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:
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"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]
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"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.
Much as I love open source and the Godot engine, this seems more like a wake-up call on the importance of corporations not being able to unilaterally, retroactively change contracts in ways that impose new charges and violate existing contractual commitments that others have relied on. If they can do that then open source doesn't offer much real protection.
Open source is that protection. There's no way for an open source project to change their terms that drastically. The whole hasicorp disaster is a prime example of that. Terraform is forked and continues on like normal, users are not impacted.
For programming platforms (like game engines) this is even MORE of an advantage, as with something like terraform you could conceivably rewrite your stuff in a matter of weeks if you have reasonable testing. For a game that is not possible.
Nobody can take away your rights under the MIT license, there's no legal mechanism to do that. You are protected, fully, from shit like this.
> Terraform is forked and continues on like normal, users are not impacted.
That's a massive overstatement of the current state of OpenTF right now. Plus they're still dependent on Hashicorp's hosting which also changed their license terms in response to the project.
You're right that because it's OSS you can do this kind of thing where it wouldn't be possible at all in a proprietary system but "just fork" requires a community to organize around it. Without a bunch of backing orgs this wouldn't have happened.
Nobody can take away your rights if the contract you sign with the engine developer doesn't allow it, as people have been pointing out is the case for other engines. IIRC Unreal's contract gives you access to a particular version of the engine in perpetuity, with source and the permission to make your own additions/changes to that source. It doesn't guarantee updates, but neither does the MIT license.
Apparently this is exactly what is happening with Unity[1], where the TOS previously said that you can continue using an old version, but now they are walking this back and trying to apply fees retroactively. Whether this is legal or not might be debatable, but unless users mount a legal challenge they are probably stuck paying or finding another engine.
You're not stuck with an old version forever, that's very hyperbolic and you purposefully ignored OP's example of Hashicorp and Terraform and instead responded with sarcasm.
That's only a problem for you if you yourself have a business model that depends on curtailing the freedom of your users. Playing the victim when a license prevents you from victimizing your own customers and users in the way that has happened in this incident is pretty rich.
It is a wakeup-call also to do due dilligence and risk management when entering contracts. And yes, clicking "agreed" in the installer is very often a contract that you should run by your legal advisors. Or at least think very hard about.
_Some_ kinds of Open Source might help there, since _some_ open source licenses are very easy to comply with and very business-friendly. On the other hand, all the game studios now complaining would also howl and whine when forced to be GPL-compliant and release their source code.
And even with business-friendly take-what-you-want-and-never-give-back Open Source licenses, there is always the risk that the project you are using does what Hashicorp did with Terraform and stuff: Change the license for all future releases to something you won't like, cutting you off from your necessary updates and fixes. Maybe there will be a community maintaining a fork, maybe there won't.
>clicking "agreed" in the installer is very often a contract that you should run by your legal advisors.
The law often makes use of the reasonableness standard. I'm hard pressed to believe that carefully reading the hundreds of TOS and EULA's hoisted upon us is reasonable.
If you're reading my comment you must have read the TOS/EULA for ycombinator, firefox (or chrome), your wireless or ISP, the keyboard app on your phone, odds are you have an email, perhaps a google account, remember the OS licence. Ever listened to a music streaming service, watched youtube? Messaged using an app? Banked online? Have some managed passwords? Like games, how many? For the common people, what about social media?
That's about a dozen "contracts" and that's lowballing it, multiplied by each update to the "agreement" (pray they don't alterate further) multiplied by the requirement to also read and acknowledge the privcy policy. All this for services that have become when not essential ubiquitous and constantly shift under you. You'd need 8 figures to run that by a lawyer, or a part time job to carefully consider. That's not a reasonable arrangement.
> The law often makes use of the reasonableness standard. I'm hard pressed to believe that carefully reading the hundreds of TOS and EULA's hoisted upon us is reasonable.
Yes, but there are two sides to "resonableness": The "what" side and the "who" side. "What" is the thing that should be resonable. But the overall resonableness just as much depends on the question: "for whom is this reasonable?". While a consumer cannot possibly be expected to really read all the ToS everywhere, a business maybe can be expected to do so. Especially for things that are very critical and integral to the business, like the license of that one framework you are building all your software upon. So I do think requiring a business to read and understand the Unity ToS is totally resonable.
to be more charitable to the above, we're not talking about consumer software. if you're starting a company selling something there is a fair bit more reasonableness in asking you to read a contract
Exactly. This isn't about Joe Blow not reading the ToS for his eleventieth browser toolbar. This is about a business not reading the ToS for an essential, integral component that will cost you dearly to replace and might bankrupt the business.
What you are proposing is literally impossible. If I were to comb through every ToS and EULA and every other legal text related to tools I use as a developer, I would not have any hours left in the day for, you know, actual development. Even then, I wouldn't have time to read and comprehend all of the legal contracts. Hell, if I stopped sleeping entirely and spent 24 hours a day combing through legal contracts, I still wouldn't have enough time to go through all of them.
what use are contracts if buisnesses refuse to read them. Sure you as an employee might not but if you're running a company you really ought to read it on your key software. We're not talking about an email provider, its the key engine you're using. It's like if you didn't read the contract with the manfuacturer you hired to make your product...
Well, in Finland where I live, ToS and EULA are generally not considered to be "contracts", and for good reason.
I'm confused what you mean by saying that the employees of a business don't need to read these legal texts but that the "business" should read them. The "business" is not a physical life form that has the ability to read, only the employees of a business have that ability, since they are humans (unlike the business entity itself, which is not human). Perhaps your idea was that businesses should hire a team of lawyers whose only job should be to read through the various ToS and EULA legal texts that their other employees merely click-through?
in lots of countries, ToS and EULA are generally not considered to be enforcable "contracts"... for users of free consumer software under certain circumstances
If you as a buisness sign up to amazon web services to host your entire backbone on, you better read the contract. If you don't, you are irresponsible.
Someone, somewhere at the buisness should take the time to read a simple little document before using it as the backbone of everything they do at a company, yes. It does not have to be a lawyer...
I'm extremely sympathetic to the idea that there are too many eulas for free products, things like games or whatever where it really doesn't matter for 99.9% of users. But for the 0.1% that make their livelihood from the program, they should take the 25 minutes to read through it at least once.
I'm not saying this because im a big bad lawyer that hates you (I am not a lawyer at all), im saying it because it's a tiny thing you can do to save a whole lot of heartbreak.
You just gotta decide when its important to read contracts and when you don't care. I don't care about the contract when I get new lenses for my glasses, or when I pay for netflix. But if im moving into a new house? I read the bloody contract.
If you had read the Unity contracts before this mayhem, would you have been able to predict that Unity will screw developers over? I for sure wouldn't, because I'm not a lawyer.
Are you implying that one needs a crystal ball to predict which companies will screw you over with ToS changes in the future, and using that crystal ball in the present time, we can then skip reading ToS for all those other companies, which will not screw you over, and only read the ToS for the one company that will screw you over?
You could change the license for future versions and charge for said updates, for the market that godot targets that would be more a little screwing to them.
How long would it take for someone to take over the project (if ever).
And it's at exactly this moment the community would fork the project and development of a free version would continue. This is not a real risk for a community-driven project, only for corporate-driven projects where a single entity owns copyright on the on all or close to all of the codebase.
The important distinction isn't who owns copyright. It is rather that there needs to be a community opposed to the license change and able and willing to do the work.
One could even imagine scenarios like an originally MIT-licensed software splitting into a commercial company offering commercial paid licenses, plus a community (or even the company itself) offering a GPL-licensed fork. Of course one could then still maintain an additional MIT-licensed fork, but if the rest of the community is happy with GPL and all the development just happens there, your MIT fork will "starve"...
While I'm able to understand your argument, IMHO the MIT license is not displaying that well. Community is plural, and fork with MIT could be like Windows: Closed source. End of the (fork) line.
Given the project itself is still strong, this might not be a problem, but then I see no reason why it has chosen it in the first place if not for that specific option.
Copyright laws are all completely out of balance and stupid. As a rule, corporations can not retroactively change contracts. If this one is legal (I wouldn't try to guess), it will be because of the EULA rules.
They don't though, if any developer had the means to take it to court it is incredibly likely that Unity would lose.
While TOS are rarely worth the toilet paper they could be printed on, I'm curious about whether arguments could be made about whether existing subscribers from 2019 could now sue for breach of contract and costs associated with (re)development.
That's the big issue. This is going to hurt smaller developers more because they can't afford to fight it.
The big question is: to what extent to Unity games need to be able to talk to Unity's servers? If they're looking at number of installs (and apparently that includes pirated copies even?), serve ads, and probably provide other services, that sounds like the games need a connection to the server. In which case they may be able to disable your game if you don't pay. And then even if you could sue them, the real damage is already done.
The problem is today everything has ToS, you get a ToS update in the email and if you do not like it you have to stop using the product, and lot of software this days require an account , and has online features or requirements.
I got burned by Steam, I have a super old laptop with some old games on it, Half Life, so one day I got the laptop out, Steam updates and f** itself, the old system is no longer supported but they had to f** things up s the games won't work.
I agree, open source is not required, but we need to own our software not rent it.
> I agree, open source is not required, but we need to own our software not rent it.
That's just a start but also require freezing your OS and have lots of spare hardware or have rights to emulate it :)
And same with data - buyed songs for example :) Big industry already is killing media you can own - cd, dvd, blueray depends on outdated cpu, pendrives decay before becoming usefull backup media...
In the age of asholess open sources and resources are best. Let's bring more viral licenses then GPL !
Did they make a commitment in the first place? It is up to the developers using the engine to make due diligence and inspect the terms of the contracts and licenses of the software they use.
I would feel very uneasy if my product was based on a framework, where the provider makes no commitment and reserves the right to change the licensing terms at any time.
Unity made a specific committment in their terms that if those terms changed in a way that disavantaged existing developers, those developers could carry on using the existing annual release under the old terms, and also that they would notify developers of changes to their terms. They then sneakily removed that committment and almost immediately imposed this licensing fee for use of the runtime, when one of the specific advantages of Unity they promoted was not having any such fees, and retroactively applied this to new installks of all existing games. It was shameless and some company offering open source software could jsut as easily retroactively decide it wasn't open source at all.
Thanks for the info. I'm not into game dev and did not know that. That was a pretty nasty move and they should't be trusted anymore.
The last part I do not agree: a license cannot be changed retroactively if there is no provision in the original license for doing so, and no open source license have that. Even if "revoking" licenses for all prior releases were allowed, it could only work if all copyright holders agreed, which is not practical for most projects.
