
Releasing the Unity C# source code - pathompong
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/03/26/releasing-the-unity-c-source-code/
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whitten
Important notes from article:

This Friday we published the Unity engine and editor C# source code on GitHub,
under a reference-only license.

We are not releasing Unity as open source. Not even a little bit. (Sorry.)

We also do not take pull requests against the C# reference source code.

That’s it! The reference source code repository is at
[https://github.com/Unity-
Technologies/UnityCsReference](https://github.com/Unity-
Technologies/UnityCsReference), enjoy using it as reference for your Unity
learning needs.

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andrewmcwatters
This eerily reminds me of how Valve Corporation handled the now abandoned
Source engine, and it's 2004, 2007, and 2013 mainline public SDK branches.
After this experience, I will absolutely not consider using closed engines.
The feeling of putting years of work into a project on a closed engine only to
run into issues further down the line that cannot be resolved by proprietary
roadblocks caused by the engine's company changing direction instills a burn
that you cannot heal from and takes away a sense of innocence on a hobbyist
platform.

~~~
pheldagryph
Any suggestions for open engines with some similarity to the tools provided in
Unity3d, Lumberyard/Crytek, or Unreal4?

~~~
digitalether
Check out Godot! It Looks very promising. I mess around with MonoGame but will
look at switching over once they fix some of the bugs with the newly added c#
support.

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gumby
The economics of the game engine business are terrible. The economics of the
game business in general are terrible already and when you're in the engine
business you've got a big cost overhead with a revenue stream made up mostly
of 0, a few small trickles, and then some big wins which turn out to be capped
licence buy-outs, because your _customers_ are in a business with poor
economics. It's worse than selling to Apple. AFAICT (I have no special inside
knowledge) Unity isn't making any real money (I believe even a company the
size of Microsoft pays only $2M/year, though they may also pay per-title
fees).

As far as I can see the only way it works is the way Unreal does it: they
develop their engine for their own needs and coincidentally let others do it
(cf Lumberyard). It's conceivable that a "casual consortium" a la GCC, Linux
et al could build one but I don't see any signs of it.

    
    
      a very steep power law, high marketing (and even licencing) costs, heavy competition...  It's a $100B market but most of the profit is around the core product, not in it.

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jlturner
I’m really glad they did this (even better if we could compile and fix our own
bugs). I’d love to see the sources of the binaries linked — there’s a lot
missing from the C# code (ie. I’d love to see how cloth is implemented and why
is it crashing on me so frequently).

