Nothing they do at this point will bring any of the goodwill back. They already messed up and no amount of walking it back is going to change the perception that they might just do it again at any moment
I’m a year into developing my first game though and this means I don’t have to abandon all the progress I’ve made. After I publish this game, all bets are off as to where I go…or should I say where I godot.
Have you explored what level of effort it would take for you to convert it to use another engine? There are a TON of tools people are making to assist with porting projects from Unity to any number of other engines. Sure, the tools won’t do 100% of the work, but by what I’ve been hearing, they take a HUGE amount of the tedium out of the process.
But for me, I’m too new to programming to pick up another language very quickly to do all the manual stuff right now. Anyone more skilled than me should definitely check those links out.
This isn’t really useful for data heavy games such as the one I’m working on.
It doesn’t help that Unity-specifc stuff seeps everywhere (stuff like floating point Maths, Vector classes, Time and so on) mainly because Unity themselves push people to go that way rather than use the .Net equivalents (which aren’t quite equivalent).
And pointedly, there was no mention of acknowledgement whatsoever of their sneaky license modifications from months ago that a bunch of people discovered after the fact.
Unity’s execs and board do not fucking care. Their opinions have not been changed. They will certainly try something just as scummy at some point in the future. It’s only a matter of time.
They don’t need good will, unfortunately. They just need devs to not abandon it for Unreal or some other engine, and the cost/benefits calculation on that is going to be made by short sighted people on a project-by-project basis.
Which is exactly why anyone in a position to do so should still drop Unity like a hot potato, sunk cost or not. We can’t condone this kind of behavior.
Even that wouldn’t bring me back. There are simply other options. Godot’s good so long as you aren’t planning of a console release. If your are then Epic are no angels but they haven’t pulled this crap with Unreal.
I agree they need to go to rev share, but I don’t think restoring trust is really what they are trying to do here. They planned for a good chunk of devs not returning to the engine. Since 80% of users don’t pay them anything, and a large percentage of what’s left like three hundred bucks (the engine costs several hundred million dollars to maintain) there’s not much to lose there., this is likely more about keeping large tier studios and mid tier ones working on mobile games in the ecosystem. They are abandoning their old “seats” model regardless.
the engine costs several hundred million dollars to maintain
I just don’t understand this. Godot is fairly comparable in scope and while it is behind Unity somewhat it also has a tiny fraction of the budget. Sometimes just throwing more money at a product does not make it any better any faster.
You’re not counting the several millions of dollars required for executive salaries yearly. Those executives are important because how else are you going to drain the life out of the developers who are actually maintaining the thing with useless meetings, bureaucracy, “cultural transitions”, and other forms of daily torment?
Unity employs a small army (about 3K) of senior software engineers, that can definitely command upwards of 200K per year, which puts the estimate at 600 million, plus a number of specialists (mathematicians, physicists) for things like cloth and hair simulation, large water body dynamics etc. They maintain compatibility for a huge and growing list of varying hardware devices, computer operating systems, VR headsets, phones, consoles, i think unity games can even run on apple tv, this means they have to get things like floating point operation results reliable on all machines, older x86 processors, RISC chips, etc going back several decades, and even get experts directly from places like Microsoft for features like DOTS C# to native/burst compiler. Most devs don’t appreciate just how much commercial game engines handle in the background and make your build process so much easier. It’s definitely would take a slew of specialists years to get something basic and usable enough, just to display a couple moving shaded triangles, let alone something robust.
Godot on the other hand while a highly capable engine, is a much lighter weight as by design (Juan L says so himself on the Godot blog). Features like plug and play multiplayer servers, machine learning for NPC behavior, encryption for credit card IAP, either aren’t included or havent been implemented as heavily or are only included in the asset store, as a product of a volunteer contributer, as most FOSS software is known to have. Just going through the unity package manager will show off the disgustingly bloated pile of software that is the unity engine. Probably several tens of thousands of packages available that most people will never use.
Nothing they do at this point will bring any of the goodwill back. They already messed up and no amount of walking it back is going to change the perception that they might just do it again at any moment
1,000%
I’m a year into developing my first game though and this means I don’t have to abandon all the progress I’ve made. After I publish this game, all bets are off as to where I go…or should I say where I godot.
