There's also the matter of future developers to consider. I'm in the process of looking at game engines to learn, and Unity has decisively crossed itself off the list. Even if current studios and developers stick with Unity, startups and novices would be foolish to pick a game engine that might suddenly decide to charge them out the ass with little to no notice. Existing developers have the issue where they already have tools and experience with Unity, but newer folks don't.
Myself I really wish that Godot would finally start getting traction in being the most advanced and the most used game engine. And it’s free.
Just look at Linux - it’s free, most used and most customizable server platform, even tho paid alternatives (e.g. Windows server) exists. I wish Godot would become de facto standard game engine.
I doubt it will ever happen but if it dose that would be a perfect fit for open source, big studios could contributr and share parts of their progress between each other like big companies do in the Linux space and at that part it would probably become and stay the most advanced option fairly quickly because you can’t compete with a entire industry and community at once!
Godot should definitely be adopted more by the indie and small studio scene. I think there’s going to be some folks who slide over to Unreal because Godot’s 3D capabilities don’t even match Unity’s yet, but there’s some stuff it can do, and it’s in active development.
Honestly, I don't blame them for not wanting to put up with Unity's unreliance. It took Unity 10 days after announcing this awful change to backtrack to a normal revenue cut. That 10 days was filled with justified outrage from a ton of developers to the point of Re-Logic donating $100k to Godot and FNA in protest.
That’s what confused me the most. When your customers are consumers, screwing them over might be no big deal. But when your customers are businesses, how were you planning to get away with something like this where anything involving fees in the 6 to 9 figures is game changing. That’s, “Cheaper to move my business elsewhere” levels of money.
Yup. They were hoping it would fall out of the news cycle and people would forget about it. Once it stretched past a week, they started to panic because people weren’t dropping it, and had to plan an announcement to save face.
The harsh truth is even if they lose half of their current users they will end up making more anyway, even with the amended changes. They planned to lose a large chunk of their user base, regardless. The “seats” model is dead now that AI is changing how game development is done from the ground up. And they needed to do this because they were never profitable (the engine’s development costs hundreds of millions of dollars) and couldn’t really compete with unreal when it came to the type of customers they could actually pay for the engine from
Nah this went really bad for them. Even if they do make more, it will almost certainly be short term. Godot got so much free advertising. It firmly sat itself next to unreal as far as who should be choosing it, but it is definitely the inferior engine if you are making AAA. It's going to get cut from the high by unreal and the low from Godot, defold, and even gamemaker.
I don't get this weird apologist attitude. Let us not forget Unity just spent over $4 billion less than a year ago buying the malware ad service ironsource. They are not profitable because they make bad business decisions. This was one more. And in all likelihood we will see the sale of unity before too long. And it will probably be less than the $20 billion offer they had prior to the ironsource purchase.
They are not profitable because they make bad business decisions.
Exactly this. Just like how reddit very quickly made enough in reddit gold sales to cover their server costs for decades, the only reason it’s operating at a loss is because they’re running it that way.
it’s a known strategy in tech startups and most non inventory based businesses in general (think moviepass) to undercut your competition to try and get as much market share as possible, even operating at a loss, and then slowly turn up the prices on your users once they are locked into your system and make back the lost revenue over time. I don’t agree with it either, but the y-combinator business tech crowd seem to love this model, so I can’t really say if it’s a bad decision or not.
I can cite an example of it with an inventory based company. KIA sold their cars at damn near a loss in the US for a long time to get a good foothold. And it worked. Iirc they had a bogo on cars at one point even.
I can however, point to evidence that it’s a popular business model, if you don’t mind accepting hacker news and y-combinator articles, as well as YouTube media of startup CEOs in earnings calls, but I refuse to defend it otherwise. These are often people with lots of money and advanced stem + business degrees however, so Im not going to sit here and act like I easily know better than them. I can say it did work for Google, but this is after they already were dominating with ad revenue and had the means to slowly introduce ads into every platform they owned ( youtube, maps, android). Popular platforms like DoorDash also have yet to become profitable, despite commanding a 70% market share on food delivery.
80 percent of unity users don’t pay and a large percentage of the 20% remaining don’t pay close to enough to maintain the engine. they did this on purpose, so it’s their fault, but it is the truth. most large studios these days that actually hit the numbers to pay unity are doing more with AI so they are paying less and those who the changes actually were attempting to make up lost revenue from. as I said, either way the “seats” model is dead regardless.
honestly as shitty as the changes were (and of course they were trying to make profit) they were actually attempting to help devs at least financially. For many use cases the install fee would come out as less than a 1% rev share. It was the other shit that made it worse, the install counting malware proposal, and the uncertainty behind the legitimacy of the numbers. (demos, piracy, repeated reinstalls)
if you’re interested in the insight from a tech investor who is familiar with the situation from the inside, but remains unbiased as someone not employed by unity, check this link for a good breakdown of what Unity’s leadership was actually thinking when they cooked this insanity up.
Sure, but if they’d implemented the revised changes they wouldn’t have lost so many users. And despite their messaging, they did already speak to some devs who’d already told them this would be a disaster, but they tried it anyway, and in a retroactive way that completely disregarded prior promises regarding changing EULA agreements, so there’s no faith in this not still changing.
