I weep for all the talented people working under squenix. They seem determined to squeeze blood from a rock, shattering it into a thousand tiny shards, few of which are worth paying for anymore.
So now it’s just a convoluted way to do revenue share.
FFS, just dump the install fee. Now it’s just an excuse to spy on their users since unity would have to come with telemetry to track installs.
If I install a game I bought on both my desktop and steamdeck, the devs have to pay unity twice. If I uninstall it and re-install it, they have to pay it thrice. Four times if I ever use my laptop to play.
If I share the game with my dad and sister via steam family share, the devs have to pay yet another two times.
But I only paid for the game once.
It’s complete insanity. Do they have to pay again for every update, does that count as a new install? What about games on subscription services?
But drama almost never kills FOSS software. It just causes it to fork. FOSS software can become like an olympic flame that just keeps getting passed from dev to dev. Once there are people actively using something, those same people are motivated to fix any issues they have with it, or add any features they are missing. That then drives improvement of the software, which in turn drives adoption, which drives more improvement…
There was huge drama around Emby going closed source, but FOSS Emby simply got forked, becoming Jellyfin.
There’s an example just within lemmy, the lemmur app apparently stopped development due to some drama, but it got forked and Liftoff picked up right where it left off.
Yes. There can be drama around FOSS projects, and there often is. Loosely organized groups of volunteers putting together serious software don’t work as efficiently as a paid team of devs led by a visionary with final say. But FOSS projects are capable of becoming self-perpetuating in a way proprietary software can never do. Once they reach a high enough level of adoption, they are very hard to kill.
The real threat is Godot. It’s getting better and better. Why pay for a commercial game engine, when you can use one that comes with a literally no strings attached FOSS license? And you have full access to the source code, so you can fiddle with any line of code, if need be.
Ah. Yet another reason for game studios to turn away from commercial dev tools and turn to FOSS software like Blender and Godot.
And since game devs are, you know, developers, they can even contribute to these tools with heir dev time, improving them and accelerating the industry shift away from this commercial bullshit even more.