Can't help feel like these stats were eye opening for them. There was a big shift in the community. The funnel of new Unity devs and games was drying out.
Are those overall numbers? Looking at the "this week's projects", it's 230 for godot vs 147 for unity. Which is probably more interesting detail than overall numbers.
> We called it “democratizing game development,” and it remains our core mission today.
> However, we can’t pursue that mission in conflict with our customers
Surprising absolutely no one. Either you can "democratize Y" or you can focus on building your for-profit company, where profits have to take topmost priority.
But hopefully people won't fall for this after it's been abused as a term multiple times. When these companies scream they just want to "save the world", remember that it's just marketing, just like the rest of this announcement.
There are better options out there. Godot probably the most mature one at this point, owned by a non-profit with the source code being FOSS, so you can be sure it'll act in your interest for the future.
Profits do not "have to" take top priority for any company, this is a widely believed myth. Any company may choose to prioritise its mission over absolute profit as long as they are clear with their investors that that's what they're doing.
If it were true companies could never legally offer discounts, bundles, whatever. Long term thinking (eg acquire customers at less profit today) would be impossible if immediate profits always had to come first.
You think companies offer discounts, bundles or whatever out of altruism? The goal is to maximize profits with those things, although it's future profits, not immediate profit.
Why create the standard for-profit enterprise then? If profits isn't your topmost priority, then going for a non-profit, public benefit corporation or similar would be in your best interest and more beneficial.
You can still make profits with those, but there is a limit, hence people tend to go for the typical setup.
I would say it’s entirely irrelevant to being nice. Unity demanding that every garbage tier game flaunt that it was made with Unity seemed like it was a net negative for unity itself.
You do not need to show a splash screen for unreal. In fact, I believe you need to get permission to do so, even if they’re only go to refuse for porn and shit.
The reason for doing the runtime fee in the first place is that they're bleeding cash despite being the engine behind many highly lucrative games.
From a long term perspective this is very good for the future of Unity, their stock price is even up on the news, but they're going to have to do something about their cash flow situation. The 25% increase for Unity Enterprise is significant, but it doesn't sound like enough.
The Runtime Fee was a new fee attached to Unity 6 that applied only to games (and only to games meeting certain number of downloads and revenue floors), so cancelling it for games customers is cancelling it entirely.
Seems a bit late now that they blew up their customer base and created a movement for developers to transition away from their products. Total own-goal, brought to you by the EA executive that thought players would pay in game for ammunition reloads.[1] The concept of meritocracy cries whenever these morons get hired.
I wish they had done this for altruistic reasons, but I doubt it.
Unity is still better than Godot in a lot of ways (mainly the support ecosystem), but by March that might be different. Godot is catching up quickly. It has more momentum behind it than possibly any other open source project I've experienced.
Honestly the best thing that ever happened to the Godot community was the Unity diaspora trying it out and complaining. A lot of that was written off as simply insisting that Godot act and feel like Unity, but given that Unity is the more mature and widely used platform, it sets the standard implicitly whether people like it or not. Also a lot of technical complaints, particularly around Godot's relatively lackluster 3D capabilities, were ironed out that may not have even been addressed if left to community momentum alone.
I like Godot but its open source nature means it does have some rough edges, mostly around GDScript but framework features like tilemap implementation, model imports and physics have always been a bit wonky.
> I like Godot but its open source nature means it does have some rough edges, mostly around GDScript but framework features like tilemap implementation, model imports and physics have always been a bit wonky.
You're attributing a lack in Godot you feel to it being open source. Given the commercial success of other open source projects like Blender, I don't think this is a fair or measured take.
Blender is a lot older and has a lot more professional investment and interest behind it. I don't doubt Godot could be in a similar state of quality given as much time and effort, but I don't think it's there yet. With open source, contribution quality is often a function of popularity attracting contributors with the necessary skillset being willing to put in the time and effort, usually for free.
