Whitehurst and chief product and technology officer Marc Whitten discuss Unity’s plans to rebuild trust with developers after the 2023 Runtime Fee fiasco.
Here’s a hint, it’s gone. You’re not going to get that trust back for 10-20 years, if you ever get it back.
What do you expect them to say, “it’s all fucked, let’s shut up shop”? They’ve fired JR, undone most of his wild spending, gutted the company to desperately undo his mismanagement and make the company profitable. Saying “were trying to go back to how it was” seems like a non-insane risk-averse business way to try and keep the Unity users who haven’t been able to jump ship already.
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.
Lol! yeah! What sort of nerd do you have to be to enjoy card games? And sports games? Like, go outside, brah. When I get my game on, it’s usually CoD on my Xbox. Headshot after headshot, teabag after teabag. It’s just something else, you know? Not something you can get by playing a card game or some rts or something where someone else is doing the shooting for you… Like… Get some skill brah.
/s … Pfew… That was hard to get through… sorry about that, couldn’t help myself
The way I see it, there are enough quality indie games, retro emulators, and titles on the average Steam backlog (to the point that it’s a tired joke) that gamers can afford to only pay for unmissable quality. People know what they like, and they talk.
Economically, money is scarce. So is free time, for a lot of us. We don’t care what you tell us to “expect” from you, game publishers with hot takes on BG3. If you can’t release finished games at game prices, maybe you’re not the beating heart of the game industry.
That might be the way it works in your head, but the reality looks different.
AAA games make the most money on PC. And even those games despite micro transactions, DLCs and so on are easily overshadowed by mobile games.
My favorite games are indie games, but indie is simply not feasible in some genres. Take MMOs for example, every stab at it has burned to the ground or was abandoned (or a scam).
Criticizing the big publishers is the only thing we have, because obviously voting with your wallet doesn’t work. You might not buy it, but several million other people who saw a shiny cinematic trailer did. And they will continue to do so, even when Call of Duty 23 sucks they’ll go and buy 24 next year.
I wanted to stick to my I Statements a little more than I did. I cede mostly to your points but reserve that it’s bullshit to tell me not to expect quality just because someone proved it can still be done. It tells me the bigger gaming industry has gotten too large and dreary to be much use to me.
“Reducing our office footprint” these ghouls are going to fire people who aren’t following the return to office decree because it will be an easy on paper excuse. Also “revenue came in within guidance” so they expected / planned for revenue to be low enough to justify firing even more people? They’ve already done two other mass firings morale is terrible right now. Lots of the best workers have been quitting to find better work and the drain is noticable. I just need stable insurance for another 6 months then I can leave too, I hope I don’t get fucked
Thank you, I’m honestly terrified. I spent my whole life so far trying to get into this industry, I finally pull it off in my early 30s and now all this. I spent 10 years roughing it and finally have been able to do things in the last two years like go to the doctor ever. I don’t have tech people wealth laying around I’ve spent so much basically doing damage control for having previously been paycheck to paycheck. I’m only just getting the ball rolling and I’m going to be so fucked if I lose this job.
I hate to say it but it might be worth looking for a job outside the games industry. It’s openly known that most gaming companies get away with terrible working conditions and employee treatment. They get away with it because there’s a revolving door of people willing to put up with shit treatment so they can say they got a job in the industry.
It’s fine if that matters to you, but you have to decide how much it matters and stick to your line in the sand. Personally I’d rather work something less interesting and have better pay and reasonable work/life balance.
Probably because most devs stopped making their own proprietary engines, so the supply for solid engines is at an all time low. With less options they can crank up the price, as there aren’t really any other options for most devs.
Most devs never would have made their own proprietary engines. With ready availability of engines to use, the number of developers skyrocketed as it lowered the bar of who can make a game.
There are a lot of game engines out there. Godot is a good engine if you’re jumping from Unity because it’s a lot more similar to Unity than some other engines and they both can use C#.
