Unity's mishandling of the Runtime Fee policy announcement has caused permanent damage to their reputation. It was a perfect case study in how to undo decades of trust-building in one day.
I follow a lot of game developers online. Every single one that uses Unity today is planning to switch engines for their future games.
Will all of them switch to Unreal, or are there other viable options?
All the Candy Crushes as well as several other games use variants of a custom internal engine that's managed by a fairly sizable central team.
It seems that Candy Crush predates the engine by a few years and that the engine was originally created as a hobby project by one of the King employees, although it’s seen commercial use on mobile by a number of studios and has received backing from King and others over the years. King are not currently listed as a backer of the Defold Foundation, but one of the board members is the “director of engines” at King.
Godot seems to be the way people are going right now though (I haven't tried it).
I'd say it's better than ever! I'm not a big VSCode user but it has some really nice integrations that it convinced me to use VSCode.
Here's an article on a neat stack that Shiro games uses https://haxe.org/blog/shirogames-stack/
Most A/AA devs I follow are planning to switch to another engine when they can (e.g. not mid-project), but I know a few who immediately started porting to Unreal/Godot. Most AAA devs I know already don't use Unity.
Unreal lets users stick to a license with predictable fees.
By using Unity you are still agreeing to a liability with no limit that can change at any time and your only recourse is to cease development or stop selling your already-complete game.
1. https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packa...
The bigger issue is that Unity is trying to assert (again) that they can retroactively change your licensing agreement at any time, and for any reason -- and have explicitly said they reserve the right to increase these fees (which, yes, are less than competitors right now) in the future.
> Unreal is even more expensive and requires reporting your revenue to pay for it. How is that a better option than Unity?
With their new changes, Unity also requires reporting your revenue/installs. In terms of the cost difference, the consensus seems to be that people will pay a little more to lock into a predictable license that can't infinitely add unpredictable fees later, even on games for sale that are no longer in development.
- John Riccitiello
This is why Microsoft doesn't care if people pirate Office tools for private use, because if they get to a position where they can decide what tools to use for a company, they'll pick what they know. Office.
The same works for Unity, if an indie company becomes a AAA level studio, they'll use what they know and what they have been using for years.
Now there's a risk that it'll be something that's not Unity.