Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer
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What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just not forkable for commercialization.
There is immense room to eat Unity’s lunch and capture its entire market share. Especially when you consider that a new engine can discard 15 years of legacy support Unity’s team fights against endlessly.
Edit: downvote me, but I’ve been doing this for 15 years and this is the only way. blender is not a useful comparison, it supports two platforms and is built on other OSS software that is GPL.
Indie and big games in the way you mean are pretty much mutually eclusive.
Subnautica is a good Unity example, but there are others
Some people also say that indie also means small, otherwise the most indie studios out there would be the likes of Valve and (Microsoft-)Activision-Blizzard.
Also, Valve and Blizzard aren't (weren't ??) publishers.
And you wont manage to achieve anything with that. Maybe Unity could spinoff its ad business (together with some major liabilities like Ricitelo and other execs) and then MS could buy the engine part.
Realistically that would still only be enough to get something you can make a cool looking demo and that only run on desktop.
Building a general purpose engine that is suitable for many different workflows and run on pretty much every singe platform like Unity is very trick and takes a lot of time (and trial an error). Dev UX, APIs, platform integration, QA, all the third party packages and infrastructure are much harder to solve than shiny graphics or advanced physics. Whatever you come up with that $30mm is only likely to cover a small subset of use cases.
$30mm is more than enough when you ditch legacy stuff like anything that isn't a Vulkan/DX11/Metal renderer.
With the right team it might. Realistically they'd just under promise and undeliver (or not deliver at all).
> stuff like anything that isn't a Vulkan/DX11/Metal renderer.
That's also not the complicated part.
The devs using the OSS engine also wouldn't be stopped from spending resources on making the engine better for their uses (and in turn, making it also better for everyone), similarly how it works with Linux.
Can't blame the VCs for trying this model, but they've played society for suckers. We let them get away with this for too long, becoming dependent on their "free" offerings.
At this point I'd be willing to get rid of my free stuff altogether and pay a subscription for products I like/use as it would incentivize the companies to add features that benefit me.
For example, search on the web is dying. I would absolutely pay money to replace Google with a search engine I trust and that works for me.
It's a problem. Whoever control search will control what we see hear and read. Dangerous times. Hoping that somebody can build a subscription search that works and returns real competitive-ness to the information marketplace
It needs two sides for this to work:
1. a company attempting to "fish" customers with this approach
2. customers who fall for this trap, and did not create an emergency/backup plan when the respective company becomes "evil"/untenable.
Every company sooner or later becomes "evil" (and be it because of ownership changes because the original founders die or want to retire). Having made no "backup plan" for such a situation to happen is in my opinion gross negligence.
Source: I have an OSS project that's vastly less complex than a game engine and worked on dozens of other OSS projects.
Second, every console and to a lesser degree mobile are constantly changing their SDKs and that requires a lot of testing to ensure that your engine works across a huge permutation of platforms. Throw in the need to support an LTS version of your engine and it balloons in cost.
All those SDL games already released on consoles and Godot soon gaining support via W4 beg to differ.
Yes, it's pointlessly hard and annoying because of platform stewards and all the hoops they make you jump through, but it's certainly not impossible nor infeasible.
So is Unreal and CryEngine.
Both of which only survive on graphical fidelity, which is not what Unity was touted for.
Unity was for filling that small-to-medium sized games in terms of man power, if you got 15 years of experience then you should know that.
I think it would be more interesting to see a Coop backed engine, where the COOP has to listen to it's customers.
Since my biggest annoyance with proprietary software or in this case game engine is that you can create the most elaborate sub-engine (for example a fully-dynamic RPG) and see it all come crashing down because some dimwit at Epic Games reeeeally wants to push the latest eye candy that breaks your sub-engine.
That's the one thing OSS is far superior at, you can fork the engine form a new developer community or even work with the OG maintainers to incorporate the sub-engine as a module and as such be officially supported both by your team and theirs.
Meanwhile with proprietary software, you're stuck at this particular version with no legal way of ensure the survival of the project, RPGMaker games are the perfect example of this, as soon as you venture past it's originally intended fidelity, you're essentially going to be limited by the engine in terms of performance.
Uf, feel that one. If the engine isn't designed with your genre in mind you may be making some significant structural changes(which will be interesting to see how open source engines handle that).
