Official Unity Announces Intent to Join Forces with ironSource

Oof, Unity has been my introduction to game development and programming. Just when I was starting to get more confident with C# and Unity. Now I might have to switch to Unreal and C++. A part of me is hoping when they see the backlash they wont make this as bad as people are fearing, but my expectations are not lining up with those hopes.

 

There is a framework that let's you use C# with Unreal.

https://github.com/nxrighthere/UnrealCLR

 

Excellent! Thank you kind person!

 

These indie developers learn to use Unity and then often get hired in bigger studios that generate larger parts of Unity revenue. If majority of indie developers and people who learn gamedev as a hobby switch engines, it will make it harder to seek talent as a larger Unity-based gamedev company. Then larger shops will also be more likely to switch to some other engine that people actually want to use.

Unity services depend on core engine being popular, functional and well-liked, not the other way around.

 

That would never happen. I should point out that IronSource as a company have never distributed malware. They made an installer packaging software which then malicious customers used to distribute malware/adware. It took them maybe a bit too long but IronSource did put a stop to it.

So this has been fully blown out of proportion. Plus this was 7-8 years ago, so a long time ago.

 

Lol, it's some hundreds people at most who are voicing themselves even including twitter.
Also it sounds kinda dumb to try to harm the direct game-dev related parts of the company if you do want that the engine becomes better. If at all, try to boycot their adds services, if that's possible at all.

 

Seems like the solution would be so simple.

Open source the engine, accept community bug fixes.

Stability & trust would increase dramatically in a matter of days.
Unity can launch a million paid services and everyone would be happy.

Instead, everyone is unhappy.

 

The open source community is not all sunshine. Hence why Linux still doesn't have a chance on Desktops vs Microsoft.

 

Seems to work for Unreal & Godot

 

Unreal is open source but do they actually accept pull requests etc. from the community?
UNITY has also revealed at least the C# side of the sourcecode (not the c++)

 

I found this interesting thread with which I agree completely.
https://twitter.com/gamemakerstk/status/1547313023236427777?s=21&t=0ayGL8TkJDQY32ncMjAwYw

 

Indies are Unity's main customer with this adtech vehicle strategy. What happens is:

Your game with ads pushes users away from your game with ads -> to another Unity ads game.

That means your game quality doesn't matter and nor does your skill, frankly. All that matters is that merging with a competing ad company means Unity hasn't really got a competitor apart from google. This means it doesn't matter where your players go, they will always be consuming Unity ads instead of a competitor's ads.

And it sadly doesn't matter to many that you just sent them away from your game to play another instead, so long as it's a title within the same ad network.

 

Yeah I believe this is the primary goal of the "merger".

 

That looks really cool but will it work on anything but windows, linux and mac or will you have to make a port yourself?

 

I remember being part of the Cocos2D iOS community a while back. It was the most popular 2D game engine for iOS for a few years at least. It eventually got killed off by Cocos2D-X (cross platform and had an GUI editor) and Unity (much friendlier than Cocos2D). And ofc everyone remembers Adobe Flash. Unity is not above being killed off fairly quickly if bad decisions are made. The problem is that bad decisions have been made for a long time now. Literally the only reason most of us stick around Unity is because it is relatively easy to use, we are use to it, and we have ongoing projects.

Our projects will come to an end, and it won't be long before FOSS becomes much better than Unity (Godot especially). In fact maybe even more so given that Unity devs will flock to support these FOSS projects.

I have talked to a few Unity devs on the forums and off, and I have nothing against the devs, most of them are extremely talented. But these changes being made at the high level will kill Unity as a game engine. Personally, I think Unity knows this, and that's why they are pivoting every single direction except toward the game engine.

 

Unreal is not open source, at least not what many understand by "open source". The code is not under an open source license and has its copyright on every file. In the FAQ they have a section about it.

 

Mobile and console platforms are not currently supported due to .NET not yet supporting AOT for those platforms.

 

They do, I think I've sent them like half dozen PRs which are all part of the engine now. If you open their editor's about dialog, they credit all these people there too.

 

Ugh, this was the future I feared Unity might pursue. Guess we'll go dot up a plan for trying out different, more sustainable technologies for our next project.

