Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I think one of the major things that just rubbed me the wrong way in this post here specifically, yesterday:

The technical issue with Godot, from my perspective, is this. I am willing and able to fork the engine, this area is what I did for money for years. I believe I can fix everything I’ve seen so far. That being said, I don’t know what I’ll see next. I doubt I’ve found all the issues. I doubt I’ll find all the issues before I’m entrenched in this engine the way I am with Unity. And I have no way of saying that I won’t stumble across things that will require either months of non-game work, or an extensive rewrite, or both.
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If they are as good in fixing stuff as they claim then why fork it and only fix it for themselves? It's Open Source - the whole idea is that fixing stuff helps everybody. And bit by bit improves the engine not only for you but for everybody. That's one of the major tradeoffs you have for not paying money for a team to keep up with their plan (sort of).
And major missing plans ... that really is something I've encountered in large commercial software as well. More than once.

Not saying that one should ignore shortcommings of Godot or any other engine for that matter speaking. But especially if someone is absolutely capable of improving the engine - then go to GitHub and ask if it's okay to work on this or that.
That's the beauty of bein open. If it is fixable then the best donation to any project is improvements.

And the best improvement for inexperienced developers is just using the engine and attracting people who claim to be as experienced as they did in their post. *shrug*

 

Oooh that is pretty sad, and makes assets folder blow up unnecessarily. But I just do not want to go with Unreal or Godot.

 

Meanwhile Johnny be like:

 

or you can get embarcadero delphi, i believe they still have a free version - and that of course is what turbo pascal was when it ported to windows..

 

I suspect the problem is getting fixes integrated into the engine, especially at the scope they are talking about. Even assuming their changes 100% align with the intentions of the founders for Godot, the sheer amount of work to merge these changes will be huge and will take away time from those already trying to implement their own changes. At minimum it will require compressive code review.

Unfortunately this has a snow ball effect, the longer major merges are delayed, the further those forks diverge from the source, making integration even more difficult and time consuming.

There are likely solutions such as onboarding certain developers and giving them permission to pursue updating the engine around their expertise, but still a slow process. If anything this is likely the most dangerous growth point for Godot in years, I hope they are able to solve it without being overwhelmed.

 

IMHO nowadays the only engine alternative to Unity is Unreal. Godot is fine for jams and small 2D games, for professional work I wouldn't let my future in hands on something so young and unpolished.

Unfortunately for me, Unreal for mobile development is a bit overkill and doesn't fit good with old mobile devices.

 

Unfortunately, the silence without protest for this whole week (nearly 10 days now!) point to the grim situation I try to point out but no one seem to believe me. That majority of employees which include all dev are collude with JR to screw us. And minority who care for us are already being laid off if they don't shut their mouth. Their next paycheck was being promised based on US paying FEE and they PLANned. And they was given stock share BENEFITS to try hard to make us and also themselves to not make stock crash as much as possible

They try to keep themselves silence but was leaked now and then that they have been (need to be, by their word) to screw us for their company's profit. When we bring legal action they hurriedly came and point out it is perfectly legal in California. When we try to say stock crashing is the way they then come beg for mercy because it would hurt employee that was given Unity's share as bonus. And even we just joke about twitter they giggly came and joking about twitter against us. They still under JR thumb and serve their overlord loyally even this day

If it not true. Company-wide protest should have been already been launched

 

May be off topic but anyone know what this should return in C#:

int.Parse(“couple”);

Should it return 2 or an arbitrary random number?

 

Idiots sadly exist in our world.

Uhm, that should and will return an error because "Parse" isn't meant to do interpretation of natural language.

This is surely a hot take, but to me "a couple" when applied to anything except in the context of relationships, is 2 or 3 objects. Rarely 4. If I mean exactly 2, then I say "two".

 

How about in the context of the number of days Unity will respond in?

 

Every day they wait to respond, the worse it gets. Floating fake stories like the 4% cap is apparently effective at diffusing conversation, because it makes it sound like they backtracked, but there's nothing official, so there's nothing anyone can say based on new information. There's only known outdated information to argue, but unknown new information.

This is entirely an attempt to calm people down and then release a "reasonable" alternative. And since that's what they think they need to do, it means they already know it's bad for developers, and is going to be bad for their company.

 

Ah
Yeah I would expect something this week in every case. They'll hopefully not let stock-harming anxiety build up over another weekend.

