Game developers flee Unity after exorbitant price plan announced | Hacker News Reader

Game developers flee Unity after exorbitant price plan announced

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Related link in the article: Unity is merging with a company who made a malware installer https://www.pcgamer.com/unity-is-merging-with-a-company-who-...

Merged, past tense. That was last year.

Unity is now (and maybe always was) a platform for mobile advertising and data collection wrapped with a game engine. Unity is offering to wave licensing fees for game developers that use LevelPlay, the advertising platform that comes with Unity, instead of their rival, AppLovin, who, incidentally, tried to buy them about the same time as the merger with IronSource. https://www.gamerbraves.com/unity-silently-offers-developers...

> AppLovin, who, incidentally, tried to buy

It’s more like they asked Unity to merge with them at fairly favorable terms (Unity’s CEO would’ve been in charge and their shareholders would still control majority of the new corp).

That would imply that AppLovin felt pretty desperate. For good reason I guess since these licensing changes seem to be in a large part designed to run AppLovin and its other competitors out of business.

It's difficult to tell if this is the result of bad management forcing the company to enact a poor market strategies or sabotage.

Developers can invest a significant amount of time and resources building tools, supporting systems and workflows around these engines that aren't necessarily portable to other engines. There is also a significant time investment in learning the API, engine internals, and nuances of operation. Disrupting revenue streams so aggressively for the licensees is only going to result in breaking trust between Unity and their customers, driving them away permanently. They can also forget about taking on any new customers as few will be willing to move to a platform which tries to aggressively limit their choice of income model.

While Unity has filled a niche in it's usefulness, there are much better offerings (either higher or lower on the spectrum of capabilities) for other proprietary engines and a few under-featured free engines. They are not irreplaceable.

I do feel bad though for all the Unity developers that are having to deal with this but at the same time I think that many might have anticipated something like this would happen for some time.

The wise man does not build his house on the sand.

A wise man does not build his house on another man's land.

A wise man doesn't allow unilateral changes of contract terms. It will be a good, and hopefully not too expensive, business lesson.

I think part of the challenge is that no ground is knowably stable. Since very few of us are shipping products that we've built from the atoms up we do have to rely on platforms provided by others. Everywhere you look there's uncertainty:

- relying on big hardware, OS platforms, or cloud platforms, e.g. iPhone/iOS, Android, AWS you're at the mercy of bugs, changes in behaviour, deprecations

- relying on walled garden ecosystems your risks are app review processes and changing priorities, e.g. the App Store, console distribution

- relying on open source you're at the mercy of project governance and contribution. Yes you have the source, could your business model really fund the maintenance and development of the project if independent contribution ceased or you needed to fork?

At some point you just have to place your bets and play the game. Good architectural decision making can, of course, mitigate your risks - and there definitely are 'bad' decisions.

Re open source.

You extend even more with project governance, extending to copyright, user agreements and product lifecycles you can not influence.

That's the thing right? You don't need to extend it if it worked at the time. You have the source and you can employ someone to make it work. The risks are much less than a any other option. Copyright, access to source and even the ability to continue functioning almost make it a no brainer.

I do agree that at some point a decision has to be made. We often shortcut the right thing to do for the immediately profitable.

I should not be surprised, but I do get disappointed.

I abandoned Unity in 2019. I didn't expect them to do something like this, but I was dedicating a ton of my personal time into honing my craft of game development and I simply felt more comfortable using an open source engine so that I could own my entire craft and I could work on stuff without constantly thinking about money and capitalism. More of just a fun thing done for the love of it.

I didn't expect _this_ to happen, but I still feel like if your putting your life into something you probably want to make sure you own it.

Which engine are you using these days?

Probably Godot. That seems to be the most popular open-source alternative.

Why not just wait for OP’s response?

Does his response prevent OP from responding?

lol wow

yeah its godot

No. It just seems insane to step in on someone else being asked a question and try and predict their response for them.

It was useful for me. This happens often when the author doesn't respond immediately and the answer might be obvious.

godot

How's the solo/indie game dev life in 2023 treating you?

My work is fulfilling but financially it's not great.

>It's difficult to tell if this is the result of bad management forcing the company to enact a poor market strategies or sabotage.

If you've followed John Riccitiello's career it's hard not to conclude that it's the former.

One of the things that just occurred to me is that Epic could be offering some sort of "move over" deal - like give a reasonable discount for the first year or two for any company that ports their game from Unity to Unreal. I know it's a huge undertaking, but if nothing else they could generate some real positive press and goodwill from the development and gaming communities.

For new games would make a lot of sense.

For most already released ones porting would be more of political/personal/etc. statement than something that would make financial sense

Quite frankly I think no one would legitimately take them up on it. You would have to make it apply only to existing, released games as it would lower the likelihood of actually costing Epic any money (from the loss of revenue as few to none would actually do it) and it's a lot easier to prove that a released/finished game is already using the Unity.

But the positive response from just offering it would be a good PR move, IMO.

It's a shame much of the skills developed in Unity don't really transfer elsewhere. I'm sure some of it can be transferred to another engine like Godot, but most of the gotchas and subtle things you pick up after years of experience won't transfer.

It's why I like to stick to more fundamental tech when building something... at least the skills you develop will be with you forever.

Could you give some specific examples? I'm interested as someone dabbling in game dev in caught in the endless cycle of engine debates.

My goto has always been C and SDL2. I have always been able to create the games I want to make with it and it's nice to be able to transfer skills from one game to another (and often can bring code over from one to another).

I don't recommend building a generic engine or anything.. I start with putting a window on the screen, capturing player input and from then on I focus on the core game itself. The entire code base is the game, there's no engine unless you consider the game an engine.

Would I recommend this for building a AAA game and targeting 12 platforms? Probably not. If you're dabbling with game development then I think it's an incredible way to learn a lot while building up a skill set that is transferable between projects.. plus you won't get the rug pulled out from under you like Unity just did :)

>My goto has always been C and SDL2.

I would also add LuaJIT. Being able to easily extend C types and do things like wrap vector math or string operators around SDL types without the complexity of C++ is a treat.

YMMV, of course, a lot of people have issues with Lua and LuaJIT is pinned to an old version of the language.

I hope Godot gains some of those fleeing Unity, but I suspect UE5 will get a lot of them.

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