I’m confused. I’ve never licensed a game engine, but I figure you’d write what charges you pay into the contract, and as far as I know, you can’t just add additional charges in later without renegotiating the contract. At least, you’d have no way to enforce those. So I’m sort of at a loss how this is even supposed to work.
The game engine is licensed as a subscription. When January 1st rolls around and the dev’s meed to renew their subscription it will have these new terms. Their options are to accept this or to never update their games again.
Makes sense. I hope the unity guys come to their senses. This whole thing seems rather self-destructive on the company’s part. Unity is far from being a monopoly, with one competitor being free and open source (Godot). And pulling stunts like these, even if you walk them back later, does not engender trust.
It would be a shame if they were forced to follow through with this threat. Cult of the Lamb is a great game. I'd be curious to know if this changes their plans for their next big content update, which they'd tentatively moved to late 2023 back in August.
i have a couple Unity games that are close to shipping, i think i’ll hold off on that and rewrite in Godot instead. I was already considering it since working with Godot is a thousand times more pleasant than Unity anyway.
It shines in 2D where Unity falters, yes. But it’s perfectly capable of doing 3D competently. It’s shaders and lightning pipelines that are a bit rough on the edges, but that can be overcome with time with more brainpower coming in to contribute. The scripting is also far more robust than the hodgepodge that Unity tries to pass off as C#. The great advantage is that Godot is a non-profit foundation with a transparent governance model. Not a predatory venture capitalist behemoth like Unity.
Godot is a passable engine. It doesn't have a massive pile of money behind it, but it'll generally do most things adequately.
Honestly - and I may be biased as I'm a AAA dev who works with the engine - Unreal is really the way to go. Reasonable pricing on a powerful engine. The main issue is that it's bloated as hell and there's a learning curve... but if you're an indie, it's just as usable as Unity. Plus if you wanted to get into AAA development someday, Unreal is super popular and used everywhere.
It’s been really great for 2d, 4.0 made it really good for 3d, and it’s even decent for general GUI applications, as an engine it feels ready for wider adoption to me.
I think it’s not up to Unreal quality, but for the vast majority of indie games I believe it’s enough.
Curious if some of the many internal AAA engines out there might start to get shopped around as a new alternate to UE. Sony, Ubisoft, and Microsoft all have a few in house engines that at least on paper seem viable for branching out — the biggest obstacle would be support, I suspect. Which isn’t a trivial obstacle, to be clear.
idTech is due for a resurgence. Maybe Valve could even get a revival in usage of Source.
Come on. I don’t expect the average person to be an expert at this, but a professional animator should understand that the human face is a bit more complex than Mr. Potato Head. You don’t just slap a grin on there and call it a day. It’s not like this is some groundbreaking experiment, and nobody has ever tried to animate a face before.
Member since 24 July 2004 here. Doesn’t feel like 20 years, but it’s also hard to imagine having ~5Tb of installed games across multiple launchers just… available. Plus emulators and other resources. Steam was a pain in the arse at first, but they made it work, and they saw beyond the limitations of dialup tech. I was all for it at the time because I had one of the few Coax connections (NTL at the time, later taken over by Virgin Media) which at that point I believe was 10Mbit… Of course, nowadays we have Gigabit FTTP rolling out throughout the UK, so this seems really quaint, but it’s pleasing to see how far we’ve come.
The US coverage still sucks. Sort your shit out guys, you’re 20 years behind the UK, and we’re a good 10 behind Norway, Hong Kong and others thanks to Twatcher.
I’m always shocked at how behind the US is in some areas of tech despite having so many of the big tech companies located there. Like you say their internet coverage and terms of packages, like still having data limits in 2023. Also the fact that they still sign for card payments in shops, when we’ve been though both chip and pin and contactless since that method was common.
Yeah - I don’t even cary cards with me any more, it’s all on my phone. Including many store cards (Coop, Texaco, Shell, McDonalds…) which automatically pick up without me doing much - I scan, it works.
The only thing I can think is that the US is such a fractured environment with Federal, State and Local government, each with different jurisdictions, rules and taxation, that trying to get it to work would be beurocratically difficult. But at the same time, it’s so ruled by corporations that surely they’d want to push the easiest way - flip your phone out and wave it to pay, easy and secure, so make it happen :D
Well fuck me, apparently. The Adobe and Sibelius fees already break me, and I’ve invested enough in Unity assets (not to mention the learning curve) to get a game close to preproduction, and this could drive me out.
I’m a tiny Dev just trying to break into VR, console, and mobile by myself, and am dirt poor with no support, just my knowledge and talent. I’m working on three beta projects, but this makes me scared to continue on Unity.
I’m a good designer and developer with industry experience, but my health has forced me into smaller Indy projects. I put all my eggs in Unity’s basket and now it feels like they’re ditching me just at the point I was ready for production.
You might wait at least a few weeks before throwing everything down - There’s been a lot of backlash, so much that Unity might walk this back or change it entirely.
The problem is they keep changing the license terms every 6-12 months and the changes have always been retroactive. I think they've changed it about once every year for the last 5 years and this year they did it twice. Games often take years to make and that means you might have no idea what the terms are going to be by the time you're ready to release.
So lets say they walk this back. What about next time?
It doesn’t seem right that they can retroactively change their terms and just decide you owe them money. I’m guessing this is legal since they are doing it anyways?
It's really no different than a service upping their subscription fee or a grocery store raising the price of eggs. There's no law that says the price will remain the same forever. You can of course add it to the terms of a contract, but it's at your (in this case Unity's) own discretion.
The main difference is that if you built your product on their platform, you don’t have the option to pick a different vendor for what you’ve already built like you would for subscriptions or eggs. It feels much more akin to extortion to me.
You built your product on their platform and agreed to the terms they set. Thats a level of commitment you put in. Them changing it afterwards is forcing you to agree to new terms that you wouldn’t agree to if you weren’t forced.
If the issue is using their servers, or keeping the runtime code updates, there should at least be the option of self hosting or locking into an older version.
Having said all that, I know very little about vendor contracts and don’t doubt you when you say legally its the same as any other price change. It feels different because of the lack of choice.
Oh, I’ll keep going, for sure! (…with one eye on developments.) But now I also need to prepare contingencies if their licensing goes the way of Avid, Adobe, and most recently Reddit and the bird one.
Something major might have to change and I can’t be blindsided by it, so I have to carve out time to deal with this, anyhow.
It’s not like nobody warned you Unity was bad, they’ve been hounding developers forever. I’ve personally been warning people to not touch unity and instead use the vastly superior Unreal Engine, ever since the UDK days. This isn’t the fall of Unity, it’s mid descent.
Sometimes it seems to me that almost everything that isn’t FOSS/non-profit goes down the shitter these days in the name of profit. It really does feel like the only way to avoid getting fucked over is to completely ditch commercial stuff.
Also, Oblivion just wasn't amazing. It was fine. More than good enough, even. But it was also just unmitigated and completely ubcofused sidequest sprawl. In my attempts to experience all that it had to offer, I ended up feeling like I experienced nothing of value.
I heard a lot of complaints from people that tge camera is way too close when you talk to someone and their dead eyes look weird. And it's true, but i find it way worse that EVERYONE just stares at you. If you walk by their eyes are glued to yours. It's such a strange thing.
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Aktywne