Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

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).

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.

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.

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.

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/...

This can be simplified to:

"The only reason are MBAs"

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

oh wait, this isn't about 'what worth does 'trust in company' even have', but more like 'public companies bad'

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.

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.

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?

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"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."

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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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

I imagine >50% of video game development is art. And I imagine some decent percentage of code can be translated without nearly as much effort as the original implementation.

Still, I doubt many developers are going to switch engines mid or late development.

But a lot of times, developers re-use much from their old games in development of their new games.

Is this realistically going to hold developers back from moving future development to a new engine?

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/

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

Bought by Apple or Microsoft maybe?

How easy is for a studio to change engine? Isn't that a decent moat?

That doesn't justify what they've tried to do here though. This isn't just a price increase, it's a significant price increase, and a poorly thought out "revshare" model that applies retroactively people who signed deals with them and built a business model off of the deal they signed.

Epic maintains their far more advanced engine with 2200 people, and they also run a AAA live service game.

ON WHAT AND WHY???

I don't. They could have sold to Meta and didn't. If they didn't have a plan that didn't involve fucking their users, that's on them.

For programming platforms (like game engines) this is even MORE of an advantage, as with something like terraform you could conceivably rewrite your stuff in a matter of weeks if you have reasonable testing. For a game that is not possible.

Nobody can take away your rights under the MIT license, there's no legal mechanism to do that. You are protected, fully, from shit like this.

I got burned by Steam, I have a super old laptop with some old games on it, Half Life, so one day I got the laptop out, Steam updates and f** itself, the old system is no longer supported but they had to f** things up s the games won't work.

I agree, open source is not required, but we need to own our software not rent it.

_Some_ kinds of Open Source might help there, since _some_ open source licenses are very easy to comply with and very business-friendly. On the other hand, all the game studios now complaining would also howl and whine when forced to be GPL-compliant and release their source code.

And even with business-friendly take-what-you-want-and-never-give-back Open Source licenses, there is always the risk that the project you are using does what Hashicorp did with Terraform and stuff: Change the license for all future releases to something you won't like, cutting you off from your necessary updates and fixes. Maybe there will be a community maintaining a fork, maybe there won't.

While TOS are rarely worth the toilet paper they could be printed on, I'm curious about whether arguments could be made about whether existing subscribers from 2019 could now sue for breach of contract and costs associated with (re)development.

I would feel very uneasy if my product was based on a framework, where the provider makes no commitment and reserves the right to change the licensing terms at any time.

For Godot, if we were to stop developing it (and I'd like to note that Godot is one of the most active projects on Github right now) you would still have the version you have now.

What is the difference between Epic not working on a game engine you use or an open source project not working on a game engine you use? Except that with Godot at least you could work on it yourself if you wanted to.

There's zero risk of this happening.

Godot is going to become Blender for gaming and eventually eat into Tim's margins. (Unreal isn't even his cash cow.)

Unreal might be significantly ahead now, but when Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. contribute to Godot, it's game over.

Your answer: you can use the old version.

What if Godot stops the development?

Your answer: good luck (???)

Then others can take it from where they left off, since it’s open source. As long as it has a user base, it is guaranteed to live on. Unlike Unreal.

In an age of locked down mobile OSes and forever changing graphics drivers and such, I don't think "FOREVER" is very long any more.

It's like a perpetual license to a specific version of JetBrains Rider. It's sold as if I own a general purpose tool FOREVER and can opt out of an endless subscription but no, it doesn't mean much at all. It will not work with the next runtime update and past runtimes are obsoleted after a couple of years. They have managed to outsource their subscription lock-in as the release cycles of a third parties while pretending to be holier than thou. If they shipped the volatile parts as open source plug-ins, I would feel differently.

Epic is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart, they're doing it because it is beneficial to them. Epic is a multi-billion dollar corporation part owned by a massive conglomerate.

> BS: in reality it's usually one or two guys who actually do the actual work.

Over the last week, Godot had 32 authors pushing 52 commits. Over the last month it had 135 authors. This is not "one or two guys".

> So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a project with zero support.

Guess what, if a closed-source company decides to stop working on their product you're also stuck, but now you're even more stuck because you don't have access to the source to make your own changes!

the Epic games leadership are bribing developers for exclusivity, including kickstarters where i was promised steam or gog

the Epic games leaderhip makes money from free to play grinding/gambling simulators

the Epic games leadership also comes from Tencent that made all their gaming money before trying to get into the western market from asian gacha

The only reason their terms are more reasonable now is because they're the underdog and throwing a lot of money made from free to play crap at fixing that.

