Will Unity be opening its source any time soon?

I wonder if Unity will be forced to open its source in a foreseeable future?

It is kicked in a bum by UE4 in AAA 3d department and Godot is kinda pushing hard in 2d/simple3d. Not to mention myriads of smaller players.

Unity is a juggernaut now but I wonder for how long with competitors having their source open and => much lesser risks and greater possibilities for developers.

We are invested deep in Unity and it is very hard to migrate. But I can feel the tension around, everybody working with Unity I know are considering moving out, none actually does thou) But everybody is talking about it more and more.

Edit: don't get me wrong, I'm a long time Unity user and I'm pro-unity, this topic is born out of some frustrations with the current and future state of the engine of my choice. I personally do hope it opens its source one day, as I believe it will benefit from that decision a lot.

 

As far as I remember, people who use the paid versions can have access to the code. For the rest, why would Unity Technologies give away their hard work for nothing?

 

We use paid version. Source access is not granted. It is hidden by quite some paywall I don't even know the height of.

And look at UE4 it is open source yet doing fine.

 

There is zero indication of Unity going open source any time soon. Source is available at an enterprise level.

 

They've certainly made lots of calculations before doing that and if they did, it's most probably because they get big and lucrative advantages out of it. They probably win more than their users do.

Why would you want Unity to be open source anyway?

 

As of now, I'm facing several limitations with assets whos developers are limited by either bugs in unity or inability to access some internal functions.

I also happened to be talking with guys making one of the most known big Unity games (yet still Souce is too expensive even for them) and they are crying about the inability to tweak stuff.

In the end, it is a question of security. With source open, you can ignore it, but you know it is there to tinker with if the time comes.

 

They're generally pretty happy to help big devs if they reach out.

 

I know it to be different from the first hands.

 

However Unreal 4 was stripped from pretty much every middleware and third party code it used to have in previous versions. They also had a fresh start with no backwards compability to maintain and a lot was rewritten from scratch.

I don't think the same will happen (possibly never) with Unity as it does not make sense business wise or technically and source access does not have a such high need for the effort. Don't forget that with Unity source access you don't only get/pay for the Unity source but you also probably have to pay for some sort of Umbra, Enlighten, etc. license fee or have other type agreements done which not all of them are willing to do with small hobbyist or developers.

 

It's not as useful as most would think IMO. There are a number of assumptions being made here, like the problem in question is worth fixing, and the developers in question are capable. Both very questionable because a codebase the size of Unity in mostly C++ is a whole different beast then the api's it exposes.

We do know that there are parts of unity based on open libraries, but guess what hardly anyone wants to touch those. Even when someone writes an alternative that exposes the source, like has happened with the navmesh stuff, nobody wants to touch it. It's just way more complex then people think and they say no I'll live with it or find an easier solution.

The reality with most large open source C/C++ projects is very few people modify them in the context of their own project.

I think the larger idea is good I just don't think open sourcing Unity as a whole is the most helpful approach. Exposing more low level api's for C++ code and open sourcing parts written in C#, makes more sense I think. And they have been doing a good amount of that recently.

 

This is on the point, yet I won't say I could agree. Until its code is not a mess (which it could be) I know a lot of developers capable enough to benefit from open source. Just take a peek at Godot, it is actually catching up, and upcoming C# integration was mainly done by a single man! And Unity with its closed code might become less and less attractive over time. With ~1500 employees they haven't implemented no good terrain, no capable HLAPI (current one is a mere prototype that even wasn't meant to be used for more than a blueprint by its creator, but that thing actually has source and is currently in the process of being fixed by a non Unity guy, hooray!) and list goes on and on.

And don't get me wrong, I'm very much into Unity and working with it every day for years, but year after year I see the world changing and Unity is losing its attractiveness when compared with other solutions. Might be that open source is not a solution and proper management of 1500 people is, but as to date, we get what we get, and community might be capable to fix all those problems if Unity itself cannot.

 

Speaking from first hand, unity was very helpful in this regard, support, expedited bug fixes and feature requests, and on one occasion a custom build of the editor to solve a problem that technically wasn’t their responsibility.

Also speaking first hand, having acesss to the source is a challenge to maintain, particularly with regards to all the moving parts, and merging changes with how fast and often the code base is updated.

Just to clarify, ‘available’ means for an additional cost. It’s not just part of the enterprise level, it’s an add on.

 

That's nice!

 

I don't see Unity using opening their source as a means to increase market share in the AAA segment. The development houses in the AAA segment are the only ones that can already afford to get licensed access to Unity's code as it is. Just making it cheaper for them to get access to something they already can get access to is unlikely to change the situation.

Unity already dominates mobile and is strong in the mid quality and indie segments, so I don't see much boost from Unity opening their source their either.

 

This is one of the reasons I prefer Unity. First UT handle the licensing for us, and that may often be the most tedious part of the technology chain when you have to combine 4+ pieces other than the game engine itself. Then the second-most tedious part, which is the actual integration of said middleware SDKs. I'm happy to skip the annoyance of poring over release notes to get SDKs to compile and can just get on with designing useless crap (i.e. games).

Others may choose UE4 instead for exactly the same reasons - they only need a few pieces of middleware and already have them sorted, and want the lighter engine without all the 3rd party stuff. It works for some. So if people want source access UE4 is the path of least resistance in that respect, with the tradeoff being more work on integrating/keeping track of licences for 3rd party bits.