 

Check out Flax. If you don't mind royalties it's practically a clone of Unity. I'm looking through the docs right now and it has OnAwake, OnStart, OnUpdate, OnFixedUpdate, etc in its "Script" class which appears to be a clone of MonoBehaviour. It's kinda funny.

https://flaxengine.com/features/

 

"Open Source" doesn't mean "Free" or without copyright. It means you have access to the source code and can change it to your liking. (except if you do, you have to share it with Epic so they can integrate your work and use it to compete against you making a clone of your game named Fortnite.)

 

That's great but we'll have to check the company's behaviour: I don't want to fall for another Unity-like scheme.

EDIT: I'm checking this out and it seems really REALLY cool for Unity users! They even have a "migrating from Unity" section in the manual!

 

They've also copy / pasted copyrighted code directly from Unity and Unreal in past. I'd be very cautious when dealing with this engine. Even their ToS used to be blatant text copy/paste from Unreals terms.

 

Bit of a red flag there. I guess I'll see how it pans out but this isn't encouraging at all.

I really hate when companies get on the M&A merry-go-round. They never seem to get back on the right track after that.

 

Interesting. If I decide to do more than poke around in the janky editor I'll have to look into it.

 

Any link to that claim? Since its a niche engine there is nothing on google

 

Amazon Lumberyard started life as CryEngine 3 and while it has evolved over the years since they bought their license so has CryEngine. If you intend to look into Lumberyard I recommend looking into CryEngine too as the latest major version has a solid set of features including C#.

https://www.cryengine.com/features

For example it has a realtime global illumination system that doesn't require baking.

https://www.cryengine.com/features/view/visuals#voxel-based-global-illumination-svogi

 

While I do like Rust for certain applications, What? Games programming with a language that does not support OOP?!
Didn't expect that to be even thinkable for an engine that's not from the 90ies.

There's a reason Unity backtracked on their initial intent to provide a pure ECS solution and now go hybrid. There just are significant components of gameplay where the advantage of ECS does not apply because you only have a single player instance and a single game state manager etc. For those it tends to be an unnecessary hassle to squeeze them into a data oriented vs an object oriented approach.

 

https://github.com/Unity-Technologi...ssing/Shaders/TemporalAntiAliasing.shader#L43
https://github.com/FlaxEngine/FlaxE...7081fe4f270b962/Source/Shaders/TAA.shader#L86

https://github.com/FlaxEngine/FlaxE...44fa4d1e63ca9fa/Source/Shaders/Random.hlsl#L6
https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/blob/4.26/Engine/Shaders/Private/Random.ush#L9
(you need to have access to UE git repo, otherwise you get 404 on these links)

https://github.com/FlaxEngine/FlaxE...144fa4d1e63ca9fa/Source/Shaders/BRDF.hlsl#L10
https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/blob/4.26/Engine/Shaders/Private/BRDF.ush#L243

Flax license:
https://flaxengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Flax EULA.pdf
UE EULA by the time Flax released:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200904042840/https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/publishing
(had to use wayback machine for this because Epic has changed their EULA a ton since that so it didn't make the legal text ripoff as obvious).

TAA and Moblur shaders actually did get removed from Flax after Unity got notified about Flax using them. And before anyone mentiones this, some of the mentioned code is based on public knowledge and scientific papers.. but them just copying the code from one engine to another along with all comments is just sketchy in my eyes. If they do things like this in just few places one looks around in the engine, there's really very little trust the rest is fine either.

 

Thanks

 

Devs not baking monetisation into the creative process are “F***ing idiots”, says Unity’s John Riccitiello - Mobilegamer.biz

Yeah, you know how I said "I think our current project will be the last one that uses Unity"? Nevermind, it will be the last game we make with Unity. If this is what Unity's two-bit overpaid manager thinks of their customers, then they can kiss my ass. I will make sure the next engine we use is open source and contribute to it regularly. At the very least I can utilize my 10 year experience as a AAA engine programmer.

 

Well, assuming you want to make money with the game, he's not really wrong. Monetization is less efficient as an afterthought of the game. The plain "show a video add after every character death or level" approach that many cheap mobile games do, does not fly well anymore because too many games went that simple way.

 

The recent mishap with Unity ads AI model might be a motivator as well. It hurt the stock, and they fired a bunch of AI people recently, I believe it was never clarified on what AI they were working on but with this acquisition/merger I wouldn't be surprised they simply sacked their ads AI engineers and replaced them with IronSource.

