This really does seem like Unity is destroying their business for pennies. Mobile game display ads seem like a very, very low value business to be in and I would imagine rates are going down all the time. Unity may manage to wipe out AppLovin by burning down the rest of their business, but winning king-of-the-hill on top a pile of ashes does not seem to be a high value position.
Edit:
It's as if Unreal wants to be king of glossy, fancy, high value brochures, magazines, and books. Unity wants to be king of phone book yellow page ads.
> Mobile game display ads seem like a very, very low value business to be in
Might be much less prestigious than selling games that aren't predatory, but Unity does in fact make a lot more money from selling ads in mobile games than licensing and by a very wide margin.
The sad truth is that for every "real gamer", there are 10+ regular mom and pop playing candy crush and buying boosts every other day.
> Create Solutions (Game engine) second quarter revenue of $193 million was up 17% year-over-year.
> Grow Solutions (Ads) revenue of $340 million was up 157% year-over-year
And an even better exerpt:
> This quarter we partnered with
one of the leading dating apps in the world, Tinder, to power their video ad monetization. Expanding
beyond games is part of our goal of providing the most comprehensive platform for the App
Economy, adding value to customers.
Customers are not players here, they are the companies using Unity.
I wish they'd go the way of Epic and make an actual game with their engine. Maybe they could make some extra income if they made anything good.
They've tried a few times and given up each time. It's pretty embarrassing when they've done things like released a fully featured multiplayer FPS demo that doesn't actually work out of the box and has a custom editor tool manager, custom scene loader, and custom networking layer that were never merged into mainline unity. Meanwhile they still have no official stable networking module. The old functional one was sunset and the new ones are still in beta.
> NOTE: Due to a bug in Unity 2018.3, you have to take the following step right after the initial import: 1 Search for Firstperson_Projection in the Project search field. Select the 4 shaders, right click and reimport them. 2 If you have script compile errors related to entities, you need to remove and re-install the entities package.
> One day soon we will remove this note and there will be cake.
> Once the editor is ready, open the Project Tools Window by navigating to FPS Sample > Windows > Project tools.
> Keep this window docked as you will use it a lot. From here you can open the levels, build assetbundles and build standalone players.
Unity does make games, but they are codeveloped with external studios and not branded as being made by Unity.
There was a fear in upper management of labeling these projects as having been made by Unity because customers might perceive Unity as competing with them.
So Unity is a digital ad company that gives away a game engine, or sells it at a loss, as a way to sell ads targeted based on what they know about the people playing the game. Ad revenue is in decline across the whole industry, so now Unity is looking to get a bigger slice of the pie by displacing AppLovin as the data harvester/ad provider
Aside: I wonder how much user data Unity-based games harvest from mobile devices. This may shed some much-needed light on privacy, advertising and mobile games.
There's just no way this change is actually gonna happen. Many prominent indie developers have already announced they'll be switching away from Unity for future projects, and you have to think that larger studios are drawing the same conclusions. The ship is sinking.
Unity will retract this. Switch to revenue share or whatever. They'll eat a huge loss of trust because of this idiocy, but they'll remain a relevant game engine. I just can't see any other scenario.
I think "loss of trust" is understating it. This is an existential threat for lots of studios, and I can't imagine them placing future bets on the platform.
This is exactly what’s happening. Studios’ strategies are moving off of Unity. None of the ones I know are going to do any further development in the engine on any future projects. One studio is rewriting their game right now to run on Godot. It’s been the biggest exodus I’ve ever seen.
They've gotten commodified. It's going to be like being Oracle in a Postgre/MySQL world. You'll have some big legacy customers who just can't switch. But the market as a whole was primed to pack up and leave anyway. Gamedev has high turnover, and what the new kids are going to gravitate towards is what works immediately for them, which Godot superseded Unity on out-of-the-box experiences a long while back, and now has the tutorial content to accompany it.
What Unity has in its favor is mostly in the Asset Store, but that's shifted towards being a commodity as well.
I wonder what they are thinking in making this move then. Someone mentioned Genshin as the big legacy customer and someone answered on why it doesn't make sense. So why do they think this is a good move? Is there really enough profit to be made off legacy customers?
The license pre-October 2022 actually explicitly allows you to continue using older versions of the software under the original licensing terms when you released back then. So there is no money in legacy customers, except Genshin-scale ones. And I doubt those guys are paying up anyway.
