The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn't track for me.
The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes makes less money than this so-called runtime fee.
I beg to differ, I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no revenue share/royalty pledge they had earlier, and ironically came up with an even worse monetization scheme.
In my opinion, the only reason this whole fiasco happened is because Unity the company has too many headcounts and has too much expense, and the reason for that is they grew too big, and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth, even if the company is much healthier if it had stayed smaller.
Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we ended up here. I think that says a lot.
> I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no revenue ...
Not quite. Unity merged with a company that sells mobile ads: ironSource. They are direct competitors of AppLovin, the dominant player in that market. The terms and backroom deals that Unity is offering devs will waive these fees if they use Unity's ad products instead of AppLovin. This is clearly an attempt to abuse their position in one market (game engines) to bolster their position in another market (mobile ads).
Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use their other (presumably inferior) products.
As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course the new fees will remain.
They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.
Based on the backlash, my prediction is that Unity either quickly reverses course (damaging their brand a little and perhaps costing the CEO his job) or stubbornly doubles down (damaging their brand a lot and giving Godot and others an opening to eventually rival them).
> Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use their other (presumably inferior) products.
The Personal and Plus tiers in particular now need to basically find additional 50 or so cents per install (factoring in platform fees and publisher fees), whereas for Pro and Enterprise tiers that figure is closer to under 10 cents).
In other words, once you start having to pay the Platform Fee on the Personal or Plus tier, it very quickly becomes cheaper to just get a Pro subscription and have the Platform Fee go away for 800'000 more installs on Pro (on top of the 200'000 you get without the platform fee on Personal/Plus).
For Personal tier you start paying after 200'000 installs (threshold), whereas with the Pro tier you start paying after 1'000'000 installs (threshold).
That gives us 1'400'000 installs that we need to pay for with the Personal tier and 600'000 installs that we need to pay for with the Pro tier, for which the runtime fee will be calculated and which are above the corresponding thresholds.
For the Personal tier, which has a fixed rate, the platform costs are then:
1'400'000 * 0.20 = 280'000 USD
For the Pro tier, with the volume discounts, the platform costs are then:
If we assume that a publisher might take around 50% (just an example value in the spreadsheet I used; though in practice can be as low as 20%), then that figure becomes:
On top of that, there are also the platform fees (like Steam might take 30% of your revenue straight off the bat, other platforms might take less), so the figure then becomes:
Personal full cost (overhead): 0.5 USD
Personal after 30% platform cut: 0.5 - (0.3 * 0.5) = 0.5 - 0.15 = 0.35 USD
Personal after 50% publisher cut: 0.35 - (0.5 * 0.35) = 0.35 - 0.175 = 0.175 USD
Pro full cost (overhead): 0.085 USD
Pro after 30% platform cut: 0.085 - (0.3 * 0.085) = 0.085 - 0.0255 = 0.0595 USD
Pro after 50% publisher cut: 0.0595 - (0.5 * 0.0595) = 0.0595 - 0.02975 = 0.02975 USD (close enough to 0.03 USD)
While the exact percentages might change, Unity asking for say 0.20 USD per copy (or effectively 0.175 USD in the example, because the first 200'000 don't have the runtime fee) means that you'll need to make more gross revenue per copy than that, because your publisher and the platform will both take some of that for themselves.
> As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course the new fees will remain.
I think you've got this wrong. Unity is (multiple really, but for the purposes of this) two products - the engine and unity ads. Unity ads is the money maker, this is an attempt at bridging that gap. Ultimately unity don't care how they pay you, they just want to know that if you're building a successful game off their products, they're going to get paid. They can't do a revshare (because for some insane reason they talked themselves out of that a few years back), so they're left with something that quacks like a revshare, but won't negatively impact their most profitable customers and force them to reconsider.
Ultimately, I think that's as far as they got with the analysis and failed to consider well... everything else.
> They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.
Any game whose monetization strategy is "ads" is uniformly trash-quality shovelware. They're not here for the long haul, they're here to optimize short-term profit and dump as much garbage on the app store as they can.
> They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.
Well if the reports are to be believed, developers were signing agreements with Unity which allowed them to make unilateral changes to fees. If so, devs really do have no business sense.
IANAL. In US contract law, a contract that includes a clause allowing one party to unilaterally change the terms at any time may still be enforceable, but there are limitations. Such clauses are often subject to scrutiny and may be challenged if they are deemed unfair, unconscionable, or against public policy. Courts may consider factors like the balance of power between the parties, the clarity of the clause, and whether there was mutual assent to the changes.
I'm not familiar with the specifics of Unity's usual contracts, but this is the kind of thing that a court might not take Unity's side on.
Probably very little. Are you implying that they were right to have signed agreements with Unity which effectively gives them controlling rights to the developers’ companies?
I could see that, but based on the massive stock unloads from numerous high level execs right before hand, it seems more likely to me that it's just another company that's going to be cratered inside of a year, stir up tons of controversy and legal problems with stupid decisions, and then everyone responsible will leave after the bankruptcy up millions of dollars. And another perfectly viable business will be stripped and sold for parts on the market because that looks better on balance sheets than just making and selling a product these days.
I don't think this is a problem of company structure. It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened. But if you hire the former CEO of EA - a guy with no low level industry experience and who left his last job because of poor financial performance - then this whole fiasco seems like it was inevitable.
A CEO under who EA introduced lootboxes. A person that proposed that when player runs out of ammo could make an easy instant payment for a quick reload.
Unity engine seems to flounder under him, despite rather insane headcount (7,703), acquisition spree laden Unity Technologies with significant debt...
I am not impressed, not with his ideas and even less with his results.
For comparison, Larry Elisson (Oracle) has distasteful business practices, but very profitable.
I have a few friends that work or have worked at Unity. This is purely anecdotal but from what I've heard it sounds like the place is fairly dysfunctional at this point. A lot of the dysfunction that exists now wasn't there even 3-4 years ago.
Then consoles all but killed arcades because it turns out no one really wanted to keep feeding quarters (and then dollars) into an unfair game even if that turned out to be cheaper than buying a game outright. Removing that monetization strategy improved the quality and diversity of games as well. I'm not keen on rolling back the clock to that version of yesteryear.
A key difference is that you paid nothing up front to play an arcade game compared to Battlefield 2024 (or whatever). There's decades of expectations/inertia not having microtransactions on home games, but I understand that is what publishers are trying to fight against.
It's worth noting that the death of the golden age of arcade games was due to no small part of the rise of console games. People didn't want to pump quarters into a machine to keep playing, they wanted to buy a game once and play it forever.
This guy wasn't proposing anything as crazy as pay-per-bullet. There's lots of games with limited ammo and you find more in the environment. Even in Doom you might run out of ammo for your favorite gun and need to put it away until you found another ammo pack in the level. This is why Valorant has a knife you can switch to, because if you waste gun ammo you run out on your main weapon. In Fortnite you have to find ammo and weapons in chests, etc. This guy was proposing an option to pay to refill your inventory immediately. But people heard "reload" and assumed something completely different.
The real problem with his proposal is it quickly falls apart if you think about it for even a minute. It's a classic pay-to-win mechanic. And once something is pay-to-win it becomes a slippery slope and a race to the bottom for the game makers. Every game has some amount of edge cases where you're playing only to realize "Damn, I'm out, this sucks. I'd pay a buck right now to refill." But once you add in some options to pay in those scenarios, the game maker has a perverse incentive to no longer make it an edge case. Some PM will realize if they make the rare event 10x more likely they'll make 10x more $$$$ and they're off to the races. They start messing with the ammo drop rates to create "pinch points" and now your super fun game really does require you to be "paying to reload" and it's not fun anymore.
This guy was trying (and failing) to present it as a player benefit but the reality is he know exactly where this road lead. It's the same place EA games with loot boxes landed in the end.
Arcades in the 90s used the countdown clock,more lives type buy in. You bought time, or they would make the game so seriously hard you had to feed it quarters to keep the game going. Paying on an instant 'hey you could use more ammo for 50cents' at a exploitive time is something I am surprised we did not see as a mechanic in arcades. But they probably would have if they had thought of it. But the idea of feed more quarters in to keep playing was most certainly there.
I remember there were arcade games where your health continuously drained and inserting another quarter would heal you. That's worse than a per-bullet price because you were losing even when there were no enemies on the screen.
I don't remember the titles because I played those kinds of games exactly once and never again. Total rip off.
It sounds like you're talking about Gauntlet Dark Legacy. I also remember guides about how to leave levels with more health than you entered them (there were ways to regain health). It's hard to single this series out as "a total ripoff" among all kinds of arcade games designed to extract quarters out of you. You can't expect someone to stay on a screen or backtrack forever. Some games use a timer, some throw an endless amount of mobs at you. The nature of the game (which was built in part around exploration) was that they used the health amount as HP + timer.
