Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Ugh,

Ok, if you're seriously considering GODOT.

Please watch this guys devblog:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmugv6_kd0qNHRZGnDyZLOWklMh0xu48Y

This guy has moderate indie success working and selling products made utilizing the engine. He goes through many pitfalls (some of which may not apply 1:1 to ver >=4.1), and changes he made to his game which, if you're working with Godot in 3D, you really need to be aware of.

 

yeah its usually only 5-10 secs.. by default but loading Flax is really fast.. both the editor itself and game testing...

 

Yes that's huge. I know one company from that list (I work for) which makes almost 400 million a year with mobile games.

 

Just in case no one has pointed this out to you yet, if using Unreal you also have to self-report (revenues). Read their FAQ. (It's a really nice FAQ too! Very detailed.)

 

Unity, let's hear something! Now!

My brain hurts because I keep opening Unity, seeing the logo, closing it in frustration, going to this forum, seeing more frustration, and then... this....



Is this an illusion? Or real? Or... unreaaaaaal? Ahh, it follows me everywhere, it's behind me. It almost got me...

 

"Please just leave me alone! Also, I didn’t even use the Unity engine.”

 

Me too! Discord is great for chats but valuable info goes under within a pletoria of nonsense.

 

100% if it makes sense to stay then you should.. ill still keep unity around but my intent with it is no longer commercial published games.. quickly testing ideas,and porting the thousands $$$ of purchased asset over time. along with no more asset store purchases.. which i was already unhappy with them deleting asset i had purchased.(without explaining)

 

no joke, I've had this playing in my mind since the news of these runtime fee changes and additions first hit me:

 

Hey mate, it's a bit OT but I hope about to see WOTA surface at some point? That's not mean sarcastic, I'm really interested!

 

Not true, if what I'm hearing is correct. They're losing very large customers too, who value trust and consistency over chaos and treachery. Keep your eye on what larger companies are doing over the coming 1-2 years, and if what I'm hearing is right you'll see a sharp dropoff in listings for Unity developer jobs and new projects in Unity, and a sharp uptick in everything else.

 

I think that if the runtime fee stays, some clever people will continue using the Unity Editor they already master as a development tool, and release games on another runtime.

a concrete example : use unity to make 2D semi-procedural levels, with your own code and/or assets, and export the end result in Tiled json format, import into engine of your choice - or into a lightweight library.

 

Wait that's actually a decent idea lol. If you can streamline the process to produce serialized data and you use your own rendering anyway...

A bit hacky but would definitely work for some.

 

Fully agree, but they don't loose them this quarter or the next. The ad boycott though is really clever.

 

That sounds unnecessarily convoluted. Unity's editor or tools are not THAT good. Especially for 2D tilemaps even if semi-procedural.

 

average unity dev in 2028:

 

How long have you been working on your yet unreleased game?

Guess what, I am currently thinking about what is the better option switching the project to URP or to Godot, Flax or Unreal.

 

You aren't wrong, and I'll likely edit that post out. I've taken my whole blog down as it had more personal information on it than I was comfortable with, with how much attention that post has gotten, and I need to go through and prune. The quoted post itself is one of the things that ended up reading quite differently than I intended it to, and that's on me.

 

Self reporting revenue is a straightforward and sensible metric that is easy to do. Self reporting installs is asinine and divorced from revenue let alone profit.

 

Well. If you still want to take the mobile route I'd stick with Unity and URP.

Reasons:
Flax: Awful license beyond what Unity does now
Godot: Good (not great) for 2D, meh for 3D, serious performance bottle necks
Unreal: The beast, industry standard. If you aim for PC, that's it I'd say, if you aim for mobile, not so sure.

 

If URP-level graphics ok, then go for Stride. Still modern C#, good graphics, good performance. The drawback that it is a small community, but well, Unity won't have that big one either pretty soon.

This. Because revenue data you already have. You have to have, since you need it for tax purposes. But no one tracks install data. But this is the goal of Unity, exactly, using a metric no one can verify ever.

 

Based on talks with Unity personally (they try to recruit me from time to time), even just normal individual contributor employees have quite a bit of their compensation in the form of stock grants... so it's possible quite a lot of that is just paying employees.

 

Well I don't see it that black. After the dust has settled I think Unity is not that dead as many seem to believe. There is a world beside f2p games (which I personally do NOT like at all)

 

The best part being that Unity started its life in Europe and turned bad when it moved to the US.

I'm curious to see how the EU will react to this and hope we'll do something to prevent it to happen in the future.