>> While Unreal engine currently does not have terms like Unity’s, there’s nothing stopping them from doing something similar. In fact if Unity manages to get away with this it seems likely they will follow suit.
Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for NEWER version Epic can change this.
Tim Sweeney explicitly mentioned this often + the fact that they are trying to break the Gplay/Apply monopoly shows that the Epic games leadership are not corporate piranhas like Unity's.
But what about Godot? He says as if "it's open source so no issue". Yeah but what if the devs stop supporting it? This "community will continue to work on it" is BS: in reality it's usually one or two guys who actually do the actual work.
So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a project with zero support. Good luck developing it further instead of focusing on your game.
> the fact that they are trying to break the Gplay/Apply monopoly shows that the Epic games leadership are not corporate piranhas like Unity's.
Epic is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart, they're doing it because it is beneficial to them. Epic is a multi-billion dollar corporation part owned by a massive conglomerate.
> BS: in reality it's usually one or two guys who actually do the actual work.
Over the last week, Godot had 32 authors pushing 52 commits. Over the last month it had 135 authors. This is not "one or two guys".
> So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a project with zero support.
Guess what, if a closed-source company decides to stop working on their product you're also stuck, but now you're even more stuck because you don't have access to the source to make your own changes!
> Epic is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart
Tim Sweeney founded Epic and wrote the Unreal engine himself. John Riccitiello’s whole career is in management. Even if they’re both entirely motivated by profit, they have different perspectives on how to get there.
Also, Unity is a public company, while Epic is private. Even though Tencent owns a considerable share of the company, Sweeney still holds over 50% ownership. That gives them very different incentives.
Sometimes we forget that executives are people too and they have their own personalities. Tim Cook famously[0] told climate change denialists in a shareholder meeting that “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock”. Sure enough, shareholders are also not solely motivated by profit, and voted with Cook on that occasion. It’s useful to remember that cynicism isn’t the same thing as realism.
If Tim Cook had calmly said what he did, I’d believe it was just toeing the party line. The fact that he actually got angry, though? He doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who’d fake that, I don’t think that’s the image he wants if nothing else.
He doesn't have to fake it. Dude probably believes that there's no connection between right to repair, unsustainable consumption, and planetary destruction. That might be worse than faking it.
iPhones have long support cycles. iOS 17 supports the iPhone XS/XR, which were released 5 years ago. So iPhone users don't have to replace their phone as much, reducing environmental impact. Plus with the recycling and other stuff used to make iPhones in the first place, their environmental impact is going to be lower than some other options on the market. Combine these two things together (longer device life, smaller impact for making a new device) and I can believe iPhones have the smallest CO2 footprint.
Phew, there I was thinking Apple do their best to make sure customers buy the new phone every year, but glad to hear it's not happening thanks to Apple.
I mean, Apple should just release a new model every five years and really get that footprint down...
Eh. Part of apples brand is “doing the right thing” and “being the good guy”. I would wager Apple’s brand would be hurt more by not being a green company. ROI is more complicated than simple fist level cost. Going green and doubling down on recycling has generated a much larger ROI than doing nothing.
Further more, Tim is bound by law to do what is best for the shareholders. Simply put, if Tim favored environmental concerns over profit he would be removed.
"Best interests" is deliberately vague. Is it in their "best interests" that you fire the CEO and call the cops because he raped an intern? Or maybe that you agree to accelerate his $40M "bonus" if he agrees to resign without saying why? Or maybe it's in their "best interests" that you pay PIs to develop evidence that the intern has a drug habit and "leak" this "shocking revelation" to the media if they go public?
You can argue almost anything meets this criterion, in some egregious scenarios a court won't buy it, but they will give you enormous leeway.
People write this sentence seeming to imply it means "CEOs and management have a responsibility to be as ruthless and sociopathic as possible to deliver the highest returns, and any consideration of the people or communities they trample beyond legal requirements is itself borderline illegal."
There is a lot - A LOT - of room for ambiguity and debate on the specifics of shareholder value and "best interests." The "legal constraints to act in the best interest" is not some set of corporate rules and KPIs codified into our legal code write large. It's not about maximizing a specific KPI over a fixed timeframe.
Not to mention Sweeney is the majority shareholder in Epic's case.
It’s a private company… to whatever theoretical extent he’s beholden to the majority of the shareholders with potential board of directors and shareholder meeting shenanigans … that majority of shareholders is himself… and I’m pretty sure he’s ok with his own decisions…
"Further more, Tim is bound by law to do what is best for the shareholders."
This stupid meme needs to die already. There is no such obligation, he only has a fiduciary duty to not trash the company and spend the earnings on cocaine. "companies are legally forced to maximise profit" has never been true and this piece of misinformation has been going around for ages now.
And, insofar as such an obligation to “maximise shareholder value” might exist, that obligation doesn’t necessarily translate into “maximise profit”.
The shareholders of a theatre company might care more about breaking even while getting an interesting assortment of plays produced with a great cast than they do about making a bunch of money out of the venture, so an executive who makes a bunch of money by running productions of uninspired cash grab shows won’t actually be maximising value. Likewise, I’m sure that Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds care more about Wrexham AFC’s managers getting good athletic results than they do about making a bunch of money.
>And, insofar as such an obligation to “maximise shareholder value” might exist, that obligation doesn’t necessarily translate into “maximise profit”.
And even where it does translate into "maximise profit" because it's what shareholders of a particular company may want, there is no timeframe for it, and there is no way to tell whether any particular decision by the CEO runs contrary to the goal of eventually maximising profits.
Companies can spend all their revenues plus a constant stream of new capital on growing market share or revenue, on charitable activities or the happiness of employees, on huge research and development projects or on restructuring after restructuring and still credibly claim that all of it is ultimately meant to maximise profits.
The point where CEOs and CFOs have to be careful is when the company faces solvency issues. That's where legal limits of freewheeling decision making kick in, because it's where it's no longer about shareholders but about creditors.
There's still argument about this. The oft mentioned Dodge v. Ford Motor Company 1919 covers much the argument for and against. But it's clearly not straightforward.
My (IANAL) reading of it is that maximising shareholder value is probably the law, but it's practically unenforcible. Being practically unenforcible doesn't stop CEOs and boards from using it as a guiding principle.
Dodge v. Ford Motor Company was a Michigan State decision, so even if one thinks it means maximizing shareholder value is the law (it really didn't say that, broadly), it only applies in Michigan.
> "companies are legally forced to maximise profit" has never been true
It's more like too hard to be proven in any way. Unless you live in an simulator it's really hard to say which set of decisions is better than another. People often say it is obvious or in hindsight but fact is there are no such hard proofs.
Even then, if the shareholders approve of trashing the company with ice cream parties (had to get rid of the illegality of cocaine for this point) there's nothing inherently wrong or illegal with that.
As long as the executives are behaving generally how the shareholders want, it's not a problem.
Cook isn't bound by that true enough, because he remains the majority stakeholder, but that is increasingly not the case as it becomes more and more regular that companies bring in new CEOs from entirely different companies if not entirely different industries, who do not own that much stake. In those cases, the board and shareholders can and do exert a lot of influence, up to and including firing them if they do not do their jobs correctly, which to shareholders is invariably some form of "make line go up."
And that's just civil influence, there are legal mechanisms indeed in place if a CEO "trashes a company" and what that means is different depending on the company.
> Epic is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart, they're doing it because it is beneficial to them. Epic is a multi-billion dollar corporation part owned by a massive conglomerate.
Holy straw man! And there’s certainly no self-interest involved with me using their engine without giving them a cut under 1 mill right?
You can make this argument about literally anything.
Godot must have no self-interest in releasing their engine for free and making $30k a month to develop their project.
Who cares what the motivation is if it gives real benefits to devs. If anything it tells me they’ve picked a business model that’s mutually beneficial unlike Unity
While you can make this argument about literally anything, it seems apt to make it about a multi-billion dollar company chasing a trillion dollar company.
It's fine to support them while they are the underdog and are saying and doing the right thing, but don't pretend like they will say and do the right thing forever.
I don't think the parent was ever saying they'll be good forever. More that if they do become evil, their licensing lets you continue using a revenue structure that made sense at the time you chose it (even if new versions have super awful terms).
> Who cares what the motivation is if it gives real benefits to devs.
Motivations matter, because they will decide in which direction a project moves over time, or if situations change. Epic is the "good guy" now, but only because they are an underdog. If they become the dominator, they might become the predator which Unity tries to be at the moment.
But if we are honest, such uncertain possibilities don't matter if they are so far in the future. This might be a problem for future games, 10, 20 years down the river..
It's hilarious that their arguments for the commercial engine are somehow both "you can use one version forever" and "you might be forced to use one version of something else forever."
If you understood the problem then you’d know that their argument is about how Unity’s new pricing change is retroactive, affecting all Unity versions and charging fees to devs for games made years ago.
Unreal uses perpetual licenses for their versions meaning this kind of bullshit behavior is not possible
Perhaps it is you who doesn't understand. We all get that part, and it makes sense in isolation. Yes, that is better.
Then it's goofy af to say Godot might make a license change that necessitates using one version in perpetuity-except a version you and others are allowed to modify and distribute.
Epic is mainly owned by its founder. They are not primarily corporate though they are influenced by it. They are 100% more trustworthy than Unity or other corporate game companies.
Until Tim Sweeney sells the company, or dies, or whatever. Enter any contract you like, but know that those contracts outlast the people who executed them.
EDIT: To elaborate, this is an article about a company fucking users over after an aggressive growth / dumping business model phase. Your response is yes but this other company would never fuck users over after an aggressive growth / dumping business model phase.
Watching this industry for a long time, I've learned that I can never trust a company. Companies are made up of people but the people within them change, and their incentives change. This is very much the case with Unity.
People, on the other hand, I can trust. Not often, but in cases where a person has made a long series of decisions over a decade or more, you can get a feel for what their value system is. Tim Sweeney is in this category. He was involved in Unreal back when I was in undergrad, more than 20 years ago. So I sort of put him in the same category as Gabe Newell and John Carmack: relatively enlightened game business leaders that understand the true value that gamers and developers derive from the ecosystem. None of them are in to make another dollar in the next quarter: they are focused on long term success and the are passionate about games themselves.
So it's not that you're wrong, it's just that your argument applies cynicism uniformly, and I'm not sure that's fair given the history of those involved.
> Your response is yes but this other company would never fuck users over after an aggressive growth / dumping business model phase.
