They should honestly just move their engine anyway. Unity has played their hand, and showed they are willing to make changes to their pricing retroactively.
This. It's not easy or trivial but as a long term strategy, they should already plan investing efforts into consolidating something like Godot or another FOSS engine. They should play like you calm down an abuser you can't just escape yet while planning their demise when the time has come.
I have a feeling a lot of the engine devs from unity are seeing the writing on the wall and looking for places to jump to. Betting they have a brain drain soon
I bet they will do so for their next game but reimplementing a entire game is FAR easier said than done, something like that could very well bankrupt a smaller studio!
Not moving is what they’ll do if “changes are completely reverted and TOS protections are put in place”. In such a case, while punishing Unity is still desirable, there won’t be installation fees that justify the costs of rewriting the game.
I mean it’s easy to reimplement entire games if you’ve built it modularly. Just swap your core game logic to run on another library and the game works the same it did before.
Edit: 'course, exceptions exist like if you wrote everything using their proprietary coding language, instead of using something universal.
Edit 2: It MAY still be possible that a translation/compiler exists that’ll run as a plugin in a proprietary engine, and converts it into something universal.
Game Dev isnt just code. Remaking a project from scratch is a massive undertaking. Porting the code could be difficult too especially if relying on core unity libraries.
It also depends on how many engine unique features you used, and what optimizations you applied. It’s certainly possible, but doing it without changing any game logic will require very complicated translation layers which will likely cause performance issues. It might very well be easier to treat it as a porting and refactoring project. You might not even realize which behaviors are unique to each engine if you don’t regularly develop in multiple engines.
This is true, and I vouch for gamedevs to first test other engines to see the differences.
Calculating for the future is extremely important in pretty much everything.
Also I wouldn’t say there would be performance issues, unless you somehow completely screw up coding and compiling said code.
Projects should work on top of a bottom layer, or translation layer as it’s sometimes called; game logic calls for functions from there, instead of directly from the engine. This is also important for code security.
_move_entity might be calling the proprietary unity_move_object with a different reg stack, but when compiled the performance should be +/- 0.
Not untrue, but it helps to adapt your future projects if done in such a way.
It does require more expertise, and it takes more time, thus it’d have to be the first thing done for the project, not something you do after everything’s done already.
If you don’t use anything from the engine itself, implement everything from scratch, only using the engine as an entry point that launches your own code, and pay unity two thousand dollars per year per seat for that privilege - I guess porting should be fairly easy.
If you ask me engines should be free for most indies (UE, Godot?), because they’re not making millions. But yeah. I get it’s not feasible for most new devs especially, and senior devs have better things to focus on.
Technically you’re not wrong. The work is done, the logic already exists.
But systems like Unity aren’t like other code where you can rip one section out and still have 80% of a working codebase. Game engines are as fundamental to most of their game code as the language it’s written in. It’s not like you can just drop things into unreal or godot, connect a few interfaces and call it good. You still have to write the whole thing from the ground up.
As I said, it depends on how it’s built. And how proprietqry the engine is.
Unity from what I know supports universal code/mesh/texture formats, but if the devs opted for the “easier to use” proprietary systems- well, that’s a problem.
Now what I don’t know is how easy are scenes to export in Unity. They’re probably built with Blender or something else though in most cases, unless Unity has drastically changed.
Assets are safe, but they often need to be re-rigged or re-formatted. It’s still a non-trivial task though. Levels will need to be rebuilt, open worlds have to be started almost from scratch, and a lot of other things I can’t think of off the top of my head.
The real problem is underlying systems. Unity often handles networking, render engines, game logic and most other things. The reason Unity was so popular was because it was easy to use (and free). Game code will need to be at minimum heavily refactored, if not rewritten, as anything that interfaces with the engine needs to be changed over. Just like you can’t just port c++ -> c# without major changes, you can’t port a game engine without major changes too.
Unless theyve built everything as a separate code bundle, only interacting with the engine at a bare minimum, there’s no way to change with minor impact. It’ll be a huge project that will also require the engineers to learn a new stack that behaves differently, further slowing down the process.
Yep, they might roll back the changes this time but they’ve shown where they want to be and now we know. They’ll work their way slowly towards it instead of a sudden change now and it will be less noticeable and harder to fight legally when they do that
I think most developers can see the writing in the wall there, but switching mid-way through a project will be costly and time consuming. If the changes were fully rolled back, I would still bet many would finish what they working on and then switch for their next game.
Problem is that if your current unity game is successful this year, and then they reimplement the retroactive charge next year, you’re still screwed. If you can afford it then it’s best to change now in order to avoid that mess that might mean you have to delist your game
I’m not sure it’s legal to implement it retroactively. I’d be very curious to get an attorney’s perspective - seems a lot like trying to unilaterally change a contract after both parties have signed. But I have a hard time imagining anyone being willing to develop using Unity going forward.
I feel like any company with a legal department would surely check with them before announcing something like this. But maybe unity is so poorly ran they don’t have a legal team or didn’t check idk
I think you overestimate how much they care about doing illegal things. They will try it, and if someone can prove it’s illegal, they’ll pay a minor fine and stop, maybe. Otherwise they’ll get away with it. That’s how corps look at laws.