This isn't meant to be a slight against open source, just an acknowledgement of the tradeoffs of an open development model. Something like a game framework or model editor can't reach a certain level of maturity until actual professionals in the field care enough to contribute, because of the knowledge gatekept within those industries, and their expertise. Most free software contributors will necessarily be amateurs and hobbyists, and that will likewise limit the quality of the end product.
There's no such thing as “altruism”. The reasons don't matter. A good reputation, on the other hand, does matter, and I'm afraid that they've squandered it. It's difficult to regain people's trust.
Altruism is just a romantic notion. Speaking about its existence is like speaking about the existence of a soul. Souls may well exist, but it doesn't manifest in this universe.
Everything we do is for selfish reasons and that's good actually, as it means we have real motivation to help others.
I just got started with a Unity project a few weeks back. My only goal right now is to build out a concept to see if it even makes sense to invest real time into. If I get to the actual money piles and it turns out the terms of doing business with Unity are too intolerable, I would consider swapping paths.
There are a lot of developers who seem interested in the idea of making games, but they get so caught up in the intense tribalism around the various approaches that nothing meaningful comes of their efforts.
I recall discussions around how quickly projects were able to be migrated to Godot. So, what's the harm in beginning somewhere else?
As someone who has worked in the game industry for years both in AAA and indie, I’d say the switching costs are quite high and proportional to the team and code size. The reason it can be so challenging is a late change can easily double your preproduction time as you have to port over existing systems/tools/workflows and the bigger teams have many more of these systems. Usually this means bigger studios only changes engines at the start of new franchises or when fully rebooting old ones (For example, the new Mass Effect is porting from Frostbite to Unreal 5, but it’s only viable because it’s a super high budget reboot with new creative direction and the time to do it)
It easier to switch if you’re indie, of course, but the reality is if your game is great it’s better to launch with the engine you have. And if your game is struggling gameplay-wise porting it to another engine isn’t going to help make the game better and puts the release at risk.
I don't understand the hate. They did a very bad decision and had major backlash. Fast-forward one year: they rectified it completely, they greatly improved the free terms compared to what was before, they replaced the CEO and other involved executives.
That's seems a sensible way of addressing a fuckup, especially considering that the plans now are very reasonable and indie-friendly.
People were kind of sleeping on the fact that Unity could at any times alter the deal to their own benefit. It wasn't until Unity did what they did, that people realized that maybe it's not a mutually beneficial relationship when one of the parts can change the terms whenever they want.
So naturally, people start exploring other options that don't suffer from the same problem. Unity, realizing this, backpedals. Which yeah, makes sense, but people who got burned by the change already got burned, and they want to avoid it in the future.
I understand both sides, Unity needs to make money, otherwise it won't be around. And game developers need to feel like they're making a choice they can still justify and feel safe about in the future.
> but people who got burned by the change already got burned, and they want to avoid it in the future.
They likely have also put effort into moving to other frameworks, and if those are working out well enough for them there is no point making the effort to go back even with this change reverted.
Same for new projects that went directly elsewhere: unless Unity offers significant benefits (and the project controllers feel that Unity can be trusted not to repeat the rug-pull later) the effort of changing stack are likely not worth it.
> people realized that maybe it's not a mutually beneficial relationship when one of the parts can change the terms whenever they want.
Unity's thinking they could change the terms unilaterally whenever they want and not actually being able to make it stick suggests to me that Unity misunderstood the arrangement more than the users on the other side of that agreement. Yes, Unity had the legal power to change the agreement, but clearly the market disagreed with that move and Unity bore consequences that apparently they weren't ready to bear.
In the end it seems that Unity learned that legal power is not the same as market power and that they didn't have the real power to change that deal... and they learned it the all the hard way.
I'd go further and add that the fact a change like this could make its way through leadership and be implemented in such a manner demonstrates a disconnect in their understanding of how games are planned out and what their role in the process is.