 

Put on a tinfoil hat, but I can't help but wonder if this is all a deliberate nose dive of the company. It is just too stupid to pass as accidental. Maybe they shorted the stock and made billions under the table as the price fell and want it to burn to the ground

 

Sometimes we try to fix the broken things. And it was not the way it work. Complete rewrite or even starting new fresh project might be less frustrate. Something like that

Just touching stride and try to build from source make me feel that way too

 

Unreal 4 is good for old mobile. ofc If you don't mean some 2012- low-end stuff
I even tried webgl and was waiting for unity to clarify webgl status in all this mess. UE webgl worked no problem, even 4.27.2. Engine code overhead was like 7-8Mb or so.
I stay with unity for one more project for sure, but my next one i go unreal way. I tried godot couple of times (v.3 and tried v.4 later) but no, just no, that's not for me.

 

do you have experience on unreal for mobiles? i mean, can you helpme with something? xd

 

Unfortunately for 3d and at least medium is scope we have only 2 choices: unity and unreal.
I really think it's time for an open source game engine to become "Blender" We really need that. If unity goes down nothing will stop unreal to have a bad price change for us. we need competition and we need something open source. Unfortunately there's no real open source alternative at this moment.

 

I would prefer that they take their time and come up with something that is fair, ethical and does not use installation fees. With the radio silence I am not sure if this plan is still a go or not.

 

we do not need another open source game engine, there is godot, godot is exactly like blender... you need to understand that open source project are not as good. Blender is overrated (i'm not saying is not good) open source is and it will be always behind because it does not have enough funding
Edit: also you should pay for good technology (if is good)

 

I dunno about you, but personally, I think an employee threatening death to a superior might just count as protest

 

Yes, pouring money into Godot to make its 3D side competitive, and cleaning up the APIs would probably be a step along the way. It's really the open engine with most potential. I'm fine with learning Unreal for 3D stuff for now, but I think I'll try my dinky 2D game ideas in Godot first. If Unity Technologies suddenly become sane again, I maty still be playing around with Godot, but would probably be perfectly fine with Unity too. It's just easier when you've learned enough to be productive.

 

I seriously doubt that had anything to do with pricing.

 

Made me laugh, thanks for that!




I find myself thinking that one factor for my engine choice could actually be who of our well-known community members is going to which engine. Maybe we should make an exodus-list somewhere? Right now I've set my sights on Godot, but if it turns out that a lot of those of us that don't go to Unreal will pick some other open source engine, I might give that one a try too.
Unity never appreciated enough how much the community matters for their ecosystem. And I'm not talking about assetstore developers here, although those sure do matter a lot too.

 

if real which i doubt it

 

Godot's development philosophy seems to prioritize ease of use over running speed. It's similar to Python in the programming language world, excelling in certain types of games while suffering from performance bottlenecks in others. Because of this direction, I think it will take a very long time (or perhaps even never) and require significant funding for Godot to change its architecture and make it faster.

 

I work in the cyber security field. I can guarantee you guys, that there is no secure and precise way to track installs. Even if they will figure it out then that solution by itself can be sold for a good amount of money.

 

People please concentrate on the elephant in the room.
"I don't think there's any version of this that would have gone down a whole lot differently than what happened. It is a massively transformational change to our business model."John Riccitiello

Now if this statement is true, that this statement was made(report found in Gameindustry.biz) that means that NO lessons have been learned and Mr Riccitello(AKA Edward Smith) is staying in his position as CEO/Larper of the year.

There is NO WAY anyone is safe with this plattform until that position(and others) are vacated and refilled.

I checked this forum because I am well underway at learning a new engine, just to see what the vibe is and I must say I feel that everything is going back to being all over the place. Things are being disscussed that have nothing to do with what was actually the source of these problem with the software we have grown accustomed to using.

If users are releasing their grip on the company after only a smidge of news without any major changes to THAT SOURCE (we will never get Unity back out of public trading but we might have influence on staffing at top level positions) then this whole storm was a failure one way or the other.

ps: Just to go a little into what my analysis of the statment is: You guys have won this battle but I will make sure to win the war.

 

I'm not saying we need another open source engine. I say we need a good open source engine. Godot is not in his prime time, unfortunately

 

We are stuck on Unity till the next project is done. If Unity has install fees which we consider unethical and impossible to calculate. We will switch to Bevy ECS for our logic and use Unreal for rendering. This combo is already better in terms of tech and will only improve with time. We may switch anyway because Unity seems to have given up on ECS and HDRP is getting more and more dated.

 

Unity,

It is now day nine of consequences for your complete unmitigated disaster of an announcement.

You STILL have not proposed or leaked terms that we find anywhere near acceptable.

You STILL do not seem to understand that for many of us, the MAIN sticking point is the Unity's bad-faith removal of the ability for the developer to remain on their current TOS.