I don't think that's a thing in arcade games. There are pay to continue in arcades, and pay to win in regulated gambling that are light on gaming aspect, but never seen one in arcades.
Maybe it's similar to how there are "Dungeons and Something" || "Something and Dragons" but somehow never both?
Except this was in connection with Battlefield 3, a title you’d have to buy. So it’s more like buying the arcade machine but somebody still takes quarters from you anyway.
I saw a reddit comment from a Unity developer that alleged that Unity told them not to worry about the changes because this dev used ironSource for their ads. ironSource merged with Unity last year and other commenters were speculating that this whole thing is a play to try to coerce the huge amount of mobile games that are made with Unity to switch to ironSource.
To parent's opinion, I'd respond that bad management is a possibility in any company.
However, a broken revenue model misaligns incentives and makes user-bad decisions a certainty.
Laying it at the feet of management is blaming the messenger -- the root cause was revenue and expectations being strategically unbalanced.
It's surprising how many people watch companies make "dumb" moves and gnash their teeth over "how could they be so stupid?"
They're not being stupid... they're looking at the cards they have in their hand, what they need to win, and playing it the best way they can.
As people have quipped elsewhere in the comments, there were no ways Unity could deliver the financial performance that was expected of them, with a developer-friendly business model.
On the surface that is the case, but once you're a publicly traded company you're beholden to your shareholders, not your customers, so your goals and incentives changes drastically and "bad management decisions" gets made.
You think the management made a mistake, I think the management (as a result of going public) is the mistake.
That’s a simplistic view. “Beholden to shareholders” does not mean prioritising short-term gain at all costs. That’s not just my ideology, it is how publicly traded companies work a lot of the time, including the one that I work for.
To imply that there’s such a stark binary difference between a privately held and publicly held company misses a lot of nuance. Investors can want a quick out or be in for the long game in either case. The controlling parties pre-IPO have plenty of knobs they can turn to limit drive-by influence if they choose. If a company gets fucked by going public, it was already fucked before it went public, because the people behind the float either didn’t care about protecting the company, or didn’t know how.
In theory, that's true. But what I see every day is the opposite. It's essentially what people are calling "enshitification". Mostly short term decisions that screw customers up for a quick buck.
I do agree that private does not mean good. It all falls under the CEO/Founders in my view. But there seems to be way more greedy short term thinking leaders out there.
I can probably count in my hands the amount of companies I follow that are not prioritizing the short-term. Maybe I just don't follow that many companies and I'm biased, but that's the impression I get.
Public companies seem to have an even higher rate of short-term profit seeking though.
It starts out noble. Once a company goes public, the first few town halls after the shareholder call the CEO or CFO will be like, "Don't worry about the stock price, we're better than all the other short-termist companies, we care about long term quality and blah blah."
But bit by bit, little by little, like Pavlov's dogs the employees get trained to peek at that stock ticker around reporting time. And over time they sync up their decision making with that schedule, and internal planning starts to reflect it. And new initiatives get created and judged by investor reactions. And it's all downhill from there :-(
Sorry, it sounds like you're defending the system that doesn't empower the public good. I hear reports time and time again that private companies that go publicly are burned by the artificial and unnatural need for constant growth. Going public serves greedy individuals (shareholders) that have no connection to the service or product that real people depend on.
The CEO's role though is to help make the stock attractive to other investors, not just optimize for their own personal finances. I personally would expect most CEOs to hold a significant portion of their stock awards as a show of confidence in the future value of the company - if the CEO won't hold the investment, why should anyone else?
> if the CEO won't hold the investment, why should anyone else?
I don't think you understand how many shares a CEO has. There are directors at Unity throwing around hundreds of thousands of shares and I'm sure the C execs have an order of magnitude more than that. You never want all your eggs in one basket, if only because you don't want everything to be beholden to the power of your country's economy (something even a CEO can't control).
Surely the CEO has both interests, and securing resources for themselves is of higher priority than securing them for others. They might be expected to hold proportionally more of it than others, but I also would not expect any half intelligent person to put all their eggs in one basket just for the benefit of others.
>It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened
TBH I think the growth argument is better. Ricetellio isn't some especially bad CEO, and I'm sure 50 other CEOs woulda done the exact same thing if it wasn't him. Which is exactly why every other tech company was also hit with massive layoffs this year.
It's not some standout, it's the 20th consequence of actions every other public company pursued. Look at all the industries Unity tried to branch out into in 4-5 years and you see why they became balooned to 7K employees: https://i.imgur.com/3Ume4Qm.png
> Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we ended up here. I think that says a lot.
I've been thinking a lot about private versus public companies. Most of my favorite products come out of privately held companies. There is something about the incentives for publicly traded companies that encourages them to make poor choices. I think it is because there are effectively two forms of revenue: selling products/services and selling stock. And those two things often conflict with eachother to the detriment of the customer. However, with a privately held company, the loyalty is primarily to the customer. Thus the products are better because they need to be to keep the company afloat.
I don't think that means that public companies shouldn't exist, but I wonder how an individual can structure their publicly traded company to avoid having the company misalign its incentives with those of the actual paying customer.
My current theory is to focus more on revenue sharing instead of stock price. For example, dividend stocks. I don't think it completely solves the problem, but it at least moves things in the right direction.
>My current theory is to focus more on revenue sharing instead of stock price. For example, dividend stocks. I don't think it completely solves the problem, but it at least moves things in the right direction.
This can't be directly enforced. You can't make laws for what people to "focus" on.
Though there is a way to indirectly push this notion: Restrict all stock ownership to be a minimum of 10 years. This indirectly puts more focus on dividends.
It also puts more focus on the core misalignment you're alluding at but failed to see explicitly: The misalignment between short term gains and long term gains.
In the end whether private or public they care about profit over customer. But private owners tend to care about customers because customers represent an overall bigger gain in the longer term and private owners are playing the long game.
If all stocks had a minimum 10 year ownership requirement it will change all corporations to focus on long term gains. I believe this one change can fundamentally fix the problem we have with corporations.
Maybe we can test this.
The other thing that needs to be changed is public responsibility. If a company dumps illegal nuclear waste in some river, directly ask for minimum fines from all shared holders. First divide the fine by the shareholder amount, charge each shareholder. Then if it's below a 500 dollar minimum add the remaining amount to get it up to 500.
Pissed off share holders paying 500 will definitely get corporations to stop doing random crap. Maybe even funnel jail time to board members or C-level execs. If a corporation is responsible for deaths it's justice to place actual people responsible rather then giving "jail time" to a corporate entity that doesn't actually exist.
> If all stocks had a minimum 10 year ownership requirement
Then nobody would ever buy that stock, because they have no exit if things go south.
And then that's combined with
> If a company dumps illegal nuclear waste in some river, directly ask for minimum fines from all shared holders. First divide the fine by the shareholder amount, charge each shareholder. Then if it's below a 500 dollar minimum add the remaining amount to get it up to 500.
Again, who would buy that stock? What reward is worth that risk, especially when you've banned them from selling stock even if they see the company is doing shady stuff?
You wouldn't buy that stock because you represent people with short term interests. And that's the point.
You're a gambler, you dive in and immediately exit. Nobody buys assets this way in reality... when you buy a car or toothbrush you don't dip in and dip out like a mad man. Paper stocks removes reality away from assets and lets you buy 0.000001% of a shoe and immediately sell it in 1 second. The economy isn't improved, and instead you create a market of buying and selling paper. It's too abstracted. We need to lower the abstraction.
People buy assets for utility and long term investments. When people do HFS it's basically a gambling ring, you're making money off one idiot trying to sell paper to the next idiot. This influences the board which influences corporate behavior to cater to your gambling tendencies.
10 year terms makes it so you make money by putting your money in an ACTUAL investment to create something better. The company caters to your long term interests. You invest in Tesla because you expect the company to change the entire automobile industry and you expect that business endeavor to succeed in 10 years. Hype, bullshit and just trying shit out because gamestop seems fun will no longer be part of the equation.
Maybe 10 years is too long. Make it 5 years.
>Again, who would buy that stock? What reward is worth that risk, especially when you've banned them from selling stock even if they see the company is doing shady stuff?
Right so if the company knows this, then they wouldn't do shady stuff because they need to establish a reputation such that a person is willing to entrust a 5-10 year investment with them. The point of this restriction is to create incentive for companies to be good.
Corporate psychology is psychopathic due to the disconnect between action and responsibility. Criminal action is abstracted, long term gain is abstracted, the point is to remove these abstractions.
Who would buy the stock you ask? People who think the company is good. People who believe in the company. Not people who want to gamble on the company.
Thus if those are the ONLY people buying stocks. Then you tell me. What does a company HAVE to DO to cater to those PEOPLE? They have to be better. Truly better.