Lol you can literally pay people to keep supporting it if the code is Free.

The same goes for Unity and Unreal.

That’s a very unique take. I would call a company that lets others take startup a buildout risks and the uses the courts and regulators to swoop in with a low cost competitor a pirhana.

It’s a good strategy (for Epic), but it is extremely predatory. It’s no secret they have their eyes on the console market next; let HW makers popularize platforms using a business model of low margin HW and high margin SW, then get governments to mandate alternative stores so Epic can undercut the SW.

Low risk, low effort, high return. It’s a solid business strategy but if it’s not pirhanic, I don’t know what is.

If I understand correctly, Unity had that too. And then they changed it anyway.

I don't know the details, but apparently Unity maintained their license in a git repository for the explicit purpose that everybody could easily track changes to their license. Just before the license changes, they removed that repository, and later put it up again, but without the clause that you could always use an old version forever without new restrictions applying to you.

Exactly.

We like to hate corporate greed and lionize the open source developers. I also hold open source devs in high regard.

BUT.

Open Source Dev have to eat too.

If we want to keep the Open Source ecosystem moving, we do need to find a way to pay them. Even today, a lot of open source projects are supported by individual corporations that keep the devs on payroll to give them time, but that can also lead to influence and lock in, and even abandonment if desired.

For a 5% cut. Add that on top of taxes and steam and you’re basically an employee.

Maybe _you_ didn't research how Unity had this same exact clause and decided to just... remove it. The author is implying Unreal could do the same at any point in time.

Isn't that valid for any software including Unity or Unreal?

With open source at least you can try it yourself

Haha this made me laugh. If you think epic isn’t piranha then you’re living in a bubble.

I thought the unity TOS had this too?

Isn't part of the current furore that unity used to have similar terms and they removed them?

so did unity, until they removed that clause

Unity also had a similar clause in their ToC, they removed that now and retroactively applied the new pricing model on ALL previous versions of Unity. Unreal can do it too.

Even if this is 100% legally true, they can absolutely say that they are revoking all old licenses, and then if you used one, it's up to you to take Epic to court to prove that they can't.

Exactly I'm glad someone is pointing out the problems with these piddly open source projects. Companies are too reliant on open source software, I mean it's not like open source tooling has ever taken off. Except for Emacs, and Vim, and VS Code, and maven, and ...

But seriously though the over reliance people have on open source projects is staggering, I mean really what happens when the guy who maintains Linux gets bored and wanders off, everyone is boned.

Therefore I agree with OP all open source projects are inevitably doomed to failure and can never work.

Glad to see someone else who sees reason.

This is where FOSS comes in: If support ends, you can keep using the latest version just like with proprietary software, but you can also fork it and fix pressing issues. It's not even a question of relying on the community continuing to create major new releases. If that fails, your org could fork it alone and patch any blocking bugs.

My company already does this for several pieces of legacy software that we haven't had the time to migrate away from. We don't make any major changes, but we can and do fix things that get in our way. We'd get no such benefit from proprietary software that changes its terms to be unfavorable.

People think that making good games is cheap and anyone can do.

Making games, maybe. Good ones? I don’t think so.

That seems contradictory to your opening sentence though, no? Eventually an open source project will get to the point that it's so good (or even good enough) that a commercial product is simply uncompetitive. That will happen with game engines to. Decisions like this will only accelerate it.

While it isn't my reason, I think most people advocating for open-source, actually see it simply as a way to keep such private actors honest, and prevent them from becoming corrupted. Like many people have said, this particular situation would have been received much differently had the changes not been applied retroactively.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7060016?hl=en

what does unity, a proprietary engine that screwed over their customers, have to do with this?

I just want to point out that the biggest non-contributors to open-source are the enterprise companies you either never or barely heard about, whose entire stacks run on tons of open source and yet it's those end user enterprise shops that are making millions.

In many ways, this probably includes Unity themselves.

we definitely are, and it's the inherent contradiction of "one entity pays to maintain it, another entity makes all the money from exploiting it". this is why there's such a commotion around BSL and dual-licensing schemes.

GPL/AGPL itself is a coherent mechanism for sustaining development. BSD/MIT tends to lead to an embrace-extend-extinguish model where one company pays to write the software, and then Amazon makes it an S3 service, extends and extinguishes the original core by adding proprietary features they keep to themselves, and public development ceases or languishes.

we are lining up for a similar showdown in the CPU space with ARM vs RISC-V. When Amazon and Google say they want an open ISA, they certainly don't mean they're going to open up their stuff. They want it to be open to them, they have proprietary extensions they bolt on (to all those instruction fields left as "vendor-determined") and proprietary accelerators they interface, and they will keep all that proprietary and never sell it outside the company. And that's the return of this same "proprietary vs GPL/AGPL vs MIT" battle. The ability for large commercial entities to extract all the value from open-source work and pay nothing and contribute nothing.