You STILL have not properly apologized for YOUR actions. You have only apologized for feelings you perceive that we have. We are not confused, we are righteously enraged. The terms offered are the problem, not our response to it.

You STILL have not even begun to properly engage US, the community, yet you tout on twitter that you have.

This will not go away for you. This rage we have will not lessen in degree. The longer you wait to address this, the worse that it will get, because your continued reluctance to do the right thing only reinforces for us how little you value us as partners.

So, I will repeat my demands plainly and succinctly again, along with my plan of action if these terms are not met:

Unity, leave your hands off of my already released games. Let them remain on the old TOS, as you previously PROMISED could happen, in PLAIN LANGUAGE in your blog as well as in contract. Anything that you did to alter this promise that YOU MADE TO US as a conciliatory gesture after that last TOS fiasco was a shady and unethical shell game and clearly done in bad faith so that you could launch this flaming wreckage of a plan.

Basing your fee on a number that is not tied to revenue is ludicrous and unworkable. You do not have the magic means to count number of installs, and neither do we. It's an unauditable metric. Eliminate the install fee.

Until these things happen I will continue to standby with pitchfork and torch in hand and explore options to enforce my rights under contract. I will also begin actively and passively campaigning against the use of Unity in the industry, highlighting your bad faith business dealings even further than they are currently exposed publicly.

No one can deny that Unity needs to do something to improve their income statement. However, core basis of the proposed plan, even with the Bloomberg-leaked updates, is unworkable and unacceptable to pretty much all of us. Over the last six years you frittered money away on everything else except the new technologies that we need for Unity to stay relevant. Now you come hat in hand for more money, talking about the need to balance some value equation, yet over the years, by letting your core product languish while chasing tangents, we are receiving less value from Unity than we were six years ago. Which end of the value equation really needs balanced here?

Grow some institutional courage and fortitude and come talk to us directly. You claim that you have talked to the community, but we here in the forums definitely do not feel listened to, having had zero meaningful contact with anyone from Unity in over a week. By leaving this forum thread for so long without engagement, you are displaying acute cowardice and apathy toward us. We may be angry and loud right now and VERY justifiably so, but generally we're really nice people and you used to know that.

Let's have some meaningful dialogue AS A COMMUNITY and not just these back-channel deals and attempts to mollify the enterprise customers.

 

I already said, that point even more grim situation you know?

It's mean company-wide protest will not happen, and that poor employee who sympathized with us are very desperate and can't find any other way except self sacrifice like that to make a point large enough. It very depressing, frustrate and unfortunate but no one in unity currently have been given not even zero f*** about this plan and that person self sacrifice. The threath only result in 2 days of shutting company and Riccitiello have more time to prolong the silence. It proof that the person is unfortunately on minority side of company. And majority is collude with Riccitiello

Only stock crash and change of leadership are possible

 

For people looking for DOTs alternatives. Epic has you covered.
It's not yet finished, but how this currently works already is amazing. It's already fully integrated into their navigation system and they have interesting sample projects for you to check out.

https://dev.epicgames.com/community...bers-of-entities-with-mass-in-unreal-engine-5

https://github.com/Megafunk/MassSample

 

I make valid counterpoints to your argument, you go personal. Sorry, that won't work, I am secure in who I am. Disengaging and ignoring.

 

Perfectly put. I haven't looked closely at Godot personally, but that blog post in question seems well put and absolutely the changes they would want to make if they were to try turn it into something they deemed viable would be too comprehensive and too divergent to be something integrated into what was there. It could probably be done as a separate project that could be turned into the new Godot once at parity, or more likely as incremental changes over time by key contributors. Hopefully that happens.

If you're interested in pragmatically developing a game professionally with the hope of it being performant, successful and with multi-platform potential, you don't want to be an engine guinea pig. Unfortunately right now there hasn't yet been of note much produced in Godot. I'd be very happy to have my current thoughts on Godot proven wrong though.

While it maybe isn't the best choice for many developers right now, that doesn't mean it doesn't have potential and couldn't grow to be something excellent with enough time and serious developer use and contribution. I also think it's currently more viable than even less proven engines like Flax and Stride.

For many 2D games or basic 3D games that can withstand a lower performance ceiling I imagine Godot would be fine right now if you don't want to target consoles. For any more complicated 3D games though it's very hard to imagine looking past Unreal or Unity (before this disaster).

 

lol, this acc seems to have an agenda against Godot, but this is hilarious

 

Godot is 2 files, the EXE and a console file, which you can place anywhere. I've never seen it "delete a directory". Just more FUD from Unity haters.