If you remove all abstraction away from the financial system you get rid of the dollar and suddenly you have the bartering system which is way to inefficient. But you make the abstraction to high and suddenly you have bitcoin and a bunch of other cryptos representing worthless shit. And you get corporations who have the mass psychology equivalent to a psychopath. It's a gradient of abstraction and I think we're too far on the abstraction side of things. We need to lower it a bit and that's what my proposal is doing. Unlikely to ever happen though.
I apologize for not being clear in my comment. None of my musing was meant to allude to public policy or law. It was about what an individual (or group of individuals) could choose to do with a corporation to avoid perverse incentives in the future. I'm not really interested in directly enforcing anything.
To make a play on an old programming joke:
Once there was an individual who noticed there was a problem with society. He said to himself "I'll use the State to change things!" Now there were two problems.
The first part of my comment doesn't require a state change. I'm sure you can issue securities with a 10 year clause.
The second part of my statement is that while I largely agree with you we Still have state controlling things in the world and it's largely a good thing. You don't want a world without the State controlling an aspect of the free market.
It's not that you don't like the State, it's just that adding additional controls can lead to large unanticipated side effects. Especially sweeping changes like some of the ones I proposed. Totally get this.
That doesn't mean it won't work. Like UBI, these ideas need to experimented on and data needs to be gathered to verify whether it will work. You can't dismiss the fact that that changing public policy Won't work because it currently DOES work.
It just depends on the business in question, and the external pressures on the business. Jeff Bezos managed to not pay dividends for years by focusing on value, but also by zooming ahead of the pack in a greenfield environment that was ludicrously profitable. Low margin businesses, private or public, will struggle and have to do something to offer value for money; e.g. make a smaller chocolate bar that's the same price, and a larger chocolate bar that costs more.
On selling stock: I think this is a bit silly. A company can't just sell its stock as a viable strategy. What happens when it runs out? And who would buy it anyway?
In the USA, corporations just do stock splits or run a corporate vote to issue more shares. Also many large tech companies use stock as total compensation for employees, so the "selling" of stock can be indirect as a form of revenue. Instead of paying employees cash, they pay in stock, which frees up more cash for other things. Thus they don't need to have as high of true revenue margins to pay employees well. Big corporations understand that a lot of paper value is fungible one way or another.
A stock split doesn't increase anything. E.g. they might double the number of shares, but each share becomes worth half as much.
Issuing more shares only works if there's a reason to believe the underlying value has increased. No one will buy shares in a company that keeps on devaluing its shareholders' existing holdings.
Compensation via share options isn't revenue, and I can't see how it's anything like revenue. They've just set aside a percentage of the business to be issued to employees. They haven't gained money. Yes that might mean they can save a little on junior salaries for employees who don't know that options don't mean much, but that's not revenue either.
The problem is, this isn't a question of, "Will Epic do something like this tomorrow?"
It's "Will Epic do something like this at any point in the foreseeable future?"
Will Epic's leadership decide to IPO in hopes of more money?
Will they take a lucrative private buyout from some other billionaire with more money than sense, like Musk?
Will they hire new upper management that persuades them they need to do something like this for Serious Business Reasons?
Will they retire and be replaced by people who do the same?
The problem is, if you build your game on Unreal, you're essentially betting all its future commercial success on one for-profit company's decision to remain Less Of An Asshole Than The Other Guy. The choice of what engine you use has suddenly become about much more than just "what features does it offer?" "How many developers know how to use it?" or even "What's the pricing structure today?" You have to worry about whether they'll get it into their heads, for whatever reason, to retroactively change their pricing structure in a way that ruins you financially.
On the other hand, if you build your game on Godot, or some in-house engine, you know you'll never need to worry about that.
Also worth noting: If the gaming industry, and the public at large, send a clear enough signal to Unity now that this is unacceptable, that makes it much, much less likely that anyone else will try to pull bullshit like this in the future.
There's another strong argument in favor of this point. This [1] is from Unreal's license:
---
"7. The Agreement Between You and Epic
a. Amendments
If we make changes to this Agreement, you are not required to accept the amended Agreement, and this Agreement will continue to govern your use of any Licensed Technology you already have access to.
However, if we make changes to this Agreement, you will not be allowed to access certain Epic services or download the Licensed Technology unless you have accepted the amended Agreement. If we make changes, we will provide you with notice, such as by sending an email or giving you notice when you next log into an Epic service."
---
So in other words, if they do a bait and switch, you're free to keep using the old license for older versions of the engine. The reason I think this is telling is because they did this in the day and age where basically every EULA comes down to "We can do anything at any time, for any reason, and you can do nothing." For them to actually have this in their terms is a tremendous display of good faith.
Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at any time for any reason and without notice (the “Updated Terms”) and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1). If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity will endeavor to notify you of the modification. If a modification is required to comply with applicable law, the modification will apply notwithstanding this section. Except as explicitly set forth in this paragraph, your use of any new version or release of the Unity Software will be subject to the Updated Terms applicable to that release or version. You understand that it is your responsibility to maintain complete records establishing your entitlement to Prior Terms."
---
EDIT: Oh wow. How sketchy. That page on Github is only their "additional terms". When you go to their terms page itself you find [2]
---
"1.4 Modification
Unity reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to modify, discontinue or terminate the Services. Unity may also modify the Agreement at any time and without prior notice. If we modify the Agreement, we will post the modification on the Site or otherwise provide you with notice of the modification. We will also update the “Last updated” date at the top of these Terms. By continuing to access or use the Services after we have provided you with notice of a modification, you indicate that you agree to be bound by the modified Terms. If the modified Terms are not acceptable to you, your only recourse is to cease using the Services.
Notwithstanding this Section 1.4, any modification of the Unity Software Additional Terms is subject to Section 8 of the Unity Software Additional Terms."
---
There is some serious lawyerizing going on there that makes this largely incomprehensible to me at least, probably by design.
I can't see how anything less favorable to the devs would not be instantly rejected in court, especially in the EU ?
Speaking of which, I don't see why the Unity using devs can't just keep using the old version of Unity, and therefore never have to accept the new license ?
(Of course I assume that Unity would have made it extra-annoying, because these changes don't just come out like that, but the point here is to give themselves time to find an alternative to Unity.)
I think this comes down to ambitions. Unity wanted to be an advertising company and when that goal started slipping away, they did something drastic. Epic wants to be a store and a virtual production platform. Who knows what they’ll do if those goals seem impossible.
It’s also worth remembering that Epic isn’t the good guy here. When incentives align, most corporations are capable of some pretty awful stuff. With Epic specifically they made accidental purchases in Fortnite very easy and then intentionally buried the refund button outside the store under an obscure settings page [0].
> Unity wanted to be an advertising company and when that goal started slipping away, they did something drastic. Epic wants to be a store and a virtual production platform.
Epic "being a store" just happens to allow them to collect a ton of personal data and push a whole lot of ads. Seems like they want to be in advertising too.
That all hinges on a motley combination of rationalizing, squinting, guesstimation of intentions and projecting future behavior of unpredictable third parties. One could have with equal plausibility made an assessment that Unity would not proceed with self-inflicted wounds, yet here we are.
Just like the "I've got nothing to hide" argument fallaciously depends on assumptions about the coherence of motives on the part of people violating your privacy, "I've got nothing to worry about" depends on assuming reasonable motives from private actors. It is a lot less strenuous to reason from a place that is agnostic about future intentions of third parties.
Epic/Valve are privately held now, but if you build a team and game series on a proprietary platform, you are at the whim of the platform owner. It might be a low risk now given they are looking to scoop up teams ditching Unity, but nobody knows what will happen in 2 or 3 years.
>hinges on the premise that Epic ... is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit
Bahaha. Epic would eat their own grandmother if it got them an increase in profit. You better hope the Epic never becomes the only game in town, because then you will see what happens to who takes home what revenue.
"who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split"
Yeah, I wonder why, almost like they're trying to slowly gain market share lead to then have a monopoly.
Arguing that just because right now there's alternatives that don't seem like they'll do that, right now. Is not a good argument against open source.
if any of those engines can retroactively destroy your livelihood, or make games unavailable forever for users because of $ reasons, then that is a huge enough reason to simply drop the engine.
Unreal will get eventually damage from this unity move as well, if I was a game dev I would seriously consider Godot right now, luckily I am a software dev not a game dev, only game dev I do is modding warcraft 3 so I don't have to bother about that stuff
Epic will never have a monopoly as long as Steam exists. They aren't complete fools here, they realize this but are aware that even having a slice of that massive pie is enough to fuel numerous positions in the future.
They still wouldn't be a monopoly engine-wise, even excluding Unity you have Godot and O3DE as popular open source options. Ignoring that a lot of studios are now sharing internal custom engines, like Sony's studios with the Decima engine.
Bingo re: Unity going public. Once you have a stock price (and assuming your early investors aren't the most aggressive type in the first place) the goal then shifts to infinite growth, and lately tech companies (even Google Netflix etc) have had to make user-unfriendly decisions to justify ever growing valuations in the face of rate hikes. Unity isn't the first, but it has maybe done it the worst.