That's even weirder then. Is it like when Blizzard decided they wished they had owned DotA money and enforced new ownership rules for mods for their new games but ended up just getting bad press?
> but they'll remain a relevant game engine
For a little while. The problem is that Unity is a public company, merged with a malware company, and (currently) headed by somebody with no understanding of their own customers. But nobody looking to make games right now is going to start using Unity. Many indie developers are going to transition off, and the major players who still use it are likely going to find that Unity is going to start squeezing them to keep any semblance of profitability. Maybe big games like Genshin/Cities Skylines/Pokemon Go stick with it, but Unity doesn't survive that transition.
I'm not a gamedev, but I am hoping one of the actionable things from this situation is a call to action from the gaming community to put together more open-source game engine platforms, and for them to be more easily sharable.
I am sure there are reasons this is difficult, but with so many industries built on open-source compliant tools, gamedev feels like a no-brainer for it as well.
Revenue share is going to be worse for most indie developers - the .20 install fee is only bad for extremely high volume, low ARPU games. Basically mobile F2P. They deserve a different payment option, but switching everyone to revenue share is would be much worse for a typical Steam, $5+ indie game.
IMO the problem is more the arbitrariness of the change than the specific fee structure. It applies to games that are already in development, it applies to games that already shipped. Even if it's strictly legal to pull that rug (I have my doubts), no one wants to build a business at another company's whim. Everyone is wondering if Unity just turned X% of their customers into sharecroppers, who's the next Y%? For indies that will be an especially acute concern since they have very little leverage.
Better fixes in no particular order: a grandfather clause, delay the new fees, fire the CEO.
Would it be any better of it there was retroactive revenue share? I agree it is shittily rolled out, but things like the retroactivity are the issue, and the ability to actually count install. Not the install fee itself. I am responding to the "it should have been rev share" mentality, which is totally grass is greener.
$0.20 is the minimum, you pay for every device they install on every time. Anytime they offload and reinstall, you pay again. Every additional device, upgrade, or replacement, you pay again. You’ll also pay then current rates, whatever Unity decides those are.
No abuse needed to lose money with this, I’ve probably installed the same games 20+ times over the years.
They can probably track accurately enough to identify that 90% of games aren't worth billing. Then once they are working with the top 10%, they can negotiate something that makes sense, like submit your monthly sales number, and Unity will use that as a limit on install count.
I agree what they are saying isn't workable, but that idea of install based fee could work, and would be better than a royalty for many.
Not unless you are giving away your game for free. Otherwise your limit is some small multiple of sales. They have said demos don't count, webgl doesn't count, piracy doesn't count, etc..
It would be easier if Unity just said they won't charge for installs past the number of sales. But most of the nightmare scenarios people are coming up with are not real.
Unity has been very inconsistent about communicating what will and will not be counted. I've seen two different channels from Unity saying that demos will or won't be counted. And practically, Unity has no way to verify what is and isn't a fraudulent installation (or if they do, they're not telling us). Imagine the pain in the ass it's going to be too contest this bullshit. And the risk remains unlimited because installs on new machines count.
Ultimately the main issue is that people made business decisions about using Unity under the assumption that the license and payment structure they were using could not change. That is no longer true by demonstration. I'm sure there's a lot of devs who are simply unwilling to deal with a vendor who changes the terms like this.
Their current CEO is one of those generic executive types with a background selling snacks, sporting supplies, and private equity investments. His prior game industry experience was running Electronic Arts so well that the board forced him to resign. This does not sound like the path to anything other than short-term “number go up” management.
I don’t disagree but in this day and age, this kind of uninspired management is all most corporations care for.
The days that, say, a company whose main bread and butter is engineering is seeking out an engineer to lead their company are well and well and true behind us.
Nowadays most companies are looking for a “number go up” guy.
Definitely: the kind of people on corporate boards are definitely looking for candidates like themselves. The rest of us should factor that in to decisions and avoid being dependent on companies with warning signs like this unless it’s something easily replaced.
It's kind of amazing just how big a Rubicon they crossed. Like, they're going to walk the changes back at this point, I don't think that's even in question anymore – but it won't matter. They have broadcast loud and clear that they can and will alter the deal.
This is the biggest issue. Unity have clearly signaled that the previous and current user agreements to use their software are useless as they may be retroactively changed at any time.
