I’m not a lawyer, but this seems illegal, they can’t retroactively change licenses, imagine Microsoft decides that starting January 1st you need to pay them 20¢ each time you open the file explorer or each time you boot windows. They can’t just decide to change their pricing strategy for an existing product that people have already agreed to. They could make it that starting from version X that would be the price, because people with games already released or in the works can keep the current terms with the downside of not being able to update the engine, or even have a page where people can contact them to tell what is their current project so that projects that started before this date are not affected. But the way it’s being done feels like it should be illegal.
Somebody’s already asked some lawyers and they’ve already said it is illegal. Now we’re just waiting for somebody to sue them, but it’ll probably take a while because getting all of that paperwork sorted will take some time.
I said it in another thread, but Unity has truly fucked the vendor-client relationship.
While it is a nightmare, you can work with a company that changes its prices and terms, but you absolutely can’t work with a company that pulls this level of BS.
It’s just not safe to have your company so dependent on a vendor that could tank it on a whim.
Pretty much the biggest mistake made due to greed is the decision to retroactively apply thr deals to already existing titles. Its one thing to neuter titles in the future, but another to fuck over everyone whose already committed to using it on a different TOS
Not a lawyer, but I feel like basing the fee on their internal guess on how many installs seems questionable. Surely some major jurisdictions would take issue with that and counting installs from before the new TOS towards the new threshold. Also their contradictory TOS terms at the very least would probably get them an expensive trial, even if they win it.
Yep. The insanity of thinking you could apply it retroactively to already licensed games was absurd.
If you tied it to a future main version release with features people wanted, you could absolutely get away with some light pushback that's the usual grumbling on price changes, and a lot of developers would suck it up and move to the up to date engine anyways.
But when you try to pull the rug on people for stuff they've already been developing under previous terms, they're going to seriously reconsider, and on stuff they already published makes it extremely hard to justify working with you again.
Yeah, that’s what burns the business relationship. Because now it’s not just “oh, Unity might screw me, and I’m investing in learning what could become a dead platform”, it’s “even if Unity doesn’t screw me now, they could randomly decide to screw me 10 years from now and retroactively charge me a king’s ransom”. That’s the stuff that has a permanent chilling effect on the whole platform.
The reason why Unity refuses to not make it retro-active is because they want money from Genshin Impact etc which already launched. If they don’t make it retroactive then the whole point of the change on their end is gone.
Because it’s a tool, game development is a huge investment, there’s really not many alternatives, and if you think Godot is an alternative, you have zero gamedev experience. You have to be straight up ignorant to believe that completely unrelated game developers are somehow supporting this, and have zero basis in reality to think they can swap engines on the drop of a hat.
I don’t think anybody claimed they could do it “at the drop of a hat”. They’re saying it would be financially beneficial for these game developers to take the financial hit to jump ship from Unity because people will be less likely to buy Unity games
That’s not any less detached from reality. Like I said, you have no familiarity with these tools if you think it’s a simple choice to just not go with Unity. It’s also rarely obvious what engine a game is actually made in unless it’s a smaller indie game that still has the Unity stuff left in. Also if you think gamers actually have the ability to boycott games, then lol.
I’m not going to give any personal information about myself, but you are WAY off with your assumption about my knowledge regarding both the development side and business side of these kind of choices. It’s what I do
I don’t need to ask your personal info, I just need to ask how many actual medium+ budget (100k+) projects do you seen being worked on/ported into Godot?
This is precisely my point, and why the OC resorted to ad hominem almost out of the gate is beyond me. That said, I do have a bit of experience in game development, and I think the short term gains from Unity would be outweighed by the losses incurred through negative PR and Unity’s stunts.
Uh huh, Godot doesn’t have any texture/mesh/animation/audio streaming, has no access to low level rendering structures, lacks significant optimizations, lacks swarm logic, complete lack of mature tools, no paid asset/extension store, miles behind shader editing and vfx effects. Which part of these are wrong, and do you understand why these things are required for big games?
I didn’t say it was feature parity with Unity, 90% of Unity games don’t require most of the features Unity has that Godot lacks.
Streaming is not the only solution to efficiently loading assets
The VFX is not lacking from Unity in anyway other than not having Unity’s specific tools for organizing them, the Shader and VFX graph. It lacks access to the stencil buffer right now, but not much else. You can still make any shader in Godot that you can make in Unity.
