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Comment by elevenoh | Hacker News Reader

I - and many I know - won't spend the majority of our waking lives developing atop an engine that's now 40% owned by Tencent.

Why? Because my users trust me.

So I won't make decisions that increase the likelihood of my users being exploited.

User exploitation is something tech folks doesn't seem consider, for now, anyway. But thankfully folks are waking up, and it's effecting valuations.

Sad to see that Epic sold out.

Tim Sweeney (epic CEO) acted short term out of the allure of $. It'll be hard to look into your employees & children's eyes not deeply regret this.

I've shifted to Unity. Turns out it's remarkably better, so I can't complain about this impetus for the switch.

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Out of legitimate curiosity,

1: What are you afraid of, now that the engine is partly owned by Tencent? The engine is OSS after all. What paths do you see for potential break of trust?

2: What are your use cases that you need a game engine for (making mobile games, console games, PC games, arch viz, ...)

3: What points make you feel like Unity is remarkably better?

I'm asking these last 2 points because I'm in the field myself and I do have some different experiences regarding choice of engines. Thanks! * And what do you

Unreal, while source available, is not open source software. [1]

1. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/publishing

For the first 80% of a game, Unity feels great. It becomes a pain during the 2nd 80%.

I hope that second 80% wasn’t a typo because it made me spit my tea out in laughter. I’ve tried my hand at a few indie games like probably every programmer/gamer and wow does that last mile to “done enough to say done with a straight face” seem to stretch on into infinity.

Having worked at a startup who's product was built around unity, that 2nd 80% is a killer.

I doubt your users give a crap.

My experience with unity, as a free user, was it creating a TB of log files of nothing but it complaining that it couldn't connect to the internet to phone home its telemetry.

I don't think either engine's approach here is particularly noteworthy though.

I’m curious to know why exactly is Tencent‘s share in Epic relevant while unity is VC funded and has the same pressure of making money?

Tim Sweeney is the majority shareholder of Epic.

https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/118194495168648806...

Why didn't Tim Sweeney try to get funding elsewhere? It seems like he had a tech company and could have gone with any VC firm.

Did he want to keep it private?

Supposedly Tim Sweeney saw the writing on the wall in 2012 as Epic sold off the Gears franchise to Microsoft that "free-to-pay" "Games as a Service" were the future of the industry and decided to shop around for expertise in that area. Tencent already had expertise in that area (both homegrown in China with several successful "GaaS" games and in already owning Riot Games at that time), and the investment was also supposedly a signifier of a bidirectional exchange of expertise sharing.

One primary source linked from Wikipedia: https://www.polygon.com/a/epic-4-0/the-four-lives-of-epic-ga...

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