What company would put their bottom line at risk dealing with these terms?
Unity is already making more money from ads than from engine license sales. Most developers don't pay for using the engine. Ad sales pay for engine development.
I'm not an industry expert (mobile gaming) but currently (14/09/2023) App Lovin (NASDAQ:APP) is worth more than Unity (NYSE:U) and they make twice as much in revenue with a higher profit margin (less negative).
Its seems like advertising is where its at with mobile gaming and I don't why that will change anytime soon.
During his tenure at EA, Unity CEO previously floated cash micro transactions to purchase in game ammo if a player ran out but could not find any.
Generally speaking it’s not hard to argue corporate leadership has lost the fucking plot altogether and are steering everything in to a stone cliff face.
Data driven fiat economics and viral media is being weaponized as a mathematical minority hallucinate they are some essential element of reality itself and not just a few meat bags LARPing hand me down spoken tradition.
It's like the classic startup ideas around "People need to organize their consumption of X, so if we just put in a button allowing them to buy X next to their lists they'll buy it from us!"
Missing the point that most people don't want that.
Except that Genshin will not be subject to it. Genshin Impact is made by Mihoyo, a Chinese company. In order to sell Unity licenses to Chinese customers, Unity Technologies created a joint venture called Unity China, and, as is standard Chinese government policy, it must be majority-owned and controlled by Chinese entities. The majority owner of Unity China? Mihoyo.
(On top of that, it makes no sense — Genshin would be a poster child for revshare: a single entity that has made billions off microtransactions and that can be easily audited in one go.)
That explanation makes no sense, because their changes were achieving the exact opposite. Genshin has a high ARPU, $0.01 per install will capture basically none of that. (Yes, $0.01 because the Unity fees are regressive, the fewer installs you have the more you have to pay per install. Genshin Impact obviously will fall into the bucket with the lowest cost.)
If the goal were to get a cut of Genshin while treating everyone else as a rounding error, they'd have changed the contract to be a revenue share. Or they would not have made the install fees regressive.
> Mobile game display ads seem like a very, very low value business to be in and I would imagine rates are going down all the time
You'd be incorrect. It's a huge business. Less ads in general more paid install services as a result of ads for games, but both are huge businesses tbh.
It's a huge business, but it feels like it's much more of a commodity business.
Changing out the ad network is probably a matter of a fairly simple swap out of highly componentized components. I'm sure devs bounce from network to network fairly quickly chasing better revenue or support experiences.
Changing out a game engine is much heavier plumbing.
From that perspective, Unity might be going for a tail-wags-the-dog approach: making their ad platform stickier by tying it to something sticky, but then you'd expect to see something more direct towards that goal like "we don't allow use of other ad platforms in Unity projects".
They also went for a lot of splash damage on non-mobile scenarios-- ad-supported games don't really exist on the desktop (yes, a modest exception for some casual titles, typically stuff like Facebook-based games)
As I understand it they have been losing money for years at ever-increasing rates so it's not like what they were doing before was working. Maybe they are doing the wrong thing now but business as usual probably had no future.
if thats all it is, then it seems a simple solution... split the product up into two. One for mobile game development and the other for PC/Console game development.
Charge them separately at different schemes best tailored for those markets.
What a lovely way of saying that everyone who doesn't leave the platform is about to become a Ubisoft tier Developer filled with spyware. Burning even their users that don't quit the platform. How absolute this decimation of their user base will be is almost impressive in how destructive this move has been. I almost have to commend it's comprehensiveness.
Unity may have damaged themself enough with this that AppLovin might get another chance to buy. Unity’s stock price has dropped 8% since this was announced.
Another fun fact, the Unity CEO and several board members sold some of their stocks a few weeks ago. [1]
It is not the same. D&D fans can of course shit on WotC and Hasbro, but they would still be D&D fans in the end of day even if changes were not reverted. Fans can't just go and become fans of "free and open source D&D".
Individual people are weak and not rational. Majority will always continue to pay for entertainment companies products and bring money no matter how bad they treated by said companies. Think of Disney or Electronic Arts games.
Unity Technologies is a B2B software and service provider. Their decision to do a rag pull under 10,000+ of businesses will force everyone in industry to diversify. Unity not going under anytime soon, but now every single CEO and CTO in gamedev will be doing research on alternatives simply because pricing Unity come up with is not viable for a lot of games.