Well, Epic didn't do that when it went through it's aggressive growth and the last time it dumped it's business model. Instead, they changed their licensing to lower fees, and when you look at what they did across the board, made things better for customers and game developers.
> Over the last week, Godot had 32 authors pushing 52 commits. Over the last month it had 135 authors. This is not "one or two guys".
Yeah, right now (and I hope it keeps increasing thanks to the Unity news).
I got burnt once (and almost twice) from this in the past. cocos2d-iPhone used to be huge, and Zynga even contributed to it. I released two games using it, and started another one. And then it stopped getting updated (and Apple keeps breaking things like Apple likes to do), so it died on the vine and I had to port to something else.
Currently making a game in Monogame, and while it did get a significant update a little over a year ago, it's had very little activity on it since then and no other releases besides a hotfix shortly after, and zero communication about what's going on with any of their official channels at least. Not great especially since there seems to be spotty support for .Net 6 outside of Windows still, and I keep running into various issues with its 3D support (which it is mainly supposed to be a 2D game, but it does support 3D to a certain extent).
Also while it claims to support platforms like PS4 and Switch, I see almost no documentation on it, and very little documentation on getting Steamworks working with it (I have some basic things working, but I'm having to figure things for Unity first and then porting that knowledge over). Also most of its multiplayer libraries seem outdated, at least the ones I looked up. And the forums/Discord still have some activity on them, but not a ton. Also I'd love to make a game that supported VR (almost switched to Unity just for that alone).
I actually compared its Github activity to Godot a week ago, and Godot looks SO much better supported than Monogame at this point, that I was already considering either porting or making my next game in Godot before this Unity news was announced. But maybe that's just me hopping onto another platform that will have the same problem in 5 years after I've gotten pretty invested into it.
I also know Unity (worked on a game professionally years back) and considered switching to that for my game too, but that mostly got killed by this announcement.
Personally I prefer code-based development (I don't like using an editor too much), so if Monogame was better supported and had much better 3D support I'd probably just stick with it. I thought I was going to when I first started using it seriously three years ago. But I hesitate to keep dumping time into it if they don't maintain it.
Also I made a small game with Phaser.js and was going to do more with that, but even that creator is pretty much the only one maintaining it and they got sidelined by life for about six months (which is fine, but get someone to help keep it going if you can! I know that's hard though). Phaser at least is already close to what I want from it, and doesn't seem to need much else for the foreseeable future.
You can access the source code to unreal engine when you get a license, but the terms are not by any stretch of the imagination open source. You wouldn't be able to freely share your modifications for instance.
You don't have to get a "license" (at least in the sense of paying anything), IIRC you just connect your EGS account to your Github account, accept an EULA (which technically is a "license" I guess) and then have read access to the Unreal Engine GH repositories.
(currently there seem to be around half a million users with access)
I'm hailing from an era where "getting a game engine license" involved several in-person meetings between top-level management of both companies, followed by multiple technical meetings between engineers from both companies, followed by exhaustive due diligence investigations from both sides, followed by intense haggling and shady backroom deals for several months, and finally signing a proper "contract", handing over absurd amounts of money upfront and then paying equally absurd amounts of royalties after release.
That's basically what I understand as "getting a license for a game engine" (this is also why Unity got popular in the first place, because they skipped all this nonsense).
OTH I accept probably 5..10 EULAs a week without thinking or even reading the text (most of them are not enforceable anyway).
AFAIK in Germany the TL;DR is that if there's anything in the EULA which violates "German Civil Code (BGB)", then either parts or all of the EULA are invalid. I remember that in Germany an EULA cannot prohibit reselling the software to somebody else, or making your own backup copy (kinda tricky nowadays though where everything is just a "service").
"AFAIK in Germany the TL;DR is that if there's anything in the EULA which violates "German Civil Code (BGB)", then either parts or all of the EULA are invalid. "
There is nothing unique about German law here. The same is true in the USA and most other countries. If a EULA or any other contract (whether agreed verbally, signed physically, digitally, or via a "click") violates the law, it can be considered invalid/unenforceable. It has nothing to do with how the agreement was agreed to, but with what the agreement contains. (There may be some legal theory that may carry some weight that a contract agreed to via a "click" is more likely to be unconscionable that one agreed to with a physical signature, but that does not automatically make all "click" agreements unenforceable.)
I was going to comment that it’s viewable by anyone on their GitHub, but you are correct: you have to be part of the Epic GitHub organisation to access the repo. Getting access is easy, but you do have to agree to their licensing terms to do so. So yes, what you said.
I used to work for Epic so I have some inside knowledge, but modifying the engine and sharing it with other licensees (via the UDN forum usually) Its actively encouraged too.
You're contradicting your own points. If it is not a problem that Unreal can change their license for next versions because you can use the old one (which is now unsupported and not worked on) that is fine.
For Godot, if we were to stop developing it (and I'd like to note that Godot is one of the most active projects on Github right now) you would still have the version you have now.
What is the difference between Epic not working on a game engine you use or an open source project not working on a game engine you use? Except that with Godot at least you could work on it yourself if you wanted to.
> Except that with Godot at least you could work on it yourself if you wanted to.
let me play the devil's advocate - unreal's source is available (despite it not being actual opensource licensed). This means if Epic ever abandons unreal, you could theoretically also just make the changes you need to support whatever your project required - as long as you didn't distribute those changes (except perhaps the run-time? Not quite sure how unreal engine and the runtime are licensed).
If unreal decides to abandon all older versions support and development, to just focus on something new that requires payment, I don't think you can keep fixing or updating the old unsupported code, even if you have the source
You just can't redistribute the source to anyone else but using it internally for your own projects to build executable that you share (and sell as long as you pay the royalties to Epic) is fine.
The last UE3 game released in 2021. UE4 came out in 2014 and UE5 in 2020.
Unreal Engine license are per engine version and perpetual. This is something Sweeney has been pointing out for years. And again a few days ago when Unity started this shit storm. And as Sweeney points out the big studios/publishers usually negotiate even better terms.
Yes you can. But unless you're a AAA developer studio, it's ridiculously infeasible. At least for Godot, there would be a community effort to maintain it. Such a community would be impossible with any closed-source (even if readable) engine.
In general one very rarely upgrade engines after release. Even during development you usually don't upgrade if there isn't a new feature in the new version you really need.
Really it is only an issue for new projects and at that point if the license of the newest version is not to your liking pick a different engine.
Also the last UE3 game I know of (Them and Us in 2021) was made by a small indie studio not some big AAA studio with massive publishers backing. At that point the engine had been in "end of life" state for 5+ years.
If you'd amended the source, then it wouldn't be the same version and the license would be invalid. If you want to use the perpetual license, you can't do anything with the source.
> Epic grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license to privately use, reproduce, display, perform, and modify the Licensed Technology in accordance with the terms of this Agreement (the “License”). This means that as long as you are not violating this Agreement or applicable law, you can privately use the Licensed Technology however you want. If you want to share the Licensed Technology or anything you make with it, Sections 3 and 4 below address when and how you can do that.
In section 3/4 it goes to that you can compile your game and give the output to outsiders if you pay the roylaties when applicable or share them royalty free on epics github (basically you make a pr to merge your stuff upstream) or on unreal marketplace (sell it)
I'm not intending to be defensive (I'm sure there's loads of people on here with more knowledge about licensing terms), but usually a corrective post is something that we can learn from. Just saying something is wrong with no more info seems against the spirit of HN.
>This means if Epic ever abandons unreal, you could theoretically also just make the changes you need to support whatever your project required - as long as you didn't distribute those changes
No it doesn't, you still don't own the code so you can't just modify it and use it to develop games.
IANAL but I am fairly certain you are legally allowed to modify the source code of proprietary software and use that modified version, so long as you do not distribute it (as you couldn't distribute the unmodified version either).
The key difference between proprietary and Free Software is not actually that you can or cannot modify the source, it's that you are guaranteed access to the source in order to modify it or not. Since you usually cannot access the source of proprietary software, you usually have no legal way to modify the source for your computing.
It all depends on the license. There’s no umbrella ability to modify the source code of a software binary, open-source or proprietary, unless explicitly allowed.
> Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for NEWER version Epic can change this.
If I understand correctly, Unity had that too. And then they changed it anyway.
I don't know the details, but apparently Unity maintained their license in a git repository for the explicit purpose that everybody could easily track changes to their license. Just before the license changes, they removed that repository, and later put it up again, but without the clause that you could always use an old version forever without new restrictions applying to you.
> 4. How You Can Share the Licensed Technology When It Isn’t Part of a Product
> You may only Distribute Licensed Technology (including as modified by you) outside of a Product as expressly permitted by this Section 4.
> a. Sharing of Engine Code
> i. Sharing Engine Code with Another Licensee
You may Distribute Engine Code (including as modified by you) in Source Code or object code to a third party who is separately licensed by us to use the same version of the Engine Code that you are Distributing.
>Any public Distribution of Engine Tools (e.g., intended generally for third parties who are separately licensed by us to use the Engine Code) must take place through a marketplace operated by Epic such as the Unreal Engine Marketplace (e.g., for Distributing a Product’s modding tool or editor to end users) or through a fork of Epic’s GitHub UnrealEngine Network (e.g., for Distributing Source Code).
Yes you can but still need to mention the original licence and copyright notice. But your end product can be proprietary, or released under other license such as the GPLv3.
But you own the modifications of your code so you can still license your derived work as closed as you want as long you as you obey the original MIT license terms which consists only mentionning it and keeping original copyright notice.
That is what all company selling proprietary products that include MIT and BSD licensed codes do. Usually the jist include a file called "third party copyright notice" with the product ad well as an entry in the "about" section of their gui.
It does matter, since the license of the fork you can make has a huge effect on the long-term sustainability of that fork.
If Unreal screws you, then you can fork it to build some features you need for your current project. If Godot screws you, then you can fork it to build some features you need for your current project, cooperate with others on the features they need which also help you, and start a community for Engine-formerly-known-as-Godot-v2 and invest in it as a thriving basis for projects 10 years down the road.
> Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for NEWER version Epic can change this.
Isn't part of the current furore that unity used to have similar terms and they removed them?
> So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a project with zero support. Good luck developing it further instead of focusing on your game.
Exactly I'm glad someone is pointing out the problems with these piddly open source projects. Companies are too reliant on open source software, I mean it's not like open source tooling has ever taken off. Except for Emacs, and Vim, and VS Code, and maven, and ...
But seriously though the over reliance people have on open source projects is staggering, I mean really what happens when the guy who maintains Linux gets bored and wanders off, everyone is boned.
