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Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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This might kill entire indie projects.
There's other engines, this will kill unity
I know and thank goodness for that... but there will be projects that simply won't be able to afford to move to entirely different engines. It's a lot of work that might have to be redone.
There's going to be a lot of money on the table for another engine that can build a unity migration or abstraction tool
I don't see that being left on the table for long
I’m sure someone will try, but it seems nearly impossible to do this in a way that’s actually useful. Most game engines are going to have fundamental differences that won’t easily map to the unity way of doing things
Art assets, sound effects, storylines, that sort of thing transfers pretty easily.
Rigging, animations, scripting, physics...these pretty much don't and would have to be rewritten from scratch.
... not really, and for what a few years? Indie devs don't have a lot of money, and there is a huge discrepancy between unity and other engines. They work in fundamentally different ways.
There are some pretty big games built in unity, the money on the table is coming from them, (assuming reasonable licensing terms) not the small indie games.
I may be entirely off the mark, as I don't work in that part of the industry. But I've messed around with unity and it's not particularly unique compared to any other engine it competes with in my experience, particularly when it comes to actual runtime. Assets will need conversion and sure, the API shim will probably give a performance hit, but there's no reason I can see that unity is fundamentally different.
I'm in the middle of a project right now that's going to be released on an out-of-date engine because the newest versions broke backward compatibility and I'm too far along to port everything. If I had to change engines entirely at this point I'd have to cancel the entire project.
It's probably still going to take some projects with it. If you've sunk hundreds or even thousands of manhours into a project you can't just... do it again, or at least not always. Especially not if you've invested money as well as time, which is probably the case for most indie projects that aren't literal one-person shows.
Honest question though, what other small engines have the support and features of unity while also having the permissive licensing they used to have?
At least when I was looking into engines unreal and unity really stood out as the only useable free engines.
There's unreal, Godot, and a couple others I can't think of off the top of my head. They're not as widely used because they lack the feature set of unreal and unity, but they're out there.
That’s pretty much what I thought. Unity is so big because it offers a ton of features with a pretty permissive license. There’s not something comparable except unreal, which has an even worse licensing situation
The thing about Unreal is that you can always negotiate with Epic Games. And if they like your project, they can even invest or provide tech support.
True, but you also have to deal with Epic, which is a downside for many. It’s a great engine without a doubt, but it does come with its downsides too
I dunno if Epic's licensing is worse. At least it's a cut of revenue and not charging per install.
Not to mention that Epic gives sweetheart deals to indies periodically. They make their money from Fortnite, not the engine.
Unity got popular because it was simpler than unreal, and way more feature complete than Godot.
Was.. these days unreal is easier to work with, and Godot is much more capable. So it's mostly inertia at this point. And now everyone is going to take a real hard look at the alternatives.
I'm not a game engineer, so someone else who's actually in that segment of the industry can probably give more answers, but Godot and Bevy seem to be making some waves.
And if they're not enough for what a dev needs, given these license changes, I don't really understand why someone wouldn't pick unreal or something much more comprehensive over unity now.
Correct me if I'm off the mark, but unity always seemed like what you'd go for if you wanted something like unreal, but (completely understandably) didn't want to pay the fees associated with it
I only prefer unity for 2 reasons, 1. I have assets that I've purchased. 2 I like c#.
It depends on the game you're making.
Godot has a dedicated workflow for 2D games, so I'd rather make one of those color sorting puzzle games that's all people play on mobile these days in Godot than Unity or Unreal.
I have a friend who has been moderately successful in the game creation space and he is saying he wants to just give up at this point because of this change.
I can’t even blame him. I would too. This is essentially a situation where the only option is going to be a rewrite from the ground up in a new language and new engine.
If I was an indie game dev I’d be questioning my future right now too.
This will kill new development on the engine and older games without who have a limited number of users.
The ones halfway or more through development to recently launched will have to move to subscriber model or a shit-ton of ads.
In the next 3-5 years however their profits will likely be up. So some larger company will likely buy them out.
I think we need to kill everything so this is a good start. Snake blisken LA
Indies are the ones who deserve to die the least.