Godot.
Context: https://godotengine.org/
Some more context: Godot established the “Godot Development Fund” to accept donations directly (https://lemmy.ml/post/4815592).
Every other engine is smelling blood in the water it seems
Their tagline is on point.
I only code in Guffman
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Existing games built on Unity will also be hit with Runtime Fees if they meet the thresholds starting January 1.
How can you have a deal in place and just say “you’re giving me more money” and think that that’s ok?
I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further. - Vader
Tech companies badly need to get their shit kicked in to stop with this “I have the right to change the terms unilaterally anytime”
This might actually lead to that, depending on what kind of lawsuits arise from this change. Which could mean there will be pressure from others who don’t have a stake in the “unity install fee” game but do have one in the “wants to change terms at a whim” game.
Or maybe it will threaten the “by continuing to use this, you agree” clause instead and open up a path to continue using a previous license agreement if you don’t like a new one.
I don’t believe that is legal. That’s just absolutely ridiculous.
I can’t imagine that it is.
If that’s the case then they could simply up the charge next year to $10 to get even more money for doing absolutely nothing. And then to $20 the next year and so forth. There’s no sane court anywhere in the world who would say “Yeah, that sounds reasonable!” and even the less sane ones would think that’s bonkers.
It used to be illegal. Part of anti-trust was forcing IP owners to license their technology to everyone at a reasonable price. That means that reddit’s API price gouging would also have been illegal and tesla and apple would have had to license their FSD and OS to other hardware manufacturers. This ability to control other companies through abusive pricing and licensing lock-in is classic monopoly violation that the govt has stopped policing.
I mean, that can’t be legal, right?
This is a good way to incentivize game developers to just not use Unity and just some other engine that does this.
Great for short term profits which makes the quarterly statements look good, but bad for long term sustainability.
The CEO of Unity used to the the CEO of EA.
It explains a lot.
A CEO who can’t manage. Shocker.
Short term profits making quarterly reports look better to stakeholders. Isn’t that how 80% of these bigwigs get their job in the first place? We should be calling it the Zaslav Model at this point 😂.
Just because it looks better to shareholders now doesn’t make it a good business decision. I swear the majority of CEO types don’t give a damn if the company goes under in a few years because they either:
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Have a golden parachute in place by sucking up to the Board.
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Will move on to another CEO position at another company before it folds. Bonus points if they golden parachute on the way out.
It’s a good decision for the CEO though. That’s part of the problem, they’re not beholden to the business. They’ll just bugger off and go elsewhere.
Modern corporate management model is just broken.
That’s what the golden parachute is supposed to be for: a payout long term so the CEO doesn’t make a short term decision that fucks the company up but pays out big. Ex: offering a stock package that you can’t sell for 5-10years.
A decision like this will pay out HUGE in the short term, but if they don’t change it I doubt many will be using unity in a few years.
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The person who runs Unity is a shithead.
Oh, he was a former CEO of EA. That explains a few things.
A Big fucking idiot
This is why they shut down Parsec Arcade. Cause they’re an asshole
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
… 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
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#.
- You can actually import assets from unity into godot using a 3rd party add-on (If the assets license allows is)
- Godot has C# scripting
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.
Unity’s CEO was EA’s CEO too. He is the guy who shaped EA into the greedy company that it is today. I’m literally not surprised
No wonder the article smelled like wet rats reading it
Oh hey, look.
The former CEO of EA made a greedy, short-sighted decision to fuck over his entire customer base.
I am shocked, friends.
SHOCKED.
Well… not that shocked.
Way to ruin a comedic moment.
I get the reference, I love that show, even though Bender may not approve, because I’m just a meat bag.
More enshitification. This is the kind of stuff I’ve grown to expect from tech companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are bleeding money due to interest rates and they need any way possible to stay afloat.
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I work for a small (15 people) Unity gaming company. Will let you know what the CEO says, just shared the actual Unity blogpost
Edit: Update - CEO added a gravestone emoji and said “yikes”
For the sake of your sanity, I hope there’s a resolution to this that doesn’t involve a rewrite.
This is the problem with being a whole company on the ecosystem of another, they can pull the rug at any time.
Yeah this is why many bigger studios just use their own Engines even if they’re shit.
rule 1: get user by giving free candy rule 2: let’s them build their product, workflow on your tools rule 3: harvest.
Rule 4: get fucked by better and cheaper products (Unreal/Godot)
Rule 5: make an obituary presentation on what went wrong (hint: it’s always management)Rule 6: Unreal does the same thing, everyone switches to Godot 😂
It is management
CEO or whatever used to be head of EA
Unreal engine will probably do the same shit than Unity, Unreal engine might be opensource (not FOSS), I think there’s the same clauses about production royalties.
Even if Godot wins, there’s a cost to move.
I think Godot will not win simply because Unreal is so much better for 3D games what most comercial games use. I think Godot will become the indie favourite for 2D. Where it goes from there I’m not sure. Is the revenue sharing not enough to carry the game engine? Unreal/Epic is a special case. But is Unity mismanaged so hard? It still has huge market share.
This is 100% targeted at bleeding indie game developers dry in hopes of taking some of that sweet viral cash from devs like the one who made Vampire Survivors. They see that indie devs are charging $3-5 for their games, and so they aren’t hitting the $200k threshold unless they go viral, so Unity is charging by install, not just by total revenue. I hope that the ESA or other interested groups take legal action against this retroactive greed.
Has to be a smarter way than this. This is just going to make devs go back to activation limits.
Just a reminder that if Unity developers with pro licenses coming to Godot contribute even a small fraction of what they might have paid for those licenses on Unity, Godot can develop even faster.
I’m sure this will give a boost to Godot development.
It already has. The Godot Developer Fund went up by $4,000 yesterday alone.
Ha, yeah my immediate thought was imagining a situation like:
Godot Developers who have not yet read the news: “Huh. Why do we have 1000 new pull requests today?”
Ngl, I did visit their site right after reading the news. My next project will be using it. I hope it catches wind with this!
as someone who was reasonably deep with unity, the alternatives really are quite thin - Godot is a big contender or otherwise it’s time to pick up some Rust game development
Godot has Rust support with GDextensions
Is Rust a game engine?
I’m familiar with the coding language but I wasn’t aware of any game engine stuff outside of developing your own
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Thanks for sharing, I’ll check it out. Games in rust could help that whole endeavor in finding insecurities and whatnot even faster with game hackers and whatnot too
Stride might be worth looking into if you’re going for 3D stuff, it uses C#
GODOT SQUUUUUUAAAAAD
We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed," the company explained in adding the fee.
Ok and??
Removed by mod
So if Microsoft published a Unity developed game on Windows, Microsoft could easily charge a $0.20 free to the unity team for installing the Unity Runtime on their OS.
Not being completely serious there. Honestly thought, did the CEO not realize if they start doing this, what’s to stop another company from doing that to them. Things like mp3, where developers need to pay a license for, could then be charged in a similar fashion for each install.
“Runtime fee” is the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard im the programming world, I think we hit a new record of low
Beyond what this means for Unity and the indie gaming scene, I’m concerned about copycats.
With how big Unity is for hobbyists, I’m worried this might have an “Apple” effect, where other runtimes (even non-gaming related) begin to try this.
I’ve heard of proprietary code libraries before with expensive licensing, but still nothing this dumb