Therefore I agree with OP all open source projects are inevitably doomed to failure and can never work.
In an age of locked down mobile OSes and forever changing graphics drivers and such, I don't think "FOREVER" is very long any more.
It's like a perpetual license to a specific version of JetBrains Rider. It's sold as if I own a general purpose tool FOREVER and can opt out of an endless subscription but no, it doesn't mean much at all. It will not work with the next runtime update and past runtimes are obsoleted after a couple of years. They have managed to outsource their subscription lock-in as the release cycles of a third parties while pretending to be holier than thou. If they shipped the volatile parts as open source plug-ins, I would feel differently.
I gave you the alternative: plug-ins that could be maintained by the community. They already have the module system but all the version sensitive .net features are in the core.
For Unreal, I don't think there is a solution to closed platforms if it requires a large/sophisticated team to maintain compatibility. We can only point out that any notion of "forever" is a fiction - you have got in bed with a commercial dependency you may come to regret if they choose to change the rules.
> Exactly. Blender still isn't the first choice for most animation and VFX jobs
And it doesn't need to be, it just needs to be a viable alternative. Everyone always looks at these projects like it's a winner takes all scenario, but it's not. There can be multiple programs that accomplish the same thing, some open-source, some not, so long as they're sustainable and have something unique to offer that's not a problem.
Sure, if we were living in my ideal fantasy all software would be fully open and free, but in this reality I'm just happy we have alternatives that are actually sustainable and don't feel like you're actively gimping yourself.
Depends on the market, for making the next pixar movie probably not (yet). However blender usage is way, way up and my game studio (Prehensile Tales) has no difficulty finding extremely talented blender users.
An open source project doesn't have to be the very most used thing from the beginning in order to eventually eat everyone's lunch :)
I have lived from my VFX freelance work for 4 years and worked soley with Blender for the 3D and much of the 2D part.
Blender has some parts where it is the best (the tracker for example easily beats all commercial trackers I have ever used) and other parts where it doesn't shine as much (e.g. fluid simulation — which is a non-issue because it integrates well with other tools).
I have been coming from 3dsMax and Maya and never have been looking back. Blender also has been getting so much in the past 5 years it feels ridiculous and makes you wonder what the likes of Adobe and Xo are doing with all their money.
> Exactly. Blender still isn't the first choice for most animation and VFX jobs.
It doesn't really need to be; being self-sustaining while being open-source beats Unity's model of being funded to cover operations while being closed-source.
TBH, it's only a matter of time before Blender is a choice for most animation and VFX, and then only a little more time before it's the first choice.
I'm afraid not. Its not as simple as that. We have a heavy competition in automobile industry but when it comes to gaming industry, it is(I mean was) mostly unreal or unity despite decades of technological advancement. The reason for this is because using a game engine to make games is no where as simple as driving a vehicle. It takes a lot of skill, knowledge(sometimes things are engine specific only to make things even more annoying) and the time to attain both of them with the engine they are working on to make good games.
You are grossly underestimating the complexity involved in game engines. It is not like a web app where devs don't have to worry about constraints like memory or frame rate and chill. Things need to happen in real time. A delay of even half a millisecond is not acceptable. And these "Things" involve changing of 3d objects' position w.r.t player's movement, calculating zero or tens or hundreds of NPC AI characters' position and finalizing their animation state, calculating the lighting on all the objects and a lot more. All this just to finally render and present one frame. Yes, hardware has gotten better over the years and memory constraints might not seem like an issue but that is not the case for games. Improved hardware only helps with improving the overall quality of the game. Game now will be able to afford to look better and do more things than games from 2003 and that's it. Games still need heavy optimizations.
Thanks for the better hardware, making 2D games now is neither expensive nor hard. So, Godot being more friendly than unity for making 2D games is quite possible to happen. But that is not the case when it come to comparing Godot with unreal. Unreal is already at a league of its own. I don't think Godot can integrate something like nanite or lumen inside its engine anytime soon. In the past few years, only unreal has been introducing ground breaking computer graphics tech inside a game engine. Unity is having a hard time to even keep up with unreal's tech like meta human. It doesn't matter how many google, amazon or apple contribute to godot, it'd be a big surprise if Godot is at least able to hold its ground against O3DE IMHO.
>Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for NEWER version Epic can change this.
Maybe _you_ didn't research how Unity had this same exact clause and decided to just... remove it. The author is implying Unreal could do the same at any point in time.
> Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for NEWER version Epic can change this.
> So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a project with zero support. Good luck developing it further instead of focusing on your game.
>
> The same goes for his very own product.
Unity had the same in its license. But they changed it without notifying and when you updated the engine the new license applies even if it's a minor version so Unreal can do the same thing.
The worst case scenario for Godot is the same as the worst case scenario for Unity: you can keep using the last release that worked for you. As far as I can tell Unreal has no concept of an LTS version, so if you don't like the new license you're not getting any updates at all.
This is where FOSS comes in: If support ends, you can keep using the latest version just like with proprietary software, but you can also fork it and fix pressing issues. It's not even a question of relying on the community continuing to create major new releases. If that fails, your org could fork it alone and patch any blocking bugs.
My company already does this for several pieces of legacy software that we haven't had the time to migrate away from. We don't make any major changes, but we can and do fix things that get in our way. We'd get no such benefit from proprietary software that changes its terms to be unfavorable.
>>>"""But what about Godot? He says as if "it's open source so no issue". Yeah but what if the devs stop supporting it? This "community will continue to work on it" is BS: in reality it's usually one or two guys who actually do the actual work.?"""
Exactly.
We like to hate corporate greed and lionize the open source developers. I also hold open source devs in high regard.
BUT.
Open Source Dev have to eat too.
If we want to keep the Open Source ecosystem moving, we do need to find a way to pay them. Even today, a lot of open source projects are supported by individual corporations that keep the devs on payroll to give them time, but that can also lead to influence and lock in, and even abandonment if desired.
Any product can end up no longer having work done on it, or the work can start getting bad. Such is life. With open source at least you have an option, if you run into one bug or missing feature, there is a chance you can patch it yourself and get the game done. In the distant past I wanted to use Unity and ran into a breaking bug in the particle system that wasn't fixed for at least 2 years, if ever.
There are already well over one or two Godot devs working on the engine. The community funding is already enough that it supports multiple full time devs salaries. If the current devs quit, this funding would be used to hire new devs. At this point, I think the Godot community is already well over the tipping point where it will continue no matter what the original devs decide to do.
> There are already well over one or two Godot devs working on the engine. The community funding is already enough that it supports multiple full time devs salaries. If the current devs quit, this funding would be used to hire new devs. At this point, I think the Godot community is already well over the tipping point where it will continue no matter what the original devs decide to do.
Yeah. They've reached critical mass to, from this point on, be self-sustaining.
I'm less concerned about Unreal pulling a Unity. The bigger issue is just a lack of attention. The last numbers I saw was that Unreal was pulling in $100m a year for Epic. That's a drop in the bucket compared to what Epic makes off of Fortnite. In my experience, products that matter a lot to the consumer but not the company tend to stagnate. Just look at Google outside of search.
Epic's still remains. Yes, if Epic removes this feature of the license, we can be concerned. But, Epic's license means I can remain on the previous license that has these more favorable terms.
Why would you need godot to be "developed further"? If your game is shipped, it's developed. You can continue doing this. When the source is private and behind a license you are forced to agree to the new terms when the old ones expire, or if you can't agree to them then you can no longer ship the game. These are not equivalent circumstances.
> Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license.
Even if this is 100% legally true, they can absolutely say that they are revoking all old licenses, and then if you used one, it's up to you to take Epic to court to prove that they can't.
> Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license.
Unity also had a similar clause in their ToC, they removed that now and retroactively applied the new pricing model on ALL previous versions of Unity. Unreal can do it too.
This still seems to be an unresolved legal question. Unity will almost certainly be getting sued for this by parties still using versions that shipped with that clause.
> Tim Sweeney explicitly mentioned this often + the fact that they are trying to break the Gplay/Apply monopoly shows that the Epic games leadership are not corporate piranhas like Unity's.
Haha this made me laugh. If you think epic isn’t piranha then you’re living in a bubble.
Yes, unless you build everything from the game engine to the distribution channel yourself, there is a cost to doing business. IIRC Epic Games Store offers a more reasonable 88%/12% revenue split, while Steam uses the same rapacious split as Apple and GOG at 70%/30%.
> the fact that they are trying to break the Gplay/Apply monopoly shows that the Epic games leadership are not corporate piranhas
That’s a very unique take. I would call a company that lets others take startup a buildout risks and the uses the courts and regulators to swoop in with a low cost competitor a pirhana.
It’s a good strategy (for Epic), but it is extremely predatory. It’s no secret they have their eyes on the console market next; let HW makers popularize platforms using a business model of low margin HW and high margin SW, then get governments to mandate alternative stores so Epic can undercut the SW.
Low risk, low effort, high return. It’s a solid business strategy but if it’s not pirhanic, I don’t know what is.
> the Epic games leadership are not corporate piranhas like Unity's.
the Epic games leadership are bribing developers for exclusivity, including kickstarters where i was promised steam or gog
the Epic games leaderhip makes money from free to play grinding/gambling simulators
the Epic games leadership also comes from Tencent that made all their gaming money before trying to get into the western market from asian gacha
The only reason their terms are more reasonable now is because they're the underdog and throwing a lot of money made from free to play crap at fixing that.
Bribing implies an illegal act. Giving money in exchange for goods and services is completely normal: I don't bribe a restaurant for food. Exclusivity is just a way of competing for games, a sign of a good competitive market.
Kickstarter is kickstarter. Half of them probably don't fulfill all their promises. That's the risk you're taking, and why it's not a preorder.
Epic don't have gambling. They've even removed gambling from Rocket League after purchasing them too.
> Bribing implies an illegal act. Giving money in exchange for goods and services is completely normal: I don't bribe a restaurant for food. Exclusivity is just a way of competing for games, a sign of a good competitive market.
It doesn't have to be illegal, merely immoral.
> Kickstarter is kickstarter. Half of them probably don't fulfill all their promises. That's the risk you're taking, and why it's not a preorder.
I don't expect them to finish a project when i back them. I expect them to deliver my fucking GoG key when they finish the project and ask me what do I want it on and i say GoG! I don't expect them to say "Epic paid us a ton of money and you can get it on their gacha financed store".
True story. So long, Julian Gollop.
> Epic don't have gambling. They've even removed gambling from Rocket League after purchasing them too.
