Releasing the Unity C# source code

Important notes from article:

This Friday we published the Unity engine and editor C# source code on GitHub, under a reference-only license.

We are not releasing Unity as open source. Not even a little bit. (Sorry.)

We also do not take pull requests against the C# reference source code.

That’s it! The reference source code repository is at https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/UnityCsReference, enjoy using it as reference for your Unity learning needs.

This eerily reminds me of how Valve Corporation handled the now abandoned Source engine, and it's 2004, 2007, and 2013 mainline public SDK branches. After this experience, I will absolutely not consider using closed engines. The feeling of putting years of work into a project on a closed engine only to run into issues further down the line that cannot be resolved by proprietary roadblocks caused by the engine's company changing direction instills a burn that you cannot heal from and takes away a sense of innocence on a hobbyist platform.

The economics of the game engine business are terrible. The economics of the game business in general are terrible already and when you're in the engine business you've got a big cost overhead with a revenue stream made up mostly of 0, a few small trickles, and then some big wins which turn out to be capped licence buy-outs, because your customers are in a business with poor economics. It's worse than selling to Apple. AFAICT (I have no special inside knowledge) Unity isn't making any real money (I believe even a company the size of Microsoft pays only $2M/year, though they may also pay per-title fees).

As far as I can see the only way it works is the way Unreal does it: they develop their engine for their own needs and coincidentally let others do it (cf Lumberyard). It's conceivable that a "casual consortium" a la GCC, Linux et al could build one but I don't see any signs of it.

  a very steep power law, high marketing (and even licencing) costs, heavy competition...  It's a $100B market but most of the profit is around the core product, not in it.

I’m really glad they did this (even better if we could compile and fix our own bugs). I’d love to see the sources of the binaries linked — there’s a lot missing from the C# code (ie. I’d love to see how cloth is implemented and why is it crashing on me so frequently).