ARM already very much is a "lowest-common-denominator" company, they thrive on designing architectures that are "good enough" and then the actual secret sauce goes in the way you customize it and what you bolt on alongside. And that's exactly what RISC-V will cement, because google and amazon and facebook don't compete on how fast they can make the CPU core, they compete on how cheap they can make it. Which is why vCPU units are still specified in sandybridge-equivalent-cores, and why we're getting zen4c cores instead of faster ones, etc - they don't care how fast it is, they care about selling you more units, and that means being able to provide more units.

audiovisual (and I am including video games here) is a somewhat unique space though because you will not win this battle, the effort involved in building unity or unreal from scratch is herculean, and all of the parties involved are used to exorbitant spends to make the product happen (which I suppose is also true of silicon!)

Sometimes this comes into conflict with the GPL community - like NVIDIA's inability to open their legacy driver core, or AMD's inability to get HDMI 2.1 working on their open driver core (which seems to have stalled out again, the dev who said "august or september" has gone radio-silent). Because if you ask HDMI Forum or Dolby or Fraunhofer or Motion Pictures Experts Group to license as GPL they're going to have a sensible chuckle while clicking the delete email button. That's not how this space works.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417#note_19...

I am actually not opposed to proprietary in general, and especially in this space it almost is a necessity given the amount of work involved. Someone has to be paid to sit down and write engine code all day, and they have to be very skilled and specialized. And this applies whether it's Unreal or Unity or your own in-house engine.

Companies obviously don't like to write a check, which is why they keep doing in-house engines even though it literally keeps killing games, like the way frostbite killed ME:A and Anthem. They would rather a game tank then to pay 2% of gross to buy an off-the-shelf engine (and you best believe if you're EA negotiating a license for all your games you're not paying list price).

What unity is doing here is insane from a business perspective, but they're not wrong either that it's a situation where they're doing an equal share of the total work (there are a lot of man-hours in an engine) and get paid jack shit. Just like open-source software. And when you increase licensing fees (like ARM, or like software going BSL/AGPL) then companies start looking for the exits. Because they're used to extracting all the profit, and at a certain scale it does become viable to just do the work yourself anyway, rather than paying someone else. And that's why you get ME:A and Anthem and BF2042.

edit: And I wrote all that without knowing that unity is currently losing a billion dollars a year, so... yeah.

I use open source software because quality of certain things isn't very important to me, and I don't want to pay for them. If push really came to shove, I could replace large portions of my stack myself using something handrolled. If enough people who want something for free and are willing to build it themselves come together, they can make something that competes with large companies. The large companies in turn can start releasing their product for free in order to maintain market dominance, or they can let themselves be replaced. There's no "free lunch" here, its all simple econmics.

Youtube has largely the same struture: for a while, videos were being made by people doing it as a hobby, then by people doing it as a job, but alone in their bedroom. Now some of them have large production teams and expensive facilities. It sure would suck for them if they stopped being able to make payroll, but I can go back to watching amateurs anytime. Your business model is your problem, not mine.

Foundational libraries, tools, frameworks etc. is often open sourced so people don’t have to “reinvent the weel” every time they switch jobs and positions. Additionally, large orgs can benefit from having a larger talent pool to draw from, because there’s more people familiar with open source software.

Do you think Oracle is maintaining Java (etc.) for altruistic reasons?

OSS is often also a vehicle for marketing, selling expertise or ops services.

Stuff is open sourced so it gets used, built upon and to gain mindshare, community and to find collaborators etc.

You using or building on the software doesn’t in any way detract from that value proposition and often adds to it in indirect ways.

Luckily, the licenses of these projects are all such that, the minute the maintainer pulls the rug out, you are perfectly free to fork the project and move on as if nothing happened. Open source protects you.

I don't get your logic. A proprietary company screws over customers, and that is, to you, an indication that OSS doesn't work?

Isn't it exactly the reverse? Anyway watching this saga now would be mad to continue with Unity, and would be a little wary of closed-source in general.

Epic released statements through their attorney's that they would consider the public version of Unreal a dead product if they lost the ability to maintain ios.

Not saying it's realistic that those types of things will get very far, but the Apple monopoly and their activities is worse than DC in some ways.