One of the "analysis" threads by a VC on Twitter mentioned the engine not making as much money as the ad business as "unsustainable". But it's the same nonsense Musk spouted with Twitter not being sustainable or "making a profit" -- it made a profit but not given the market realities deliberately hoisted upon it.
Nothing against Epic, but they have a strategic incentive to encourage people to use their store. Getting a discount to use the engine in exchange for a store “exclusive” is a cost that I see developers not really appreciating. There is no free lunch.
I don't think that's unusual. When Valve announced Source 2 for free, there was a similar discount to use the engine: the game must release on Steam. Maybe that has changed in the 8 years of no news about the release of Source 2 for developer though.
The question is not "do we _suppose_ that it's _likely_ that they _would_ do something similar?", but rather "is it _possible_ that they _can_ do something similar?"
If you're using a proprietary engine made by a for-profit company, the answer to that second question is always "yes", and the answer to that first question is always subject to change.
If you're using an open-source engine, the answer to the second question is "no" (because in the worst-case you can fork it to buy yourself time), and the answer to the first question is totally moot, because the first question is no longer a thing.
It's about risk management: optimism is not a strategy. Mitigation by removing the attack vector _is_ a strategy.
I think it is unlikely Epic or Valve will adopt something as overtly hostile to business users in their ecosystems as long as they are controlled by Tim Sweeney and Gabe Newell (respectively).
I think it’s anyone’s guess what will happen when that stops being true, but anyone under the age of 40 or so should recognize they will almost certainly outlive those individuals. Closed source means you are beholden to what their successor’s decide even if you (like me) are confident their current leadership will make good decisions.
I get that you're writing stylized speculations but in my experience in the games industry, every single point is wrong. It is the most upvoted comment because it touches on a bunch of first-principles-know-nothing boogeymen, but so it goes with Hacker News nowadays. You can keep reading to find out why, or whatever, my dog in this race is (1) I use Unity (2) I don't think they're going to change anything about these terms except maybe the installs issue (3) and the vast majority of people will continue to be unaffected by these pricing changes.
If people want to spend their breath agitating for something, it's to get Unity to share the source code for a lower price. That would actually help me make better games. At the scale where Unity pricing matters, the engine costs will take away from marketing spend.
> ...the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to... break the promise of no revenue share/royalty pledge... too many headcounts... privately held [is good and public is bad]... says a lot.
Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine. You can certainly believe there is. It's a complex piece of software and target platforms and technology are always changing, so it's understandable that it is expensive to develop.
>If people want to spend their breath agitating for something, it's to get Unity to share the source code for a lower price.
while I hate it being gated, it's not that expensive for a medium sized company to get source code access. $3000 + probably some per seat licenses that are orders cheaper than what you pay employees (even significantly underpaid game devs). if you get more than 250k installs you're already paying more than that to begin with with the new plan.
>Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine.
maybe for you, but to pretend there are zero alternative tools because you don't like shows more arrogance than the post you are criticizing.
>I'm actually not saying that one person should use one or the other - they are simply made to do and make fundamentally different things.
it's a tool at the end of the day. you can make Unreal engine 5 run Undertale and you can make Gamemaker run Crysis if you are determined enough. Most people here will be talking about the technical aspects of the engine, not the political/historical roles each engine has made.
I can kind of see where you are coming from but I disagree with the angle that Unity/Unreal are fundamentally different skillsets. they are ubiquitous enough and feature filled enough that the limitations come a lot from the team rather than the engine, with a few special edge cases.
To name one: Unity and Unreal are awful for games with mass destructible environments for example. People CAN still make those, but that's the one case where it may be worth rolling your own tech. Essentially, you make your game separate from the actual unity layer and use Unity purely as a renderer, not for its game framework. I know Unity games that do this, and I think UE can do the same but I lack the knowledge there.
Completely agree. If I had to make a destructible game from scratch I would implement that tech in unreal rather than starting from scratch 10 times over.
And I'm not saying "from scratch". I'm more saying that I can't rely on Epic's actor/component framework to provide what I need. You can find other Middleware to help with mesh destruction and work around that as a base.
> Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine.
Depends on the game - the majority of Unity games can be done in Godot, as far as I can tell, because they're simple indie games with fire-sale assets (or even free assets) from itch.
Unity is not making the revenue they need, because their "popularity" is on free-as-in-beer games which no one is going to pay for anyway. It's just an added sword into their side that the majority of devs who use unity can switch to Godot with almost no difference to their (devs) revenue.
They simply serve very different audiences of both developers and end users. Their coexistence is evidence of how different they are from one another, not how fungible they are.
They really don’t at this point. Unreal has reached a point where it’s a better choice than Unity for nearly every single project. There’s still these pervasive beliefs that Unity is better for 2D or better for small teams, and it just isn’t true.
The one exception is junk mobile games, and even then I think Unreal is a completely reasonable choice.
Unity has been well and truly left behind with the gap widening every day and they know it.
Their coexistence is a legacy of a time where Unreal had not widened its viable use cases beyond triple A style 3D games, but that hasn’t been the case for years now. It’s just taking a whole for developers to catch up, and obviously there’s a lot of inertia with Unity projects and experience.
I am saying that only from the point of view of someone who has made and published a lot of games, in roles including developer and director, on a lot of platforms and dealt with a lot of engines. But I really hate making this about me. The outrage-driven discourse that people hitch onto to promote their shit is the worst excess of cultural materialism.
The most succinct explanation for the difference is that Unreal gets your game financed, Unity gets your game made.
> There’s still these pervasive beliefs that Unity is better for 2D or better for small teams, and it just isn’t true.
You're coming at this like a feature box checking sort of deal. There are so many bigger picture things going on with the differences between the two engines. I'm actually not saying that one person should use one or the other - they are simply made to do and make fundamentally different things. For example, if you're aspiring to make a top-ranked Steam game, it makes a lot of sense to use Unreal, because those are all multiplayer FPSes; and it also is telling you that you need a team of 10-100 people and at least an $8-$100m budget, because that's how much it costs to "enter" that space and build on Unreal. Your takeaway shouldn't be "for small teams" or whatever, because you're looking at the wrong stage in the pipeline.
And what I am saying is that they absolutely are not designed to do different things any more. That used to be the case, but Unreal has fully eaten Unity’s lunch here in a technical sense. The engine’s roots are in AAA first person, but they have grown it far, far beyond that. It is now a fully capable general purpose engine for anything from 2D puzzlers to AAA FPSes.
There just are not games any more for which Unity offers any legitimate advantages over Unreal. Unity has been incredibly stagnant as an engine for pretty much a decade, while Unreal has expanded its capabilities and feature set to now virtually fully encompass those of Unity. The idea that they are designed for different things is just out of date.
In 2023 I think the only legitimate reason to pick Unity, and this is a very good reason for what it’s worth, is experience with the engine. I say this as someone who published games in Unity in the past and has transitioned to Unreal. They are both general purpose game engines serving the same teams and the same games, with the exception that Unity cannot support truly top end games.
> and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth
Why is "growth" always interpreted as "higher headcount" and not "higher profits"?
Certainly a company that has continually growing profits without increasing costs would be seen as more valuable than a company that constantly increases their costs with revenue?
Does Unity hiring more Engineers actually increase revenue?
very generalized answer here but it comes down to:
1. you want to make sure product A is profitable
2. at some point Product A will reach a steady state (in some utopic future, but let's pretend). i.e. Product A will hit a point where its excitement will taper off.
3. How do you get that explosive growth back? New product. But you want to maintain old product.
4. hire more people to work on Product B. Have it launch, big growth!
5. then recession hits and it turns out you need stability. Product A is fine, everyone on Product B is fired
profits are important, but it's not the end all be all for how the stock market works. It may not even be the most important factor. You want to build excitement and become the thing big thing, even if it turns out to be a check you can't cash. So in that lens, Unity hires (or hired) more engineers or acquires companies to increase excitement, not necessarily to increase profits. "Product A" is ads, and right now even that isn't very stable for them, so I guess they are trying to find a new Product A.
Back in the old days, Game studios used to simply make games to build this excitement. It has a set track, a big time to announce and release for spikes, and your existing teams works on the next game. But more studios want to get that "Product A", so even games are investing more in GaaS for that steady income. It's what ended up happening to Epic with Fortnite, where their "Product B" is actually announcing exciting engine features.
> 2. at some point Product A will reach a steady state (in some utopic future, but let's pretend). i.e. Product A will hit a point where its excitement will taper off.
> 4. hire more people to work on Product B. Have it launch, big growth!
Why is the answer "hire more people to work on Product B" and not "Move people from A to B and shrink the product A team to focus on bug fixes and security fixes"
I would think that the desire to hire a whole new team rather than move staff is what keeps Zawinski's Law [0] around.