They're free to play. That means the game is designed to keep you playing forever and keep you buying IAPs. It is not designed to entertain you.
Releasing on a store is not immoral. Is not releasing on GoG what you believe to be immoral? Even GoG has paid for exclusives, they charge store fees like everyone else. They're a business too at the end of the day.
That sounds like an unfinished feature to me then.
Why are you playing games forever that aren't entertaining?
I was crowing to my game dev buddy about how he (a Unity C-sharp developer) ought to check out Bevy and Rust because the Rust type system is friggin’ awesome!
Will developers be charged the Unity Runtime Fee for subscription-based games?
No, in this case the developer is not distributing it so we’re not going to invoice the developer on subscription-based games (e.g. Apple Arcade, Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, Netflix Games, etc.)
———
Surely Unity management can’t think this will fly? Surely MS, Apple etc. have contracts with developers that say they have the full rights to distribute the games under some arranged fee structure. Is Unity now just going to go to them and say “Hey, those contracts you have actually don’t give you the right to distribute the parts we own. You’ll have to pay us too!”. That just seems so unrealistic.
And, further, even if that ‘works’ MS, Apple etc. would surely then have a legal case against the developers, who represented that they were assigning full distribution rights to the games, to make them pay anyway.
This all just seems like a giant ill thought through mess, and I think this ‘subscription’ question and answer is indicative of how the entire thing was planned. Is Unity management really so naive that they think this will work? Are they just following the whims of a CEO with no legal input? Did they just not think this through? Are they _trying_ to get all this into litigation?
Usually with things like this, where there’s a lot of online sound and fury, I can make a ‘well, they probably intend for this result, that’s why they’re doing it like this’ judgement. But this just seems like chaos and I am finding it so hard to understand how any of this was decided.
Unity was a dream, or a lie, the lie that you can make games without a somewhat competent software team.
Now TFA gives hope to another dream, or a lie, the dream that magical open source fairies can let you keep getting away without a competent software team. It won't.
Find those programmers, build a team, build a company where this team has a place, adjust your business model (i.e. raise your prices) to where you can afford to pay them.
"Our terms of service provide that Unity may add or change fees at any time... Consent is not required for additional fees to take effect." -- Unity spokesperson
Never do business with a company that thinks this is OK.
I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source.
I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way.
Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a technology is equivalent to supporting it. I'm not immune to this. I just considered how I would feel if React or Golang suddenly changed so that I had to pay to use them. React is supported by Facebook and Golang by Google, both unimaginably massive and wealthy corporations. Even though I have never directly contributed a single thing to either project, I know I would feel some combination of betrayed, angry and frustrated.
But I think about all of it. nginx, haproxy, redis, postgresql, nodejs, python. I don't think I could even write out all of the open source I am using in my projects within the confines of a Hacker News comment. Just trying to wrap my head around how I could even pay for all of that software if I had to is anxiety inducing. I don't mean just the cost, even the logistics of that many micro-transactions. Imagine trying to pay every YouTuber you watch some fair value for the content you consume.
We are no where near an answer on this, I don't believe it will be settled within my lifetime. But the current model to justify the free-lunch we've all been served is crumbling. If the corporations that we expect to bear the cost of our free-lunch start to crumble then we are all in for a rude awakening.
I think you've completely misunderstood the situation. This isn't people feeling entitled, rather it's people feeling vulnerable to the whims of a private, self-interested entity.
While it isn't my reason, I think most people advocating for open-source, actually see it simply as a way to keep such private actors honest, and prevent them from becoming corrupted. Like many people have said, this particular situation would have been received much differently had the changes not been applied retroactively.
> I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source.
I don't get your logic. A proprietary company screws over customers, and that is, to you, an indication that OSS doesn't work?
Isn't it exactly the reverse? Anyway watching this saga now would be mad to continue with Unity, and would be a little wary of closed-source in general.
I don't think anything is "crumbling". Some companies got a large amounts of investment and sky high valuations on a product they were practically giving away. Now they need to figure out how to make those valutions work and return that investment. That sucks for them, but that doesn't prove that its impossible to sustain an open source business to make a certain piece of software.
I use open source software because quality of certain things isn't very important to me, and I don't want to pay for them. If push really came to shove, I could replace large portions of my stack myself using something handrolled. If enough people who want something for free and are willing to build it themselves come together, they can make something that competes with large companies. The large companies in turn can start releasing their product for free in order to maintain market dominance, or they can let themselves be replaced. There's no "free lunch" here, its all simple econmics.
Youtube has largely the same struture: for a while, videos were being made by people doing it as a hobby, then by people doing it as a job, but alone in their bedroom. Now some of them have large production teams and expensive facilities. It sure would suck for them if they stopped being able to make payroll, but I can go back to watching amateurs anytime. Your business model is your problem, not mine.
>But I think about all of it. nginx, haproxy, redis, postgresql, nodejs, python. I don't think I could even write out all of the open source I am using in my projects within the confines of a Hacker News comment.
That seems contradictory to your opening sentence though, no? Eventually an open source project will get to the point that it's so good (or even good enough) that a commercial product is simply uncompetitive. That will happen with game engines to. Decisions like this will only accelerate it.
Nah, we used and paid for Unity because the licensing structure we signed on with made sense. They’re literally changing the terms on us in a way we cannot push back against. Games made years ago are subject to this new fee structure. Games which are no longer sold at the same nominal price and a massive existing install base who anytime they reinstall our game we get the privilege of paying Unity each time forever.
> Nah, we used and paid for Unity because the licensing structure we signed on with made sense. They’re literally changing the terms on us in a way we cannot push back against. Games made years ago are subject to this new fee structure.
and you can still do this with the software codebase released before april 3rd, you just don't get ongoing development.
this may, of course, involve rollbacks etc, you need to rebase onto the older version not the one that's been out for the last 5 months. But the license does explicitly allow you to do this.
> 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).
> I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way.
I just want to point out that the biggest non-contributors to open-source are the enterprise companies you either never or barely heard about, whose entire stacks run on tons of open source and yet it's those end user enterprise shops that are making millions.
In many ways, this probably includes Unity themselves.
It helps to think of FLOSS as an ecosystem, not individual components. Also those large companies use many parts of the ecosystem and chances are some of your code, just not necessarily the component you are using (most). Even only using the ecosystem reinforces it for others and in turn the chances support existing or publish new tools in it.
More often than not, open source licenses are given for very practical reasons that aren’t directly tied to extracting money directly.
Foundational libraries, tools, frameworks etc. is often open sourced so people don’t have to “reinvent the weel” every time they switch jobs and positions. Additionally, large orgs can benefit from having a larger talent pool to draw from, because there’s more people familiar with open source software.
Do you think Oracle is maintaining Java (etc.) for altruistic reasons?
OSS is often also a vehicle for marketing, selling expertise or ops services.
Stuff is open sourced so it gets used, built upon and to gain mindshare, community and to find collaborators etc.
You using or building on the software doesn’t in any way detract from that value proposition and often adds to it in indirect ways.
>But I think about all of it. nginx, haproxy, redis, postgresql, nodejs, python. I don't think I could even write out all of the open source I am using in my projects within the confines of a Hacker News comment. Just trying to wrap my head around how I could even pay for all of that software if I had to is anxiety inducing.
Luckily, the licenses of these projects are all such that, the minute the maintainer pulls the rug out, you are perfectly free to fork the project and move on as if nothing happened. Open source protects you.
> I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source.
we definitely are, and it's the inherent contradiction of "one entity pays to maintain it, another entity makes all the money from exploiting it". this is why there's such a commotion around BSL and dual-licensing schemes.
GPL/AGPL itself is a coherent mechanism for sustaining development. BSD/MIT tends to lead to an embrace-extend-extinguish model where one company pays to write the software, and then Amazon makes it an S3 service, extends and extinguishes the original core by adding proprietary features they keep to themselves, and public development ceases or languishes.
we are lining up for a similar showdown in the CPU space with ARM vs RISC-V. When Amazon and Google say they want an open ISA, they certainly don't mean they're going to open up their stuff. They want it to be open to them, they have proprietary extensions they bolt on (to all those instruction fields left as "vendor-determined") and proprietary accelerators they interface, and they will keep all that proprietary and never sell it outside the company. And that's the return of this same "proprietary vs GPL/AGPL vs MIT" battle. The ability for large commercial entities to extract all the value from open-source work and pay nothing and contribute nothing.
ARM already very much is a "lowest-common-denominator" company, they thrive on designing architectures that are "good enough" and then the actual secret sauce goes in the way you customize it and what you bolt on alongside. And that's exactly what RISC-V will cement, because google and amazon and facebook don't compete on how fast they can make the CPU core, they compete on how cheap they can make it. Which is why vCPU units are still specified in sandybridge-equivalent-cores, and why we're getting zen4c cores instead of faster ones, etc - they don't care how fast it is, they care about selling you more units, and that means being able to provide more units.
audiovisual (and I am including video games here) is a somewhat unique space though because you will not win this battle, the effort involved in building unity or unreal from scratch is herculean, and all of the parties involved are used to exorbitant spends to make the product happen (which I suppose is also true of silicon!)
Sometimes this comes into conflict with the GPL community - like NVIDIA's inability to open their legacy driver core, or AMD's inability to get HDMI 2.1 working on their open driver core (which seems to have stalled out again, the dev who said "august or september" has gone radio-silent). Because if you ask HDMI Forum or Dolby or Fraunhofer or Motion Pictures Experts Group to license as GPL they're going to have a sensible chuckle while clicking the delete email button. That's not how this space works.
I am actually not opposed to proprietary in general, and especially in this space it almost is a necessity given the amount of work involved. Someone has to be paid to sit down and write engine code all day, and they have to be very skilled and specialized. And this applies whether it's Unreal or Unity or your own in-house engine.
Companies obviously don't like to write a check, which is why they keep doing in-house engines even though it literally keeps killing games, like the way frostbite killed ME:A and Anthem. They would rather a game tank then to pay 2% of gross to buy an off-the-shelf engine (and you best believe if you're EA negotiating a license for all your games you're not paying list price).
What unity is doing here is insane from a business perspective, but they're not wrong either that it's a situation where they're doing an equal share of the total work (there are a lot of man-hours in an engine) and get paid jack shit. Just like open-source software. And when you increase licensing fees (like ARM, or like software going BSL/AGPL) then companies start looking for the exits. Because they're used to extracting all the profit, and at a certain scale it does become viable to just do the work yourself anyway, rather than paying someone else. And that's why you get ME:A and Anthem and BF2042.
edit: And I wrote all that without knowing that unity is currently losing a billion dollars a year, so... yeah.
