The music was generally all over the place IMO. I hated how they played that cheesy violin theme whenever they caught a whiff of someone being even slightly emotional and followed it up with their upbeat main theme right after. It’s definitely something they should work out before next year. I don’t remember it being this bad in the past.
I hated how they played that cheesy violin theme whenever they caught a whiff of someone being even slightly emotional
That’s the thing, that wasn’t a sad emotional theme, it was literally their cue to get off the stage. They play music over them then the teleprompter says “PLEASE WRAP IT UP”. That’s why everyone is so pissed.
It’s almost like the CEO of the company (John Riccitiello) supporting the most Indie game developers holds 53 million dollars in EA shares or something…
Even, and most likely especially, if Unity does poorly does EA benefit… I bet ya Riccitiella knows all the features of Frostbite, but couldn’t tell you if you can do native reliable UDP networking in Unity…
This is what we get with propietary software. We can’t go to another entity or create one to develop the engine for us moving forward. We can’t take the current state of the engine and just patch it to keep existing games alive.
If you depend on some work and that work is being done by software only some other company control, this company is really in the control of that work.
I hope all the devs with weight followsuit. My little project moving won’t really disturb anyone but me. Sweeping and sudden policy changes like this are bullshit.
What I'm hoping is that gamers take some of the big pocket publishers that use Unity and abuse the absolute fuck out of them so they send their lawyers after Unity for the obviously unenforceable terms.
Unfortunately Unity will probably just settle with them for nothing to avoid them setting precedents.
TL;DR of the situation is that Unity released a statement 2 days ago saying they want successful developers to pay up to 20 cents every time a user installs a Unity game starting from Jan 1 2024, even if your game was already released. This caused a huge ruckus in the game dev community and many developers want to switch away from Unity.
Note that it’s “per install” (they clarified that reinstalling on the same device only counts as one install), not per unit sold. And Unity will also track pirated copies, so the devs would still have to pay the fee even if they didn’t sell it to you.
It’s because they literally don’t know how to differentiate a download from legit and illegitimate. They’re going to track every time their bundler is downloaded and bill the developer for it, that would include pirated copies and legit copies alike.
That’s assuming pirates would go through the trouble of removing said functionality. Pirates hate trackers, so they might do it, but not necessarily, as often the priority is just to get the game working.
That’s a recent change. According to the faq on the official forum, initially the idea was to charge every reinstallation. Then they realized it was crazy. Now it’s every first installations:
If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs. (Updated, Sep 13)
I fail to see how they can guarantee it’s the first install.
I game inside a VM with GPU passthrough and I’m pretty sure it would be trivial to install-bomb any game to rack up install numbers and costs.
Moreover, would anyone even trust any number of times Unity tells you your game was installed?
They could a magical 10% that would be hard to prove/disprove.
Anyone with a half-competent legal team would stay the fuck away from any of this nonsense going forward.
However, I’m not knowledgeable on any Game Industry economics, but isn’t $0.20 on a $20-$60 game negligible? I understand some people will have multiple devices so the developer could be out $1. On a $20 game that someone sells 1000 copies, that’s only $200 of $20,000 sales (maybe $800 in fees at the high end). I’ve used Unity before and it’s still a pretty solid game engine with easy to use tooling; using it would definitely save you time to build your game (time=money). Additionally, if I were to be building a game studio, everyone knows unity, so it would be easy to hire or find contractors who can help with pieces of the game. It makes sense from a business standpoint for me unless I’m missing something.
Is there a max fee? On the opposite side of the spectrum I could see DDOS-like attacks on game developers where an attacker can spin up a bunch of virtual machines and then keep installing the game to charge the developer $1mil dollars.
It’s the complete unpredictability that devs and businesses hate. 2% of every purchase they can plan for, but with install fees they could get randomly billed for copies that were already sold, and that is unacceptable. This isn’t a one time fee, whenever somebody installs the game on a new device, the dev gets charged. Not to mention the fact that some people might have multiple devices, but randomly in 3 years they could get a new PC and suddenly the dev gets charged again, all the while the dev didn’t make anymore money from that copy. Who the heck would agree to a system like that?
Not to mention that if a game gets added to a service like GamePass, then the service gets the bill. No way Microsoft would say yes to that, which means the Dev misses out on deals that could’ve made them a bunch of money.
A competitor could literally buy one copy, make a script that spins up 1000 vms a minute and downloads your game over and over on “new devices” and put you out of business
they really only have themselves to blame. Part of the task when you are making a major software platform decision as a company is to research your vendor’s financial strategy
This is basically victim blaming & the old Unity license was fine because it allowed you to create console ports. Godot still isn't a valid solution for consoles.
Why isn't Godot a solution for consoles? Is it not implemented yet? Just curious. I'm starting to read about Godot given the debacle that Unity's management caused. It's been great advertising for Godot.
As others have said, I can’t fathom how they’re going to get this optimized for switch. I had a relatively powerful PC at launch and it was struggling to reach a consistent 45 fps on pretty modest settings.
I think was pretty badly optimised at launch and they did fix it a little bit. Don’t think it’s enough for the switch though so it will be interesting.
If they have managed to optimise it for switch then hopefully an update can be made for PC
No, what killed it was them taking on too many high profile licenses at the same time and trying to juggle high workload and high demand with short turn around. Pair that with the fact that they change and work on things between episode releases, too.
Also related, Bill Willingham, who wrote The Wolf Among Us, released his IPs in the public domain as a middle finger to DC, who’s not paying him royalties, nor did they consult him on the making of the game. - exputer.com/…/the-wolf-among-us-creator-public/
Unless the CEO walks and takes his yes-men with him, I don’t see Unity recovering from this self-inflicted shitshow in the near term. I bet it has motivated a lot of devs to look at the viability of using Godot instead and being free of future shakedowns.
If you switch to Godot and implement a feature you needed but it didn't have, please do us a favor and take that part of the code and put it out there under the MIT license (unless I'm misremembering what license they use) it will help the next person switch easier
nitter.net
Ważne