 

So I've looked some of the EULA. Parts that stood out:

1. License

Flax grants you a revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license to download, install and use the Application solely for your personal, non-commercial purposes strictly in accordance with the terms of this Agreement (the "License").

3. Modifications to Application
Flax reserves the right to modify, suspend or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, the Application or any service to which it connects, with or without notice and without liability to you.

8. Hardware and Usage Data

You acknowledge that, as a default setting, the Engine Code will collect and send to Flax anonymous hardware and basic usage data from end users of Engine Tools. This functionality is used by Flax to improve the Engine Code. You may modify the Engine Tools settings under the License to turn off that functionality.

1. EffectofTermination.
Uponanytermination,theFlaxLicenseswillautomaticallyterminate, you may no longer exercise any of the rights granted to you by the Flax Licenses, and you must destroy all copies of the Licensed Technology in your possession and cease distributing any Products developed under this Agreement.

2. Class Action Waiver

You agree not to bring or participate in a class or representative action, private attorney general action, or collective arbitration related to the Licensed Technology or this Agreement. You also agree not to seek to combine any action or arbitration related to the Licensed Technology or this Agreement with any other action or arbitration without the consent of all parties to this Agreement and all other actions or arbitrations.

16. Amendments to this Agreement

Flax reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to modify or replace this Agreement at any time. If a revision is a material we will provide at least 30 days' notice prior to any new terms taking effect. What constitutes a material change will be determined at our sole discretion.

 

Ya, they'll all be back once they see how dire the "competition" is.

And the major developers never even budged because they actually know how to do math and see that it's quite a generous scheme compared to a flat 5% royalty on gross.

 

i was about to share that, i did not know about that..
...And they are still silent... big mistake imo, for what i can see

 

Covers the spying on users angle:

 

i'm sorry but this guy has no idea what he is talking about

 

DO NOT EDIT your post. The trolls/haters will win.

Godot is a joke as an engine for any serious/professional game developer who want to make a game more complex than a 2D platformer/game jam/$1.99 steam game, and everybody in the industry knows this. 99.9% of people defending it and asking developers to migrate and leave behind years of Unity work have never published a real game, in Unity nor Godot (or any other game engine for that matter...) and have no idea about the amount of work that an engine change would cost to the developer(s) of a real game.

Heck just check Twitter for Unity developers who are evaluating Godot, posting some < 20 minutes work GIFs of very basic 3D renders (some nice 3D models + some good lighting and materials), and see the replies of the amazed Godot "developers" who "never saw something as beautiful as this on Godot"...

 

I've just taken a look into Godot and want to quote some updated information, since I don't see it posted:

"Just to note on my side. This is a very old issue, almost five years old. But somehow it keeps resurfacing in social media, so I think its a good time to add some clarifications.

Everything mentioned originally has been 100% corrected (and I want to thank @vblanco20-1 who provided many of the original suggestions):

• Linked Lists no longer used in hot paths
• RID Owner uses O(1) allocation (array)
• We have a superb implementation of HashMap and HashSet in Godot 4, we even took care to ensure the hashing functions for each Godot datatype generate the best entropy, and hence have the best distribution possible.
• We use worst case memory allocators (despite the name this is a good thing, means memory grows to accommodate the game needs on demand and stays there) and pools almost everywhere performance matters.
• Data oriented structures are used now extensively where it matters.
• Original issues raised regarding culling have both been resolved in both Godot 3 and Godot 4.
• Threading now is used extensively.
• The list of improvements since this issue was opened is far too long. Five years is a long time.

Even though what is mentioned on this issue has already been taken care of, there still is work pending to do optimization wise in Godot 4:

• Multithreading in many areas still needs work (mainly on the scene side, this is very new).
• Some locking in a few areas could be better.
• Godot still does not support texture/mesh streaming, which should help a lot with I/O performance.
• And really many other things.

But the situation now is day and night compared to 2018. There has been literally hundreds of pull requests geared to optimize Godot in the meantime, to the point that Godot 4 is pretty much all new code rewritten from scratch.

There is also a lot of continued work being done to optimize different areas and this has not stopped."

- reduz

source:
https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/23998

 

non-commercial

I didn't find the "commercial" TOS though.
This plus the 4% Rev-share made me skip looking at it.

 

Reticence at a time like this is a BIG MISTAKE

 

Juan Linietsky (reduz)
Ariel Manzur (punto-)

That is the guys that make the engine, if they leave and make a paid version, noone knows what will happen to it.

