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Comment by binarynate | Hacker News Reader

Clarification: Unity's "Industry" license is only for non-gaming and non-entertainment applications (e.g. automotive, architecture, etc.). So this doesn't impact developers developing games with Unity.

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Until it's an established payment model for one product category, after which it fill feel more natural to extend it to others.

The worst part of it isn't even that devs would get their wallets shaken out but that it's really just surveillance in disguise. Those apps would “““have to””” spy on me as an end-user in order for them to know what to charge.

Now thinking about it, its so valid point, how would that even work though if I am being honest

like I am pretty sure that the only way that they can do this is via giving it internet access and if that's the case, I wonder how much spying it does on our computer before sending it to unity headquarters in the name of this industry fees

Please, someone create a #usegodot or some twitter thing to just get it trending. We need to use goodot (I tried typing godot but I wrote goodot TWICE which is so funny and ironical so I am keeping it here)

Also I wonder how it might stand in eu / gdpr

Unreal already has % of revenue. How do they track that, and is this any different?

Aka my guess it's a combination of trust, verification using public numbers (like downloads on Steam) and the ability to do audits of some kind?

I believe that’s correct. It’s primarily on you to report revenues and they can audit you if they think you’re lying.

Unity knows what project you're building and if you've built it under a paid license before. If they notice you using a free license, they'll go after you.

If only godot was good. I think Stride3D has more chances of being a good replacement.

I think phoning home is the platform for data collecting ("advertising") revenue.

Unity has always had a separate license for the other types of applications, so it's a slippery slope argument without a slope.

The issue here is the surveillance aspect.

I switched to unreal several years ago because Unity had written hundreds of gigabytes of log files complaining that it could not phone home and filled up my hard drive

I hope you filed a bug report.

That sounds well and good, but Unity forced my last company into the more expensive license unilaterally and with no discussion. They doubled our costs just because they can.

At this point, we should all treat Unity like we do Broadcom. Utterly toxic and should be avoided at all costs because they will shake you down and leave you with a lesser product for no reason other than blind greed.

Nothing Unity does will ever recover the goodwill they nuked for money

I would expect no less from a company that acquired/merged with IronSource...

Did you change to another engine? If so, which one? If not, what prevented you from doing so?

Genuinely curious.

We did not. Most of our contracts were integrating our stack into the customer's existing Unity project.

Plus we'd have to either re-train our Unity devs (more than half the software team) or find new developers.

The extravagant cost of a Unity seat meant we couldn't afford to give anyone except the Unity devs a license. The rest of the software team can no longer tweak the Unity project, and instead must file a ticket for one of the Unity devs to make the change and upload a build. For the same reason, we couldn't set up a build server in our CI system.

It was an absolute nightmare. At the end, I had to resort to ripping apart old copies of our android apps to inject new libraries into them. We couldn't afford Unity at all by that point, so it was the only option to get things working right now.

So glad that my new job has nothing to do with Unity or desktop software at all.

*for now

Thank you. I really do not understand why anyone trusts Unity to keep this for only non-entertainment if it proves successful. They only backed off before because the backlash was so bad. Assuming that means they won't try to find ways to slowly bring it back in the future is dangerous to me.

It does, though, because it means you don't have the freedom to pivot to other industries, or to fork for use in industry, which is a thing that can happen. It's definitely a reason to consider avoiding Unity.

It makes less sense in automotive or architecture than games. Games scale incredibly well and practically for free, cars not so much.

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