Game developers flee Unity after exorbitant price plan announced

https://boingboing.net/2023/09/17/game-developers-flee-unity-after-exorbitan-price-plan-announced-but-not-everyone-can-get-out.html

by cratermoon • 3 years ago

81 29 3 years ago

boingboing.net

HybridCurve• 3 years ago

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.

ungamedplayer2• 3 years ago

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

giuseppe_petri• 3 years ago

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

macguillicuddy• 3 years ago

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.

nightowl_games4• 3 years ago

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.

nvy2• 3 years ago

Which engine are you using these days?

tjpnz• 3 years ago

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.

aussieguy1234• 3 years ago

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-...

cratermoon• 3 years ago

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...

ffgjgf12• 3 years ago

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.

sircastor2• 3 years ago

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.

ffgjgf12• 3 years ago

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

sircastor2• 3 years ago

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.

consoomer2• 3 years ago

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.

relativeadv• 3 years ago

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

consoomer2• 3 years ago

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 :)

eggy• 3 years ago

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

Game developers flee Unity after exorbitant price plan announced

Related Stories