Even if they don't take the engine a different direction the up-leveling cost of getting new features/bug fixes is significant. Back when I was working in industry we had one person who's almost fulltime job was to merge -> fix compile errors -> fix runtime issues -> checkin change and uncover more edge cases that got broken -> repeat process, it was brutal.
And here I thought industry is that one programming market with no awful grinds. I do sympathize though, webdev frontend+backend is just hellish (but you do have some tools to alleviate the pain, but when you have to rewrite the app 6+ times it really breaks you).
These days it's quite common to see new patches and even new content for single player games.
Also Blender officially support more than two platforms but I don't know how it's in topic here.
Why are you not self hosting?
Probably, its because the its very convenient having some else doing the release cycle QA, deployments, infra work for you.
The same goes for game engines.
Are you going to start self hosting tomorrow if AWS announces it’s charging you $0.2 per db query on top of the existing pricing?
No, you’ll swap cloud provider.
Maybe some people will try self hosting… but they’ll find out it’s actually more expensive and harder than it looks, once you start doing it.
Anyone telling people to go self hosted in this situation would, rightly, be giving bad, naive advice.
So, maybe have a moment to think about that, before you down vote someone for saying “that’s bad advice” to use an open source game engine.
I even have engine source, and guess what, it’s wildly complicated. My team doesn’t remotely have the bandwidth to do anything meaningful with it even if we had the right to make modifications.
The argument for open source always neglects this reality. Just because I could change something doesn’t mean I have the economic reality to actually change it.
Windows, Mac and Linux; that's three, right? And it supported many Unix variants while their marketshare was significant. Where does your "two platforms " come from?
>> I’ve been doing this for 15 years
Most commenters here don't have 15 years of gamedev experience, but many here watched Blender turn into a tool among the leaders coming from a "very weird UI" in about that same amount of time. Why can't the same happen to Godot?
>> PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot.
We heard the same about GNU, GCC, Linux, Apache... look back at what happened to most closed source Unixes of the 90's. Yes, game engines are a different market but your argument is the same we heard other times.
I'm sure Unity would be fine with that. I don't see how could they hope to collect more than 0.5-2% if averaged out over their all customers even with the new pricing.
I guess the problem is that revenue share is very hard to enforce, by adopting something like that you'll be probably giving up on a significant proportion (if not the majority) of fees you could get from developer in China (and some other countries in similar situations). Install fee (while a bizarre idea) should be easier to enforce.
Half the Unity games are complete and utter garbage anyway. Most people don't need the complexity of a full-blown engine for the kinds of games they put out there.
So that aspect would not be OSS.
No “open engine” will ever be enough, by definition, as the games people will pay for will be those which were hard to make, and tech advantage is one well proven way to do that.
The tech industry is beginning to learn that barriers to entry, such as those Nintendo created in the 1980s or existed in the early days of the App Store, actually helped the market function to create much better results. Apparently Atari will be repeated again and again.
Also, doesn't the whole trust issue apply equally to F2P games? A supplier increasing prices is one thing. If your supplier is Darth Vader and goes around saying things like "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further" -- even if it's within the letter of the law and the EULA (and that "if" is still somewhat in doubt, especially in the EU), doesn't that make you...rather nervous about the possibility of future surprise changes to your unit economics, even if this particular change to your unit economics doesn't put you out of business?
On the flip side, small companies are more likely to be discouraged from ever using Unity because of this.
So who remains using it? Mid-tier companies who can’t afford to switch?
Which will likely be very insignificant if they are actually making any money on their games. Nobody besides those making about $1.2-2 million and who have very low revenue per user will be really affected financial that much.
The fact that Unity randomly imposed fees their clients hadn't agreed on for install of games which are already released and the whole install tracking issue itself seems like a much bigger issue than the actual cost.
Because a lot of the posts I've seen on reddit around this whole thing sound alergic to the idea of paying for a game engine.
I'd wager it won't affect most small studios, since most games never get close to the prerequisite $200k revenue in a year. But the thought that if you finally do see success you have to start paying danegeld to Unity...?
Far worse is that Unity apparently has the ability and desire to do things like this. What's to stop them in the future from altering the deal further?
You already had to upgrade to Pro if your company (now it's per game which in theory might be a significant discount) had more than $200k in revenue. So yes, but you still had to earn over 1 million per game and the fees are not that bad with Pro (since you get 1 mill for free).
Unity will still likely be much cheaper than Unreal. Zero respect for customers and unpredictability (what they might pull off next?) would seem like much better incentives and cost for most.
Heh, "smart".