Have you explored what level of effort it would take for you to convert it to use another engine? There are a TON of tools people are making to assist with porting projects from Unity to any number of other engines. Sure, the tools won’t do 100% of the work, but by what I’ve been hearing, they take a HUGE amount of the tedium out of the process.
Yeah I have. There’s a couple of promising programs that everyone should know about:
https://github.com/V-Sekai/unidot_importer
https://github.com/barcoderdev/unitypackage_godot
But for me, I’m too new to programming to pick up another language very quickly to do all the manual stuff right now. Anyone more skilled than me should definitely check those links out.
This isn’t really useful for data heavy games such as the one I’m working on.
It doesn’t help that Unity-specifc stuff seeps everywhere (stuff like floating point Maths, Vector classes, Time and so on) mainly because Unity themselves push people to go that way rather than use the .Net equivalents (which aren’t quite equivalent).
Aye. I’m not waiting for godot.
And pointedly, there was no mention of acknowledgement whatsoever of their sneaky license modifications from months ago that a bunch of people discovered after the fact.
Unity’s execs and board do not fucking care. Their opinions have not been changed. They will certainly try something just as scummy at some point in the future. It’s only a matter of time.
They don’t need good will, unfortunately. They just need devs to not abandon it for Unreal or some other engine, and the cost/benefits calculation on that is going to be made by short sighted people on a project-by-project basis.
Which is exactly why anyone in a position to do so should still drop Unity like a hot potato, sunk cost or not. We can’t condone this kind of behavior.
Ah, the ol [trust thermocline] (https://web.archive.org/web/20230403081519/https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904)
I won’t trust Unity with any of my future projects until I see the heads of their entire upper level management team on pikes.
Even that wouldn’t bring me back. There are simply other options. Godot’s good so long as you aren’t planning of a console release. If your are then Epic are no angels but they haven’t pulled this crap with Unreal.
I agree they need to go to rev share, but I don’t think restoring trust is really what they are trying to do here. They planned for a good chunk of devs not returning to the engine. Since 80% of users don’t pay them anything, and a large percentage of what’s left like three hundred bucks (the engine costs several hundred million dollars to maintain) there’s not much to lose there., this is likely more about keeping large tier studios and mid tier ones working on mobile games in the ecosystem. They are abandoning their old “seats” model regardless.
I just don’t understand this. Godot is fairly comparable in scope and while it is behind Unity somewhat it also has a tiny fraction of the budget. Sometimes just throwing more money at a product does not make it any better any faster.
You’re not counting the several millions of dollars required for executive salaries yearly. Those executives are important because how else are you going to drain the life out of the developers who are actually maintaining the thing with useless meetings, bureaucracy, “cultural transitions”, and other forms of daily torment?
Unity employs a small army (about 3K) of senior software engineers, that can definitely command upwards of 200K per year, which puts the estimate at 600 million, plus a number of specialists (mathematicians, physicists) for things like cloth and hair simulation, large water body dynamics etc. They maintain compatibility for a huge and growing list of varying hardware devices, computer operating systems, VR headsets, phones, consoles, i think unity games can even run on apple tv, this means they have to get things like floating point operation results reliable on all machines, older x86 processors, RISC chips, etc going back several decades, and even get experts directly from places like Microsoft for features like DOTS C# to native/burst compiler. Most devs don’t appreciate just how much commercial game engines handle in the background and make your build process so much easier. It’s definitely would take a slew of specialists years to get something basic and usable enough, just to display a couple moving shaded triangles, let alone something robust.
Godot on the other hand while a highly capable engine, is a much lighter weight as by design (Juan L says so himself on the Godot blog). Features like plug and play multiplayer servers, machine learning for NPC behavior, encryption for credit card IAP, either aren’t included or havent been implemented as heavily or are only included in the asset store, as a product of a volunteer contributer, as most FOSS software is known to have. Just going through the unity package manager will show off the disgustingly bloated pile of software that is the unity engine. Probably several tens of thousands of packages available that most people will never use.
If they open source their engine then at least you wouldn’t need to trust them.
Give it two weeks, no one will care anymore