Another one bites the dust (Stingray shut down)

Stingray game engine being shutdown already...

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/supp...es/sfdcarticles/stingray-end-of-sale-faq.html

 

Makes sense, really. Unreal and Unity are pretty much the top of the market and show no signs of being dethroned.

 

Disappointing. Stingray showed promise and more competition is always welcome.

Especially considering the bad year that Autodesk had - they can't afford to bleed money until it begins to gain ground.

 

I hope this helps people realize how toxic subscription schemes for software are. Unity's isn't that drastic (at least for now, hope they don't change it), but the concept is pretty anti-consumer in general. (And yes, there's a way you can still use Stingray but it requires yet more subscriptions, and if those expire/are canceled, same result.)

--Eric

 

I agree, but at the same time, even if the license didn't restrict further use in that case you'd still be on thin ice relying on 3rd party tools which are no longer supported.

 

It didn't die.

It just returned to the mothership.

 

Availability is meaningless with development ceasing. GameBryo is an excellent example if you want to see what happens when a game engine stops being developed but continues to offer licensing.

For about a year after development ceased there were games being released. Naturally these would be the games that were in development prior to the company behind the engine shutting down. After that year though the number of games being developed shrank considerably and eventually ceased.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebryo

Of course I don't expect the death of Stingray to be too similar to the death of Gamebryo. Gamebryo came from a time period where there was little to no actual competition, it had time to establish itself, and so on. Stingray was basically the complete opposite. It had seriously popular competition, it was only around for a relatively brief period of time, etc.

 

That's exactly the kind of S*** I've come to expect from Autodesk, which is why I'll keep avoiding their products.
I 100% agree on subscriptions being terrible for consumers. I really wish people wouldn't have let Adobe, Autodesk etc. get away with that. It might be too late to revert the damage now.

 

Subscription is most a different pricing scheme - at the end of the day, subscription or not, is there's no developer behind the wire (maintenance), product is dead and you won't be willing to start a new project using an engine that almost certainly won't work as soon as the platform updates (ie. iOS)... sounds obvious right?

 

I don't think everybody is letting them get away with it. Serif would not have taken Adobe on with their Affinity series if there wasn't such a demand for avoiding the subscriptions.

The Affinity series is Designer (Illustrator competitor), Photo (Photoshop competitor), and Publisher coming soon (InDesign competitor).

Affinity seems to be seeing success taking on established products, far more established and dominant than Unity and UE4 combined, so Stingray cannot place all the blame on the competition, not by a long shot.

 

Autodesk is a veteran when it comes to creating and destroying products.

 

Yeah, I've bought one of the Affinity tools (Designer I think) to support them, and because I'm not even happy with Adobe Illustrator. But I gotta be honest, the tool was just nowhere close to being a full replacement for the kind of work I need to do with these things. As inefficient as Adobe may be, with Photoshop CS6 they're so far ahead of everything else that I won't be able to switch any time soon and maybe never will be. I basically need 100% feature-parity, 100% file compatibility, plus all shortcuts and UI being virtually the same, or else switching cost from Photoshop to anything else would be too high and costly for me.

There's a market for less professional users that is probably served very well by the Affinity tools, but that could be more like a gamemaker vs unity or clickteam fusion vs unity kind of comparison. For some the simpler tool is perfect, for some it just doesn't cut it.

Regardless, I wish Affinity the best and hope they grow. Maybe one day they'll catch up! Adobe certainly has been dragging their feet in the innovation department since subscriptions have eliminated their financial incentive to make the next creative suite better than the last year's suite.

 

From a business perspective, I can see both sides of the sub/flat pricing schedule.

Pay single license high price once, use forever

• Customer gets a snapshot of the product in xyz state and can use it forever.
• Customer gets free updates for a period of time.
• Hazard: Good products satisfy customers, satisfied customers may see no reason to update.
• Hazard: Good products often don't need more features, updates or support - no room to grow.
• Hazard: If you update the product *just to update it* then you risk bloat issues.

Subscription

• Customer gets the product in it's current state with regular updates until they end their subscription.
• Customer gets no access to the product if not paying.
• Hazard: Customer may lose interest over time if updates are not interesting, thus making them salty.
• Hazard: Customer would prefer to simply buy the product and never update, thus sub models drive them away.

Photoshop really hasn't changed much over the last 15 years. It's as simple as it was.

I think there's pros and cons either way. Personally I dislike sub models as well, and much prefer to actually own my software. Sub models basically make software a service, and I'm not particularly excited to build a skillset around a service.

 

Looks pretty amazing, and the cost for each is just one month's payment for the Adobe Suite. Once they come out with their version of InDesign, I may consider switching out company over. However, I am guessing our Photoshop users will scream at the thought.

 

And in a lot of cases being a "full replacement" means "being the thing my clients / colleagues use".

It looks neat and for the price I'm tempted to buy both of their tools. But I'm not professional graphics worker and don't have half of the constraints that working in that field comes with.

(As an aside, Humble currently has Vegas video editing software available for US$20. Between that and the Affinity stuff a hobbyist could have an alternative to a big chunk of the Adobe suite for only a couple of months' worth of the cost.)

 

I think they have more experience in buying promising software and then quickly destroying it.

 

Can I change your mind? We already have enough competition - fantastic efforts like godot, which not only compete but are open source. Stingray proved the market was already saturated to the point that nobody could even find room for it. Progress is way too far ahead. Making a new engine today and expecting to compete with Unity is like making a new OS and expecting to compete with Windows.

In addition to this, the killer is that autodesk will no longer present barriers between the dcc tools and the game engines. There have been some moderate barriers in place for true integration.