It's not mutually exclusive. But it depends on Product B, and oftentimes these kinds of tech companies want to grow in completely different areas.
Take Amazon, for example: they have great engineers, but probably not too many game developers (or those interested in moving from current SWE positions to the game division). And they almost certainly had no artists on board, among other disciplines needed for a game. So when making Amazon Games they would have to mostly hire new staff. Not the best example given how they floundered for a decade, but I think that was a management issue over a talent issue.
Perhaps because it is generally well accepted that you can maintain stable profit margins with a fixed employee count, but increasing profits with a fixed employee count is not possible beyond the maximum potential of that fixed set of employees?
(Not sure, this is an amateur's guess on my part.)
> In my opinion, the only reason this whole fiasco happened is because Unity the company has too many headcounts and has too much expense, and the reason for that is they grew too big, and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth, even if the company is much healthier if it had stayed smaller
Also Epic only needs to look to their closest competitor to see this is a terrible idea.
That said, the author forgets to mention one more important advantage of open source alternatives like Godot: they avoid market manipulation simply by existing, as they block monopoly. Unity wouldn't risk _future_ customers if they were not as confident in their position (Unity is king on mobile, don't forget).
people trusted in unity for years, enough to build their products and careers on it and around it, and something like this still happened. was it foreseeable? even if it was, well what then, 'great, i have no options besides sucking it up or switching, since i built upon this'. what guarantees do epic/unreal customers have?
oh wait, this isn't about 'what worth does 'trust in company' even have', but more like 'public companies bad'
Has Unity ever said anything about turning their software into a platform, for instance asking for monthly/yearly subscriptions instead of a one time fee ?
If they did, that's when the devs (and especially teachers of future devs !) should have dropped it as soon as feasible.
platform isn't just about subscriptions, subscriptions don't really make a platform, and overall it'd be kind of a poor tell of whether it's time to jump ship. epic/unreal is kind of a platform (there's a bunch of stuff in their ecosystem that plugs in, etc.), so what, should people jump ship from unreal now
You're right, it's not a sufficient condition (pretty sure Red Hat offers Linux support in subscription form), you also need to have closed source software for a platform.
I don't know about the situation with Unreal, but I would be very wary of using it, considering Epic has been pushing a game Store. (And Unreal's source code is merely source available ?)
There is a secondary argument in favor of home-grown engines too. It's been very disappointing to see so many game companies abandon their own rendering technology in favor of Unreal. Terrible licensing rules might drive companies to go back to having their own engines.
gamers are weird like that. I think you can still be successul without crazy graphics, but the PR you will get around the net will be dreadful because people want to justify their high end rigs or their next gen consoles. And those people are disproportionately more likely to comment.
But you also can't listen too much to the core gaming audience because they also don't think more subtly about what makes a game fun. And despite that PR good looking games can still sell. No wonder the market is so unstable, it's audience is fickle.
It's not just graphics, it's everything. Look at Frostbite for example from EA. While a good shooter engine, they had to make significant changes over the years to adapt the engine to other genres of games, and that significantly bloated timelines. Jason Schreier has reporting on this if you're interested.
We kind of forget that a lot of custom engines aren't universal ones like Unity or Unreal that can adapt to anything you throw at it. Custom engines are largely hyper specific to the type of game they were making with it, everything else is experimental, untested, undocumented, or non-existent!
Frostbite is a weird example because they focused heavily on graphics over gameplay. It is also an FPS engine that was forced into powering an RPG, and without any real input from the developers in question.
I'm sure most larger gamedev companies can make a decent game engine on their own if extreme performance is not needed. The recent Baldur's Gate is a good example.
you're asking for consumers to temper their expectations. Just look at how much crap they threw at Redfall, and that was likely a game many people played on Gamepass for "free".
It sucks but part of that "need" for insane graphics is consumer driven. Even though Nintendo games get a lot of flack for how "weak" the Switch is, but their big IPs do cirlcles around the industry, all on one platform without even relying on MTX. But I guess Nintendo appealing to more than just the core gamers helps a lot. Come to think of it, it's surprising how few "family" AAA games there are these days.
okay, and I can point to a dozen games called unfinished that sold fine. We are far from over those days.
We're nitpicking at this point. Can we at least go back to the core topic and agree that critics and consumers are generally more sympathetic to games with good graphics?
This should also be a wakeup call to anyone using closed source tools at all: DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, Azure, AWS, Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc.
While some of these tools are best in class, it's borrowed time until the owner decides to change the terms, stop offering it, or raise prices enough to damage your business.
Closed source software tools are a liability, and the benefits often are only minor compared to the risks.
I've been on several teams where entire projects with dozens of person years of effort had to be thrown out because tools stopped being supported or were made prohibitively expensive. This isn't about open source posturing. Relying on closed source software you can't easily switch off of just isn't worth the risk.
(As an aside, I'm not a purist, I'll use tools like JetBrains, because I could easily switch off to open source tools if I had to without any disruption to my business)
Edit, I do not suggest writing your own tools, I suggest using great open source tools: postgres, apache, Linux, mariadb, open source languages, Redis, couchdb, etc.
At least with these individual tools, it's usually not your entire codebase written around that thing. For instance, you can generally switch from one database to another if they decide to overcharge you. You can even switch from one cloud service to another. In other words, they (usually) don't have you nearly as locked in.
With Unity, it is a much bigger ordeal to switch to something like Godot and Unreal and most people who have already finished their games can't even really consider it as an option. This is why it was so egregious.
Of course you can switch databases, but in practice it is extremely expensive. That's a big reason why it is pretty rare. Why use a closed source tool and take on that risk when great open source ones exist?
For a lot of companies, switching databases is effectively impossible. Perhaps not quite as impossible as switching game engines, but certainly impossible enough that it would kill the business. A lot of companies use database specific functionality that's far from trivial to replicate in another database. A lot of that database specific functionality can also be legacy that no one really understands anymore. Migrating without an option to keep these poorly understood but critical systems will set you up for unexpected data loss, corruption or availability issues. And that's after spending a year on your migration. If Oracle pulls anything like Unity here, this will kill off a lot of companies
>Why use a closed source tool and take on that risk when great open source ones exist?
in the case of servers: because open source servers literally can't support your scale of business. That's one of the few places where Open Source can never truly succeed: when you need a lot of hardware and the operating costs exceed any income coming in.
By that point it is a lot better to roll your own servers. But that is of course crazy expensive. Even other multibillion dollar corporations choose to leave some server management to places like Amazon/Microsoft.
While it's true that this can happen to external tools, it doesn't happen very often. Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their products are supported long terms and work well. For in-house developed software it happens frequently that past employees leave the codebase in a state, where new team members end up rewriting it.
So it's a bit weird to say you shouldn't use closed source since there is a small chance things change in a way we don't like, and then your alternative is to use in-house software, where maintenance issues in the future are pretty much guaranteed.
>Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their products are supported long terms and work well.
I would say that's not quite accurate. They have only one incentive: profit.
Long term supported products are one way of getting money, but it's most definitely not the only way. Many times it's not the most profitable one either.
Companies don't make shitty decisions because they are scheming on how to screw customers up. They do it because when push comes to shove, only profit matters.
One guy will plot a chart saying if we screw customers this way (with pretty words, of course) we can get X% more profit. Then they get promoted and this cycle repeats itself. Or a pandemic hits and suddenly your margins decrease drastically. Now screwing the customer is back on the table.
Unless your company only plans to be running for a few years, those are not as rare as we may think.
My alternative is to use battle tested open source software. I don't suggest writing a database in house.
Also, I would say the opposite, it happens all the time. There's only a few closed source software tools that have been around for more than fifteen years, and countless that didn't make it.
> Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their products are supported long terms and work well.
This is only sometimes true. If a company knows their product's growth phase is over, they may decide to milk the existing customers as much as possible. That's the right choice for maximizing profit.
I believe that's what happened with a previous company I worked at. Vendor of an old software product started suing about licensing violations trying to extract more. They couldn't harm future sales, because no one was going to buy the thing anymore. A team spent a year replacing it.
If AWS actually tried to abuse its power, it would really damage the tech industry. Tech companies would see the risk and start treating the cloud as rented machines (EC2), and stop realizing all the benefits of their provider managing a complex system on their behalf.
If I were AWS, I'd willingly write into contracts that costs can go up no faster than the PPI + 5%, barring some sort of force majeure. Hardware gets cheaper, so I'd expect costs to come down, but this essentially "we're not going to screw you" clause.
If AWS tried to abuse its power, people would switch to another CSP.
While certainly, the shift would not be easy, but if AWS increased their prices enough, it could still be a savings in the long run.
EDIT: On the other hand, publicly traded companies are often extremely short-sighted because they have to make those quarterly reports, so maybe they would be unwilling to spend $X over the course of a year in order to save $X every year after that.
Such a platform should be a co-op owned by all the users, designed for the public good. It really is almost like a piece of infrastructure.
