Unity Overhauls Controversial Price Hike After Game Developers Revolt
bnnbloomberg.caAs some folks like to say, “the cat’s out of the bag”. I am surprised open source isnt a bigger deal in the game dev world. The web is ruled by it. As i’ve been looking at godot recently, coming from the open source world, it was a breath of fresh air being able to read the source to understand what the engine does, and even to be able to make changes that suit my needs. You dont have to pick godot. Any open source engine that works for you is a good choice. Imagine you are leveraging work done by people with a similar need and similar challenges, instead of a bunch of disconnected business folks and product managers that build engines for the sake of building them. The engineers working on unity are great but we all know how engineering is enshitified as soon as business folks take control.
I’d say this to game devs - if open source works just fine for some of the most complex web and operating systems out there it will work great for game dev. Dont be afraid of making the switch.
The lack of interest in developing a custom game engine today surprises me. It should go without saying that using a tool like Unity can help you get going quickly, but when it doesn't exactly fit your original game idea, it can and does often turn into an uphill battle. Directly utilising the SDKs without the use of middleware grants the most freedom, and technologies like DirectX were actually designed to simplify life to begin with.
99.99...(some arbitrary significant digit)% of "game ideas" are perfectly capable of being represented in Unity or most modern game engines. For the rest, it's easier to change your concept rather than put off shipping for several years to build a competitive engine just to scratch your specific programmer itches.
Plenty of people do start their own custom engines. The problem is, a general purpose game engine of any relevant quality is comparable in complexity to a modern web browser, most game developers don't have the time or talent to handle that, and once they get past a gee-whiz renderer and maybe loading textures, they wind up in the weeds and never ship anything again.
Don't get me wrong - I've done it. I've got the corpses of several "game engines" including the ersatz one I'm building around a roguelike that I haven't and may never finish, but it isn't a satisfactory general solution for most people.
The old "there are two types of game devs, those who make games and those who use games to write engines/toolsets". Those solo game devs on Youtube building their magnum opus are inevitably the latter. It's a different kind of fun, but yeah, don't expect to ship anything.
Yes, a one-size-fits-all game engine will undoubtedly be extremely complicated. However, depending on your project, you will most likely only require a subset of its features.
One could also argue that if people base their creative decisions on the game engine, that's not always a good thing.
> For the rest, it's easier to change your concept rather than put off shipping for several
Plenty of games still have their own custom engines.
Also you have games like Rimworld which pretty much only use Unity for rendering and cross platform support.
There's a ton of interest in it. There are forums out there that are years old with people showing off game engines, whole subreddits dedicated to the topic, too.
The problem is, it's a massively difficult undertaking to make a custom 3D game engine. Rendering alone is a huge topic without getting into the specifics of interfacing with GPU drivers. Window management is incredibly complex, especially if you want to support multiple platforms, or multiple modes of input. And then once you have all of that figured out, you still have to make some system to integrate the state of your game with all of those systems, and then finally, add your game logic on top. All while still building out those lower level systems as you go.
This is way easier to do in 2D than it is in 3D, largely because most people have a better grasp of 2D geometry than 3D, but even just making something OG Mario Bros. needs a fairly substantial game engine. Sure you can code golf it into something tiny, but then you don't have an engine, you have a game program. Engines need a certain level of flexibility to explore.
And sure, there are libraries for doing all of those things, but wiring them up together often ends up with piles of adapter code between the libraries to let them all use each other's data structures, at which point natural groupings of libraries form, and you're effectively back to having a game engine, just by defacto standard instead of intentional assembly.
> Unity will limit fees to 4% of a game’s revenue for customers making over $1 million
This is 20% cheaper than Epic, correct?
...but with the added expense and logistical burden of having to track all your installs nonetheless.
For many it will be much cheaper than that. Maybe even less than 0.05% (depending on how they track installs)
How exactly would you track your installs? Say it's an offline-only game that is on GoG, how would you possibly know whether or not somebody copied the installer to another PC and installed it there?
Yeah. I’m not even sure someone at Unity knows. I’m just guessing that most games bought on Steam for instance wouldn’t be installed on more than 5 unique devices or so.
Without DRM (maybe even if it was cracked?) you’d be paying for every install of a pirated copy which would be absolutely absurd.
This whole spectacle belies a decided lack of ability to think like ones customers do .. if Activision had thought for a moment about what it would be like to have their own titles subject to these same license impositions, they'd have had ample warning about how the rest of the market would respond.
But, they simply didn't think about this from their customers' perspective - and this is itself a very shocking circumstance for a million-dollar industry to ignore.
It goes without saying that if you can't think like your customer will, then you're not ready to deliver them a product. If you think your customers are your product, you're in dark territory, as well.
Have Activision been treating their third-party developers like they are chattle? It sure seems like it in this case.
This one is going into the textbooks on how to not conduct a revenu model change.
Most of their customers are way to locked in for them to change engine in the short or even medium term, but this will have significant future impacts.
They could just a get a new CEO… of course they won’t (because almost the whole board is just as deranged) but that could largely fix this issue.
Thank God, literally interviewing with them tomorrow
"Could you please explain how decisions are made regarding corporate strategy at the executive leadership level?"
"We smile and nod at the devs, and then go spend long romantic weekends with the sales team."
If you don't need the job, really do ask them these hard questions. Your personal financial stability is on the line, so be very careful about joining a company that is this detached from its customers.
If they are applying for an engineering position the people interviewing won’t be able to answer them and the HR interviewer might just cross him out of the list entirely.
Back in the day Unity used to have company wide discussions before most very major decisions (even when they still had 500-1000 employees). That’s long past. Hardly anyone in the company knew anything about the new price model before it was announced.
Please report back any questions you ask them :)
“So are you guys…okay right now?”, but more interviewy
Good luck! Better use this advantage.