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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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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I'm in the middle of a project right now that's going to be released on an out-of-date engine because the newest versions broke backward compatibility and I'm too far along to port everything.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.