But AWS is a business, and businesses are there to make money. They are there to extract as much money as possible from users. I doubt they'll ever do a big change like Unity, but I bet they end up with a slow boil of raising prices.
I agree that it's not the only solution, but it's the only way to (somewhat) guarantee a lack of bullshit.
There are companies like The Omni Group that I think are, generally speaking, bullshit-free. They make (in my opinion) pretty good products, I can buy them once, I get the normally-expected number of updates, and it's about as ideal a transaction you'd want. I don't mind them charging money for a good product, and I'm grateful that products like OmniFocus exist.
That said, one thing that continues to bother me is that Omni could change things whenever they want. They could decide to start charging 10x the price if I use OmniFocus for anything involving business, or they could make it so that my flat-fee purchase of OmniFocus no longer works.
Do I think Omni is going to do that? No, I think they're generally pretty decent people, but open source guarantees that I can always take a snapshot of the "current state" of the project, and also guarantee that there's not retroactive strings being attached to things I'm making with that software.
You suggest that mongo and elastic search are not open source and redis is ?
While all three have a company backing them and sell or have some restrictions (usually targeted towards cloud providers not self hosting ) i would have said all of them are open enough in their current versions not to have a vendor lock in risk
Redis is open core (that is, redis itself is Open Source, only extensions aren't), the others are outright not Open Source. That's a meaningful difference, depending on whether you're using the non-FOSS extensions.
Mongo switched from GPL v3 to SSPL in 2018 the only difference is whether you can offer mongoDB as a service , all other GPL clauses are the same , there is no difference for app developers I.e no vendor lock-in
Elastic moved from Apache 2 to ESL v2 for the same reasons with same restrictions against managed offerings again no restrictions for a app developer to host modify or do they want .
Redis splits between 3-BSD , SSPL and RSAL v2 and closed source for redis , Redis stack and Redis enterprise.
Just cause OSI does not consider restrictions on competing with the author Open source doesn’t make elastic or mongo less open source ( redis also uses these ) certainly not for anyone not a cloud vendor
> Just cause OSI does not consider restrictions on competing with the author Open source doesn’t make elastic or mongo less open source ( redis also uses these ) certainly not for anyone not a cloud vendor
Okay, sure, if we allow people to redefine words whenever they feel like it they can be open source. Which is to say, no, that's not what those words mean. It can be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software but not FOSS.
Yes words have meaning. You should read original comment again .
The OP said closed source,he didn’t say not open source or FOSS or source available .
Of all the three, redis is only one with closed source components classifying redis as open and ES , mongoDB as closed is misleading and false . Either all three are in grey area if you are purist, or all three are shades of open if you are a realist .
none of the restrictions are relevant to the vendor lock-in point he was making
Also OSI doesn’t own the word [1] Open source or the open source movement.
Classifying ES and mongoDB in the same category as Oracle is just not helping vendors to be open .
[1] trademark or copyright perhaps , not the word or concept or the movement .
While I support using the open source counterparts, most of the time the closed source tools price change doesn't happen retroactively. It's usually go together with new version or new contacts.
Unity pricing though, happens retroactively in a sense that older, released games will be tracked the install numbers too. As if when SQL Server having the price changes to gb-based pricing happens too to 2005 version and forward. I can assure that even government will decline that kind of retroactive change.
That's great in theory, but most people don't have the funds for a rack, let alone a cage, or people to stack and maintain it all. The hardware alone to run a proper DB cluster is going to be prohibitive for most startups.
Survivorship bias. These are the ones that haven't _yet_ gotten worse and are still currently popular. I'm listing them so people won't get blindsided when they do eventually bite their users.
There isn't enough space to list the closed source software tools that didn't make it. Off the top of my head: Adobe Flash, MS Basic, SourceSafe, ActiveDesktop, FoxPro, J#, Oslo, IronRuby, and Silverlight.
That’s not what survivor bias is. You listed a set of services saying that open source is better. But the entire history of everything you said shows they are superior to the open source solutions and have gotten cheaper and more capable.
Flash had a 10 year transition and was open sourced along the way, but was no longer supported by any of the open or closed source browsers… how does that help your point? No one. Listing a bunch of crap closed source projects doesn’t strengthen your point as there are equally a bunch of crap open source solutions.
What’s the open source solution to S3 or DynamoDB anyway? These are software solutions that require a certain kind of infrastructure, you are saying all companies should also specialise in that infrastructure?
Where do you stop? Self host in a data centre? Well now you rely on the data centre… self host in premise, now you are beholden to your ISP. Be your own ISP? Now you are beholden to government regulation? Be your own government… it gets absurd, but I’m just following your line of logic down the line.
It rather looks like it depends on who makes the product. One thing to look at is who has established trust and (so far) maintained that trust. For example, AWS has said that their products will get cheaper over time and that they wont deprecate any. The fact that they've managed to do that for 15 years or so means they have a built a lot of trust - which is itself an investment that they would be foolish (financially damaged by) a decision to break that trust.
Meanwhile, Google has firmly established that they will destroy any product at any time, and you would be insane to build a business on their products.
Adobe and Microsoft make meh products that dominate industries, and you are at their whim, and look, these two companies provide all your examples. (And to be fair, SourceSafe went away because it was not reliable and any sane business paying for a VCS switched to perforce before eventually moving to git like everyone else).
IBM will sell you anything as long as it's called "Watson" so who knows which Watson has been discontinued or not.
I think at this point, the real question is who in their right mind would ever build a game in Unity again?
I'm sure this will make their company a short term gain in profits, but in very short order no more Unity games will be made. Even if you accept the terms they're proposing, you know damn well they are willing to change the rules at any time at your expense.
Unity just became an extinction-level-event liability for any game company. Who would dare touch it with a ten foot pole?
The leadership will be ousted by their shareholders quickly enough, I expect.
> The leadership will be ousted by their shareholders quickly enough, I expect.
Wouldn't be that certain... there is a lot of stuff built on Unity. The most common theme I heard was that they're trying to capitalize off of Genshin Impact [1], but there's also a ton of other highly successful games like Among Us or Untitled Goose Game that won't/can't (easily) be ported to another engine.
In other words, they want to become the IBM of game engines. Rent seekers for sub-par service.
This doesn't really address the concerns of the above-- that people will not make new games in Unity. Unlike IBM, which could arguably sell to large corps subpar product, Unity's consumer base are flighty and don't have upper managers that can be bribed with nice dinners.
They have a sizable captive user base and will be milking them until they're dry, at which point those responsible for this disaster will jump ship with a massive golden parachute.
Among Us can't easily be ported to another engine?
LOL
I've been making a Unity VR game, and I can assure you, with a bit blood, sweat, tears, and some ChatGPT assistance, it can be done, especially for the vanilla 2d games which represent the majority of Unity games in the wild.
People keep bringing up Genshin without even knowing anything. I don't even wanna read that sportskeeda article because I'm 100% sure they also didn't research and I don't want to give them any engagements.
The developers of Genshin is a major shareholders in Unity China which is an offshot company based in China which has different terms. They are separate entity from Unity Technologies.
Yup, my opinion as well. Then there will be massive layoff to cut R&D and UnityAds. It might go back to sub 5000 employees but essentially IS is going to lead.
For sure, I bet many projects have too much momentum to switch, but there are likely lots of smaller efforts (mobile-flavor of the month) that are going to be switching stacks as soon as possible.
The good numbers will be in just in time to calculate the bonuses and the bad numbers won't show up until the decision makers work somewhere else, after all they are the guys who doubled the profitability of Unity, so they will have lots of options.
> I think at this point, the real question is who in their right mind would ever build a game in Unity again?
This is pretty unfortunate, because Unity is partly responsible for the surge of Linux gaming over the last 10 years. Supporting Linux comes nearly for free on Unity (compared to many other engines), and fewer Unity games will likely mean fewer Linux games.
My humanGPT hallucination on the situation would be that because Unity is proprietary and Godot is open source, Unity runtime would be less diverse and more stable. How much of this is correct, I don't know though.
Godot is never going to be able to ship for consoles due to license incompatibility. That's a pretty big dealbreaker for non-hobbyist projects that aren't exclusively targeting desktop.
There are paid, non open source forks that support console.
Actual godot does not, and never will.
From their own docs:
“ Godot does not officially support consoles (save for XBox One via UWP) currently.
The reasons for this are:
To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. Godot, as an open source project, does not have such a legal figure.
Console SDKs are secret, and protected by non-disclosure agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not publish the code as open-source.
Consoles require specialized hardware to develop for, so regular individuals can’t create games for them anyway”
Consoles no longer require specialized hardware to develop for. There are test kits for ps5 but you can compile on your PC. Where are you getting your information from? The only requirement is a header or two and a code sign. Godot OSS can’t support consoles because the SDK (those headers) are closed source, but there’s nothing stopping you from implementing the half dozen header functions in Godot source yourself. There’s some companies trying to provide that support. I’m sure Godot* (the company) will as well.
