On a sort of unrelated note, I always hated unity as a game engine anyway.
Many years back we had this big 2 month long project for a class and we had decided to develop a game.
We settled on a spinoff of advance wars with some additional vehicles and mechanics.
We decided to try unity since it was reccomended by literally everybody.
After 2 days of using the crappy UI, getting flashbanged by the free light mode, and pulling our hair out over scripting, we said screw it and just made a bespoke engine with SDL because no one knew opengl or vulkan and we didn’t want to try another engine.
That was also the day we realized how much nicer C was to C++ lmao. Objects were nice, but we were so ready to redo the whole thing in C with structs and functions.
That was also the day we realized how much nicer C was to C++
Absolutely. I went through a whole process of using less and less C++isms that everyone was recommending me as they just made everything so much harder, longer to compile, produce more unreadable errors, harder to organize… Until I eventually was just writing C but structs have functions.
It is difficult though. Godot has been in development since 2007. It was not FOSS until 2014. It is still way behind Unity and Unreal Engine in many ways, which have been around since 2004 and 1995 respectively.
Yes, very much. Unity has an army of highly-paid developers, some of which are behemoths in the industry and built other highly-regarded technology. It could be done, I mean, I don’t think Unity was particularly efficient spending its internal resources, but it is gonna take a while for other open-source engines like Godot to catch up.
For now. They’ve raised prices, next step is cost cutting. Lot of those devs might l could find other work and end up pushing a branch or two to Godot.
yes, game engines are highly complex programs with decades of development, problem solving, and bug squashing under their belt. Fortunately there’s about to be high demand for a foss engine so I imagine Godot will get pretty good, but it’s got a long way to go.
As an avid godot dev, the only gripes that I’ve had with it are a) merge conflicts can be a nightmare (but you can use git unlike unity sooooooo) and b) it lacks some deep control, but I was just able to fork it and implement it myself lmao.
It’s actually really polished imo. It’s sleek, minimal (compared to the others in its weight class), only 100mb, and development is just accelerating.
Things like oblique clipping planes for the camera’s frustum. Basically something so specific and niche that it’s kinda understandable that it’s not a focus of the main engine.
I’ve been using git with Unity for 6 years and it works fine. Merge conflicts with scenes are painful, sure, but I guess that’s just the way it is. In my use-case there weren’t many conflicts.
As others pointed out, alternatives already exist. Besides Godot and ebiten, there’s also Stride, which focuses on 3D.
Now, an Open Source alternative that is compatible with Unity, similar to what EnigmaGM offers as a counter to GameMaker (and, in a similar vein, FPC Lazarus vs. Embarcadero Delphi), would require a fuckload of work and people with the skills to make it work.
I don’t see how any of this would hold up in court. I’m pretty sure you can’t be liable for a new tos for what is essentially new software that you didn’t use in your project. This company is clearly run by fucktards who are hoping to prey upon devs that just don’t know better or can’t fight back.
The Unity Runtime (Basicallt the core of the engine) is technically licensed as a subscription. So when the free license renews, this is included in the new ToS and it’ll be a lot harder to fight.
Obviously not a lawyer, but I’m not 100% certain that the billing terms would stand up to legal scrutiny. It’s been kinda hard to keep up with this story so my apologies if any of this is wrong, but I believe that they said they were wanting to use an “aggregate proprietary model” to determine downloads. What that basically means (I think) is “we’ll tell you how much you have to pay us but we can’t independently justify any individual charge”.
Again, I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know of anything off the top of my head that’d make that illegal, but it also doesn’t really feel like it’d square with how things work. I mean if companies could just make up a number and say you owe them that much without being able to say why or whether or not that number comports in any way with reality, then what’s stopping every company from doing that? What’s stopping a magazine for example from coming back to you and saying “Yes, you paid us for the magazine. But our proprietary aggregate model that totally reflects reality promise tm suggests that you might have shown that magazine to two or three other people after you purchased it from us. So that means you have to pay us three instances of the review licence fee.”?
I don’t know. Obviously this is all scuzzy and morally wrong. It’s just that even factoring in that this is a subscription service and that they are a corporation with an army of lawyers who’ll likely win any challenge to it, I can’t really shake the feeling that there’s something fundamentally legally wrong about that aspect of it in particular that wouldn’t hold up in court. Even for them.