Because China is increasingly looking broke, so daddy Tencent's purse is tightening.
On top of that, the world's banks now have interest rates to look after again, so their free money streams have ended too. Meaning that companies have to prove their profitability.
But the rich want to keep their free money train going, so we're all paying now.
Tim Sweeney alone owns 50% of the company, he can pretty much make his own decisions independently from Tencent. Also China is slowly catching up to the US’s GDP with way less government debt, what are you talking about?
The most current projections is China will never catch up to US GDP. Just for posterity, China GDP per capita is under $14k, while US is above $80k. There is no conceivable path to closing this gap. Not with an authoritarian in charge who shuts down entire industries on a whim and murders political rivals who disagree with him.
Or taking advantage of that happenning with the competition, to enhance profitability.
Make money is the point of pretty much all companies, and financially there are only 2 thinks stopping them from upping their prices:
If there is competition it will lead to losing customers (though thinks like branding subvert this quite a bit) which means the money they make with higher prices might actually be less.
If prices get too high people will choose the “do without” option.
Anyways, the point being that if there is a broader shift in pricing in the market, even companies that are not under the same financial pressures to up prices will still do it as the 1st of those price limitation is relaxed so they can make more money.
As recession looms, you have general inflation and increased interest rates. This affects overhead and loan repayments. That and probably other factors all contribute to the need to raise prices.
It’s not just the gaming sector. Almost all other sectors are raising their prices or adjusting their service plans. Eg. shrinkflation and/or lower quality on products and services.
This is particularly for people using the engine to write film rending software which gets bought one for a lot of money but low volume, and gets used as a huge cost savings for mid-high end production that can save on lighting and comp passes or even render time.
High volume software(games) probably won’t change much at all.
Because like all the tech industry, they grew massively on the back of low interest rates since 2008 where investors saw better returns putting money into companies than sitting on it, now the interest rates have shot up again post Covid, they need to show their investors they can make better returns than the 5%+ they’d make just leaving the money in the bank. Hence the cost cutting by sacking staff and gouging of customers by price increases.
I have the old one. Next iteration will have the same better display along with better cpu/gpu/ram, current battery is more than enough for a day of my gaming needs and I doubt I will ever need to touch a screw let alone a repair. I’m glad there’s an upgrade at the same price for newcomers but it isn’t “radiant” anything.
I’m thinking some people having more joy at staring at the fps counter then play the game.
I’d like to respectfully say you’re fucking dead wrong. The display is gorgeous, the increased framerate is amazing, the battery life is SO MUCH BETTER and it downloads games and launches faster. On top of having more storage space on the LE edition. And the charge cable is LONGER. I was actually able to play over 3 hours of deep rock on a flight and still have some charge left. If you use the device a lot it’s a massive upgrade.
Ok so let me get this straight. 1-3 more fps, a brighter screen and a bit more battery is now considered revolutionary for portable gaming. If that were the case then the rog ally or one of the other handhelds would be considered more revolutionary for portable gaming.
You got it crooked. 60hz to 90hz is a lot more than 1-2 frames. “A brighter screen” okay guess you don’t know what HDR is and have never seen the difference between LED and OLED. “A bit more battery” got me from 90 minutes of gaming to over 3 hours. For someone who actually uses the thing constantly, it’s huge. But continue to be ignorant because I doubt what I wrote will change that.
If you count 60 to 90hz as increased performance then sure you get more frames. I’ve used an oled switch and it does look good but it’s definitely nothing game changing.
Steamdeck oled has a few nice to haves and nothing more. The release of the steamdeck changed the game for handheld gaming. The release of the steamdeck oled changes nothing. We’ve seen oleds on the switch, we’ve seen handhelds with good battery life and we’ve seen handhelds with high refresh rate monitors.
