I’m talking about Jim Whitehurst taking Unity in a different path and leaving us game devs the f#^k alone. We’re done. Go sell to movie studios, VFX shops, Video Wall Warehouses, digital twin and construction. Sell enterprise software subscriptions.
I think we both agree that small indie studios will not be returning no matter what promises are made, who is CEO, or what new shiny monetization idea they come up with next.
> I think we both agree that small indie studios will not be returning no matter what promises are made
One thing I agree on: more often than not, behind an interesting piece of art lies an interesting personality.
To advance the conversation based on some substantive facts, based on my conversations with creators of large free to play Unity games, all were already using IronSource and were not impacted by the changes anyway. As a game developer who publishes himself, I do not plan to migrate away from Unity, and I wasn't really impacted either. I can't speak for the 30 or so studios who posted pleas to revert the changes, but based on what happened, I believe they got what they wanted. So if their decision-making is rational / based on facts, I don't think they're migrating either.
This is all to say that when you have no budget, so you value your time at zero and you have no visual art you didn't author yourself, it's easy to put 100% of the personality into the product, and make that The Thing. There are people I know who turned 20,000 followers on a TikTok about games into a $1m check for a game studio! This is a viable strategy, it is uniquely suited to people to have opinions about game engines. But my facts-informed opinion is that this isn't representative of most game developers, and that they are actually really happy with Unity and relieved that the pricing changes found a middle ground that is less emotionally charged.
What did I just read??? "Substantive facts"? That was all opinion. You didn't even directly respond to the poster until your last sentence and there you declared your opinion to be "fact-informed" and assigned both the feelings and actions of the average Unity dev using your, at best, subjective experience.
I've been using unity for almost a decade now and enjoying it despite the many caveats and idiosyncrasies I come across.
The bottom line is, I definitely don't want to throw away the decade of experience I have using Unity if I can help it. Ultimately I want them to learn from their mistakes and move forward. While Unity has had a fair share of missteps ultimately it's the devil I know.
I'd like to ask (only out of genuine curiosity): Do you also build your own engines or are you fully entrenched and dependent on Unity? I would feel very disappointed if I spent a decade on something only to depend exactly on that one thing and not be able to create it myself, especially when it's such a tractable problem in a sub-year time frame even with learning happening. The fit you could have with your own engine with a bigger up front investment of time and energy seems like it would easily pay off vs. just using Unity for years and years.
Not only sunken costs, but building an engine is no easy task. It’s easier to write a game than to write an engine (most of the time).
I do think this is the right approach. This is the approach I took. I was dependent on an engine for a long time until I realized it was just a facade and that I already possessed the knowledge to do it myself. So when XNA died, and MonoGame wasn’t mature yet, I had no choice but to write my own. Some of that effort went into MonoGame’s early days, most of it didn’t (I respect keeping the API the same but we, devs, could have done better to improve it).
Unity made it easy to build games without having to know the underlying proponents that do what they do. Instead, it’s presented through a massively opaque interface called a MonoBehavior. Because of this opaque abstraction, it’s almost impossible for a Unity game developer to know exactly what’s going on under the hood.
My first game engine took me 3 years to get to a point where I could ship something. My second was 1 year. My latest was 3 months.
Eventually, it becomes just adding another interface to your GPU abstraction to support wgpu or DX14, or Vulkan2, or Metal, any graphics api becomes just a Buffer, a Queue, and a sync lock.
Small studios absolutely will return to Unity. This whole debacle will be a faint memory a year from now, the marketing machine will continue and indie developers will become entrenched in Unity's C# ecosystem, build tooling, all-in-one package + asset store. Some indies won't return sure, but Unity will continue to maintain it's foothold with indie developers.
> entrenched in Unity's C# ecosystem, build tooling, all-in-one package + asset store
instead of indies, i think this applies much more to mid-level studios. Indies tend to be much more flexible and agile, esp. very small indies. Mid-level studios, with a dozen people that have gotten used to the toolchains and have existing investment in it (any custom plugins for example), would have a harder time switching away.
However, this whole debacle just goes to show that proprietary software may be a trap, unless the T&C explicitly clarifies and makes it _not_ a trap. This is what unreal engine has done (you at least will always remain on the same T&C for the version you signed it for).
