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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

> Now my position has moved towards, "I guess I shouldn't play anything made in Unity

I'm not a game dev at all, but this is where the whole thing has brought me as well. If it's based on Unity, I'll pass.

Ah, I wish it were that easy, but a number of my favorite games (KSP, Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium off the top of my head) are made in Unity. If you play indie PC games you can’t boycott Unity without missing a ton of really good games.

If you play games you can't play games without missing a ton of really good games. There are _a ton_ of really good games.

The games market is large, but not infinite. Like, there may be many space games, but only one space sim that has the depth and complexity of KSP 1, and that’s KSP 1. Not to mention that a lot of gamers have no idea what engine their favorite games use. For instance, I was shocked to discover that Disco Elysium used Unity because it looks so different from the “stock Unity look”.

>Not to mention that a lot of gamers have no idea what engine their favorite games use.

If you start to boycott something, you typically have done some research (why else would you have wanted to boycott it in the first place). I.e boycotting Nestle means that you research where the company may have their fingers in and avoid that.

> If you play indie PC games you can’t boycott Unity without missing a ton of really good games.

That may be true, but so what? There are more great non-Unity-based games than I have time in my life to play anyway.

I suppose this is going to change drastically going forward as game devs probably won't want to risk their livelihood on the whims of a company that is ok with making such changes

I suspect that kind of boycott would hurt the independent developers more than it hurts Unity.

Those developers will then need to pivot in response to market changes. But yes, that's often how it goes.

If you boycott a child-labor produced coffee, and it just so happens that your favourite indie cafe uses that as their main coffee because it's so cheap! Yea, that cafe will suffer.

I'd be all for a boycott in your example, but not in the case of Unity... as a purchaser of games. As a developer, you'd better believe I'd be looking hard at Godot / Defold / Unreal... or turning off the Unity ads in my products. I don't think Unity's intended pricing change is morally equivalent to child labor.

I used a hyperbole to get my point across. I'm not equating the two.

I mean, even not using them as a development platform is something. But I don't get the logic behind supporting them as a purchaser of games? Is it just FOMO?

No. It's because I don't believe it strikes at the right targets, for lack of a better metaphor. You get collateral damage that I don't think is worthwhile. If the desired goal is to have developers move away from Unity, Unity themselves have given enough incentive.

You suggested boycotting the developers that use Unity. I don't get your scorched earth logic. It seems unreasonable to me.

It isn't "Scorched earth". It's boycotting by proxy.

>Unity themselves have given enough incentive.

Sure, if they change on their own volition, then I have no need to boycott those developers. This adds to that incentive should they not do so.

(copied from my other comment)

I.e. I have no real way to boycott Nestle, but if enough people stop buying their products, the stores will carry fewer of them. Yea, the stores (or devs, or cafes) will get hurt in the short term, but only if they're insistent on not listening to their users/the market.

There's no equivalent to the "child labor" in your analogy - and I don't mean that because upcharging for video games isn't morally equivalent to abusing children, I mean that because in this instance the potentially "exploited party" is the developers you are proposing a boycott of. There isn't some third party that Unity and the game devs are colluding (directly or indirectly) to exploit, where a "boycott by proxy" might have made sense.

If the dev studios feel like they're being mistreated by Unity, they are already incentivized to abandon it. If they don't abandon it, they either _don't_ actually feel mistreated, or they are just not in a financial position to switch over just now. Boycotting them in either scenario is not helping anyone.

The company Unity is exploiting Unity the development platform. Developers have a choice to use it. But at the end of the day, it's an analogy. It won't be perfect. My point remains that this is perhaps the only way an end user can boycott Unity. By not using products that use it. If you have a better way of doing so, I'm all ears.

I understand your point, but disagree.

1. Assertion: End-users of Unity are developers, not gamers.

2. Opinion: Gamers should not boycott developers in this situation.

This analogy doesn't work; in your coffee example, the cafe is complicit in benefiting from the manufacturer's cost-cutting (at the expense of the children). But the only injured party in the Unity case is the game developers themselves, who presumably are already aware what their own interests are.

To fix your analogy, it would be like a coffee manufacturer who apparently somehow screws over their customers (cafes), so you decide to retaliate by boycotting the cafe.

Is it really though? As an end user, I don't actively buy things from massive coffee distributors, just as I do not use unity to develop things. If the cafe, in this example, carries other beans- I'd have no reason not to buy those instead.

The boycotting happens by proxy. This isn't a hard concept to understand.

> If you play indie PC games you can’t boycott Unity without missing a ton of really good games.

The naivete involved in expecting to boycott a product without having any inconveniences never ceases to amuse me.

The very nature of boycotting necessitates that you will miss out on things. If you never used the product/byproduct, what effect would your boycott have? It's like a bald person boycotting a hair cuttery, who cares?

In the gaming world, boycotts are an absolute joke. I think many gamers don't even know what the word means and will pre-order and play the hell out of a game they're claiming to be boycotting.

This is a really weird takeaway for an end-user. This is punishing game developers for using a certain tool. Unless Unity is doing something adverse to the end user I don't see why that should be a factor in your game purchases. I've played plenty of great games made with Unity.

I don't like how Unity conducts their business, and I now actively distrust them, so it makes sense to add them to my list of "companies to avoid".

I don't want to support businesses that operate as they do. The intent isn't to punish developers, of course, but continuing to give money to a company that I don't want to support is asking more of me than I'm willing to do.

In the end, it's just me and my decision will have no effect on anybody. If enough other people also avoid Unity, then devs will have to adapt. That's just life.

So you don't like Unity because of everything happen and how they threated game developers. And for that reason you want to refuse to pay those game developers?

As it's now Unity dont collect any telemetry.

Unity already showed they were willing to change contract terms unilaterally, so why anyone should trust that they will stay doing what they currently do is beyond me.

Not exactly. I don't trust Unity because they've clearly demonstrated that they can't be trusted. I'm not avoiding Unity as some sort of solidarity with wronged developers, I'm avoiding Unity because I don't want to support a company that behaves that way.

> As it's now Unity dont collect any telemetry.

Maybe not (but maybe -- how would I know?), but Unity clearly has no problems throwing people under the bus if it suits them, so again -- they can't be trusted. On this point or any other.

As demonstrated by their previous stance, Unity may choose to track your private data in the future, even on games you already own and purchased with the understanding that there would be no tracking.

Tracking players is their intention, and although they have rolled it back (solely due to the strength of the backlash), they have revealed their hand. We now know that tracking players is how they want to monetize heading into the future, and that they have no qualms applying it retroactively to games you already own.

> So you don't like Unity because of everything happen and how they threated game developers. And for that reason you want to refuse to pay those game developers?

Your framing is wrong. If I really want to buy a game but choose not to, I'm not "refus[ing] to pay" the game developer. Game developers don't deserve to be paid with my money if I decide not to get their games.

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