as possible, because Unity will try to screw them some other way.
To where? Godot isn’t there yet (sorry, maybe in five years, it’s impressive and on the right track. Not today). And unreal is under the same pressure.
i don’t think unreal is under the same pressure for three reasons:
they already have a reasonable revenue sharing model. they make a lot more per licensee than unity does because they take a cut of your sales rather than charging a per-engineer license for the dev kit.
epic’s headcount is not nearly as horrendously bloated, even before the recent layoffs.
the company is still privately held with Tim Sweeney the majority owner.
points 1 and 2 mean epic is actually profitable, and has been for decades at this point. meanwhile, the publicly traded unity has struggled to break even for most of its existence
Yes, point 1 is the model they should have adopted in the first place. The whole problem with their original announcement was that it was a) retroactive, b) structured in a way that would significantly hurt f2p and indie games, and c) based on installs rather than sales, meaning you could get charged multiple times for the same sale. If Unity had come out and said “starting with Unity 2024, we will be switching to a revenue sharing model", a lot of people might have still been upset, but it would not have caused nearly the same shitstorm and they would have had a better path towards sustainability.
Point 3 is absolutely real, because when you own your company, you do not have legal obligations to throngs of faceless public stockholders. Companies turn to shit all the time when they go public, because the pressure for immediate quarterly returns outweighs the pressure to maintain long-term sustainability. I think it’s exactly why platforms like Steam have avoided enshittifying, because their owners know they can make more money long term by building a sustainable platform that people like rather than burning their users to make a quick buck and juice their next quarterly report.
Its stating that because he owns a majority share, he has the ability to suppress publicly traded short term value inflation in favor of showing other private investors that long term growth is both sustainable and profitable.
Which, as shown by how completely anti-short term the epic games store is run, is clearly a sales pitch that his other private investors are buying into.
Which is probably the exact reason they are remaining off the public market
It points at the long term focused business decisions, and then points at the private nature of its investors, and says “hey thats a pattern we see a lot with privately owned and invested companies.”
You know what else isn't there yet? Unity, Unreal, Source, CryEngine... literally every commercial game engine requires development if you're actually looking to push hardware limits. They're just toolboxes.
Godot is no different, except that developers are going to be much more likely to release their changes publicly.
Keep in mind that the console makers likely don’t want too much of their SDKs to become part of Godot’s open codebase. They license it to publishers who promise them that they won’t divulge important IP.
keep in mind that unreal engine is also open source. Epic just has a system where if you get the go-ahead from a console maker, and they can confirm that, then you get access to the parts of the engine that connect to the console SDK’s
if you are an indie dev today, you can get the go-ahead from sony/nintendo/whoever and launch your UE/unity game on those platforms without much fuss. if you have a godot game you have to contact a third party porting house and ask them to port the game to those consoles. those companies have already made the godot hookups into platform specific SDK’s but you still have to contact, and licence them to do this, if they accept working with you.
keep in mind that unreal engine is also open source.
The Unreal Engine is not open source by any reasonable definition of open source. Being "source available" is not the same as open source, as you can't use the code whoever you like.
you can’t use most open source code “however you like” either, they all have licenses. the main restriction with unreal engine is that you can’t mix it with copyleft licenses and you can’t use it commercially.
but you can do what most people want to do, modify, extend, fix, learn. that’s the most relevant thing for what we are talking about here
you can’t use most open source code “however you like” either
Alright, sure my language was overly broad. "The licensing is restrictive in a way which makes it clearly not open source." would have been a better choice.
...the main restriction with unreal engine is that you can’t mix it with copyleft licenses and you can’t use it commercially.
So, it's not open source.
...but you can do what most people want to do, modify, extend, fix, learn. that’s the most relevant thing for what we are talking about here
That still doesn't make it open source, mainly because you are missing one of biggest aspects, distribution.
Open source != copyleft. That’s free software if you want to go that route.
Also, you can distribute your version, of course you can. Both your changes and binary form. It’s just all distributed under epics unreal engine licence
Also, you can distribute your version, of course you can.
Are you sure?
You may Distribute Engine Code (including as modified by you) in Source Code or object code to a third party who is separately licensed by us to use the same version of the Engine Code that you are Distributing.
Any public Distribution of Engine Tools (e.g., intended generally for third parties who are separately licensed by us to use the Engine Code) must take place through a marketplace operated by Epic such as the Unreal Engine Marketplace (e.g., for Distributing a Product’s modding tool or editor to end users) or through a fork of Epic’s GitHub UnrealEngine Network (e.g., for Distributing Source Code).
So, you can only distribute source to people who are specifically licensed by Epic to use the source. That sure doesn't sound anything like "open source" to me.
you can only distribute your source under the licence of the source code, yes. just like copyleft licences. The whole concept of open source is demonstrably, flaky.
You want it to be a concept closer to free software, I say if the source is open, you can modify it and your changes are able to have an effect then it’s open source.
I don’t think we are going to resolve this. I would prefer if it was free software but that’s not gonna happen for godot or unreal engine
kinda, its MIT so it’s not free. I can, for example, change a bunch of godot. release my changes in binary only form and you can’t demand the source from me. I mean you can but i’ve no legal compulsion to do that.
I’m sorry, but Unity is just not a viable entity. They have consistently lost money since 2004, and in 2022 reported nearly 1 billion in net losses. Just close it down!
The first new paying model was also targeting games that were old(er) and already out for some time. That was one reason the backlash was so terrible. They backpaddled now because of the backlash, but I am sure this developer was sweating a lot in the last weeks.
This bit got me: Evidently, all of Epic Games’ business had been “heavily funded by Fortnite” in the last six years, and different parts of the company became “disconnected” from their revenue streams.