It's a lot easier, I think, to switch from D&D 5E to Pathfinder 2e than it is to switch from Unity to Unreal/Godot or whatever. The stakes are a lot lower, that's for sure.
Yeah you can switch to Pathfinder, but you wont just forget about D&D existence and there still gonna be tons of friends unaware of drama who prefer D&D. Like there is still tons of Star Wars fans who continue bring money to Disney even though they might hate the company.
At the same time gamedev business is still a business and Unity is now unreliable supplier. Today we are lucky, but their ToS and fee changes could literally kill my company overnight in slightly different circumstances. Businesses that not mitigate risks like this go bankrupt really fast so no one sane will ever trust Unity after this rug pull.
The stakes are lower and I think that's why these companies get away with it with consumers. Many consumers will never know as long as it doesn't hit them with a paywall. But when serving other businesses, they know and will NOT forget (because they will literally be hit with a paywall).
You're talking about the consumers, and you're 100% right in regards to them. But you seem to be equating D&D fans to the game studios, and I see that as a false equivalency.
Consumers of Unity games == consumers of D&D
Companies based on the OGL == Companies based on Unity license
WotC/Hasbro == Unity
D&D consumers =/= companies based on Unity license
In both cases, a large corporation (WotC/Hasboro, Unity) captured the space with promises that their platform would be free to use in perpetuity. In both cases, smaller companies were built around this garuntee; they naively thought that in perpetuity meant in perpetuity. In both cases, these smaller companies that popped up grew the large corporations to what they are today.
In both cases, the corporation tried to sneakily revoke the older agreements to trick these smaller companies into a terrible deal. In both scenarios, the corporation displayed rent-seeking behavior and proposed changes that would destroy the companies that helped them become what they are today.
> Fans can't just go and become fans of "free and open source D&D"
Not sure what you mean by this, but my friends and I are and always have been fans of "free and open source D&D" because that's literally what D&D has always been. That's why so many were angry with the OGL changes; thats why the OGL changes got dropped. And, once Hasboro tipped their hand, many did transition to free and open source tabletop games that respect their third party creators and consumers alike https://www.polygon.com/23587624/non-dnd-dungeons-dragons-og...
To clarify my analogy: D&D == gaming, WotC/OGL == Unity, Pathfinder == Unreal. You can still work in the "gaming" domain, but switch from Unity to Unreal. Similar to how some D&D tabletop studios are switching from OGL to Pathfinder while staying in "D&D" domain.
Wondering if Microsoft shouldn't have bought Unity, It could have made sense, because of its focus on developer, because of its interests in gaming and because it's a huge showcase for C# and .Net as many of the features of unity could have been folded into regular .Net or there could have been an opportunity to have a '.GameNet' version, maybe.
Monogame came in to fill in the XNA gap to a certain extent. Works pretty well as long as you're making 2D games. I'm trying to make a 3D game in it right now, and it's...okay, not great.
> I guess this could also be a play to make Microsoft interested in buying them out when money crisis hit.
That would be a stupid idea. Companies that are in financial trouble tend to be cheaper to buy, typically a lot cheaper if there’s only one serious buyer candidate.
If they think “when we’re almost broke, we can sell out to Microsoft for X million”, certainly they can get at least the same amount now that they aren’t?
Xbox doesn't provide a game engine, just lower level APIs. Unity is a popular way to get games on Xbox for folks who can't build their own engine. Further, things like HoloLens run Unity as a first class dev environment.
I used to work on both Xbox and HoloLens at Microsoft, but this is all public info.
I've been a pro Unity dev, as an employee and then a freelancer running a small team doing contracts for 10 years. I think this was in the back of my mind for a long time but yesterday a switch just flipped in my head and I decided Unity are just not to be trusted anymore, the company has lost all credibility and I never want to use Unity for another project. I'm learning Godot atm.
"Make your apps have a shitty UX, and sell your user's data without their consent, or we'll force you to discard all the work you did under our previous license"
In other words, any unity products going forward should be considered suspect. Any new games should avoid the entire company as they are clearly dishonest and have no interest in maintaining whatever contract terms you might agree to today.
When the anonymous source in the article said "they've been killing it," then I knew that the quote came from a source internal to AppLovin. Their exec team loves to say stuff like that.
