Hopefully this will encourage the use and development of Godot and other open source engines. If Unity doesn't back off, I don't see any other possible reality.
OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Just the QA testing budget alone that is required to support all consoles, PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot.
What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just not forkable for commercialization.
There is immense room to eat Unity’s lunch and capture its entire market share. Especially when you consider that a new engine can discard 15 years of legacy support Unity’s team fights against endlessly.
Edit: downvote me, but I’ve been doing this for 15 years and this is the only way. blender is not a useful comparison, it supports two platforms and is built on other OSS software that is GPL.
Yeah it seems like enshitification during the long tail is the point of the VC model across all industries. Give product away for free, figure out how to screw the install base later on.
Can't blame the VCs for trying this model, but they've played society for suckers. We let them get away with this for too long, becoming dependent on their "free" offerings.
At this point I'd be willing to get rid of my free stuff altogether and pay a subscription for products I like/use as it would incentivize the companies to add features that benefit me.
For example, search on the web is dying. I would absolutely pay money to replace Google with a search engine I trust and that works for me.
> Yeah it seems like enshitification during the long tail is the point of the VC model across all industries. Give product away for free, figure out how to screw the install base later on.
It needs two sides for this to work:
1. a company attempting to "fish" customers with this approach
2. customers who fall for this trap, and did not create an emergency/backup plan when the respective company becomes "evil"/untenable.
Every company sooner or later becomes "evil" (and be it because of ownership changes because the original founders die or want to retire). Having made no "backup plan" for such a situation to happen is in my opinion gross negligence.
Maybe I’m an outlier, but I blow right past their limits on any reasonably-priced tier. I use my search bar for all sorts of inquiries, serious and frivolous, including basic addition and subtraction. I tried it for a month and found that my usage far exceeded what I was willing to pay, which was about $10 a month. If they can get the costs down, I’d happily subscribe, I think the results were very good. Google’s results have become terrible over the years, it’s hard to fathom how it’s still their cash cow when the product is practically unusable.
Search is dying. The quality of search I mean, which doesn't bode well as civilization pretty much runs based on our ability to search the web for commercial/ government / political work.
It's a problem. Whoever control search will control what we see hear and read. Dangerous times. Hoping that somebody can build a subscription search that works and returns real competitive-ness to the information marketplace
Depends on who the backers are I guess. Perhaps not the classic kind — like say, convince MS, Apple, and Sony to pony up $10mm each. It’s a good play for them to not be caught in this Unity fiasco and $10mm is a rounding error.
Traditional VC companies wouldn't work because they'll always enshittify. Even on consumer space, you can see enshittification from MS, Sony and Apple.
I really don't see a reason why the companies you listed would need that 2% royalty at all honestly. They already get the 30% from the sales themselves, and could very well financially support the existence of an OSS game engine with no extra royalties. Sony and MS already develop the Unity and Unreal integration for their platforms without charging extra royalties.
The devs using the OSS engine also wouldn't be stopped from spending resources on making the engine better for their uses (and in turn, making it also better for everyone), similarly how it works with Linux.
And you wont manage to achieve anything with that. Maybe Unity could spinoff its ad business (together with some major liabilities like Ricitelo and other execs) and then MS could buy the engine part.
$10mm each. $30mm backing and you could get a pretty solid tech base to build a game on. Especially since there are some great new libs out there for things like physics. The Horizon Zero Dawn lead programmer has an OSS MIT engine that is very advanced and less bloated than PhysX.
Realistically that would still only be enough to get something you can make a cool looking demo and that only run on desktop.
Building a general purpose engine that is suitable for many different workflows and run on pretty much every singe platform like Unity is very trick and takes a lot of time (and trial an error). Dev UX, APIs, platform integration, QA, all the third party packages and infrastructure are much harder to solve than shiny graphics or advanced physics. Whatever you come up with that $30mm is only likely to cover a small subset of use cases.
v1 you would not attempt to be the be-all-end-all. Target iOS and Android since those are core Unity markets and throw on PC+Switch as the secondaries.
$30mm is more than enough when you ditch legacy stuff like anything that isn't a Vulkan/DX11/Metal renderer.
VC backed for profit engine is precisely what Unity is though?
So is Unreal and CryEngine.
Both of which only survive on graphical fidelity, which is not what Unity was touted for.
Unity was for filling that small-to-medium sized games in terms of man power, if you got 15 years of experience then you should know that.
I think it would be more interesting to see a Coop backed engine, where the COOP has to listen to it's customers.
Since my biggest annoyance with proprietary software or in this case game engine is that you can create the most elaborate sub-engine (for example a fully-dynamic RPG) and see it all come crashing down because some dimwit at Epic Games reeeeally wants to push the latest eye candy that breaks your sub-engine.
That's the one thing OSS is far superior at, you can fork the engine form a new developer community or even work with the OG maintainers to incorporate the sub-engine as a module and as such be officially supported both by your team and theirs.