To dismiss Godot because you, a solo hobby dev, can’t target PS5 is hilarious.
Did you read it? It clearly backs what I just said. Godot open source doesn’t support consoles because console sdks are closed source, but there’s nothing stopping you from publishing on consoles. They literally list a company who is doing that, more are following. There’s no restriction at all other than you having access to the SDKs which you get when you sign a contract to publish your game on their platform.
So your argument breaks down to "once I get access to the closed source console SDKs and spend money for devkits, I will need to use a closed source fork of Godot to ship my closed source app on consoles"? What is the alternative? The console vendors do not allow console ports to exist in the open.
With unity you get the console version of unity when are authorised by the console manufacturer. So it’s not like you have to do much to make at least the core engine work on console. The work is in the game itself which is different game to game.
Reputational damage. Big part of the appeal of consoles is “it just works”. That falls apart of you start letting random shovelware devs ship whatever.
Having access to the SDK doesn't
give you unfettered access to publish on their stores. It only allows you to write and compile code targeting their hardware/runtime.
No, that's a different concern entirely. Nintendo could (though never will) open up Switch development to everyone while still exercising judicious control over which games are listed in their own store.
And in the meantime, there's already tons of crap shovelware on the Switch storefront. Nintendo doesn't filter for quality.
Linux doesnt run on consoles though and the comment was about linux, which godot supports quite well. Once it gains popularity it will also sort out console issues.
This is going to be an issue for the Vision Pro. I am kind of surprised Apple hasn't stepped in and said this will not apply to Vision Pro apps or something.
It is very very rarely case (at least in my limited years in corporate world) that the leadership is more evil than the board (atleast for public for-profit companies. Even more rare is the board not having this chat with leadership before the announcement.
The problem is that this really screws the shareholders, and _obviously_ so.
Most of the value of stock comes from the ability to sell it to someone else who wants to buy it. Who wants to buy stock in a company that has presented a plan to self-immolate?
The current stockholders may see some returns from short term profits, but then they'll be left holding the bag.
This seems like a case where the shareholders are incentivized to oust the board, because the company is going to screw them.
They may just not care about being the game engine of choice for indie gamedevs anymore, or they may even actively want to not be that anymore (as a branding thing). The way Unity positions itself on their landing page is VERY different from what they were doing 5 or 10 years ago, when (indie) games were absolutely front and center (and there wasn't much else, period).
I think being a AA game engine was just one early part of their long term business strategy, and this last move is them ejecting that stage of their rocket as a necessary part of moving on to the next stage of their strategy.
This is no different from Oracle. When tides change you can see how a company like Microsoft reacted (make embrace OSS) vs how Oracle reacts which is to double down on its expensive out of touch offering. It’s clear Oracle isnt fully irrelevant now because there’s a lot of legacy clients who have inertia. It’ll only be a problem for them a decade from now. Unity’s leadership likely decided similarly. If they thought about this at all that is.
Realistically - how locked in are developers to their current engine?
I imagine >50% of video game development is art. And I imagine some decent percentage of code can be translated without nearly as much effort as the original implementation.
Still, I doubt many developers are going to switch engines mid or late development.
But a lot of times, developers re-use much from their old games in development of their new games.
Is this realistically going to hold developers back from moving future development to a new engine?
I think you’re grossly trivializing the effort needed.
Let’s take art as an example. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s targeted to explicit engine behaviour. It’s symbiotic with the code. You can’t just go from Unity’s universal pipeline to Unreals.
And code is even harder. Forget language choice for a second, but logic itself is very tied to the engine. Unity’s monobehaviour architecture is very different to how one would write it in Unreal or Godot. That’s not even getting into engine specific optimization.
what might be fast in one render pipeline will be slow in another. Scheduling is different.
Also many developers rely on third party tools that aren’t engine agnostic either.
I work for a hedgehog based studio for their supposedly non existent mobile games arm albeit I don't work in engineering.
For us, it's a huge deal. It's that people have spent the best part of a decade working with Unity, their support and enterprise training is very good. Also we have a game out in December which is also Unity based.
As of yet we haven't made a decision on what to do but legal are looking at it, so, it's business as usual for now.
I kinda feel bad for Unity. The company is in a bad place finacially. They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no good solutions to this. Either they try to increase pricing and piss off their customers, or they cut costs (which they've been doing with mass layoffs) and risk losing ground to other game engineers like Unreal.
For years the only thing really holding the company a float was their valuation. So long as investors were willing to give them money for growth and future profits they could continue to fund their loses. But now their growth is slowing and investors are less willing to pay up for growth generally what does Unity do?
I've felt for a while that they'd be a likely victim of this most recent tech rut and that seems to be playing out. They have no moat, slowing growth and are burning huge amounts of cash. Unless the macro changes in their favour it's hard to how they get out of this and stay on top.
I wouldn't feel bad for their executives. They are the ones who chose the 'growth at all costs' path, and this is what you get.
They could've probably been sustainable and profitable if they mainly serviced their core audience of indie developers with a smaller amount of employees and a simpler product, but it seems they really wanted to brute force themselves into the AAA market.
I suppose. There's quite a few companies in Unity's position right now for a reason though.
For better or worse the "growth at all costs" strategy was the strategy companies like Unity had to employ for the last decade to attract investor capital so I tend to blame the low interest rate "easy money" environment more than companies like Unity being reckless.
Although that said, it does seem Unity made some stupid moves in recent years. I don't follow the company that closely, but I'm aware they made some large acquisitions funded in-part with debt during the pandemic. It's one thing taking on debt if you have a strong balance sheet, but it seems a little short-sighted for a company losing billions to use debt to fund an acquisition – especially at the elevated prices they paid during the pandemic.
> I tend to blame the low interest rate "easy money" environment more than companies like Unity being reckless.
As if the founders had no other options in life than to start companies relying on business models where you capture the market with investor money and then once you’re customers are locked in, you squeeze them as much as possible. Unreal is in the same market. They also took in investor money. They’re not in the same situation.
The people behind Unity chose to play the game. The c-suite is handsomely rewarded, and we praise their business acumen when things go right, but if things go wrong suddenly they’re victims of circumstance.
You can’t stay small if you took a lot of investor cash. This is why self-funded companies are usually the ones who avoid these awful growth/layoff cycles.
"core audience of indie developers" I thought that the engine was hugely popular beyond games? from what I recall indie games were just a small portion that used Unity.
Honestly, if they just added revenue share like Unreal does and tweaked their subscriptions a little, the backlash wouldn't have been nearly as bad. The uproar is a combination of a really badly announced system and details that don't seem to be ironed out properly leaving devs ripe for abuse. Plus you have one of the most tight knit communities of artists who all reacted almost as one to this announcement and have experience with abuse from gamers in terms of piracy, review bombs, refund waves and so on. I guarantee most developers would have grumbled but given in to a revenue share
I'm also completely baffled how poorly thought out this whole thing has been. Unity has been used by the likes of Nintendo, Microsoft and other massive game development studios. Do they seriously think a fee applied on retroactive sales and revenue numbers would be accepted without issue from them?
> Honestly, if they just added revenue share like Unreal does and tweaked their subscriptions a little, the backlash wouldn't have been nearly as bad.
They ran the numbers. If it was going to work they would have gone that route, but I think the problem is that the clear majority of Unity-users (indie devs) make no money anyway.
Revenue sharing with someone making $0 in revenue is pointless.
Okay, but when we're told to share our work for free "for the exposure", we're supposed to buy that and just give it away? They wanted people to use their product for free for the exposure. Changing their mind is one thing, making it retroactive is another.
> Do they seriously think a fee applied on retroactive sales and revenue numbers would be accepted without issue from them?
Unity have not proposed a fee on retroactive sales. They have proposed a from-this-point-forward fee that applies to new sales/installs of any game made with Unity, including new sales/installs of back catalog games.
Sales and installs don't happen at the same time. If I buy a game once on Steam, I might install it on any number of unique devices. Per the Unity FAQ, every one of those installation events results in an additional bill for the game's developer.
In other words: This is absolutely a retroactive rug-pull on new installs of old sales.
Update: Because of the way they're rolling this out, the only way to avoid the retroactive license change is to immediately stop using Unity's development tools. If I were running a game studio, that's what I would do.
> They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no good solutions to this
Maybe they should have something to show for this $1B/year and take a cut of this $250B+ industry to cover the costs? They appear to have about %30 market share, so they need to capture less than %2 of the value created with their tool to break even and if they can't do that or they are providing tech for the less than average profitable part of the industry they should shift focus or reduce costs.
AFAIK it's only natural for businesses to go out of business if they can't capture more value than they consume.
None of this is attributable to engines, it's the size of the products built using the engines and it appears that the ad revenues are not included and that appears to be another $80B.