Seems to me, the bit where all these game frameworks get a bit tricky is when you want to target iOS. Apple keeps moving the goalposts (you must use some version of Xcode, or you must target some version of iOS) and so the open-source frameworks have to constantly faff about to support the latest apple things. A few years ago I was building using LibGDX which used RoboVM to target iOS but then Xamarin bought RoboVM and shut it down and etc etc etc...
What Unity offers is a solid way to build cross platform and target iOS. They're able to offer that because they have the resources to keep up with iOS. Open-source alternatives understandably struggle to keep on the iOS treadmill.
Yup, in fact just 2.5 years ago everyone was switching from Unreal to Unity. The reason? Apple threatened to revoke Epics dev accounts that it needed in order to support ongoing upgrades for ios.
Epic released statements through their attorney's that they would consider the public version of Unreal a dead product if they lost the ability to maintain ios.
Every ToS-style contract has a "we can change anything about this at any time, screw you" clause, but they also almost never use it except to change their privacy policy.
There are limits to what sorts of changes are enforceable, though most of those documents also say the vendor gets to choose the arbitration firm that decides what is enforceable.
I suspect it's partially because the lawyers remind them that certain contract terms are not enforceable, and also that shooting yourself in the foot doesn't really help revenues long-term.
How is this tracked though?? It could work like this..
+ When you build, Unity secretly adds your Unity account id to the build.
+ When the game is run for the 1st time it secretly calls home to Unity server with your account id
+ The server increments # of installs from your account by one..
But couldnt this be overcome by just creating a new Unity account for every build?
I really want to know btw. I am a unity dev and have just tendered for a contract assuming we'll build it in Unity. Switching to Godot will take us time and reduce quality as we are not experienced in it.
No way you'll be changing bundle id/package name on every store release!
My guess of the original game plan was likely to just print out a list of most installed games, manually work out package names to developers, and pick up the phone at Unity's convenience for negotiation talks, working out disagreements including knocking out dupes and fraudulent counts. That should be technically doable.
The real problems are, most devs just don't have the cash flow to split for $0.20 per install, nor they believe they have leverages to reach into agreement for mutual benefits(special 99.9% discount or whatever), nor any viable paths for making the full amount even as eventuality(just add those banners at the top and bottom of your screen! On the launchers! People love clicking those gifs right!? Ads!), and that total dead end feeling had traumatized developers enough that they had formed impression that Unity is a total showstopper with ropes included.
But the part they cast int to dollar isn't the most problematic part.
So to summarize the answer to the title: Probably, unless a dev used an older version that had language around being able to keep the old terms, in which case it'll be for the courts to decide.
And of course "is that legal" may or may not quickly play second fiddle to "is anyone going to use them ever again after this stunt".
Note that, "older" means before April 2023. The language that existed then said you could continue to use the calendar year version that was available at the time, so presumably, you can use 2023 releases of their software as long as you were using it (started development? started training?) before April, assuming the courts rule that the old Software ToS applies.
I can't imagine anyone will start using them now, so there's a good chance that the new ToS will only apply to whatever new customers they signed on between April 2023 and Sept 2023, and people that voluntarily update to the 2024 release.
Still, it's a shame. They just threw out millions of developer hours (minimum), and it doesn't seem likely they'll be able to come back from their mistake.
Godot is completely free but I still suggest trying to write your own small frameworks. A lot of Unity’s code is third party. All their 2d rigid body physics is Erin Catto’s Box2D.
To a casual developer who wants to implement a simple fun idea it’s overkill but if you love making games it’s essential. You can learn stuff from using video game frameworks too.
I wish game development wasn't so monolithic. You're either all in on Unity, or all in on Unreal, or all in on GoDot. They are designer forward, code later. Each has a marketplace of sorts, but in my experience it's substandard.
Compare that to web development (different beast I know, but there's no reason gaming can't be more componentized). Web development is so simple these days because I spend most of my time gluing stuff together, and sanding the edges.
Game development has concepts like this, and I have no doubt I'll get replies showing me some nifty component system, or talk about how I just don't understand ECS etc, but they seem tacked on to a monolithic walled garden. There's something magical about "npm install x" and adding a whole feature to your app.
Maybe it's because "it's art" and game development is just a passion project.
The problem is, that making a 3D engine is extremely tough, and most 3D engines are completely proprietary as a result. There are plenty of 3D libraries that make 3D game development for small games easy, but when you compare a Python library next to a system that includes a 3D engine, a level editor, a file management system, and the ability to easily compile for different systems, its no contest for game companies. A fully-fledged development environment scales better for these multi-million dollar projects than a singular library.
It's why in the 90s every game was mostly built on an engine specifically designed for that game, and in the 2000s they switched to prebuilt game engines. Saves a lot of time AND money.
> Web development is so simple these days because I spend most of my time gluing stuff together, and sanding the edges.
This does exist in the gaming industry, it is called "shovelware". "Shovelware" is when you just glue existing assets purchased for cheap and "shovel" them into a game for a quick buck. Usually not very complex games, low effort stories, etc. Also usually very cheap to download.
I assume the parent comment meant gluing parts of the game engine together like renderers and physics engines. You can make shovelware in a monolithic game engine.
It's not as monolithic as you'd think. There are lots of engines out there but their communities aren't very vocal compared to Unity, Unreal, and especially Godot's community.
If you look at both of these you'll see just how many engines there are and neither of these cover everything. There are plenty of engines popular in the Python community that no one outside of it are aware of. Such as Arcade [0], Python-Tcod [1], Ursina [2], UPBGE [3], and Panda3D [4]. But based on your description you'd really like https://gdevelop.io/. It embraces exactly what you're describing where you can build a game but just installing entire features others have made and put online into your game.
No, it's not because it's art, it's because it's okay if all websites look the same, but regarding games, mostly 1 or 2 or its kind will survive, the others have to innovate or will be seen as sub-copies. On top of that, the complexity of making a game makes it so that it's more "coupled" to the hardware, so it's harder to generalize. If you want more component, then you can use the assets store, but at some point you will have to put in some work if you want your game to not be considered as a shovelware
You better understand the value proposition of game engines than you think.
Spin your view a little: NPM is your web development engine. Somebody had to write all of that code that undergirds NPM as an engine as well as the particular library you want to install.
Game engines are no different. They manage a bunch of (mostly boilerplate) game development components (sound, textures, rendering, animation, menus, collisions, physics, resource I/O, etc etc) so game developers can spend time "gluing stuff together, and sanding the edges" of their game. Monolithic engines like Unity have a plugin system for installing 3rd party libraries, and the engine tooling itself acts as its own level, effect, cutscene (etc etc) editor.
At the end of the day games are just like any other programming task. You have a limited amount of effort/time/budget, so you have to make decisions about where you want to optimize. Game engines, even monolithic ones like Godot and Unity (and, really, every 3rd party game development tool) are all designed to let you focus effort/time/budget on the unique aspects of your game.
If you are thinking about why the game engines aren't broken down into finer reusable components (e.g. one module for rendering and another for physics, etc.), it probably has to do with how these things are tightly integrated, and how every game engine has a different design philosophy on how the world should be organized. The different organizations might also mean that you have to design the games to fit a specific game engine, which is unfortunate.
Maybe you are lamenting why the marketplaces or asset stores are so closely tied to the game engines? For some plugins, they have to be tailored to the specific engines. But for arts and sounds, there are many free and paid options to choose from, although not necessarily of the same quality and cost as one might get from the asset stores that are sponsored by the game engines (e.g. Unreal Megascans).
There are still various tools associated with game development (e.g. Blender for 3D, your favorite text editor for scripting), and those aren't tied to specific game engines.
not quite an apples to apples comparison when your document can be open and read by other spreadsheet applications. You cant take a unity game and run it on unreal.
This is a straw man argument. The problem is not closed source but lack of regulation and power asymmetry between the large company and a small customer. These types of bait and switch one-sided contract changes should be illegal. In fact, the way how Unity approached this is likely illegal, since they have retroactively changed the contract while attempting to hide this fact from the customers.
We need to strive towards establishment of fair, enforceable legal frameworks that prevent this kind of abuse from large players, instead of magically hoping that open source will fix everything.
I agree completely, but open source alternatives like Godot make it easier for people to pack up their things and leave, and you'll never need to deal with this issue if your business uses open source software. Open source can be a part of how we hold abusive corporations to account, and it's a way for developers to take action without hiring a lawyer.
>A Wake-Up Call on the Importance of Open Source in Gaming
This is no "wake-up call" as there was never any doubt that all things being equal, FOSS would be a better option.
There are already where plenty of FOSS options to build games. The developers who didn't pick them up did it because Unity/Unreal give them features and convenience and such they don't get from them.
I've been watching a few gamedev streamers port their games to Godot and it's clear that it's not there yet in terms of feature parity. The good thing is that the Godot devs are in the chats, posting (unreviewed) PRs that could be used as workarounds but some major things (profiling?) are miles off still.
The author seems to misunderstand the new pricing model (as did many others; this is Unity's fault) [1]
The $0.20 is not retroactive, nor do you need to hope your users see 10 and impressions to cover a cost to the game developer -- you need to earn $200,000 _and_ have 200,000 installs. A free game would not be charged, and if you don't believe you can muster 10 ad impressions per user (to cover the unity install cost of $0.20), the base cost of the game can be increased by < $0.01 across your 200,000+ sales starting next year when the policy takes effect on new installs.
It is retroactive, games that are already made today and already exist today on the various app-stores will be impacted.
10 ad impressions per user might not sound like much, but you're going to get a lot of people installing your app, not liking it, and uninstalling it. The way the mobile game business works the "install count" means almost nothing, you need many, many, many installs to start making any money at all because so few people 'stick around' to actually make you any money.
Regardless of how they spin it, this model is very bad for the FtP games, which is the vast majority of games now.
Looks like you know a lot about F2P games, can you help me understand this fee in the context of other variables such as cost of customer acquisition? Is that usually a much lower amount than 20 cents? What about 2 cents, which would be the cost on a pro license, which most successful F2P devs would assuredly be able to afford?
I’m hoping you can answer these with concrete data. If that’s not possible, could you share your references?
> What about 2 cents, which would be the cost on a pro license,
2 cents with the pro-license only applies after the first 1M installs, tallied per month. If a game is under 100K installs per month, a pro license only lowers the install fee from 20 cents to 15.