My guess of the original game plan was likely to just print out a list of most installed games, manually work out package names to developers, and pick up the phone at Unity's convenience for negotiation talks, working out disagreements including knocking out dupes and fraudulent counts. That should be technically doable.

The real problems are, most devs just don't have the cash flow to split for $0.20 per install, nor they believe they have leverages to reach into agreement for mutual benefits(special 99.9% discount or whatever), nor any viable paths for making the full amount even as eventuality(just add those banners at the top and bottom of your screen! On the launchers! People love clicking those gifs right!? Ads!), and that total dead end feeling had traumatized developers enough that they had formed impression that Unity is a total showstopper with ropes included.

But the part they cast int to dollar isn't the most problematic part.

I can't imagine anyone will start using them now, so there's a good chance that the new ToS will only apply to whatever new customers they signed on between April 2023 and Sept 2023, and people that voluntarily update to the 2024 release.

Still, it's a shame. They just threw out millions of developer hours (minimum), and it doesn't seem likely they'll be able to come back from their mistake.

Even as simple as a tile based Ultima-spinoff engine, it's still a lot of work.

This does exist in the gaming industry, it is called "shovelware". "Shovelware" is when you just glue existing assets purchased for cheap and "shovel" them into a game for a quick buck. Usually not very complex games, low effort stories, etc. Also usually very cheap to download.

It's why in the 90s every game was mostly built on an engine specifically designed for that game, and in the 2000s they switched to prebuilt game engines. Saves a lot of time AND money.

What do you mean by monolithic?

Spin your view a little: NPM is your web development engine. Somebody had to write all of that code that undergirds NPM as an engine as well as the particular library you want to install.

Game engines are no different. They manage a bunch of (mostly boilerplate) game development components (sound, textures, rendering, animation, menus, collisions, physics, resource I/O, etc etc) so game developers can spend time "gluing stuff together, and sanding the edges" of their game. Monolithic engines like Unity have a plugin system for installing 3rd party libraries, and the engine tooling itself acts as its own level, effect, cutscene (etc etc) editor.

At the end of the day games are just like any other programming task. You have a limited amount of effort/time/budget, so you have to make decisions about where you want to optimize. Game engines, even monolithic ones like Godot and Unity (and, really, every 3rd party game development tool) are all designed to let you focus effort/time/budget on the unique aspects of your game.

If you are thinking about why the game engines aren't broken down into finer reusable components (e.g. one module for rendering and another for physics, etc.), it probably has to do with how these things are tightly integrated, and how every game engine has a different design philosophy on how the world should be organized. The different organizations might also mean that you have to design the games to fit a specific game engine, which is unfortunate.

Maybe you are lamenting why the marketplaces or asset stores are so closely tied to the game engines? For some plugins, they have to be tailored to the specific engines. But for arts and sounds, there are many free and paid options to choose from, although not necessarily of the same quality and cost as one might get from the asset stores that are sponsored by the game engines (e.g. Unreal Megascans).

There are still various tools associated with game development (e.g. Blender for 3D, your favorite text editor for scripting), and those aren't tied to specific game engines.

Take a look at: https://itch.io/game-development/engines/most-projects

And

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-generous-space-of-al...

If you look at both of these you'll see just how many engines there are and neither of these cover everything. There are plenty of engines popular in the Python community that no one outside of it are aware of. Such as Arcade [0], Python-Tcod [1], Ursina [2], UPBGE [3], and Panda3D [4]. But based on your description you'd really like https://gdevelop.io/. It embraces exactly what you're describing where you can build a game but just installing entire features others have made and put online into your game.

[0] Beginner friendly 2D library:

[1] Rougelike: https://python-tcod.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[2] Beginner friendly 3D engine (built on Panda3D): https://www.ursinaengine.org/

[3] Blender Game Engine Fork: https://upbge.org/

[4] Highly flexible code first 3D engine: https://panda3d.org/

The other issue is how they measure "installs", as it has been a constant problem in the mobile community for years on end (a problem especially affecting the ad industry as you may imagine). I personally don't see how they will accurately measure the cases mentioned in the tweet without forcing everyone to have some authentication.

10 ad impressions per user might not sound like much, but you're going to get a lot of people installing your app, not liking it, and uninstalling it. The way the mobile game business works the "install count" means almost nothing, you need many, many, many installs to start making any money at all because so few people 'stick around' to actually make you any money.

Regardless of how they spin it, this model is very bad for the FtP games, which is the vast majority of games now.

If Unity just counted number of buyers they wouldn't have to deal with malicious installs and users of their engine would have more predictable costs. But for some reason they don't want that, and that alone is suspicious.