 

Yeah, I can not replicate it with the latest version, take it with a grain of salt though.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comm...t_deleted_all_my_computer_files_in/?rdt=41456

 

Hi,

I'm the person who wrote that post, and thanks for reading it.

Other people have pointed this out, and I alluded to it earlier in the post even, but making a fork doesn't mean it will get merged. It has to align with the goals of the project (admittedly I still don't know what they are), and also has to be approved on its own merit. Deep core changes like this to an engine would destabilise it for everyone - and I'll be the first to admit I am one person and can't possibly test all the platforms, configurations, and use cases of the engine to make sure I don't break anyone, so it's very likely I would.

I can however make sure I don't break myself and my own use case. This is a much easier task and one that feels more in scope for me.

Past that.. I'm sorry to say that even that (relatively mild imo) technical criticism of Godot has resulted in such a backlash from the Godot community that I've had to lock down my social media and my public facing email. I still stand by everything I said in the post, but the community at large has made it abundantly clear that they are not seeking feedback and do not want me there.

This is also okay, and their prerogative.

That being said, I no longer plan to work on a public fork or engage with Godot at all.

Hope you understand and thank you for being kind and reasonable in your criticism of what I wrote.

Edit to add: I don't intend this to start anything or turn people away from Godot or anything by the way, I'm just trying to answer the question honestly. The engine is perfectly fine if you are okay with its limitations. It may grow to be even better than it is today.

I was just trying to give people info on things they may not have thought of or had visibility on, because lots of people in my relatively small community had been asking me for input. That very targeted post then reached escape velocity, and now it's being viewed outside of the context of a person with a project they want to release commercially with a minimum of risk and headache. Take it how you will, but I'm not trying to talk anyone out of Godot.

 

Also looking into options for an ECS to use with Unreal so, I am curious, why Bevy over something like Flecs?

 

Sorry to hear that. Damn internet.

I think there's a lot of value in the blog post you wrote and I personally appreciate you taking the time to investigate the engine and comprehensively cover your thoughts about it.

 

Rust is a much better language than C++. If I write Rust code, I know I can use that in future games. In my opinion we are too late in the day for C++. You also can use Rapier for deterministic physics.

https://crates.io/crates/bevy_ecs
https://rapier.rs/

 

Thank you, and I'm glad you found value in it. I'm just hoping the internet forgets I exist again soon

 

good stuff. all true. i wish i had your talent to express deepest sentiments of the community. i stand by your pitchfork and torch.

 

There is a recent proposal to set a threshold of $1 million, consistent with Unreal, and charge a 4% fee on amounts exceeding that. For big companies like the one behind Honor of Kings, which uses Unity for development, with an estimated revenue of $2.2 billion in 2022, this would mean paying $88 million in fees. It is unlikely that anyone with common sense would accept such a high cost. It would be more feasible for them to hire their own engine developers, especially considering they also have the option to use Unreal. So why would they choose something so expensive?

 

Again. I highly doubt Unity at this point is trying to save its indie community. If they did, they would have to act faster. I think they will only try to save their mobile business and if some excessively afraid indie stays, that's a plus, but unintended consequence.

They just don't care about non-mobile, non-ads-driven business anymore.

(And when I say they I always refer to the company, not the employees individually).

 

its full source so i guess it depends on what he would do with the licence if he quit working on it. At this point I still like that better than an ever changing TOS that they keep saying one thing,and then secretly changing it.. wasn't it Two years ago we went through a similar TOS issue for them to revert right back..?
dont get me wrong i love using Unity and have working with it for 10+ years and the current changes dont effect me financially.. but what's to say their next set ot Changes dont, or just fully restrict build options or use of editor if they can make another cash grab.

 

Yeah that's unnecessary, really. The thing with these kinds of posts usually is just that nowadays it's become very difficult to discern whether someone is really talking from a position of knowledge or just making assumptions.
I've only come from a perspective of 3D software - especially Blender nowadays and the amount of false information posted as fact can be astonishing sometimtes. And the thing about chosing an egine is - as is apparent with Unity right now - you have to commit and be sure about it. Especially with a sentence like "unlimited technical risk" that immediately spreads doubt, of course. In one way justified because you want to know the drawbacks of your chosen plattform - in another way you want to be sure that this person is not just dishing out for personal reasons, either.

But getting backlash from a community on a large scale like that sucks and I'm sorry to hear that.

 

for those interested i'm working on this, there is some info about other game engines
https://discord.gg/WbEXfVuZ