Basing the fee on number of installs instead of number of buyers is a problem, it's an unpredictable cost that developers have no control over as it also counts repeated installing of the game. Their FAQ suggests that malicious "install bombing" is something they cannot prevent automatically but instead have to resolve via their support. In other words you depend on them having good support while they profit from bad support, all while their CEO is the kind of manager who wanted Battlefield players to pay for each weapon reload.
If Unity just counted number of buyers they wouldn't have to deal with malicious installs and users of their engine would have more predictable costs. But for some reason they don't want that, and that alone is suspicious.
No, it is different - and it crosses line. There is DRM built into the Unity engine that informs Unity (the company) of an install, and companies pay via this Unity derived number. Not reported game sales, or even self reported game installs.
I think when most people are, in this context, talking about the "retroactive" part, it's about if it will affect existing games. The pricing structure will be applicable to everyone starting next year.
The other issue is how they measure "installs", as it has been a constant problem in the mobile community for years on end (a problem especially affecting the ad industry as you may imagine).
I personally don't see how they will accurately measure the cases mentioned in the tweet without forcing everyone to have some authentication.
Unity is saying they can send developers a bill for whatever they want, and if it's not paid their game can't be installed.
Unity has published what "whatever they want" currently is. It doesn't matter if people get the details wrong on that because Unity can change its mind.
That being said, you're still more wrong than the author on the details. The change is retroactive in that it applies to existing applications. The author was very clear what they meant by "retroactive":
> this change will be done retroactively on existing applications as well.
If I got 3 ads impression the moment I install and open and app. I can promise you that I will never know if the app has 3, 4, 10 or 100 ads impressions.
> While Unreal engine currently does not have terms like Unity’s, there’s nothing stopping them from doing something similar. In fact if Unity manages to get away with this it seems likely they will follow suit.
I sense a lack of arguments if people make up pure speculation like that without any foundation. Also Unity's business model had a negative tendency over the last couple of years already ... with Epic having clear statements and an ethical roadmap in response. Oh, and by the way: Unreal Engine is open source. The more you know.
> The Licensed Technology licensed to you under this Agreement includes all Unreal Engine code and related content that is copied to your computer when you install Unreal Engine.
Have you read it? You literally get read access to their entire GitHub repo.
Yes. Having access to the source is not the same as open source. I encourage you to re-read it. They also have an FAQ clearly outlining the restrictions. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq
"Can I copy and paste Unreal engine code into my own project or engine?
If you use any Unreal Engine code in your product (even just a little), then your entire product is governed by the Unreal Engine EULA, and is subject to 5% royalties when your gross lifetime revenues from that product exceed $1 million USD."
> [...] and is subject to 5% royalties when your gross lifetime revenues from that product exceed $1 million USD.
That's part of their general license and business model anyway, and not specific for source code usage, but the engine (parts) itself. How is this relevant?
Notice that you can't even access the repo without them authorizing you to do so. Notice that there aren't any public mirrors for the current version of the code.
They say you can fork but also point out that you can't distribute the code without the people you are sharing with also having a license.
Whatever floats your boat. I am not here to get into Stallman level discussions about what is open and what is not. Point is we get to work with the sources if we want/have to, tied to a license with all its privileges ... and of course restrictions. Just like with any other open software sources.
These platforms just pigeon hole developers into a corner. Yeah I get it - it makes game dev 'accessible' but what are we really missing out on? I'd take quality of quantity any day. Entire generations of programmers are being boxed into being tool dependent. Same goes for web frameworks and mobile ecosystems. Obviously building a game engine from scratch is a massive work of labor and requires vast knowledge in alot of things, but outside of AAA studios, is anything building engines from the ground up?
If developers signed agreements to that effect, yes, in America. There are fairness tests in many other countries.
What is blowing my mind is that developers have been signing agreements which effectively gave Unity the right to take any revenue they wish, at any time. At that point the developers don’t own their company anymore. Unity does. Always have a lawyer check your agreements before you sign them. If your business relies on an agreement to function, make sure the other party can’t make unilateral changes.
switch to godot(http://godotengine.org/), gamedevs. you reap what you sow. it's better to support open source projects like godot instead of unity whose control lies with the company whose actions probably might not lie with you/your companies' interest. There are hundreds of instances in the past where open source projects replaced corporate projects(ex: blender, git). so, better use godot imo.
All other 3d games I found made with Godot look like they came from the 90s. 2d capabilities look great though. There's probably also some selection bias, it's probably not the first choice for most who want to make a 3d fps.
I wonder if Apple knew about this, or have been blindsided by this - having just teamed up with Unity for Vision (although mostly just because they hate Epic).
> By using an open source engine you can be sure that whatever that “next thing” is, the engine won’t keep you from taking advantage of it. Nor would the engine be able to dictate your monetization strategy for you.
We really ought to separate the fact that "open" does not always mean "free" here. Especially given that it is fairly straight-forward to change licenses on a whim.
Imagine you wake up one day and suddenly the company/OSS maintainers put out a dual-license on the project. You now have to pay $0.20 per install after your app has made $200,000 over the past year. Now you're still using open source, but still legally held to the terms of that license.
Licenses tend to be permissive enough that if such thing were to happen or other factors(discontinued development/support/etc), community forks can be created(which has its own set of problems).
No, that doesn't work. You can't retroactively change a license like that. What could happen is that future versions get licensed differently (if either all contributors agree, the project used a CLA or is permissively licensed).
Either way however then you could either stop using it or fork the project.
That's not possible with something that is open source. If it has a "dual license" that means you can pick which license to apply. You just pick the one that doesn't make you pay.
There are a number of projects doing this today with dual-license models(Permissive/Commercial). I'm not a lawyer and have no idea if they hold up in court/can be enforced but it absolutely is a thing today.
These are a little different. So these "dual licensed" products work like this:
You get a GPL version of the code, which is free and nobody can charge you for, ever.
If you want to use the software in a way that is not GPL compatible you can opt for the other, paid for, license.
This works in some cases, but in the case of Godot (assuming we were to do something like this) is the MIT license, which already gives you the rights to do whatever you want.
And even in the GPL case, if the other license terms became too odious you could simply switch to the GPL version, and not pay.
This is specific to GPL-style licences. You would have to meet the terms of the GPL anyway (i.e. provide your modified source code under the same licence).
The commercial licence is just an additional option for companies willing to pay to not adhere to the GPL terms.
There are certainly cases where maintainers have started licensing _new_ versions of a project under different, non-open source terms (Terraform, ElasticSearch etc.). But you're free to continue using any code that was released under the old licence.
There are some badly written licences which make it ambiguous whether the licence can be revoked in future (e.g. Wizards of the Coast with the OGL), but I have rarely seen this raised as a concern in a software context.
It might exist but open-core model ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model ) is much more commmn. I went through QT project licensing FAQ and I still don't see any situation when I would be forced to pay for commercial license when creating commercial software. Some SO answers suggest that complying with LGPL is harder on mobile OSes. Anyway - if you release something on open license, you can't really limit its use, no matter how your second license is constructed. That is probably why paid add-ons are so popular.
>You now have to pay $0.20 per install after your app has made $200,000 over the past year. ... Now you're still using open source, but still legally held to the terms of that license.
You can't retroactively pull an open source license ... whatever the new license is, if it forces you to pay, it no longer meets the definition of 'open source' [1]
Until recently, Godot was practically unusable for 3D. They're still actively adding features that other engines already have. It also exports for consoles, where Godot doesn't.
Having said that, I've been looking at it recently and it looks like it has everything I need. I'm definitely going to try it out before deciding between it and UE5.
They really should have trialed this pricing structure as opt-in and then slowly rolled out (if at all) instead of wholesale shoveling it on everyone with a quarter's notice.
Games make a lot of money. It makes sense that studios would make for the world they profit from. Changing the deal mid-stream seems like the big problem here.
There is no indication that Unreal would follow suit, and no corroboration for such a claim is given in the article. How does the author get off saying that?
Not only get it out but actively promote it as an opensource project instead of proprietary and make revenue through an asset store. Theres so few games that use source that theres no way its commercially viable on its own.
Valve doesn't do it that way. Instead of some crummy asset store with generic and terrible looking assets they literally just let you use the assets from their games. See Garry's Mod, Sven Co-op and Insurgency for an example of this.
This is written based on my quite poor understanding of
the game business. I am sincerely wanting to learn more
about how it works and how the new license structure impact
developers.
My questions below might be idiotic.
(but not intentionally so)
I have no idea how many apps reach above 200.000 installs total
or $200.000 income per year.
How common is it for apps to meet the minimum requirements
when the fees kick in?
I would guess that if you base the application on a subscription
model that this will not be a major problem?
Also doesn't Apple App Store or Google Pay charge far more than this
on income?
Look at the millions of free to play games in the App-Stores.
Normally you have 98% of free playing users paying nothing, 2% pay.
Imagine now you have 1 million installs. 2% (20.000) pay you 200.000 / year.
980.000 players pay nothing. Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000, you made ZERO with your game... crazy. That is an uncalculatable risk for a small company.
You'd only pay above a million user and need to have above in 1 million revenue.
Previously you weren't even allowed to use Pro/Personal if you made over $200k (not just per game).
> Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000,
Not saying the whole price model is not stupid but only those developers who are very bad at basic math would pay this. Everyone else would upgrade to pro.
> Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000
Again, not really. Even in this case only a subset of user would pay 20 cent.
Another example demonstrating the incompetence of Unity's marketing department, they should've understood that most people can't really memorize more than a single number or be expected to spend over 30 seconds reading something (now I'm not saying that this change overall was not a terrible decision but even a significant proportion of people commenting here don't seem to understand how their per install pricing is going to work).
> For many developers it is now cheaper to switch the engine than to pay for Unity.
Only for a (possibly very) small minority.
I find the the fact that they had no qualms about retroactively applying this to already released game much more infuriating (if they did this, what can they do next?). The pricing itself seems fairly reasonable if make more $1.5-2 or so per user (compared to Unreal anyway).
The problem here is that most platform tax your income, not your userbase size. If you think of big free to play Unity games like Genshin Impact (or even smaller stuff like VRChat) the amount of paying user is probably in the single digit percentage, yet with Unity terms you are on the hook for everyone who installs your game.
> reach above 200.000 installs total or $200.000 income per year
No developers/companies who made more than $200k per year (overall revenue of the company, not per game) were even allowed to the use the Personal/Plus tiers and were required to upgrade to pro (which has 1 million install/revenue limits).
I don't think the itself cost would be unreasonable for at least 90-95% of all developers and if you average it out across everyone the proportion of revenue Unity get's would be still pretty low (not much more than 1% or so).
