Gaming community will now approach every little thing at unity like the end of the world rather than middle management not knowing when to escalate a gap in policy, miscommunication, or just a dumb single person making a dumb call.
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)
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.
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.
I am not a developer but don’t they have to state the engine at the beginning of the game? Really no idea, just guessing, as I’ve seen a lot of games with it.
That would involved buying/downloading the game first to find out though (which would defeat the purpose of avoiding Unity in the first place). Out of curiosity I checked some of the games on my Steam wishlist to see if Steam had the engine listed anywhere, and unfortunately they don't. A few had it under the fine print copyright section under System Requirements, but not all. Because of this whole thing, it would be nice if Steam would include that as well, like in the sidebar where they list the developer and publisher. I can't speak for other pc storefronts though.
You can go to the SteamDB page for a game, click App Info on the left, then look for the “Detected Technologies”. This will usually tell you what they’re using if it’s not a custom engine. You can use the Augmented Steam or SteamDB browser extensions to get a direct link to the SteamDB page from a game’s store page.
Also, SteamDB has a page here with aggregate data of how much each detected engine is used across Steam. Unity currently accounts for over half of the games using known engines (snapshot).
Edit: For non-Steam games you could check out IGDB.com. It has crowd-sourced data on all video games, including which game engine was used.
How else do you want to handle a CEO owning stock? From his perspective: He sees hard times coming for Unity so he sells his stock. At the same time he tries to turn the situation around, uncertain if he will succeed.
And AFAIK the trades are public so everyone would know that the CEO is sceptical about the company’s future. There are obviously problems with the ToS changes but is the stock selling really all that relevant in this discussion?
The selling was planned a long time ago right? I think the main problem here is a CEO owning stock in the first place. If he owns stock he will obviously sell it when he no longer thinks it’s a good investment. And if it’s planned some time ahead it’s not exactly inside knowledge. At least I don’t think that this is a bad case of insider trading.
Yes even if they backpedal no one knows if they don’t try something again in the future. So everyone who can switch to a different engine should do so.
I’ve used unreal professionally for 10 years. It’s not very good for smaller teams. There is plenty of reason to pick another engine over it. Unreal is great for medium to large studios. 15 people or more. It can absolutely be used with less but the pain of doing so it’s more apparent.
Also before this whole unity fee change, unity was cheaper than unreal. Although I’ve always skipped over it because I want source access.
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.
Finally an article that goes beyond the drama and misinformation. It is not just about the new fee, which realistically is nothing compared to what you would owe epic for the same level of success.
What sucks is the shadiness and the deceptive nature of it all. I am sure the executives felt really clever and thought it would almost fly under the radar After all, they managed to spin this as not-a-royalty after years of boasting that Unity wouldn’t have any.
The new changes are essentially this :
You’re forced into going with the pro or enterprise license past a certain revenue (which was sort of a thing already).
You’re forced into serving Unity ads, or else you get charged a some royalties, which realistically should still be less than what UE charges.
You’re forced retroactively into it, as they deleted the old TOS behind the scenes.
They’re definitely not being upfront about their intentions, and due to their complete aversion to mentionning the word royalties, they managed to deceptively make up a lie that sounds worst than the actual truth. Even though this is a move targetted at multi-mullion dollars productions, actual students and hobbyist are now worried about being charged per user downloads, which is not happening.
It is sad to see, Unity went from being owned and operated by people who truely cared. I worked there for a number of years and most leaders and employees truely believed they were a force of good in this otherwise shitty world. It is crazy how much the company changed in just a number of years/months. It sucks, and whoever ended up in charge robbed both the employees and the users of something great.
John was a smooth talker, and even as the company was turning corporate and seemingly stepping on old values, he was very good at making sensible arguments and justifying the company transformation. I can’t help but feel deceived now. Ultimately I left the company because I disagreed with so many decisions. Virtually my entire backlog was stuff I disagreed with and I just couldn’t justify waking up in the morning. We’re long past the “Users first” slogan which made Unity so popular with indies.
You’re leaving out what’s really the key problem with the new pricing, which is that it is per install. It’s an unlikely but very possible scenario that a developer could lose money (inexpensive game with an abnormally high number of reinstalls).
The pricing incentivizes “live service” or ad-supported games that constantly extract revenue from users rather than “buy once” games.
Their pricing is based on "trust me bro" currently, since they don't have details on how it will work. They say it was installed i number of times, therefore you owe them j. No need for a bot farm when they can just lie, since we have no way to verify their numbers.
Fair enough, this is an atrocious billing system, but I I firmly believe that this is simply a gimmick to get around charging royalties without calling it so. Maybe I am biased, but the people working at Unity are not monsters, and I believe the employee who posted publicly and stated that the people implementing this system made sure that it would be under-reporting installs is speaking the truth. I think there is this misconception that Unity is simply gonna fire an event for every install and charge you directly for each report, but there is no way that this will be this simple. In all likelihood they will use this to keep a list of the popular games, and the actual fee will be based on heuristics like estimated sales and whatever other analytics and ads generated by the game clients. Sure it is a “trust me bro” system, yes it’s bad, yes it could be abused, I think it is fair to call it out and ask for a more transparent system, but deep down I just don’t believe that Unity is evil and did this to abuse the developers.
In all likelihood THEY will be the one forced to under charge, and really they’re doing this to force you into their ecosystem so it is likely that they will reach out the studios individually before incurring the fees. The whole thing is worded in a way that past a certain level of success, they will charge you royalties unless you play ball with them and serve ads and buy in other services. I would not blame anyone for calling it scummy, but I think it is important to understand their motives, they want to force your hand to use whatever they’re selling. The installation fee is just a smoke screen, they have nothing to gain bankrupting studios by making up numbers. Of course, this is just my own take. I think I have a fairly good understanding of how they operate, but I could be wrong.
Magic, thanks for posting this. I’ve been trying to find a good and clear explanation of that been going on since I started reading about people getting upset with unity during the week.
Unity is mad that mobile game companies acquire millions of users in a few months as they transition from soft launch to global, and then sell their companies for millions - if not billions - of dollars.
They want a cut of that pie, and in true unity fashion, they chose the most inept way of doing that.
If you have developers of games like Cult of the Lamb feeling scared, you did it wrong.
You protect your indies, you protect the people making art with your product. The people who invested 3 million and are making billions in the mobile ads game? That’s your target.
How they could be this inept is astounding…
Also, I’ll echo the other commenter’s statement in saying the article is very well written. They just weren’t able to really answer the “why” portion very well. John Riccitiello wasn’t wrong when he said this plan wasn’t designed to affect 90% of their customers - but it also doesn’t mention how that remaining 10% makes more than that 90% combined.
They’re wet go, John Riccitiello! That’s why I recognized that assholes smirk in the thumbnail. He used to be president of EA. No surprise he’s brought those scummy tactics over to unity.
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