Open source is a much safer bet for the long term for an indie, esp. if they're just starting out now and do not have toolchains attached to unity. And the godot ecosystem is just budding right now, which means the opportunities are also great there.
> which means the opportunities are also great there
Opportunities to spend significant amounts of time working on tooling and other engine features (with a non insignificant likelihood of still ending up with something inferior to Unity depending on your use-case) instead of actually making your game?
Yes, what Unity's management tried pulling off was stupid. However The engine itself is remarkably cheap from the perspective of many developers compared to any open source options.
> unless the T&C explicitly clarifies and makes it
Funnily enough IIRC Unity had a similar issue with the T&C back in 2019 when they promised to never change it retroactively again. Somehow they managed to "forget" it in a couple of years...
I guess one important difference with Unreal is that Epic has way less bloat (several times less employees) and make huge amounts of money from Fortnite so they don't need to try and squeeze as much as possible from their engine clients (currently anyway..)
> T&C back in 2019 when they promised to never change it retroactively again.
it's not about changing it, it's about including a clause in the T&C that the version they signed is the version in perpetuity for their version of software (obviously, an upgraded version may have the T&C changed).
"For this reason, we now allow users to continue to use the TOS for the same major (year-based) version number, including Long Term Stable (LTS) builds that you are using in your project."
Which is something they presumably "forgot" about...
yea, they did "forget" it. It's because this condition is _not_ in the TOS! It's a side-channel communication/agreement.
The unreal terms[1]:
> 7. The Agreement Between You and Epic
> a. Amendments
> If we make changes to this Agreement, you are not required to accept the amended Agreement, and this Agreement will continue to govern your use of any Licensed Technology you already have access to.
vs the unity terms[2]:
> 23.2 Changes to Terms
> To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Unity reserves the right from time to time to (and you acknowledge that Unity may) modify these Terms (including, for the avoidance of doubt, the Additional Terms) without prior notice.
> _not_ in the TOS! It's a side-channel communication/agreement
I never implied it was otherwise.
However if we look at their TOS from 2019 (the time of this blog post) they do have this:
> if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1)
I don't think the section is still there anymore? But presumably it still applies to you if you haven't upgraded past 2018/2019 versions. But it was actually in the TOS (just like for Unreal) which I didn't expect.
Unity is common in small indie studios because, for so many use-cases, it's the only game in town. for most 3D projects, Godot isn't ready yet, so their only option is Unreal. Which is substantially what Unity replaced in the first place.
Give it 5+ years and another screw-up from Unity at the tail-end, and I 100% agree that Unity is sunk for indie devs. But as it is, Unity has a grace period where devs are locked-in and if Unity can demonstrate stability over the next few years, then people will forget it.
And yes, if. Unity's current PR position is in a fully-stocked rope warehouse, but they could navigate out relatively unscathed.
>”Unity is common in small indie studios because, for so many use-cases, it's the only game in town”
I wholeheartedly disagree. There’s more choice than ever. A search on GitHub would show you.
Unity has had one thing going for it. It was easy to get started and it had a ton of learning material. It is NOT the only choice. Off the top of my head there’s:
- Ogre3D
- O3DE
- MonoGame
- GameMaker
- Godot
- Cocos2d
- GDevelop
- Pandas3D
- Reactor
- Stride3D (formerly Xenko)
- Three.js
- Babylon.js
Unity’s editor first approach and their C# “everything’s a behavior” is why so many think it’s the only game in town. It’s not. It never was.
I'm not so optimistic. They changed the model and JR is out. Unreal is way too bloated for many indie dev projects and Godot isn't ready yet. That may be enough goodwill for now.
maybe if this happened two years down the line and W4 Games had more time to establish itself (maybe even make it's own game to inspire confidence) it'd be a different story, but I can still see indies coming back. If they ever left to begin with. And this isn't even talking about the corporate giants in the mobile space.
So they actually cancelled their subscriptions and/or stopped development of their current games? What proportion of all developers did that?
> As an employee at Unity
I don't think they are even remotely close to being as transparent internally as they used to be a few years ago. Also as far as I'm aware sales data wasn't accessible to every single employee even back in those days?
I think we both agree that small indie studios will not be returning no matter what promises are made, who is CEO, or what new shiny monetization idea they come up with next.
I wish him the best of luck.