Is just a huge gamble, unless you can personally guarantee that Godot will keep be perfectly developed for all new future reqirements by someone else forever, which is by default impossible.

There is just zero guarantees with the open source, unless you are ready to make the engine yourself than focus on create a game instead.

 

<said wrong things because i missed the tim sweeney fund being old> sorry

e: The more you look the more it looks like unity being where it is now was a joint venture of several actors.

 

it is in fact worrying to see mane indie devs saying "i'm going to stay with unity because my f2p game will not become succesful". They definitely don't know about among us

 

Flax is in the process of fixing their EULA. That won't be the case. It will be protective of the end users.

 

I’m kinda biased because I live here but I suspect as soon as they put some of their plans into enforcable legal text (especially the fee waiver if u don’t use AppLovin and if it is indeed retroactive) they AT LEAST get fined because it’s definetly illegal here.
Worst case for them, the comission starts working on new legistlation/legal frameworks together with the gamedev studios against companies who want to pull a unity in the future.

 

Yep, and that's one of the reasons why we are not choosing Flax. We do not want to get involved with an engine which might have code copied from Unity/Unreal and could have legal issues if it becomes popular. The information that I have is that that was not the only code which was copied from other engines. It seems that the issue was solved time ago, but who knows...

 

Well, try MonoGame, it is c# and no strings attached
https://community.monogame.net/t/how-good-of-a-replacement-is-monogame-for-unity/19448/7

 

so I must be dreaming when I see my fps inside the editor drop to 30 after importing 3 or 4 vroid models...
the bigger the project grows the worse the performace gets, I can get better 3d performance on rpg maker and I'm not even being sarcastic.

 

But we can be sure what will happen to it in that case.

In the worst of this case, engine updates will stop. You will be limited to the last supported development technologies, save changes you make yourself.

Games you have completed and no longer maintain will still work as they previously had.

Games you have in progress can be finished on the GODOT version you last downloaded.

You will likely want to find a new engine for your next game, or join a fork if one is available.

Holdouts will keep a fork of the repo open for at least a little while, leaving you to transition on your own schedule.

Such is the way of Open Source.

 

Jaimi, yeah, we will support UMA but it cannot ported to Unreal. Not that I want Unreal, I want to use Unity. Maybe we can help you out. UMA has been a huge part of our game and our work with clients. Happily be there for you.I have some worries about the UMA bodies change so much that our assets will be unusable.

 

Can you please stop spreading misinformation?

Ariel Manzur has long since left active Godot development and founded Lone Wolf Technology, which does Godot console porting and publishing services. He already earns money from Godot by not making Godot itself closed source. He also does FOSS centric consulting on the side. These guys live and breathe open source software.

Juan Linietsky also does not actively code for Godot anymore and only functions more like a technical lead. He founded W4Games, which offers Enterprise support for Godot, they're also working on affordable Unity style console porting for all major consoles that'll be cheaper than Unity Pro. They're also working on various cloud services for Godot. The company recently attracted 8.5 million from OSS centric venture capital investors. The VC investment group that funds W4Games also pledged 10k/month to the Godot Foundation for engine development. Long story short, Juan is already making money from Godot without making it closed source. There's no need to! These guys believe in FOSS.

Do yourself a favor and read how Godot is governed and who is actually actively developing it. It's public information.

 

And is lost to time. You search a forum for info first and see if someone's already talked about your point/issue.

 

Probably not much, really. The last MIT version still exists and if by the time the engine hasn't deteriorated to utter rubbish then there will be a lot of interest from the community to keep it going somehow.

Why do these things always keep popping up? Open Source is problematic in the way that it needs donations and/or active voluntary devs as well as good lead/organization to stay active and in steady improvement. Organization and direction are always a probem. Also getting full time developers since, so far the private industry has kept hiring a large portion of talented devs who then of course cannot work on an open project any more.
BUT the source code will always stay available in at least the latest version before a branch went private. Can still be downloaded and used or even continued by anyone.

Whereas proprietary software gives you how many guarantees, these days?
Hint: I don't know if you've looked at the first post in this thread.

 

They refer to the commercial software as the Product. I'm not a lawyer but my interpretation is that if you violate patents, s/w laws or incorporate illegal s/w with the engine then they will try to "cure" the issue and if that can't be done then presumably it would allow them to revoke the license. It specifies what violations would presumably do this, there might be language in there that states it's not limited to those though. At which point is it's card de blanc for them, but I can't confirm that. I leave this exercise to anyone moving to Flax.