Meanwhile with proprietary software, you're stuck at this particular version with no legal way of ensure the survival of the project, RPGMaker games are the perfect example of this, as soon as you venture past it's originally intended fidelity, you're essentially going to be limited by the engine in terms of performance.
> Since my biggest annoyance with proprietary software or in this case game engine is that you can create the most elaborate sub-engine (for example a fully-dynamic RPG) and see it all come crashing down because some dimwit at Epic Games reeeeally wants to push the latest eye candy that breaks your sub-engine.
Uf, feel that one. If the engine isn't designed with your genre in mind you may be making some significant structural changes(which will be interesting to see how open source engines handle that).
Even if they don't take the engine a different direction the up-leveling cost of getting new features/bug fixes is significant. Back when I was working in industry we had one person who's almost fulltime job was to merge -> fix compile errors -> fix runtime issues -> checkin change and uncover more edge cases that got broken -> repeat process, it was brutal.
>Even if they don't take the engine a different direction the up-leveling cost of getting new features/bug fixes is significant. Back when I was working in industry we had one person who's almost fulltime job was to merge -> fix compile errors -> fix runtime issues -> checkin change and uncover more edge cases that got broken -> repeat process, it was brutal.
And here I thought industry is that one programming market with no awful grinds.
I do sympathize though, webdev frontend+backend is just hellish (but you do have some tools to alleviate the pain, but when you have to rewrite the app 6+ times it really breaks you).
Exactly! I, up until recently, have been happy to pay Unity six figures for enterprise support for exactly this reason.
I even have engine source, and guess what, it’s wildly complicated. My team doesn’t remotely have the bandwidth to do anything meaningful with it even if we had the right to make modifications.
The argument for open source always neglects this reality. Just because I could change something doesn’t mean I have the economic reality to actually change it.
Windows, Mac and Linux; that's three, right? And it supported many Unix variants while their marketshare was significant. Where does your "two platforms " come from?
>> I’ve been doing this for 15 years
Most commenters here don't have 15 years of gamedev experience, but many here watched Blender turn into a tool among the leaders coming from a "very weird UI" in about that same amount of time. Why can't the same happen to Godot?
>> PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot.
We heard the same about GNU, GCC, Linux, Apache... look back at what happened to most closed source Unixes of the 90's. Yes, game engines are a different market but your argument is the same we heard other times.
Blender has been around for 29 years, to be fair it’s only been open source for 21, but still it took an extremely long time to get to a point that was comparable to other tools. It’s still definitely not as used as Maya. I do genuinely feel Godot can be adopted widely because it’s better than any other open source game engine that has been around, but blender took an absurdly long time to be competitive.
I'm sure Unity would be fine with that. I don't see how could they hope to collect more than 0.5-2% if averaged out over their all customers even with the new pricing.
I guess the problem is that revenue share is very hard to enforce, by adopting something like that you'll be probably giving up on a significant proportion (if not the majority) of fees you could get from developer in China (and some other countries in similar situations). Install fee (while a bizarre idea) should be easier to enforce.
I don't understand what QA budget has to do with game engine budget and why the latter needs to be larger. What's the budget of Linux again compared to stuff that runs on top of it?
First off, you can’t OSS consoles. The manufacturers require an NDA and arpproval to gain access to the hardware and SDKs. This costs real money.
Second, every console and to a lesser degree mobile are constantly changing their SDKs and that requires a lot of testing to ensure that your engine works across a huge permutation of platforms. Throw in the need to support an LTS version of your engine and it balloons in cost.
All those SDL games already released on consoles and Godot soon gaining support via W4 beg to differ.
Yes, it's pointlessly hard and annoying because of platform stewards and all the hoops they make you jump through, but it's certainly not impossible nor infeasible.
I’m not a game developer nor do I plan to become one but the thing that seems strange to me is all of this talk of revenue sharing with the development tools. If I create a successful app or website using Visual Studio, Microsoft isn’t going to take a percentage of my revenue. Even Apple won’t take a percentage to use Xcode and only charges to publish on their platform. Why is game development different?
Because that is the business model that Epic and Unity figured out for their engines, and poor game developers saw as preferable than paying once upfront, which might or might not have been a mistake.
I know. So if you use unity to create a game that is being published on iOS or the Microsoft game platform, are you not being charged 30% from Apple/Microsoft and then a per install charge from Unity. That doesn’t sound sustainable whether you are a small or large developer.
I spent some time in the trenches on this, and concluded what is needed is some sort of agreed module/integration mechanism and an ecosystem of open and proprietary modules. (Quite similar to how many large game devs operate already).
No “open engine” will ever be enough, by definition, as the games people will pay for will be those which were hard to make, and tech advantage is one well proven way to do that.
The tech industry is beginning to learn that barriers to entry, such as those Nintendo created in the 1980s or existed in the early days of the App Store, actually helped the market function to create much better results. Apparently Atari will be repeated again and again.
What? VC-backed is all about the strategy Unity is employing: capture the market and enshittify afterwards. They literally can't "be an engine company. Period".
