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.

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).

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).

I looked into it a bit more and unless I did some bad maths or misread their terms, the whole Runtime Fee looks like a badly disguised sales funnel to me: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/unity-runtime-fee-a-look-at...

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).

Let's see how I got there, let's take their Runtime Fee rates: https://unity.com/runtime-fee

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

  100'000 * 0.15 = 15'000 USD
  400'000 * 0.075 = 30'000 USD
  100'000 * 0.03 = 3'000 USD
  TOTAL: 15'000 + 30'000 + 3'000 = 48'000 USD

With 1'600'000 units sold, the overhead per a single unit then becomes:

  Personal: 280'000 / 1'600'000 = 0.175 USD
  Pro: 48'000 / 1'600'000 = 0.03 USD

  Personal: 1/(1-0.5) * 0.175 = 0.35 USD
  Pro: 1/(1-0.5) * 0.03 = 0.06 USD

  Personal: 1/(1-0.3) * 0.35 = 0.5 USD
  Pro: 1/(1-0.3) * 0.06 = 0.085 USD

  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)

Here's the graphs that I came up with, first how the total runtime fee changes based on the tier: https://blog.kronis.dev/images/1/4/-/u/n/14-unity-pricing-gr...

Also, approximately how the runtime fee overhead changes with publisher/platform fees included (with the example percentages above): https://blog.kronis.dev/images/1/6/-/f/e/16-fee-per-install-...

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGMrebXypJo

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.

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.

Any chance you have an example? I can't recall an arcade game that had you pay per bullet.

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.

Maybe it's similar to how there are "Dungeons and Something" || "Something and Dragons" but somehow never both?

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.

Unity going public was like .org's PIR being sold to PE.

You think the management made a mistake, I think the management (as a result of going public) is the mistake.

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.

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.

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 :-(

So I guess the conclusion is that Unity was fucked pre-IPO?

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).

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

---

"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.

[1] - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal

> When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS.

> Moving forward, we will host TOS changes on Github to give developers full transparency about what changes are happening, and when.

The link to the mentioned GitHub repo just recently became dead :/

[1]: https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-an...

---

"8. Modifications.

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]

---

"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.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20201111183311/https://github.co...

[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20200814002539/https://unity3d.c...

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.)

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].

[0]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...

Ambitions change. And you're subject to the whims of the ambitions of those with more power.

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.

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.

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.

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

The big issue is if those two companies collude, but for storefronts there's less incentive than other industries.

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.

https://www.pcgamer.com/source-2-will-be-free-wont-ask-for-r...

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How can you say that when unreal exists? They are dominant in PC and even used in many large mobile games.

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.

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.

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.

- Tilemaps generally

- Tilemap with rule-based brushes

- "Sprite shapes" basically free-form 2D polygon sprite created via a shape editor

- 2D collision with polygon colliders (bonus points if the two can work in tandem)

- 2D lighting

- Snapping things to a grid? Like moving props in a scene on a grid. Or editing a shape to snap to a grid?

> Snapping things to a grid? Like moving props in a scene on a grid. Or editing a shape to snap to a grid?

Out of the box you have [0]. With about 10 lines of code, or a few blueprint nodes, you can support more advanced snapping.

[0] https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/Basics/Actors/Actor...

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?

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.

> 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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law

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.

(Not sure, this is an amateur's guess on my part.)

This can be simplified to:

"The only reason are MBAs"

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).

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.

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 ?)

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

I'm just saying it's not as bad because it's quite a bit easier to switch a database than to switch a game engine.

_presses X to doubt_

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Work with vendors that you trust, vet your dependencies, decide how much risk you want to tolerate, pay attention to the licenses that you are using.

Especially for something as critical as a game engine is to game development companies.

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.

> Redis

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

https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch

https://github.com/mongodb/mongo

How are ES and mongoDB not open source ?

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

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yup, Unity also had that same trust for 15 years. Never underestimate greed.

I mean, sute, but there is a reason why really good and complex software is usually closed.

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.

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.

[1] https://www.sportskeeda.com/esports/will-genshin-impact-affe...

[2] https://www.create-learn.us/blog/top-games-made-with-unity/

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.

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.

Source: https://blog.unity.com/news/unity-forms-new-venture-to-manag...

I would love to track new releases for the next N months and see how it compares vs historical. Does utilization fall off a cliff?

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.

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.

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”

To dismiss Godot because you, a solo hobby dev, can’t target PS5 is hilarious.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...

To paraphrase the docs : You can ship games on consoles, but the tools required to do so will never be included in the open source code.

Eg. Just because you need to buy a tin opener to open your can of beans, doesn't mean you don't have any beans

The difference is that lots of Unity and Unreal developers go through the trouble to do this.

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.

TLDR A game market flooded with shovelware crap is a disaster for everyone.

Modern day consoles intentionally add hurdles/friction/cost to publishing in order to weed out the less serious studios.

And in the meantime, there's already tons of crap shovelware on the Switch storefront. Nintendo doesn't filter for quality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They can take ownership of their decisions.

The early investors and founders cash out first and the public that bought into the unsustainable growth trajectory are left with a failing company.

This is so common I truly don't understand why people still buy into these companies.

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?

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.

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.

Note, it's not sales, it's installs. And it's not new installs.

That you keep saying sales really means you aren't fully informed about the changes and should spend some time researching 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.

Unity acquired Weta at 1.6B. The solution is not to do this.

"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

1- https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2021/Unity-Com...

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.

It's not like they bought these with a pile of $6B cash they had lying around

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.

The only reason Unreal engine has so favorable license conditions is because Epic Games earn billions from Fortnite and Epic Games Store.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Tournament_(cancelled_v...