No matter what is the app.

This sales model will ruin indie devs who aren't so eager to swallow adtech's shaft that they're content with rolling out malware to their users.

Unity has published what "whatever they want" currently is. It doesn't matter if people get the details wrong on that because Unity can change its mind.

That being said, you're still more wrong than the author on the details. The change is retroactive in that it applies to existing applications. The author was very clear what they meant by "retroactive":

> this change will be done retroactively on existing applications as well.

This is true.

It doesn't look like it to me. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal

Either way however then you could either stop using it or fork the project.

You can't retroactively pull an open source license ... whatever the new license is, if it forces you to pay, it no longer meets the definition of 'open source' [1]

[1]https://opensource.org/osd/

Big network effects

Having said that, I've been looking at it recently and it looks like it has everything I need. I'm definitely going to try it out before deciding between it and UE5.

Imagine now you have 1 million installs. 2% (20.000) pay you 200.000 / year. 980.000 players pay nothing. Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000, you made ZERO with your game... crazy. That is an uncalculatable risk for a small company.

https://unity.com/case-study/marvel-snap

> Generated $100M+ revenue and 21M+ downloads on Android and iOS since October 2022

At $0.20 per install after meeting both conditions that would be a lot of money.

Note: I don't know the full terms but just took what most articles are reporting on.

i.e. $4,160,000 USD (# of total downloads - 200k * $0.20)

I personally think its dumb for Unity to even have the $200k install pricing. It's created a ton of bad examples and drama.

Should just be upgrade to pro at $200k revenue then only after $1m do they do install pricing.

No developers/companies who made more than $200k per year (overall revenue of the company, not per game) were even allowed to the use the Personal/Plus tiers and were required to upgrade to pro (which has 1 million install/revenue limits).

I don't think the itself cost would be unreasonable for at least 90-95% of all developers and if you average it out across everyone the proportion of revenue Unity get's would be still pretty low (not much more than 1% or so).

Most people seem to be upset because how they applied these changes retroactively on currently released games and because the whole model seems way to convoluted and not really thought trough.

Ultimately though it is all about time efficiency, solo or small teams have little manpower and since they don't even know if their first, second, or fifth game will sell any at all it may not make strategic sense to spend months reproducing common engine features in order to save a hypothetical percentage of revenue that they may never ultimately make. You need to test the gameplay concept as cheaply as possible.

Creating a game engine from scratch is FUN, and if game development is a fun hobby then full steam ahead. If however it is a business that you plan to make money on, you're unlikely to recoup the time investment into a bespoke engine just to test the market for your games. If the game turned out to be successful you could always piecemeal replace the commercial engine with bespoke via updates (inc. using money to hire people from the success).

Same applies to most software. It isn't that hard to make a new programming language or a http framework. But once you make one finding other people who know how to use it is a pain in the ass.

> A developer who wanted to pursue that kind of claim in court could argue using the concept of promissory estoppel, or the "notion that you can't just change the deal if somebody else relied upon it," as Hoeg put it.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/wait-is-unity-allowed...

That's why a model of free game with paid addons/extras/pay-to-win/etc. works so well – once someone already tried your game and gets invested in it, they're more likely to spend anything.

This pricing is per install, not per player. Installations are an unrestricted functionality which can be abused. If you care about quality games: this pricing causes the opposite.

Unity also doesn't give a crap about quality unless by quality you mean microtransactions, milking players and ads/adware. The engine is associated (partly unfairly) with lagginess, low performance, high ram usage, and crappy games and assets flips. Unity is famous for how slowly new features come and how buggy it is in parts. They also scrapped their own game on Unity that was supposed to show how to use Unity right, it's an engine company that never made games (unlike Epic or id Software, who made games first, engine seconds, and even when being in engine business they kept making games). Unity users who just slapped few assets together basically created the asset flip genre, the opposite of quality. As CEO of EA Riccotello supported always online online DRM that shut down singleplayer games on release day due to servers dying, as CEO of Unity he said you are a "fucking idiot" (direct words) if you don't want to maximize your monetary return from your players. Unity bought an adware company, Unity has an ad network (and if you use it to put ads in your game, they waive the install fee, curious..).

> While we don't have a formal structure for offering commercial support, many Godot developers can already help you, work per hour, or relocate to your company. For such inquiries, contact support@godotengine.org. Let us know about your needs and we'll try to find the right person for you.

How often do you think that happens for unity? _Maybe_ for some massive developers, but I don't think this would be very common for most customers.

Have you ever tried to use Microsoft "support"?