>> “A fresh report…has thrown light on the situation”
…no it hasn’t. This was in their original announcement. Discounts are available for those using other Unity products/services (which includes their ad stuff).
Describing a 100% fee waiver for studios that start a new engagement with one specific service as "discounts... for those using other Unity products/services" isn't exactly being forthcoming.
This isn't my car insurance giving me a discount on my homeowner's policy, this is my landlord threatening to jack up my rent unless I use his garbage disposal company.
Sonic Color's remaster. But it's not a good example when talking about stability. I feel half of it is on the engine and half on the fact that they were porting a Wii game to modern consoles (despite being gen 7, the Wii had ancient techniques for lighting and textures. Which is where many issues of the port came from).
The Sonic Colors Remaster had an infamous strobing issue on the Switch before it was fixed. Cassette Beasts, a great game on Godot (https://godotengine.org/article/godot-showcase-cassette-beas... ), had weird performance issues for a relatively simple graphics game.
Godot on consoles isn't as seamless as Unity, unfortunately.
There’s quite a few. The biggest one right now is Godot. There’s still MonoGame, Open3D, Unreal, and others. Unity has one thing these others don’t (outside of Unreal) and that’s a healthy asset store. Solo indie devs aren’t necessarily the best artists. We know the math, but lack the eye.
I do have the eye, but lack the skills in my hand. I can do shiny art, but am so slow compared to an skilled artist. So why should I do their jobs?
Blender has also an asset store btw, but not really comparible (yet). But the blender foundation would be a player I would trust to invest in them. I always stayed away from unity and it seems my gut feeling was right.
I’m aware of the various assets stores and anyone who compares them has never used Unity’s. There’s plenty of places to get 3D models. There’s one place to get game ready, rigged, low poly, high quality models and assets.
Every store requires work on the devs part, Unity’s doesn’t (or extremely little).
I also don’t want to give Unity any more money so buying assets from them and porting them isn’t my idea of a good time.
well I guess that's my personal issue. my projects weren't going for low poly so that's probably where Unity's asset options just fall off a cliff for me.
Granted, I was off the unity train for over a year for personal reasons, but it still helped get me into industry.
There’s quite a few art asset marketplaces though. You’ll find most art is sold across all of them as well as it’s obviously easy to do. The move by Roblox to make their creator store denominated in dollars is likely a move to reduce the friction to attract these sellers there as well.
The Unity asset store isn’t limited to Unity (yet…). If you’re ising Unreal or Godot or whatever, there’s no reason you can’t use assets from the Unity store. (With the exception of code assets of course)
Its fairly trivial to buy art assets from the Unity asset store and port them to Godot, there are tools to do it automatically. They are just meshes and textures after all.
One of the others is Panda3D. It's not on a lot of people's radars but you can use it with Python and C++. It's pretty code oriented which might not be everyone's cup of tea but I enjoy working with it.
Disney thanks you. No one else uses that engine really. It’s perfectly fine for 2008. It doesn’t have a modern rendering pipeline, doesn’t support DX12, Vulkan, or Metal.
If that’s your requirements, use my engine Reactor3D.
Technically it's from around 1993 so it's even older! There's a decently size community around it gets about 20,000 downloads a month which isn't that bad.
Godot is already a great, viable option for many games, and it's only getting better with each point release. Official (paid) console ports are coming in the near future. An asset store is coming, probably next year.
It's not a drop-in replacement for Unity, but nothing is.
Godot and yes although it isn't at parity at this point as more people adopt it it will increase in the number of features, especially if people choose to support it monetarily.
Typically antitrust laws apply to a company using a monopoly in one industry to behave anti-competitively in another. Unity is behaving terribly, but they aren't a monopoly, and this isn't really even anti-competitive, it's just shitty. There's a greater case that they aren't properly representing the fiduciary interests of their shareholders.
In this case, it seems that they are wanting to leverage Unity's dominance in mobile gaming as a way to out-compete rivals in the mobile advertising space. Questions for lawyers: Is Unity's share (more than 70% of the top mobile games in the market) large enough to be a monopoly? Is this move to displace rivals in advertising behaving anti-competitively?
Has any real lawyer got any idea whether the unity license update is unconscionable? I have this vague notion that the bar is lower for contracts of adhesion.
TFA mentions "UA platform" several times but doesn't mention what that means. Can someone enlighten me? Google isn't disambiguating things much either. Thx!
