Assets are safe, but they often need to be re-rigged or re-formatted. It’s still a non-trivial task though. Levels will need to be rebuilt, open worlds have to be started almost from scratch, and a lot of other things I can’t think of off the top of my head.
The real problem is underlying systems. Unity often handles networking, render engines, game logic and most other things. The reason Unity was so popular was because it was easy to use (and free). Game code will need to be at minimum heavily refactored, if not rewritten, as anything that interfaces with the engine needs to be changed over. Just like you can’t just port c++ -> c# without major changes, you can’t port a game engine without major changes too.
Unless theyve built everything as a separate code bundle, only interacting with the engine at a bare minimum, there’s no way to change with minor impact. It’ll be a huge project that will also require the engineers to learn a new stack that behaves differently, further slowing down the process.
Technically you’re not wrong. The work is done, the logic already exists.
But systems like Unity aren’t like other code where you can rip one section out and still have 80% of a working codebase. Game engines are as fundamental to most of their game code as the language it’s written in. It’s not like you can just drop things into unreal or godot, connect a few interfaces and call it good. You still have to write the whole thing from the ground up.
There’s not really anything other than unreal that has the same capabilities. This isn’t just going to kill unity, it’ll kill a ton of indie developers
That’s exactly what this is. They want to price out the $3-$5 games that unity is primarily used for. They make no revenue from those since the revenue threshold never gets hit.
They’ll almost certainly lower the revenue threshold next too
So basically they’re explicitly condoning it. That’s not just bad, but even worse that they’re doubling down that a delete+reinstall will charge the dev twice.
This will end a lot of indie projects and they’ve basically destroyed their good standing in indie dev circles.
I can’t even blame him. I would too. This is essentially a situation where the only option is going to be a rewrite from the ground up in a new language and new engine.
If I was an indie game dev I’d be questioning my future right now too.
That’s pretty much what I thought. Unity is so big because it offers a ton of features with a pretty permissive license. There’s not something comparable except unreal, which has an even worse licensing situation
TF2 was technically a Live Service when it was actively receiving updates. The fixes that are added by valve are an outlier, and doesn’t change game balance. Constant balance changes are a necessary part of any competitive game. I’ve got no interest in something that isn’t being updated semi-frequently.
Self hosted servers don’t make sense in most of these games anymore. Communities like this vastly overestimate the want for custom servers. Most gamers don’t really care, for better or worse.
I absolutely will accept it because it brings better gameplay. FPS games are more fun when there’s constant balancing changes and new content on a schedule. It’s infinitely better than older game models where if one thing is broken you’re stuck with it for the entire lifetime of the game.
Being able to run my own dedicated server isn’t even something I’d want to do, nor would I want to play on player hosted servers.
When games go EoL, sure, require them to open source the multiplayer engine. But really, it’s not a big deal that an individual can’t host a Battle Royale server.