If you just look at things like market share it's easy to lose sight of the fact that we're all tool vendors like the dude in the Snap-On truck.
Developers spend hundreds of hours of their lives to learn these platforms. When that fee came out, many had to pivot, letting all that experience go to waste, and starting over in other platforms. It's hugely disruptive to their time, their careers, and income.
Many have moved on. Dropping the fee doesn't mean they will come back. Even if it made financial / career sense, they were burned, still with a bad taste in their mouth from the experience. They cannot trust that Unity won't screw them over some other way in the future, better to keep going with their newfound direction if it's starting to pay off.
When your users / developers lose trust in you, it's the beginning of the end.
I hear the term “magic smoke” (or “magic blue smoke”) mainly from people who are messing around with electricity and who put it through an electronic component in volumes or directions that burn the component out.
The resultant puff of smoke brings the component’s behavior from the logical world to the physical one—tangible evidence of an unfortunate finality-of-outcome, an intricate IC become just a lump of charred sand again.
Likewise Unity could have done a whole lot of things with their licensing framework while users still had trust in their behavior. But now that they’ve blown out the figurative trust “chip,” they’re gonna have to find a way to get a new one before they get much out of tinkering further with their licensing circuit.
I remember back when putting together PCs in the 90s if the cable for the IDE drive was connected incorrectly it would emit smoke - I didn't directly experience it, but any instructions I had read warned about it.
TLDR: When electronics burn out, they often release "magic smoke" that is believed to be the source of their power (since they almost always fail to work afterwards).
For what? The damage is done but the engine is still ...fine. They'll have this black eye but they're not dead in the water. If you're an enterprise customer, you'll probably be asking to lock in terms for quite a while, though.
The engine is fine, but existing projects all invested effort into moving off it if they could, and new projects won't touch it with a 50 foot pole.
Large orgs are, indeed, likely locking in terms, but Unity's whole market was basically people building things initially in tiny setups with it, with more convenient access than Unreal.
It's more or less the same mistake flavor that IBM made with killing CentOS - they killed their onramp of the 500000 tiny projects using it because it was trustworthy enough, and that also kills the existence of 50 projects that go onto to be massive successes built on it.
It isn't the first questionable move, and it really shook a lot of people. Flipping back again a year later is the right move, but it doesn't instill confidence. It merely ceases the erosion of it.
They probably fired him because of the 90% stock drop, not because of any user complaints. There is no reason to believe the new leadership has different values, and people are right not to trust the company.
> I don't understand the hate. They did a very bad decision and had major backlash. Fast-forward one year: they rectified it completely, they greatly improved the free terms compared to what was before, they replaced the CEO and other involved executives.
But nothing prevent them from doing the same again if their indicators say it would be profitable. Developers just don't want to take the risk anymore.
I work at a fairly large mobile gaming company. We are stuck on the old version of Unity that doesn't have this fee. But to Unity's credit they are still supporting that version and doing bugfixes for us, but it sucks to be walled off like that, trying to eke out our existence as long as possible until we have to pay a lot more money.
> I don't understand the hate. They did a very bad decision and had major backlash.
One element of why the recoil was so strong was that this wasn’t consumers reacting angrily when the price of their favorite widget went up. This was Unity threatening to bankrupt entire companies and destroy livelihoods.
Once that trust is broken, specific to the tech stack underpinning your whole business, it is very hard to get it back.
They are constantly changing and abandoning things every six months.
How many times have they abandoned a networking library or built a new UI system that you have to relearn. Then right when you get the hang of it they release the next thing that maybe is better but also has big problems.
There are now so many half baked systems it just feels like a mess.
It doesn't work like that. This is a business, not a family member or old buddy. Their move last year underscored the immense risk that business have when dealing with them. Your game is a single CEO change away from bankruptcy when you give them so much power.
https://x.com/reduzio/status/1830184668588568701
"A year ago on Itch, Godot was about 1/10th the projects of Unity. Today its closing in to 1/3rd."