Most people seem to be upset because how they applied these changes retroactively on currently released games and because the whole model seems way to convoluted and not really thought trough.
One way way to put this into perspective is salaries. 200k usd means any game studio with at least 2-4 employees must earn that yearly to break even, so they are affected.
They would probably qualify under enterprise pricing of $0.01 or $0.02 on Pro. To release a game without Unity branding you also need at least 1 year of Pro subscription. They also would count more than 21M maybe e.g. multiple devices.
They also charge more at less scale and can't detect things like pirated installs, bypass Steam DRM, and you're still gonna hit the Unity servers. It's just checking device HWIDs.
But Marvel Snap is a card game and like many others has terrible monetisation, you can't keep up with card releases at all without paying. It's more like the pay to win games.
That was this summer, not last summer. It's seems that there's a lot of discussion even today about usage going down: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/16icvv2/1_month... . I have noticed a continuing decrease in quality on reddit for many years (as it attracts more people), like all sites that grow and depend on ad revenue, and activity seems to have gone down substantially lately in the few subreddits I still watch.
Developers / professionals are more judicious in where they spend their time / money / effort than most people. When I select a technology for professional use, I look at the long term prospects for the company. Open source is always a positive, as I don't have to worry about a company raising rates and trying to extract more money from us. Feature completeness can be a concern, as is ease of use, but we really only need our needs met and a path to meet our future needs.
Everyone told me "use Unity" "the biggest mistake you can make is building your own engine". How well did that advice age?
Nobody needs Unity or Unreal.
My most recent game (playshadowvane.com) is built on 100% proprietary technology, I built everything in-house down to the physics.
Always ignore mainstream game dev advice, they are just trying to sell you products. Build as much as you can in-house, it's not only better for the look/feel of the game, but no company will be able to rug pull you later.
Ultimately though it is all about time efficiency, solo or small teams have little manpower and since they don't even know if their first, second, or fifth game will sell any at all it may not make strategic sense to spend months reproducing common engine features in order to save a hypothetical percentage of revenue that they may never ultimately make. You need to test the gameplay concept as cheaply as possible.
Creating a game engine from scratch is FUN, and if game development is a fun hobby then full steam ahead. If however it is a business that you plan to make money on, you're unlikely to recoup the time investment into a bespoke engine just to test the market for your games. If the game turned out to be successful you could always piecemeal replace the commercial engine with bespoke via updates (inc. using money to hire people from the success).
> You need to test the gameplay concept as cheaply as possible.
There are some edge case concepts that I have found to be completely impenetrable on commercial engines.
Multiplayer is the #1 thing in my mind. I've gotten the FPS multiplayer examples to "work" for UE and Unity, but the confidence I have in these solutions is not great. I've seen what Unity can do (BattleBit), but I don't know how many decades of game industry black magic and hackarounds it requires to force a commercial engine to behave that well.
I really think the answer is that it depends. If you aren't trying to have a "perfect" version of some gameplay aspect (i.e. multiplayer in my case), then the commercial engines will absolutely be the fastest path to validating your idea. Put differently, I think some game ideas are not possible to validate on commercial engines. But, I don't think this is very common.
It took me about 3 days to build the engine, including custom physics, gravity/jumping, collision detection including raycasting, and about 3 weeks to finalize it and start working on the game. Game was released in under a month and we already have a small community. It was definitely worth spending a little up front time to avoid a service provider, and have more control over the mechanics and look/feel of the game.
By the way, you re-use a lot of the same code when you build in-house, like you said often times your 1st title is not a hit, but you improve upon a lot of that engine code and release subsequent games. Most AAA developers do this.
Now try to hire 20 level designers and 5 engineers who know how to work with your engine/tools.
Same applies to most software. It isn't that hard to make a new programming language or a http framework. But once you make one finding other people who know how to use it is a pain in the ass.
Level designers use tools, not really contributing at the game engine level. Long before I built Shadowvane I built a map editor in Three.js that anybody could use. If the game became profitable, in-house tooling would sophisticate and the team would be the ones shaping it. But yes if for some reason my first hire was a level designer, they could add value day 1.
Once your comment has a reply, please don't edit it in a way that removes the context for readers! Instead, it's fine to add something to the end preceded by "Edit:" or similar.
> A developer who wanted to pursue that kind of claim in court could argue using the concept of promissory estoppel, or the "notion that you can't just change the deal if somebody else relied upon it," as Hoeg put it.
My reading is that the article skips a step in its analysis. Note that I did not watch the linked video with the video game lawyer and whatever he says is probably more contextually useful than what I say:
I’d be more apt to call this an illusory contract where one party reserves the ability to choose how it performs. This destroys the mutuality of agreement in which the contract rests. In some circumstances this might get you to a win simply by escaping the contract. But not if you want damages; in this situation an equitable remedy that does not presume the existence of the contract would be exactly what you would want.
On the other hand all of these clickwrap licenses seem to reserve the right to change at any time. I think the only reason that they are not adjudicated as illusory is the existence of mandatory arbitration clauses but I’m not sure. I’d be interested in being set straight if someone reading this is more knowledgeable.
To me (not really into gamedev actually so chances are I'm completely wrong) it seems like nowadays, when physics and reneding is done in hardware and game engines bundle so much logic and are shared among so many games, creators will soon be able to give up coding (anything except scripts) and concentrate on selling pure content. Users will then purchase compatible engines from engine developers or use open-source engines.
There’s nothing about the whole situation that open source fixes. Your champion open source project can change its license and pricing too.
The only way to protect yourself here is to enter into a non-ambiguous and non-shitty contract with your vendor.
If the software industry learns anything from this it should be that it’s not super smart to build your business on a technology with variable pricing that you don’t have control over (or something to that effect).
As Game developer myself, and unity user, I was concerned about the new pricing model, however, actually reading the actual changes[1], you see that 99% of the developers are not affected, and in some cases, for those affected, still cheaper to go with Unity than with Unreal: There is a video explaining it well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENoVL68z9PU
For sure an open source solution would be more than welcome, but sounds like impossible, because either those out there are half-backed, or are just finding a way to monetize it too..
Why not charge $1 for your game? Problem solved. If you're making a game with a fancy commercial engine I would hope what you're offering is worth a buck. Let's get some quality in this world.
The difference in conversions between free and $1 is not a matter of price. The hard part is getting someone to pay in the first place.
That's why a model of free game with paid addons/extras/pay-to-win/etc. works so well – once someone already tried your game and gets invested in it, they're more likely to spend anything.
And in mobile gaming there's also the matter of looking for "whales". Basically, while majority of people will never spend anything, there's a minority willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars. Then, the difficulty comes from showing your game to enough people to find whales.
(Whether that model is ethical in the first place is a whole different matter. I don't think it is, so maybe eliminating it will be a net positive in the world.)
With $1 paid to the developer the player only needs to (re)install the game 6 times on their computer to cost the developer more than they earned.
This pricing is per install, not per player. Installations are an unrestricted functionality which can be abused. If you care about quality games: this pricing causes the opposite.
> We treat different devices as different installs. We don’t want to track identity across different devices.
This allows malicious actors to fake the device identity, which leads to the exact same problem.
> We are not going to charge a fee for fraudulent installs or “install bombing.” We will work directly with you on cases where fraud or botnets are suspected of malicious intent.
This roughly says "trust us bro". They will "work directly with you" in cases of fraud? How nice, but that could just mean an automated response email with generic advice, followed by radio silence. No promise that they will resolve the issue, no promise they will work on it before your dev studio is bankrupt, this is just a collection of words built on trust they don't have right now.
Because mobile games that aren't free do not sell (except Minecraft). In mobile F2P space you can end up with tons of downloads, with less than 20 cents per download, because majority of the players are free casual ones, who play few hours or even minutes, and 99% of your revenue comes from the so called 'whales' (players who spend a LOT of money). If you hate this business model - good for you, I do too and I don't do mobile gamedev, but it's a reality there and Unity knows it.
Unity also doesn't give a crap about quality unless by quality you mean microtransactions, milking players and ads/adware. The engine is associated (partly unfairly) with lagginess, low performance, high ram usage, and crappy games and assets flips. Unity is famous for how slowly new features come and how buggy it is in parts. They also scrapped their own game on Unity that was supposed to show how to use Unity right, it's an engine company that never made games (unlike Epic or id Software, who made games first, engine seconds, and even when being in engine business they kept making games). Unity users who just slapped few assets together basically created the asset flip genre, the opposite of quality. As CEO of EA Riccotello supported always online online DRM that shut down singleplayer games on release day due to servers dying, as CEO of Unity he said you are a "fucking idiot" (direct words) if you don't want to maximize your monetary return from your players. Unity bought an adware company, Unity has an ad network (and if you use it to put ads in your game, they waive the install fee, curious..).
For the record, I am not a game developer but I don't think that changes my opinion on open source technology.
Open Source software is great, but that also comes at the cost of support when you are running into a problem. Particularly if you are on a critical timeline, especially if trying to fix a bug after something is released.
You are at the mercy of the community being able to help (and most likely only being able to give them a limited amount of information) vs the possibility of the company you are licensing from sending you engineers to actually help you fix the problem.
For business critical this is an important thing that needs to be looked at, and from what I can tell there is not anything like this for GoDot (I don't see an enterprise option similar to redhat).
This is not in any way shape or form defending Unity, what they are doing is horrible and will likely (hopefully) cause a migration to Unreal. But just saying open source is not a cut and dry option either. Especially not for something as critical as the engine.
Not really in a position to say anything conclusively either but I don't think you are at the mercy of the community. First, it's open source, so your company can look and fix the code themselves. If it's restaurant software this is likely complicated but for gamedev it is much more likely the company already has the expertise to do that. Second, Godot doesn't have a formalized process but one of the developers can be willing to offer paid support.
> While we don't have a formal structure for offering commercial support, many Godot developers can already help you, work per hour, or relocate to your company. For such inquiries, contact support@godotengine.org. Let us know about your needs and we'll try to find the right person for you.
Not sending engineers, but when I worked for a smaller dev studio we did need to contact Unity and get support a couple times when we got stuck on something. I think we ended up paying for access to the source code and the development manager ended up making a couple of changes in the source code to get something working better as well (I don't remember the specifics, I was working in Unity but on a different game at the time).
This was like 10 years ago though. That guy worked on multiple arcade games in Assembly back in the day too (you've likely played games he worked on if you've played more than a handful of popular arcade games), he was no slouch.
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.