You’re completely right, but Unity also has the money to get this to be stuck in court for ages. They’re counting on being able to win a war of attrition on it.
There’s just enough questionable tactics around it that it’s legally plausible they get away with it.
This fight will probably set some major precedent for how online services charge.
Others did it and faced no consequences. No government step-in, no mass customer loss. When there are no consequences for greedy monopolistic behaviours, greedy monopolies act greedily. Welcome to market capitalism without proper regulation.
“Oh no, Microsoft DMCA’d my project! Whatever will I do with this fully intact git history that I have mirrored by design on every single development machine?”
I’ve gotta say, this doesn’t strike me as a particularly substantial issue. I’ll admit that it becomes harder to find contributors when you’re trying to operate outside of the $MAINSTREAM_PLATFORM, but that’s going to be a perpetual problem in the world of “Forge-likes” until someone figures out how to federate the social-media aspects of it (sidenote: why hasn’t anyone tried doing that?)
EDIT: Of course someone was already working on it. Why did I even think of assuming otherwise? Godspeed to the ForgeFed project!
Every website hosted in the US is subject to DMCA (or directly getting sued for copyright infringement). Even if you host your own website and refuse to comply with DMCA requests, they’ll just send them to your hosting provider instead.
Eh, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. As people have said above the infinite free money is drying up. That’s a fact that all these corporations have to contend with. The only difference between Twitter and Facebook or Unity and Google is that Twitter and Unity have made their dumb decisions already. Facebook, Google, and others have navigated this fairly well so far. But they are feeling the same pressures that Reddit and Unity did and eventually they will bend to them too.
Shout out to Postman who this week decided to depreciate their local (secure) credential storage scratchpad, to force people to use their API and store everything on their cloud platform
For the VS Code enjoyers, there’s the Thunder Client extension. It’s pretty good but I hate that you can’t commit your queries on the free tier anymore
John Riccitiello is an American business executive who is chief executive officer (CEO) of Unity Technologies. Previously, he served as CEO, chief operating officer and president of Electronic Arts…
The more I read about this mess, the more I believe this is the work of one or multiple CEOs who have absolutely no clue about the field they are in and started giving orders.
You know what kind of boss I mean. That kind who can’t handle a NO and throws a fit every time they are proven wrong. But you still do as they will, because they are disgusting human beings and you are already in talks with a new workplace.
What’s weird to me is that CEOs should know all about accounting and financials. He should have realized that this pricing model is unsustainable for most Unity developers, because many make less than what he’s asking for per install themselves.
It’s clear that professional CEOs don’t know anything about tech, but this isn’t a tech issue.
They absolutely do know. They’re well aware of the impact this will have on small devs. That was their goal. They want to price out those free or low cost games that use Unity and never make a profit to avoid paying royalty fees.
This wasn’t incompetence. It’s straight up malice.
They don’t want to price out small devs, they want to get them onto their ad platform. They’ve said games that use their ad platform will have the fee waived.
The problem is, I don’t think the CEO would be in anyway getting the consequences of their actions. Of the company is sinking, they will just “be fired” and get those extra money (like huge amount of money). The company will close and announce bankruptcy. The “person” isn’t punished.
Their CEO is the guy who was leading Electronic Arts when it was voted the worst company of the year, implemented first lootboxes and who was openly suggesting to charge people real money per reload.
Now the clause is completely absent in any of the new ToS, which means that users are obligated to any changes Unity made to their services regardless of version numbers including pricing updates such as the recent fee that will charge developers per game install.
No, it doesn’t. Just because Unity decide to update the terms and conditions does not mean that users are obligated to accept new terms.
It’s akin to a TV comedy when someone grabs a contract and eats it thinking it will void the contract. If they do try to sue anyone using older versions with that TOS, it should be fun to see how it plays out in court.
I wonder if they would be able to team up with eachother against unity.
I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know exactly where everyone involved resides. That being said, I imagine pooling resources might help with those costs, if possible. There’s certainly more than two gaming companies that are being screwed by this.
To be honest, I would contribute to a legitimate go fund me for them. Fuck unity.
So unity too hired a few managers who want to make a quick buck, get a good bonus and then leave unity before it’s the burning husk that will be left once this is all said and done.
Yup. I think the “person” should be held accountable for their actions. The company would die, but the CEO would still get so much money out of this situation.
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