W4 is opening a dedicated paid store.
Godot can run native C++, making it more optimized than Unity in several areas. DOTS can out do it in some areas, but again native C++ is still faster.
You have direct access to Godot’s render pipeline code so no idea what you mean by ‘low level’, no idea how’d you get lower level than direct access to the render pipeline itself.
Streaming is required for a lot of use cases, it’s probably the most important of everything I listed. Godot is miles behind even Unity in fidelity still. “Opening a paid store” still means it currently does not exist and also means there’s zero assets for actual purchase. Running native c++ has literally nothing to do with Engine optimization lol. That’s also just false, you don’t have access to the rendering server even from gdextension.
This isn’t coming from me btw, this is coming from the literal creator of Godot, so you’re disagreeing with him here. Really shows you how deep into the circlejerk we are here lol. godotengine.org/…/whats-missing-in-godot-for-aaa/
edit: nice the guy who calls me cringe blocks me after replying so he can’t be called out for being wrong. Maybe don’t be so argumentative when you reply and don’t know what you’re talking about. How toxic.
Edit, I didn’t block him, he’s being a troll I guess.
Firstly, I can tell you only skimmed that and haven’t actually read it because it contradicts multiple points you made in this and the previous comment. Like, actually read it before trying to use it as a source.
“Everyone who disagrees with me is circle jerking”
Lol, okay buddy. You’re a tad bit cringe
Like, “As such, this means that low level access to all the rendering server structures needs to be exposed via GDExtension.” Says it right there, in the page you linked. “Often developers need to implement rendering techniques, post processing effects, etc. that don’t come bundled with the engine.” You have to do some of it yourself, which means ITS VIABLE. Again, not on parity, but viable. Again, not feature complete, not as polished, but viable.
And on streaming “Of the above, most are relatively straightforward to implement”, meaning that users can already do this, the article even mentions how much of the ground work is just handed to you. I’m not arguing the point on if this should be fully implemented by the dev team to come fully prepackaged, im simply telling you that you’re wrong about godot not being viable. It should come by default, but it’s still easy to do. Again, if your point is it should come default, I agree with that.
I can tell you’re just being argumentive for the sake of it, so I’m just going to ignore you from here on out. You aren’t adding anything constructive and you’re not capable of reading something YOU linked, so you’re not worth the time or effort.
I remember when I first started using Unity years and years ago and people like you would just talk shit about it non stop. I remember when I started using blender in middle school and people like you should just talk shit about it.
Some things you can’t take back, especially when as CEO you don’t even try to take it back but just indicate that they might scale some of its extremes back. For now.
I mean, nowadays I assume almost all C-suite execs (which make these decisiones) to be conservative (or “apoliticals”/“insert other tag” that act like conservatives)
I don’t see an official statement but it would be really amazing for a company that is asking everyone to follow the new rules to ignore the well established laws at the same time. They can have whatever opinions they want but these places are recognized as such.
I mean, they kinda started that by the statement already. They could have just limited it to a pre-approved list of charities, but instead, by not calling it a charity, in direct contradiction with US law, they’ve dragged themselves further into the clusterfuck, as if that were somehow possible.
The 2020s hot new business practice is self immolation through hypercapitalist greed and assuming that just because you're the most popular in an industry you're the only choice.
Calling Planned Parenthood a political group is just telling on yourself. You hate women’s bodily autonomy and/or trans people enough to overlook the fact that they offer free and income cost adjusted birth control and vasectomies and hysterectomies and fertility treatments. They are a non-profit organization offering every type of sexual and reproductive health care. They, in fact, do not engage in politically driven discrimination against certain types of sexual health issues. They treat those trying to get pregnant with the same level of evidence based care as those seeking abortion or hrt or to be made infertile, without concern for public opinion or political discourse. I assume all of the above can be said of the children’s hospital mentioned, but I don’t have an ongoing relationship with them to base my comments on…
That doesn’t sound like a great outcome: one less game engine in the market, developers having to change all their codes, tons of layoff, c-suites finding a new job like nothing happened.
No, it’s far from great, but it’s better than allowing shenanigans like this to become the norm - and they will become the norm unless Unity pays severely.
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Aktywne