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Comment by starburst | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it could have been planned all along, the damage done seems irreversible. No one is going to propose Unity ever again for upcoming projects even if the fees are actually a much better deal than the competitions (like Unreal 5%).

The audacity of asking everyone who have built a game using their engine (completely disregarding the TOS at the time) to be potentially on the hook to receive monthly bills from their own black box that estimate the number of installs ensure that their reputation is effectively ruined, the future is that no one is going to trust them to use their engine because at any point they can come up with new ridiculous fees...

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If Unity is the best by a mile it works.

But that's the thing, it isn't, it's simply good enough, get the job done and is so popular that employing people that knows it is easy. I agree it is a good value proposition which is why it is the industry standard for mobile games.

However, it isn't some marvelous piece of technology that's irreplaceable and when you factor the fact that they can come up with any kind of ridiculous fees and breaking their TOS at will, that value drop drastically to the point that everyone will be looking at alternative in the future, no one is going to use it, certainly not the people that right now helped making this one of the most popular game engine. Those people are pissed off and have been for a while but this is just too much. It cannot work.

Even before the recent upsets, for technical reasons the vibe I had been getting is that for a long time now Unity has been tolerated, not celebrated, and this latest move has tipped the scales and made tolerance no longer possible for many.

Unity suffers from an outdated and inefficient architecture, both in game logic and the rendering engine.

There have been multiple ambitious projects aimed at finding a more efficient way to process game entities, and more efficient ways of rendering them, but that has only resulted in a fragmentation of the ecosystem.

Despite spending countless millions on trying to stay technically relevant, Unity has been living on past merits.

Every new version is bloatier, slower and buggier. When you have a Unity version that works for your project, you stick to it and hope you won't be forced to update because Apple / Google changed something that now requires a new Unity version to be compatible.

It actually is, in the ecosystem of engines having C# as the main language.

Now that the trust is broken, this will also have a big impact on using C# for game development.

Unity skated by on their freemium pricing and easy programming languages. Unreal has been technologically superior for _years_, only held back by the high revenue split, the footguns the Blueprints came with, and how daunting the C++ interface could be.

The real nail in the coffin is less the pricing changes in and of themself, but that they can make it retroactively applicable. This means that this pricing is also subject to change, so devs have no good insight into the future pricing models. IF you';re a solo dev or a small team, ;you simply can't afford that uncertainty.

Unreal isn't great for 2D games, and other small games that don't need all of its power. It's amazing and has unprecedented quality/perf, but being so powerful makes it hard for newbies to pick up.

Godot on the other end will be a perfect fit for what Unity is leaving behind. It's not only free, but OSS, and maintained by amazing people.

It only takes one 'whale' studio using unity to say 'you know what, we're going to give half of what we used to pay for unity to godot' to really speed development of key features. OSS is nothing if not persistent.

Unity isn't.

Unfortunately for them, it isn't.

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