And of course:

We're better off I think.

 

Photoshop has changed a lot in the last 15 years. Just not all of it in really useful ways. It has added a lot of very powerful capabilities, but as powerful as the may be, the are things that are rarely needed. I do like the subscription model for the adobe suite, primarily because I don’t ever have to decide if an update is worth it, and don’t have to worry about being out of sync with other tools and operating systems.

I love affinity designer, but at best it is a great complement to illustrator. It’s fantastic for illustration but is a long, long way out from being an replacement for illustrator. I enjoy that there are many small specialized tools now that work well with the production workhorses.

 

Godot is impressive in many ways, but I don't see it as commercially viable; even 3.0. It's an impressive and appreciated effort and advances the open source movement, but I still don't think they can compete with commercial engines in the ways that Autodesk could. Perhaps, you're right that starting from scratch is setting yourself up for failure - Lumberyard may end up being the model for how new players enter the game in the future.

There is no reason that those two *have* to be mutually exclusive. Autodesk has an incentive to increase adoption of its creation products across the board. Besides, Stingray didn't have a chance if its highlight feature would continue to be Maya and Max interop. The first few updates seemed to indicate that they were invested in diversifying Stingray's abilities, but it quickly died down. I liked Stingray's bottom-up design and wish they continued to advance it.

 

What I find odd is this was already true when Stingray entered the market. Stingray seemed to be a bad decision from the get go.

 

You need weirdos like us to make an engine succeed. F*** tech, it's the forum oddballs that keep things going.

 

Yep we don't like monthly subscription. So, why bother with this? We have better competition coming from Lumberyard and Godot 3.0 for the big "U" Juggernauts.

 

Can't tell if sarcasm but using another engine right now is like walking to work every day in the cold and rain, waiting for occasional buses and Unity is like this taxi service on demand that's warm and cosy and gets you where you need to be quicker in comfort. Sometimes it crashes though.

 

An engine gets tested with prototypes. Nobody is saying to release a full fledged AAA title in Godot 3.0 but I find stupid to monopolize the Game Dev industry because you fill comfortable with one product knowing that are people that are making other programs that are learning from the mistakes from the big programs.

 

I don't think people care because Unity, like everything else these days, is free to pick up and try. Most people probably fit in Unity personal license, only contributing to company bank balance when they need to change the logo or whatever. I think that's fair.

 

Unreal have been losing money for a while, so maybe soon our choice of engine will truly pay off

 

No direct competition to Unity would be terrible for us in the long run.

 

Yup. I would think a majority of game developers are the hobbyist-hope-to-go-solo-pro-sometime mentality, myself included. It feels great to save on engine cost, because most of my costs are now related to business administration rather than product development tools. Once I earn enough to hit the next pay tier for Plus, I would gladly shell out my money for it.

Is this true? If it is, I can see that one of the reasons is because development time with Unreal for hobby/solo developers is far more of an investment for Unreal than it is for Unity.

 

Well i know the deal with tencent in 2014 or whenever it was is the only reason they are still alive, it stopped them going under.

Currently I also know their usage amongst developers has decreased since mobile and VR, which are traditionally done using unity. Unless the industry ups and releaeses yet another game-changer tech, this may be the dying breaths of unreal as we currently know it ! (I think it will go back to focusing on games and in-house tech)

 

Ofcourse but there will always be competition! I remember when i started and there was only "mark overmars gamemaker" (now owned by yoyo games). Engines rise and fall, only unity remains!

 

I think we're going to be seeing AAA developers on loan to Unity so that AAA can eventually just migrate to Unity. This makes the most sense IMHO.

https://unity3d.com/company/public-...world-renowned-gaming-industry-veterans-drive

*Stirs rumour pot*

Unity already handles more platforms and can do more than nearly all engines out there today. 30 years ago bits and bytes really mattered. Then it was int. Then it was about cutting corners and asm optimisation. These days, some AAA engines probably have some fat, somewhere. The last of the truly tight optimised engines probably stopped last console gen with xbox 360 and ps3. Fat is necessary now because it's about increasing how much staff can achieve. This becomes the new bottleneck.

Engine performance, and hardware, they'll solve themselves. And I don't actually see a reason why Unity wouldn't be more attractive than low level control in the "content is king" universe our industry is heading to.

When performance no longer defines how much your game title earns, Unity wins. And it will win sooner, with it's optimisations and with SRP.

The cap for most devs is content.

 

Unreal dying would be devastating to Unity in the long run. Unreal is the only thing keeping Unity on its toes right now, and giving it something to strive for on the high end.

 

Just like Godot 3.0.

 

Until they reach the point where they need certain middle-ware that normally costs four to five digit sums individually...

Or, much more likely early on, an extensive selection of pre-made assets in a rather obnoxiously coded store...

 

By that time, I think that they will have a publisher already.

 

I doubt that. Even publishers need to see solid marketing potential before shelling out. You still need intermediate systems to be built to show off at least an alpha version of your game to publishers. Those intermediate systems can either take years to develop, or bought as middleware solutions, that the Unity Asset store is really good at.

 

Godot is the bitcoin of game engines.

 

But you are talking, thinking with the status of Godot right now, not in the near future.

 

Godot will need at least a decade before it catches Unity and by then Unity is a further decade.

I wish it the best of luck, but it's not even close, and it's unlikely to evolve for a long time, from ES3.0 which is the only rendering platform it supports: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-3-renderer-design-explained

I appreciate they stuck with ES3.0 and I don't think they had much choice, but that's a problem for godot, not a problem for me

 

It always amazes me how many people miss this concept.

 

Xenko thread was fun.
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