 

Baking monetization into creative process produces Diablo Immortal.

 

Which would make sense. I forgot where I read it but they apparently have about half of their staff in R&D.

No.

 

Which apparently is still reasonably profitable and I enjoyed the 2-3 hours I played it so far (only rarely have time for mobile games).

 

Profitable? Yes, good game? Hell no.

So its all priorities, some want to make a good game and decent money, some dont care about if game is good or not, all they want is the cash.

 

Yes. The game was explicitly designed in a creative process to include ridiculous monetization.

 

Unity is pivoting hard towards skinner box ad ridden scams, which is not what the indie scene that developed around it is about at all.

Unity will not be a game engine any more, it'll become a pure ad delivery medium.

 

If I wanted to make a lot of money, I'd have stuck around after my internship at a defense contractor. I didn't because I didn't want to keep making things that could help kill people.

Our studio can survive without making games laden with ads or microtransactions.

 

Let's immortalize that:



full interview:
https://www.pocketgamer.biz/interview/79190/unity-ironsource-john-riccitiello-marc-whitten-merger/

 

@atomicjoe Though note that the title quotes him agressively/manipulatively wrong. At least the first paragraph has the correct quote.

 

I think for now I'll continue using Unity but I'll keep my eye on Godot and will dabble a bit with Unreal

 

Fair. The game industry is quite unique that you can get along often without learning new frameworks all the time at all.
For example from what I learned about web dev in college merely 4-7 years ago, barely a fraction is still in use, haha.

 

Yes, but not for the reasons you just gave. Unity did it because the alternative would have been more than a decade of development before anyone would have had the chance to use it.

There is a weird misconception that integrating monetization into your gameplay leads to games like Diablo Immortal but that only happens if you go to the extreme.

 

No one is bashing free mobile games for putting ads in there: you have to make a living in some way and development is not free!
The problem is when you can't choose anymore.
Also, the big backlash is not because of monetization per se, it's because Unity has wasted tons of cash buying other companies that didn't profit the engine or its users in any way, fired plenty of developers of the engine and THEN merged with an adware company with a reputation of serving malware.
It's the last straw that breaks the camel's back.

 

I'm curious why you think this is even a possibility in the future? Do you think Unity would bake ads into their personal edition games? If so, that would be idiotic and immediately patched out by people modding the decompiled games. We haven't monetized our games, but we also haven't seen anything suggesting that we need to either.

Somewhat subjective, though also a valid critique. Though in this case, it was mostly stock, and not cash, used in the purchase. However, I also think that a lot of Unity's recent developments just simply have not been announced as they should be. They are still constantly churning out fantastic new packages like their localization package, but now it's even more difficult to find the new ones since they decided to hide them.

The CEO in the interview says:

Take that as you will.

correction

Still bad, but two different things entirely.

As a developer, I've been pretty happy with Unity's current feature set and, while a lot of what they have been doing is not directly useful to me, I certainly see where Riccitiello is coming from. More money *could* make Unity a better engine. However, it also could not.

 

YES. And also data dragnet analytics.

Not if it's in the TOS and you don't want to get sued.

 

Currently, you need to deliberately opt-in to Unity Gaming Services and keep the Analytics package installed (which you CAN uninstall). Doing this would also be antithetical to their goal of wanting to target more non-game industries. Many organizations and practically anything involving the DoD (which Unity works with) would not tolerate any form of unauthorized analytics.

I keep a close eye on their TOS. Currently, it very much passes the liability, control, and responsibility to the developer. If they do what you said, I will drop Unity in a heartbeat. Not a single game engine company in their right mind would try and control how a developer can use their engine to make games like that.

 

Didn't mean to sound as negative as it did, there are plenty of games I played with interstitial ads and MTX; put down more money into Clash Royale than I care to admit before I decided to stop playing it. That's just not our goal, we want to make indie experiences on PC, console and later mobile when it permits us. We are at an advantaged, privileged position compared to most people that use Unity.

The wrinkle in my nose is the obvious direction of Unity management finding the cheapest solution possible towards making a lot of money for themselves, which granted is what a public company is supposed to do. The consideration to shutdown Unity Answers was probably to save on hosting costs, along with the layoffs that included the Gigaya team that I know in their eyes they were fine with axing because all they saw was a money drain. All this tells me is the quality of their product matters little to Unity management.