Am I misunderstanding something here? This seems like a racket scheme! (As in a "shame if some 'hacker' on 4chan were to 'install' your already shipped game a million times a second racking up our new fee... unless you do what we want" type of extortionary deal.)
I don't find this particularly surprising. This wasn't much of an extrapolation. I stopped playing many computer/video games years ago because I had a sense that monetization was going to suck the delight out of them.
Capitalism as it works right now demands continuous, ever-increasing growth. When you saturate one source of income, you have to create an entirely new one. We went from games that were complete at shipping to games with DLC. Then we got microtransactions, lootboxes, invasive advertisements, platform revenue cuts, forcing always-online, and now this.
I suspect their next trick will be that play time of games that use their engine needs to be monitored and they'll demand some sort of royalty for every X minutes played. Some day companies will find a way to monitor every breath you make and every step you take, too. The money machine must be fed.
Hmm, I wonder if they get the 0.20 cents per install from adds? Then again it would be extremely ironic if they would charge more for install than they can provide revenue via adds...
This isn’t even close to accurate. For one thing, developers already pay to license the Unity engine, it’s only free if you agree to keep the unity logo loading screen and make under a certain amount of money.
Two, unlike the Reddit API changes which just annoyed mods at worst (yes there were problems for people with disabilities but that is such a small percentage it was basically a rounding error for them) this is an existential threat to F2P mobile games which are Unity’s largest market by far. When you aren’t directly selling the game and the only way to make money is to get as many downloads as possible in the hope that a certain small percentage buy IAPs these few cent fees per install could very easily wipe out their entire revenue.
Three, unlike Reddit which had no viable alternatives for the millions of end users to migrate to, Unity has far fewer customers and an extremely viable replacement in the form of Unreal and potentially Godot.
> The outrage is on par with the Reddit API drama (if anybody remember?)
You are spot on with this comment. Both Reddit's changes and Unity's changes will have/have had massive effect on the userbase.
Reddit's activity in many of the largest subreddits is down 50-90% from before July 1 when the changes went into effect. I imagine Unity will see similar numbers.
A per-installation fee model is bonkers: of course Unity is allowed to charge for their product, but if your margins are already pretty thin, it's pretty hard to budget for a per-installation fee – not even per sale!
How many apps are successful enough to meet the revenue thresholds (over $1mil), but are sub $1 ARPU, and aren't ad revenue driven? I'm sure there are some, but that's going to be a small number, and there likely can be some carve out for them.
Those thresholds are just the point when you'll be net negative. There's still a large range above that ARPU where you're making less money than before or with a different engine. Cult of The Lamb has already announced they will delist their game, and the Slay The Spire dev team have announced they're halting development on their new game to port it to a new engine.
Those are exactly the types of games that would be much worse off under an Unreal style royalty.
Cult of the Lamb is $24.99 on Steam
Unreal royalty is 5%, so $1.25 per sale
Unity is $0.20
So royalty is ~6x more
If there was a reasonable way to count installs (I don't think it is technically possible), install fee is much better than royalty for most devs who are not F2P apps.
This is not an accurate calculation as it assumes a single install per purchase.
Let's say I really like this game and install it on my laptop, desktop, and steamdeck (3 installs). Now, let's say I upgrade from win10 to win11 (4 cummulative installs). Alright, now I'm bored of the game an uninstall it. A year later the game recieved a new free DLC including new content. So, I install on my laptop, desktop, and steamdeck again, after I have updated both PCs from win10 to win11 or made some other hardware change (7 cummulative installs). And repeat this process every 2 years.
Unity's price is now much more than Unreals as I'm now costing the dev $1.40 after just the first update. Every subsequent update means I'm costing the dev another $0.60.
This may seem ridiculous, but anecdotally, it seems relatively common.
Again, the issue is not with Unity wanting to make more money, but with how they are trying to achieve this. Install based cost means you cannot estimate tooling cost as it is impossible to estimate situations like above.
As usual, a lot of it isn't even genuine outrage but people who just want to see a giant fall. I will even admit, as someone who didn't like Unity anyway I find this quite amusing.
Unity is my favorite developer tool. I think it is fantastic for both prototyping and production. I am (used to be) a VERY strong advocate for the platform. My current product won't be affected by these changes.
