Break Out The Popcorn

duane

Unity's playing "russian roulette" again. How much will their developers stomach before they trash the place?

https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten

"The fees, which Unity said are essential for funding development of its tech, left many game makers wondering if having a hit game through Unity would cost them more money than they could make. Developers spoke throughout the day of delaying their games to switch to rival Epic Games' Unreal Engine or other services on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter."

I probably shouldn't enjoy this so much. 🙂

fire7side

duane I don't think they thought that through. At the end of a game cycle they can get a lot of downloads but not make much.

MeisterDerMagie

duane The only reason I'm reading your post is because I'm one of those Unity developers... I'm considering switching for personal projects, but for my day job, I'm forced to use Unity. Aaaand no C# for mobile (yet) is a big disadvantage.

DaveTheCoder

duane How much will their developers stomach before they trash the place?

I don't think this will cause a mass exodus. If the developers are basically happy with Unity, this change isn't big enough to make them switch to a completely different engine.

packrat

duane https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten

rather than issuing a fee every time a user installs a game:
"an extra fee will be charged if a user installs a game on a second device, say a Steam Deck after installing a game on a PC."

my virtual machines are ready :)

samuraidan

I've already seen like ten memes of people who are gonna make scripts that spoof thousands of downloads in order to bankrupt companies. assuming it even gets that far, that'll happen once and a ton of lawyers will get involved to force them into less dumb changes, I think.

Armynator

I'm not enjoying this at all. I'm a Unity user since 2012 and shipped several projects based on it.
Sure, Unity already had more and more problems accumulating over the past years, but there often was at least some logical long-term thinking behind it. The licensing change was the final nail in the coffin for me however.

Fortunately I kept open to other technologies and started following Godot very closely back in 2019 already.
So here I am now, completely switching over to Godot with my current projects.

It's annoying and I'm very unhappy with the whole situation, but at least Godot is production-ready with Vulkan and Jolt at this point. If this would have happened one year ago, I would have switched to Flax or Unigine instead.
Congratulations to the Godot team and all volunteers for getting Godot 4 ready in time.
And congratulations to the Unity management for their selfless act of promoting open source engines that hard with a single announcement.

jonSS

For me its like deja vu, when a simillar thing happened in game maker 2.
But iam sure Unity will be swiming in money now, with all the bots making 0.20$ per unistall / install...

Nerdzmasterz

The fact that EA is in charge of Unity has made me lose all respect for that engine... They're squeezing out indies like lemons.

I long to go to Unreal, but I need a better graphics card for that. (grumble, grumble, grumble, grumble, grrr...)

So, I guess I'll be here for a while. Hello, Godot forum.

packrat

hehe.

el_malo

I don't use unity, because my machine doesn't move it (it was the first thing I tried), even so I don't think this will affect its use since I think it is very established (of course, studies of professions will probably do it, being affected).

Megalomaniak

DaveTheCoder this change isn't big enough to make them switch

The fee has to be paid for every copy installed by a player/user. Even for pirated copies of a game/product. I suspect it's bigger than some think.

el_malo

could this mean that more people could migrate to godot and by default give more support to godot ?

synthnostate

It's not unusual for a dying corporation to squeeze its loyal customers for all they're worth in the short term, even if it loses most of them forever within a year, until it's just one of hundreds of zombie brand names owned by a holding company. "Capitalism" at its finest...

duane

I can't see this dissuading many people who have already got a lot of investment in unity -- it's going to cost you time/money to switch, and time is money to businesses. On the other hand, if they keep nickel-and-diming their existing developers, they may alienate new developers who would have happily joined the unity community.

Godot's got problems, but it seems like every time I hear "Unity" it involves the villagers getting out their torches and pitchforks. 🙂

Nerdzmasterz

Megalomaniak Exactly this. To say that I am absolutely P'd off about this is an understatement.

I'm still in exploration mode for a new engine, I'm still torn. Like... I love Godot for its simplicity and Unreal for its graphics. Anyone know how much the graphics here have improved?

duane

Speaking of villagers with torches...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-14/video-game-company-unity-closes-offices-following-death-threat

Although, I have to wonder if this was really a credible threat or if they're milking it for publicity. 📺

MagickPanda

benabbottnz Only when godot stops posting news like ＂we are slowed because we are run out of money＂
I was involved in another open source project, the only time it asks for money is the forums owner can't upkeep the server fee, devs never asked a single bucket.
Imo it's fine for open source/non-profit project to ask for donation/support, bit it's just abit hilarious for such project binding progress with fund level in official news.

duane

MagickPanda

You might be misinterpreting the project team. It seems to me that they're saying, "We're getting paid to work full time on godot. If you want us to continue to work full time, keep paying us."

I'm not donating, and probably won't in the future. However, I have to admit that godot has been moving much faster than other projects this way. I'm just not entirely sure that's a good thing...

MagickPanda

duane From my speculation they are stressing themselves by making a lot of 'promising' shiny new features without putting much efforts at polishing exist features, I am not sure it's about survival or securing the full-time godot job, or it's part of Juan/core team's development roadmap planning, but in a long run they will get overwhelming number of bugs/issues created by the new features(They already did tho -.-)
Donating is not the only way to support a foss project, fixing bug, reporting an issue, creating a game, convince~~trolling~~ a friend into choosing Godot engine etc are also sorta contribution, so all users dedicated their time to godot should be honored.
Maybe godot should freeze features development and dedicate to fixing bugs and compatibility problems, esp the compatibility/performance problems with vulkan, cellphone renderer, html5 web etc, will make godot more competitive than making tons of new features that are nigh useless due to compatibility or bugs.

Megalomaniak

MagickPanda but in a long run they will get overwhelming number of bugs/issues created by the new features

That already happened long, long ago. Before there even were many(any?) full time payed devs.

MagickPanda Donating is not the only way to support a foss project, fixing bug,

That's great and all but accepting contributions and on-boarding new developers is itself a huge time sink that requires preferably not just dedicated but well compensated expertise.