If the changes were launched this way, being tied to a new version in 2024 then this would have been a perfectly fair approach, you could stick with 2022 / 23 LTS for your projects and only if you want ‘new’ features would you pick up 2024 LTS and agree to the new terms.
I’ve honestly not seen much difference between major versions e.g. 2021 - 2022 LTS, so unless these new versions come out with amazing new features, devs can still stick to these old reliable versions.
It’s much better overall but the way they’ve handled this has been shithouse
It might now win any new developers but people who work many years to build things like custom simulations have no way of switching to other platforms.
It depends on a lot of factors though. Creating your own engine is by far not an easy task. The more feature rich it shall become, the more work it will need. Especially if it should have high 3D graphics quality while also running performant. That alone can cost a good team at least 2 to 5 years.
Switching engines also depends on how portable your work from the old engine is with regard to the new engine. It may not be impossible but can still be a lot of work. The earlier that decision is made, the better.
If the devs are determined enough they can surely do a switch. But they might sweat a lot. And especially for smaller studios, or studios without sufficient funding, this quickly becomes a matter of financial survival.
So it’s not impossible, yes. But don’t take that lightly as well.
Switching engines also depends on how portable your work from the old engine is with regard to the new engine. It may not be impossible but can still be a lot of work. The earlier that decision is made, the better.
Not to mention I’m guessing a good amount of indie devs are not abstracting every detail of interacting with the engine from the getgo in the chance they want to swap engines down the line. I’m sure some more experienced studios due for that just incase measure or to make migrating past breaking changes a bit easier when they crop up. But generally speaking I can’t imagine that’s a common tactic. But even if it did your still going to have to recreate every new implementation for your interfaces and there are bound to be differences here that are gonna take some time.
That works for consumers because they don’t have nothing to lose. Smaller devs will still gravitate towards Unity because the various fees don’t apply to them, but any big studio won’t touch it with a ten feet pole. Immagine putting the salaries of a full studio in the hands of a company that might decide out of the blue to ruin your business model, it’s a nightmare scenario for any CEO! More so when there are viable alternatives
It’s times like this I wish we did things more like china. The one person who is actually responsible for this change is going to get a huge payout, but the same can’t be said for everyone else at the company whose lives are going to be completely thrown off from the incoming layoffs.
They have over 7,000 employees they need to lay people off anyway. The reason they’re not profitable is because they’ve massively overextended themselves. Why did they buy Wetter, utterly bizarre purchase choice.
If they had a sensible number of employees and didn’t buy random companies every 5 minutes they’d be profitable.
Honestly, Unreal has been in a different league ever since Epic started dumping Fortnite money into it. That’s probably why Unity tried to start charging more, because they’ve been falling behind for the past few years and can’t afford to keep up. Not that I think it’s good to leave Epic/Unreal without decent competition, but I’m more inclined to blame Fortnite for the downfall of Unity than the indie devs Unity just scared off with their desperate cash-grab.
Unreal has been in a different league basically since its inception. Compare the original Unreal engine to its contemporaries like Quake or Half Life and it’s amazing what they could do, if you had a box that could run it.
The difference between Unreal and Unity is Unreal has a sustainable viable business model (I think I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no “sustainable” business models under capitalism, what with demanding infinite growth and lal that). Epic Games develops their own games; the development of Unreal Engine has pulled its weight as a component of Fortnite and such. Same thing with Valve; I don’t think they ever bothered to charge for developing a game in the Source engine because they made their money for engine development through Half Life 2, Portal, TF2, Left 4 Dead etc.
Unity on the other hand doesn’t make and sell games, so they have to either directly charge developers (which they both do and don’t) or they operate their own adware nonsense. And neither of those revenue streams are enough. Which means they don’t have a viable business model. So they pull a stunt like this to hasten their inevitable bankruptcy.
Yeah I was a game programmer in the early 2000s. Unreal made my jaw drop back then already. They’ve always been state of the art (although arguably CryEngine had the lead for a while), long before Unity came around. As you might remember, it started out in 1998 as the game Unreal (and then Unreal Tournament) which was a kickass first-person shooter. It has been around for 25 years now.
Unreal is now also selling their engine to Hollywood productions that want to replace green screen with real-time effects for the actors to play against. It’s impressive stuff, and I bet they’re going rake in tons of money through that channel as well. Unity is just not in the same ballpark.
That said, there’s room for Unity if they’re willing to find a business model where they don’t compete head-on with Unreal. As the article indicates there is (was) a strong community providing tons of cheap or free-of-charge assets, and it’s been very appreciated among indie devs for these reasons. Unity excels in support for mobile and web platforms. They don’t need to make their engine support all the latest cool technology. They just need good developer relations and tools that make it easy to turn cool ideas into fun games. The fact that they squandered their biggest asset (the community) shows that the leadership does not comprehend Unity’s value proposition. It is being lead by fucking morons.
Good. The terrible marketing team who made this decision is still there, and they still want this end result. They just learned they need to approach that goal more slowly.
I’ve worked on older projects such as 2019 and overall they all work very similar, so I’m assuming people will still start projects on 2020/2021 LTS given they’re fairly stable
The only thing I’d be keen on in be versions of unity would be if they came with better versions of FSR / DLSS baked in, instead of having to wait on third party addons
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