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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

I think at this point, the real question is who in their right mind would ever build a game in Unity again?

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.

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> 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/

This doesn't really address the concerns of the above-- that people will not make new games in Unity. Unlike IBM, which could arguably sell to large corps subpar product, Unity's consumer base are flighty and don't have upper managers that can be bribed with nice dinners.

They have a sizable captive user base and will be milking them until they're dry, at which point those responsible for this disaster will jump ship with a massive golden parachute.

Yup, my opinion as well. Then there will be massive layoff to cut R&D and UnityAds. It might go back to sub 5000 employees but essentially IS is going to lead.

Is there an easy way to determine what underlying game engine is used on Steam or the Apple Store?

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?

Considering game Dev is measured in years, it'll take a while.

For sure, I bet many projects have too much momentum to switch, but there are likely lots of smaller efforts (mobile-flavor of the month) that are going to be switching stacks as soon as possible.

I have no clue how accurate that is https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Unity/

Among Us can't easily be ported to another engine? LOL

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.

What engine did you port too?

Godot

People keep bringing up Genshin without even knowing anything. I don't even wanna read that sportskeeda article because I'm 100% sure they also didn't research and I don't want to give them any engagements.

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'll be gone, you'll be gone."

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 at this point, the real question is who in their right mind would ever build a game in Unity again?

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.

Depends what they jump to; godot, for instance, should be similar AIUI?

Godot is never going to be able to ship for consoles due to license incompatibility. That's a pretty big dealbreaker for non-hobbyist projects that aren't exclusively targeting desktop.

Godot games have been shipped on consoles plenty of times

There are paid, non open source forks that support console.

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”

So your argument breaks down to "once I get access to the closed source console SDKs and spend money for devkits, I will need to use a closed source fork of Godot to ship my closed source app on consoles"? What is the alternative? The console vendors do not allow console ports to exist in the open.

Use Unity, Unreal, or anthoer commerical engine that doesn't have a large upfront cost?

Unity, Unreal, and friends have these similar problems: the console SDK isn't open and may require porting work to integrate with the engine.

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

With unity you get the console version of unity when are authorised by the console manufacturer. So it’s not like you have to do much to make at least the core engine work on console. The work is in the game itself which is different game to game.

Why would an SDK be secret?

Because the console manufacturers want to protect their proprietary platforms.

Protect them from what?

Reputational damage. Big part of the appeal of consoles is “it just works”. That falls apart of you start letting random shovelware devs ship whatever.

Ok? What does that have to do with the SDK?

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.

That has nothing to do with SDK secrecy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983#Loss_...

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.

No, that's a different concern entirely. Nintendo could (though never will) open up Switch development to everyone while still exercising judicious control over which games are listed in their own store.

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

Security through obscurity(which is often enough btw).

Consoles no longer require specialized hardware to develop for. There are test kits for ps5 but you can compile on your PC. Where are you getting your information from? The only requirement is a header or two and a code sign. Godot OSS can’t support consoles because the SDK (those headers) are closed source, but there’s nothing stopping you from implementing the half dozen header functions in Godot source yourself. There’s some companies trying to provide that support. I’m sure Godot* (the company) will as well.

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

That is literally from the godot site.

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

I think you're conflating two things.

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

You can carve a spoon into a can opener. That doesn’t make an unmodified spoon a can opener.

Did you read it? It clearly backs what I just said. Godot open source doesn’t support consoles because console sdks are closed source, but there’s nothing stopping you from publishing on consoles. They literally list a company who is doing that, more are following. There’s no restriction at all other than you having access to the SDKs which you get when you sign a contract to publish your game on their platform.

Linux doesnt run on consoles though and the comment was about linux, which godot supports quite well. Once it gains popularity it will also sort out console issues.

My humanGPT hallucination on the situation would be that because Unity is proprietary and Godot is open source, Unity runtime would be less diverse and more stable. How much of this is correct, I don't know though.

In my experience Proton works so well now that the only games that don’t work are those with really invasive anti-cheat systems

Thankfully due to proton, unreal engine games (and home rolled engines) should just work out of the box too.

This is going to be an issue for the Vision Pro. I am kind of surprised Apple hasn't stepped in and said this will not apply to Vision Pro apps or something.

It is very very rarely case (at least in my limited years in corporate world) that the leadership is more evil than the board (atleast for public for-profit companies. Even more rare is the board not having this chat with leadership before the announcement.

The problem is that this really screws the shareholders, and _obviously_ so.

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.

They may just not care about being the game engine of choice for indie gamedevs anymore, or they may even actively want to not be that anymore (as a branding thing). The way Unity positions itself on their landing page is VERY different from what they were doing 5 or 10 years ago, when (indie) games were absolutely front and center (and there wasn't much else, period).

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.

This is no different from Oracle. When tides change you can see how a company like Microsoft reacted (make embrace OSS) vs how Oracle reacts which is to double down on its expensive out of touch offering. It’s clear Oracle isnt fully irrelevant now because there’s a lot of legacy clients who have inertia. It’ll only be a problem for them a decade from now. Unity’s leadership likely decided similarly. If they thought about this at all that is.

Realistically - how locked in are developers to their current engine?

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?

I think you’re grossly trivializing the effort needed.

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.

I work for a hedgehog based studio for their supposedly non existent mobile games arm albeit I don't work in engineering.

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.

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