Unity provides a good example of why it would be a wise strategy. You don’t need a unicorn in this space, just something that can throw off serious cash over time as that 2.5% compounds.
Ah yes, the only way to make fun and successful games is to introduce corporate greed. History has proven your 15 years of experience wrong many times.
Console port support for Godot would rely on commercial/proprietary offerings due to the fact that you can’t open source those code (as you have to incorporate vendor code).
Wrong. My indie studio is “small”, but we ship an open world game that is only tenable on Unity because our our minspec. I’d switch something not Unity ASAP if something comparable entered the scene.
As I have been pointing out for years, and this clusterfuck shows yet again, if you rely on any platform, you are not indie.
Some people also say that indie also means small, otherwise the most indie studios out there would be the likes of Valve and (Microsoft-)Activision-Blizzard.
"VC-backed" seems like a naive opinion at best. Also, doesn't UE already do everything you describe? Why is another one needed?
Half the Unity games are complete and utter garbage anyway. Most people don't need the complexity of a full-blown engine for the kinds of games they put out there.
QA costs could ultimately be paid off by people who actually use the engine, no? If they contribute back or, at least, create an issue things could work out.
You can’t risk your business on broken software. An engine company also has to support old releases of the engine for a certain period of time because you can’t just upgrade your shipped game to every new version of an engine that might contain back compat breaking changes — or changes that have too high a cost to port to.
It is certainly amusing to see people think they can build a "community" around a corporation and proprietary software and then learn the lesson the hard way.
I would think the fee would be even worse for F2P games because they rely on a huge install base. If 5% of the installs generate any revenue at all, they'd have to generate 20x the fee in revenue on average in order to break even.
Also, doesn't the whole trust issue apply equally to F2P games? A supplier increasing prices is one thing. If your supplier is Darth Vader and goes around saying things like "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further" -- even if it's within the letter of the law and the EULA (and that "if" is still somewhat in doubt, especially in the EU), doesn't that make you...rather nervous about the possibility of future surprise changes to your unit economics, even if this particular change to your unit economics doesn't put you out of business?
It’s a funny one. Major corporations are more likely to feel the hit to their bottom line, and generally are able to take a short term painful decision to make a long term profitable one, like switching or investing in their own engine.
On the flip side, small companies are more likely to be discouraged from ever using Unity because of this.
So who remains using it? Mid-tier companies who can’t afford to switch?
Which will likely be very insignificant if they are actually making any money on their games. Nobody besides those making about $1.2-2 million and who have very low revenue per user will be really affected financial that much.
The fact that Unity randomly imposed fees their clients hadn't agreed on for install of games which are already released and the whole install tracking issue itself seems like a much bigger issue than the actual cost.
Yeah, I'm particularly thinking of Microsoft-Activision-Blizzard being able to jump ship with a Hearthstone 2, while Hasbro-Wizards of the Coast is probably now stuck paying Unity the money for Magic the Gathering Arena for at least a decade. (And even there, they are lucky, they were just mentioning that they were now thinking about going beyond the 1vs1, PvP focus of Arena just this summer !)
What's interesting here is the economics of F2P mobile - which, as the article describes it, incentivize the creation of maximally addictive games that drain the user's wallet.
I used to be a heavy palm pilot gamer so I was excited for the future when Android hit the scene. instead, I get a lot of "free" games that are fun for an hour -- just long enough to get you invested and having fun -- to have the game time wall you and ask to pay to get passed it. I'd happily pay $1-15 for a fun mobile game but I haven't found one yet, honestly.
I wonder, if godot becomes the defacto successor, will we see posts of the sort in a few years we see about cloud open source these days? People complaining about the redistributors (cloud companies/game studios) not giving back to the open source software they use to make their money?
Because a lot of the posts I've seen on reddit around this whole thing sound alergic to the idea of paying for a game engine.
Not necessarily, consider how big companies are paying Sqlite just to be certain that it keeps being supported, even despite it literally being in the public domain.
Yes, but it is precisely because they are trying to get a slice of the pie from large studios that whatever happens to indie devs with their changes are just collateral damage
I'd wager it won't affect most small studios, since most games never get close to the prerequisite $200k revenue in a year. But the thought that if you finally do see success you have to start paying danegeld to Unity...?
Far worse is that Unity apparently has the ability and desire to do things like this. What's to stop them in the future from altering the deal further?
Oh I 100% agree, it's a bit refreshing to not just be told "don't worry if you're an indie dev" - like you get told oh so many times like the trap it is.
> $200k revenue in a year. But the thought that if you finally do see success you have to start paying danegeld to Unity
You already had to upgrade to Pro if your company (now it's per game which in theory might be a significant discount) had more than $200k in revenue. So yes, but you still had to earn over 1 million per game and the fees are not that bad with Pro (since you get 1 mill for free).
Unity will still likely be much cheaper than Unreal. Zero respect for customers and unpredictability (what they might pull off next?) would seem like much better incentives and cost for most.