I mean you’d think so, but look at how often companies get into lawsuits for clearly illegal shit. Plenty of places will still try to enforce arbitration/NDA clauses that have no actual legal basis or consequence.
There’s no way this is legal unless it’s already in a contract – and even then, it might still be illegal. The notion of charging people more money because you’ve raised your prices after they’ve already bought something just breaks economics completely. You’d be able to sell a bunch of a product for cheap, and then later say sike and charge everyone a lot more.
I’m sure companies would love to do that, but no company exists in isolation. Every single company is buying something from another company to sell their product. If they could do this to their buyers, then their suppliers could do it to them. It would probably end up cancelling any gains you’d get.
I’m guessing this was a move their executives made without any consultation with legal, because it’s the kind of idiotic move only they could think of.
The exact same thing was said about Reddit execs like Huffman. They never cared enough to compromise. We’ll see if the Unity execs are similarly terrible people, whose greed will destroy the company. Seems like the trend these days.
The only way Unity can realistically fix it at this point is to pull a WotC and not just backtrack all these changes, but implement a legal mechanism that guarantees changes like this cannot ever be retroactively applied to past versions of the engine.
Yeah, you should diversify your skills as a dev because soon the market for Unity devs might become noticeably worse. As a company, if you can afford it it might be worthwhile investing some money into Godot
We have never made a public statement before now. That is how badly you fucked up.
Lmao shots fired. Unity’s C-suite made their own bed… and the bed is made out of anti-personnel mines. I genuinely hope this picks up steam.
Unity showed their hand when they made the announcement. I had never thought to look up who owned them before. Now that I am aware that they’re majority-owned by VC and PE firms, it’s pretty clear to me that this category of monetization-oriented behavior is here to stay, because that’s how VC and PE operate. Unless and until they somehow get a new owner, it’s my sincere opinion that Unity should absolutely not be seriously considered as a game engine for any new game project.
This. We’re only just now feeling the sting more keenly in a number of ways because companies are desperate to stay the course with increased profits year over year despite there being a massive global economic slump.
The 2010’s were full of venture capital pumping money into companies, and when we asked, “How is this business profitable,” they’d respond “Just trust us, bro.” Well, now the well has dried up, the venture capitalists are here to collect, and we all get to be surprisedpikachuface.jpg watching this trainwreck unfold in slow motion.
If there’s a penny in your hand, it’s a penny they need. Leave not one cent to be saved, not a morsel for tomorrow, because the people who control the money, want to own it all too.
There’s a subscription for every need, for every hobby, for ever facet of reality. No matter what you do you can give one of these firms between 30 and 300 dollars a month to send you a box of crap you don’t need.
There is no aspect of your life that is not fully monetized, and if there is, they’re coming for it. A stroll through the park? Buy water from a fountain that used to be free. An old game with friends you love? Why not buy the expansion, play online only a small fee to have the latest updates and play with anyone! They’ll find any avenue to sell to you and completely miss the point of what it is you’re looking for, in the quest to fill that need at the highest price you’ll pay.
This is what we get with propietary software. We can’t go to another entity or create one to develop the engine for us moving forward. We can’t take the current state of the engine and just patch it to keep existing games alive.
If you depend on some work and that work is being done by software only some other company control, this company is really in the control of that work.
Just the latest in a wave of companies that seem to be looking for ever-more scummy ways to take advantage of their customers in search of the Holy Dollar.
This is hardly a comprehensive list, there’s so many recently, but this is just what I could remember off the top of my head:
Why stay at all whether they revert it or not? They’re egregiously incompetent and if they’ve done this sort of thing once, they’re going to do it again. Developers should go where their support will help make something better (Godot) and not stick with the crusty old Unity hag that is constantly pawing at their pockets hoping for the jingle of coins.
I agree, although a lot of the work going into a game is the game design, art, and iteration, and not just the programming and rigging. And it may actually be a catalyst to rewrite parts better
I agree for a specific scenario: if you don’t use many unity specific packages or assets. Then, perhaps you are correct, still I don’t blame anyone staying even in that case, as it is still daunting to take on such a task.
Strongly disagree. While a lot of work does go on to art assets which should be simpler to migrate, the code is absolutely what makes the game. There are tons of very successful games with low quality or stock assets, there are very few popular games with broken code.
Even then, it’s still a lot of effort to check every asset you’re using to ensure they work as expected in your new engine.
It really depends on how modular their codebase is. The Doom 1/2 modern ports they did in 2019 use Unity. But it’s actually still the original Doom underneath and just using Unity for input and output to make porting easier
This is the classic tactic of doing something just to see if people will accept it. Even if they backtrack, they absolutely WILL do shit like this again. It’s just like EA and micro transactions
Even though it’s just one dev, they’re giving Unity a reason to revert. If you just say “Yo, I’m OUT!” then they’ve already lost you and they have no reason to revert on your behalf.
If Developers were in a relationship with Unity, it’d be the sort where Unity always comes home drunk and is verbally abusive, but they stick around with the belief that Unity will change.
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