I'm still absolutely and 100% against these changes and am lobbying internally for us to explore different 3d engines not because of the price changes but because Unity has announced, loudly, they do not respect their own user agreement and may change it retroactively(!!!!!) at anytime.
I disagree. It is a lot of effort to build and maintain an engine. To be more precise, there is no such thing as a pure engine, but a platform with tools. Hardly anyone can build these things alone or even with a small team.
Most indie games and devs would not exist without Unity and it makes perfectly sense to use services from 3rd parties. We all do, we all rely on others.
On the other hand, a steady and trustworthy business relationship is key. While I understand Unity, they wanna earn money, I think it is bad to act in such a manner.
Regarding the "look a like" feeling: This only shows, that the market works this way. How could an engine change that?
The engine is the medium gamedevs work in so it does highly effect the types of games they even think about designing.
For instance the kinds of games made in RPG Maker vs Threejs vs Unity vs Pico-8. So by having more engines we'd get more types of games because the different constraints of those engines would impact the games developers will make.
I like you reasoning and I agree on this point. However, this also works the other way around: give people a new platform and tools, and let them focus on game design.
Why reinvent the wheel? The examples you mentioned would mean, that everyone who is using Pico-8 is basically a rip-off and not creative enough to build their own completely innovative platform. RPG Maker is Unity in disguise with a different business model, same goes for any other platform.
There are a lot of great ideas no one is willing to pay for. Sacrificing time for no pay is a hobby. I wish some many game dev a cash cow, so that they can focus on others things as well. I don't have a problem with artists going so-called mainstream to earn a living.
I do agree that new platforms and tools are important and I wasn't clear enough that I don't think that everyone needs to make their own tools and platforms but more of them is good. So I agree not everyone should reinvent the wheel
I wouldn't say that everyone is a rip off using Pico-8 in fact I think Pico-8 is amazing and I'm very grateful that the platform was developed because it's changed my views on game development and its author would agree that the medium you work in is very important. he idea of a cozy design space is what lead to its development.
And RPG Maker certainly isn't Unity in disguise (well I guess the older versions) and because they way it's designed leads to very different games then Unity even though you can create the same kinds of games in Unity.
I have no problems with artists making a living from their work either and I also have no problems with people exploring new ways to make games.
so I guess what I'm saying is not everyone needs to go out and make a Unity/Unreal/Godot clone but I wish more people would explore the fact that their tools are a medium and can greatly impact the type of art they make.
Square enix spent millions on their in house engines (luminous engine).
They have a good report on how and why it wasn't a great investment (10 year delays on projects).
They've switched to unreal for everything now.
Building a custom engine costs a lot of money and adds risk to a project. Games already have a very high probability of not breaking even and so publishers are going to be extremely reluctant to take on any additional risks.
I disagree.
It's not an engine problem if a game look like others. Most of the time, it's not lack of creativity too. It's often, not taking risk and applying what is already working.
Games haven't had that "dell identical" issue for years on end. Would you really believe Hollow Knight, Genshin Impact, and Pokemon Brilliant Diamond were all made on the same engine?
>And then open-source it and let the creativity roam free.
Well now you're just hoping for the moon. Many studios do indeed have their own engines in house, but I believe CryEngine is the only one that eventually became open source (over a decade, an aquisition, and two forks later).
I don't think this changes the enormous benefit of not having to build your own engine, specially for indie games. To me this is encouragement to avoid situations where you can have the rug pulled out from under you, i.e. either go full open source or have a better license agreement than Unity was offering.
We're well past "shouldn't be", unfortunately. Mobile tried premium games and it didn't work. They became free to play and there's only 3 real ways to monetize: ads, subscriptions (which include battle passes), and MTX.
Gabe Newell is always quoted for saying "piracy is a service issue". But it turns out it's a issue you can eliminate if you keep all your content on a server and the app is just a free, thin client. Mobile found its own way around piracy, and it found new markets even when "core gamers" left.
There are plenty of free to play games supported by ads that are fun to play. It's also a great funnel for converting a non-paying user into a paying user to disable the ads.
It is also a great way to hook up kids as early as possible to get the best tracking data and condition them to whatever it is, that you want to sell them.
With paying for games, the cost is clear. With ads, it isn't.
Edit: It's as if Unreal wants to be king of glossy, fancy, high value brochures, magazines, and books. Unity wants to be king of phone book yellow page ads.