The game engine market is the market of supplying the game developers with the tech to build their games. That's where the game engine makers that spend 1B per year and hold %30 of the engine market need to charge about %2 of the products made using their engines to break even.
Not Weta FX but Digital’s Tools, Pipeline, and Engineering.
"Weta Digital’s Academy Award-Winning VFX teams will continue as a standalone entity known as WetaFX under majority ownership by Sir Peter Jackson and helmed by CEO Prem Akkaraju."¹
Why feel bad? They're a victim of deliberate bad choices. The buck stops at the top. Nobody told Riccitiello to hit the gas pedal, nor to enrich himself by selling shares prior to a disastrous announcement, he did that all on his own.
I feel much worse for the thousands of developers he's holding a metaphorical gun to with this awful policy, who now have to stress about swapping engines.
They spent like 6 billion on acquisitions that don't help make their core product better. Literally just don't do that and you'd be in the green right now.
Yes, and now they are burning tons of money due to that debt and having to make ridiculous decisions to appease the stockholders. You just stated the exact reason this whole thing is a problem.
UT99 and all the Unreal games have been delisted from stores and they're shutting down the game's master server. You can still play solo or in LAN but online multiplayer is gone and there's no (legal) way to get new copies.
as someone who has played so much of these two games: both are incredible games, in their own way - creating/testing maps, the weapons, the movements, the game-modes, the moddability (skins, sounds, etc)...so good
Because to make the next Fortnite takes not just a lot of money, but luck. What if they made a game and it flopped (a techinically impressive game can definitely flop)? People will be like "oh see Unity engine is so bad, even the game from the first party doesn't sell".
In some ways this is backwards, you could argue Fortnite was a flop and became a success because of their license conditions (pivot to cloning licensee PUBG).
Unreal has had much more favourable license terms since ue4 in 2014, which is before Fortnite and the Store. To the best of my knowledge, unreals terms have always been "good", which is one of the reasons it's so popular.
Maybe they should stop acquiring a continuous stream of startups that have nothing to do with their primary mission? I would bet only a very small proportion of Unity employees work on or even adjacent to the Unity engine.
I’d probably bet that the majority of games on steam have less than 1000 sales, so being a popular game on Steam probably doesn’t mean much compared to being a popular game by daily active users viewing unity ads.
The methodology on the site only includes games with a minimum popularity, so the long tail of tiny indie games isn't included. By the way, since steam has a fee to be included, aren't most of those tiny indie games over at itch.io anyway?
> Unless stated otherwise, we filtered out unreleased games, free games, those that launched with less than a $4.99 price point, and those that have fewer than 50 reviews.
To be fair, the difference here is that Unity is doing more than just an engine for a specific type of game. Rather, they are building lots of different tools for lots of different games.
For example, Larian (BG3) and Wube (Factorio) each have their own engine. They are specially built specifically for the games they are making.
Also, you say "have been kept modern" but even that is questionable. "Modern?" What does that really mean? It's "modern" enough for the game. Starfield was just released, and it was released without ray tracing.
And we are just talking about games. Unity and Unreal do more than just working on the engine for games. So yes, while it's a lot, it's not fair to compare the bespoke engine use by game companies and engines like Unity and Unreal.
How many such game development companies actually are there? I see a lot of aging engines out there, and companies that jumped to unreal, but I have by no means broad knowledge
Gaming companies get a lot of crap for this - it seems unfair. The OS I'm using to write this is a relative newcomer at only 30 years old. Obviously, it has changed a lot in that time, but so have the engines. Most software doesn't get rewritten, it evolves.
Certainly not an expert but top studios like Bethesda and CDPR maintain their own engines with an order of magnitude less employees. They make games too.
They also produce games that are very similar to their other games, with similar mechanics, while Unity has to support a far more diverse set of games (basically anything 2d or 3d), and presumably has to continually offer a wider set of cutting-edge features.
Given the state of Creation Engine, I wouldn't say that Bethesda maintains their engine well. CDPR is switching to Unreal. CP2077 launch issues were mainly due to their engine not being capable of handling such large games.
Epic Games only had about 2,000 in 2020 and they also develop games, store front (although really slowly), so it's at least a 4x more than they need.
But also their previous monetization seems to try charge per professional developer which is a limited audience compared to consumers, especially if you want to maintain a AAA engine (which it seems Unreal is favoured still) given it seems fast pace techniques & improvements. Maybe by selling cloud servers for networking, which I think maybe they were too expensive compared to alternatives.
May I ask you if you ever heard of Rust? The game, not the programming language. Online survive game, which has thousands of active players every single day since like a decade already, full 3D and quite awesome graphics I'd say. It's written in Unity.
While I don't know the Rust code, this isn't necessarily solely a Unity problem. Unity's C# API provides a lot of footguns that game developers tend to not think about in the near term. Lots of code bases I've seen in Unity don't do a good job of caching component instances, or just never opened the profiler to see their GC is off the charts. Unity can run really well if the proper thought and care is put into it.
That's not their focus at all. They're trying to be an all-things-entertainment company, currently, they are focusing on movie animation and digital character creation.
Some of the stuff looks pretty cool that they are adding but would probably take a retooling of many workflows to use correctly. They had some very compelling items they were adding in that would make people pick it over others. But with those license terms. That will be a hard pass by many. My guess is they are hurting financially but took cues from their weta tool stack for installs. Where in that industry per install cost is decently normal and just rolled into a production budget. But on the games side that is not going to fly. As it is a one time cost vs recurring. I feel bad for the shops where they are 2 years in with this thing and just had the rug pulled on them.
Do feel bad for them but this is a problem of their own making. Many parts of their current situation were avoidable.
That doesn't justify what they've tried to do here though. This isn't just a price increase, it's a significant price increase, and a poorly thought out "revshare" model that applies retroactively people who signed deals with them and built a business model off of the deal they signed.
Losing a billion means they spent more than that, but on what? I haven’t used unity since 2016 and never in a professional capacity but I can’t imagine anything significant was improved or added in the last year.
I'd love to read more about "game engine development, in general, moves at breakneck speed," if you happen to know of a blog post or something or might be willing to share more.
Blender is also managed exceptionally well for a FOSS project, systematically polishing up rough edges and paying close attention to the needs and desires of its userbase which no doubt inspires larger donations from more donors than FOSS projects usually have.
Small nitpick: AIUI it is possible to sell binaries of a GPLv2 program, provided you keep providing source for free. (I think; IANAL, there's maybe some caveat about exactly when you have to give source and to who.) That can actually work if your users don't want to compile stuff themselves.
In theory. Show me one example (not service or support, but selling actual software). You have a better chance of winning a lottery, happens every day.
In theory, I can just walk through solid wall, using a quantum tunneling effect.
The closes thing you will find are things like blender release under GPL (i.e. pay me a money to release my commercial software under GPL, but that's not selling GPL software),
Maybe Godot is similar enough where you'd be able to consider this. Otherwise this move is more harmful in the long term of Unity and it's about future games and not current ones. Long term matters more, always.
It may also make AAA invest away from Unreal as it looks like a monopoly now.
Unreal is technically orders of magnitude ahead of Unity, and they have around 4000 employees spread across multiple continents. And I'm referring to the entirety of Epic, so that's also the Fortnite teams and everybody else. Unity, by contrast, has about 8000 employees. Many companies seem to be hiring far more employees than they realistically need - often to the point of their own detriment, and I don't entirely understand why. Even for successful companies like Google, it seems unlikely that they need anywhere remotely near 180k employees.
Everything you wrote paints a familiar picture: a company whose leadership made poor financial decisions over and over. I won't judge anyone for mourning the loss of their favorite corporate entity, but I personally find it hard to feel pity knowing that they dug their own grave.
Unity seem like a very valuable acquisition target. Any of the American or Chinese big tech companies could put Unity to good strategic use plus a few medium sized tech companies like Adobe and Sony.
My money is on Meta. Unity powers the vast majority of VR games and is (was) the favored API for Meta's dev tools, and even Apple chose it as their only officially supported 3rd party toolkit for the Vision Pro.
Meta seems to enjoy throwing money into the VR space to subsidize it at the low-cost end, I could easily see them doing a hostile takeover of Unity "for the good of the VR space"
Apple “chose” it might be a bit misleading. While I’m sure they could’ve gone with Unreal, the outstanding lawsuits alongside the very loud negative press from Epic made it a non starter. Outside of Unreal and Unity, there aren’t a lot of options.
The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes makes less money than this so-called runtime fee.
I beg to differ, I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no revenue share/royalty pledge they had earlier, and ironically came up with an even worse monetization scheme.
In my opinion, the only reason this whole fiasco happened is because Unity the company has too many headcounts and has too much expense, and the reason for that is they grew too big, and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth, even if the company is much healthier if it had stayed smaller.
Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we ended up here. I think that says a lot.