Really sucks to be a Unity developer right now. I’ve been working with mostly Unity for around 10 years now, and while I’m not directly affected by the recent changes, it really feels like the engine has been dying a slow death for a few years now. Hopefully Ricitello will leave eventually and they can turn this around, otherwise many of my skills will be useless in a few years…
If I were running a Unity project, I'd be tempted to just jump to Unreal. No matter what promises Unity makes you don't have any actual guarantee that they'll keep them while Unreal has the "non-retroactive" clause directly in their contract. However painful the switch is, you'll only have to do it once.
"non-retroactive" clause directly in their contract
I also wonder how Unity‘s approach will work in countries where that is the legal default. I have a feeling that we will be seeing quite a few lawsuits next year, if they actually go ahead with their plans.
Nintendo would probably prefer the 20 cent per copy license fee to a percent based one. New Pokemon games are sold at 60 dollars in the US and sell millions of copies. This is a bigger issue for indie developers looking to sell for a cheaper price to bring in sales.
are unity and unreal so different that your 10 years of experience in one isn’t helpful for the other? i’m not a game developer but I had assumed it was similar to web frameworks - definitely high switching costs for porting an existing project, but as a developer looking for a job there are still many portable skills.
i’d guess it also depends on what parts of the engine you are working in?
To an extent I can apply my knowledge to other engines, sure. I’m working on my third Unreal project currently, and while it’s not like starting from scratch, I’m definitely way slower working with it. It also doesn’t replace Unity completely. It’s great for high-spec 3D stuff, but almost useless for mobile 3D/AR apps, which is a lot of what I do (not making games but mainly industrial interactive 3d applications).
Hey same here, although I’m just getting started in the industry. I’ll look into Unreal soon I guess, been wanting to do that for a while anyways, and maybe also experiment with godot
Unreal is good if you want to work on big expensive projects at big companies. Godot is good if you want to work on your own projects today and potentially but not definitly work on small to middle-sized projects at small to middle-sized at small to middle-sized companies in the future. Unity is fine if you want to work on small to middle-sized projects at small to middle-sized companies now and potentially in the future.
Which sucks. There ought to be a clear and unambiguous path to chose for someone moving into game development today but since Unity keeps making weird choices that are hostile to developers whilst not continuing to improve at a good pace, it’s hard to say for sure which engine will fill in the not-Unreal Engine part of the market unless you have a crystal ball.
Realistically the best thing is to have as strong a foundation in programming generally as you can so that switching engines is minimally disruptive (as there will always be a need to do so eventually. There’s very little chance one single engine will continue to be the standard over the 40+ years of a career.)
I’m not so sure about that. Godot is fantastic for making the sorts of projects they are describing. But if the relatively minor difference between Unity and Unreal’s workflow are a turn off for them, then the consciously different workflow in Godot is probably going to be a significant barrier. Personally, whilst I love Godot because it’s FOSS and lightweight and a great platform for building smaller scale games: a big part of the appeal for me is that I find the Unreal and Unity ways of doing things stupid, confusing and clumsy and the Godot way clever, clear and elegant. I know lots of people feel the exact opposite.
“not always possible for other developers”, mostly because they’re busy shitting out rubbish, buggy titles riddled with micro transactions (or whatever nonsense they can get away with to nickel and dime their customers)
People took note of how great BG3 is because it’s just a good game, you’re not be treated as a resource they can squeeze to get extra cash
IMO One of the hardest parts about Emotions in games is the narrow edge between developing a loving relarionship and a caring One as a close friend. I loved the Characters and interactions in BG3 but Part of me wished there were also “comraderie Events” similar to stardew valley were there are Events for getting to know poeple closer without the intent to develop a sexual relarionship to the Character
Spot on. Its mainly for words for which have similar spellings in both languages and my autocorrect is used to german and wants to spell Things capitalized as often as it can
Thanks for explaining. I’m convinced that autocorrect and touch screen keyboards are behind a great deal of the bad grammar and weird sentences that we see online.
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