…Did you not see this coming? Have you really not had a plan for when Fortnite started to lose momentum? I get that having a product blow up will leaf to a period of manic spending because your cash flow suddenly feels infinite, but come on. You’re not a small player in this, Epic. You’ve been around since the 90s. You know better than to mindlessly ride the wave of a success.
Of course the Fortnite money was going to run out. That’s why you invested so heavily in UE5, right?.. Right?
But wootz! Don’t you see! Fortnite was making inroads into the metaverse, and we all know that whoever cracks the metaverse concept is going to reap infinite profits right? Because that’s certainly not a weird dystopian sci-fi pipe dream or anything! It was going to be all smooth sailing straight into forever profits!
Not to mention the amount of money they literally burn through EGS. If I remember correctly, the plan was that it wouldn’t be profitable for another 3/4 years (by 2027).
Fucking idiots. I swear, i dont know why we place CEOs and richer folks, in general, on a pedestal so much. Minecraft has longevity because its basically digital legos. Fortnite is a FPS with buildable aspects.FPSes come and go with the winds.
People have this tendency to associate wealth with knowledge, or business savvy. For many companies, it’s just a matter of “creative accounting” coupled with a psychopath CEO and lucking out. Epic lucked out with Fortnite Battle Royale, don’t forget their original “save world” was a total flop as a paid product
Their plan for when Fortnite stopped pulling in money was for their Epic Games Store (that they propped up by paying devs lump sums just to not launch their games on Steam) to actually make Steam levels of money because surely exclusives and freebies will make people spend money on their store. Turns out there’s a lot of people that will never spend a dime on EGS, either because they won’t install it or only use it for the free games.
So all that Fortnite money they used to pay devs to not release their games on Steam ended up being a failed investment, and they’ve had to change their incentives from “we’ll give you a huge lump sum that’s about equal to what you’d have made with a successful Steam launch” to “well we’ll give you a better revenue split if you launch exclusively on our store that guarantees you get 10% of sales volume compared to Steam”. Turns out 60% of 1m sales is better than 80% of 100k sales.
Workflow just wasn't as good, it didn't have a lot of the little features (search was definitely not as nice to use), and as a Nikon shooter back then, it never nailed the Nikon colours the way I wanted without very heavy post-processing, which was time I didn't want to spend.
I’d rather not pay a subscription in the first place.
I’ll never be a fan of sub bundles that it’s obvious that it’s all about maximum profit for the company. Why is the only bundle PS and LR? (Besides the 3d modeling crap.) Or using everything in the cloud. Why is there no “your choice bundle”? What if I just need Premiere and Acrobat? Or any other combination for that matter.
Because it's aimed at photographers who raised a huge stink in the first place (I was one of them).
You don't have to use it in the cloud too, all my camera photos are sitting in my drives, none of them have been uploaded to Adobe's servers.
PS and LR at this price is cheaper than the perpetual licenses if I upgraded every other cycle, so it's been cheaper for me. Of course there's still cheaper alternatives for PS now (Affinity Photo is really good), but since I still use LR a lot and the cost is bearable, I stay on it.
No, it's still US$10 for me for both. I wonder if it's a regional thing, or Adobe are being sneaky bastards and hiding the cheaper version of the plan somewhere.
Lol. I just searched it man. No need to get all defensive. It’s not an argument. Instead of replying twice, you can also edit. But I don’t see that plan at all on mobile. It seems like an intentional design choice. There is no “look harder” when it simply doesn’t exist.
Yeh, I use 4 applications from Adobe in very limited amounts. I wish they did a pay as you use subscription! If you use them all every day it’s cheap, but I maybe use them about 10-15 hours per month at the most.
Traditional I would be working on a freelance basis with companies and teams that would only use adobe, and wanted files in those formats. Though as I’m doing more and more of work just for myself the alternatives are getting more tempting.
Paying forever is not a better deal than paying the price of a few months of use and then having it for years. Maybe a business can justify that, but for a hobby? No way.
Maybe a business can justify that, but for a hobby? No way.
Hobbyists CAN and DO get the $10/mo plan. It’s cheaper than most streaming services and if it’s a part of your workflow (as a hobby photographer, for example) then $10/month for a constantly updated software is a good deal.
Like if you don’t value photoshop at $10/month that’s okay but A LOT of people do.
Paying forever is not a better deal
I just ran into the not forever issue when I had to re-buy Affinity photo to get the newest version.
It’s not. It’s miserable to actually use. It’s miserable to manage in a production setting. It’s just not acceptable unless you’re working for yourself.
Yeah…no. It’s objectively worse in many ways. Student on a budget? Hobbyist? Gimp will get the job done…but then again so will Pixlr 99% of the time. It’s gotta get a whole lot better before production houses seriously consider switching.
Gimp was competition for Photoshop some 25 years ago. Photoshop has improved a lot since those days, Gimp hasn’t. Gimp isn’t even the best graphics app in the Free Software space anymore.
I have used gimp over the past about 15 years, photoshop & Corel suite past 10 & 4 years ago as well. Gimp is not photoshop anyone who has used it, understands that it’s a different product and frankly it does not matter. It’s very capable where it matters and the net result is it costs nothing. No rent charging for nice but not necessary features for myself.
I’d recommend Photopea for casual use that’s not miserable to use. It’s in browser only and is basically a photoshop clone with slightly less features, but it’s amazingly close to Photoshop when I need it to be, even with things like using a pen or a really specific option menu.
It does generate it’s revenue via banner ads but I’ve never seen them with my adblock, if I’m needing to quickly whip something up and utilise my Photoshop familiarity, it’s my go to.
gamedeveloper.com
Aktywne