 

Personally, I don't see how Unity will go open source any time soon. That being said, however, I'd like to point out that going open source and opening up the source are two different things, and the former can at least potentially benefit both Unity and its users as it has been the case with many other projects.

If a project is under an open source license, it doesn't only mean that you can see its code for reference when something goes wrong, but also mean that anyone can fix bugs and make improvements.

This might not sound like a big deal if you are not familiar with how open source works. But you can just look how actively developed Godot project - an open source game engine that is quite less popular than Unity - is to see its potential impact. Currently, 497 people have contributed code to the project, making almost 100 commits on daily basis with 2,664 forks. If they can keep that pace, it will likely become quite a serious competitor in near future.

Actually, something like this has happened all over the industry in the past 15 years or so. Many large companies with an established user base have gone out of business or been forced to open source their own products because they couldn't keep up with open source competitors.

However, open source is not entirely a bad thing for a business since many companies have created a working business model around an open source project.

Having an active open source project means they can have fewer in-house developers to make a quality product. And there are still areas that can be monetized, like contents (i.e. Asset Store), training, technical support, certifications, and more. They can even continue selling their software as a commercial product, especially if they can dual license it with such viral license as GPL.

I'm not saying that Unity should or will go open source soon, even though I hope they would personally. But if they do, it doesn't have to be like they are giving up their business or there wouldn't be any difference to those who already have access to the source.

So, I think it's something we shouldn't simply dismiss as a crazy idea, especially when we're starting to see some competitors emerging from the open source front.

 

I have a rather negative view on the impact open sourcing Unity would even have.

Open source works best when you have a lot of people participating within the same industry. This industry (AAA primarily) has yet to understand that open sourcing core tech so that companies can concentrate on the end product, is truly a tide that lifts all boats. It frees companies to concentrate on new and interesting end products, which is what drives capital investment. That last part is really lost on the majority of developers in this industry.

So what I think would happen, given current and past history, is developers would customize stuff for their game and give almost nothing back. That's what they do right now, why would they do any different in another context?

 

Unreal is not open source. Blender is open source. Open source is different in some significant ways compared to having source code access. For one thing, if Unreal was open source, they would not be able to have the royalty licensing that they do. With that in mind, Unity 100% absolutely will not ever be open source.

--Eric

 

People are making the confusion because EpicGames made their engine code available on git hub: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue4-on-github

 

Yeah having its source open is what I meant talking about Unreal. And they sure as hell are benefiting from it.

That is a pity to say truthfully. Just opening a source as UE did and allowing for pull requests with a tight QA might improve Unity far beyond its current state. As @mysticfall said, look at Godot, it is so impressive how fast it is developed.

 

No, it's not. Not even close, SRP HD. Adam series etc...

Unity's providing most of the source it controls for people going forward, things like high level networking, and tools as well as things that matter as C# for us to control the engine without needing full source... but allows some control. Yeah people can license the source but anyone who is an individual also with a game to make really shouldn't be looking for any source at all IMHO.

A financed team with unique needs? sure. But for them it's not actually a problem.

I doubt it. Those 497 people will need to still navigate software patents of things Unity freely licenses. Those people will need to all be as smart as Unity's carefully-vetted hired staff that come from the game industry. Unity has some of the smartest people in the entire game industry working on it's future right now. People like Sébastien Lagarde who dramatically contributed to Dice among other things, and some of the smartest developers ever to work in AAA game dev like Mike Acton and Andreas Fredriksson - and a host of others (sorry if you're not mentioned, I'd run out of e-paper).

Quality or quantity? Not belittling anyone who has contributed (probably very smart people did) just that throwing a number in the air never tells you the quality.

 

Are you sure that game developers should care about movie makers? How does it benefit us?

It is not even funny to mention HLAPI in this context. It was developed as a mere prototype (blueprint) on how you could use LLAPI to create a high-level library and was never meant to be used in production. Its sad buggy state is a joke actually. This is a bad example of Unity doing its job.

And do you know that HLAPI can't function without some internal calls which makes it impossible to be included in the project without compiling as dll and replacing one in Unity's folder by it? How is that an example of Unity doing open source the right way?

And yes, Unity is leading (except it has far worse adoption in AA - AAA space than UE) and will continue to lead for a long time and I glad it does as I use Unity a lot. I only wonder for how long and how much better it could potentially be if to open its source.

 

So on one hand you lambast Unity for apparently not being as visually attractive then you ask why should you care? Even though you know full well that drives tech toward better visuals. The optimisation comes with innovations from smart staff, compute shaders etc. But first the problem must be there - making movies - for a company to solve that.

 

I lambast Unity for not being visually attractive? What are you talking about? I'm making stuff with Unity so pretty one could never tell it is Unity. Unity could be made very pretty. Yet I do it with the very heavy use of assets (Beautify, Amplify's stuff, lots of vegetation and terrain shaders and so on) from the store. So it is not so much onto Unity itself but more on a community.

 

You tell me.

 

I'm talking about adoption, not prettiness.

 

I don't understand, because it doesn't make sense to me, sorry. For adoption, wouldn't it be marmoset or even substance painter?

 

I'm sorry too. My goal is not to start an argument but to make a point about Unity losing a chunk of attractiveness due to been close-sourced.

And what about substance and marmoset? They are very different beasts why do you even mention them? By that logic, Maya beats everything. But it is comparing apples to stones.

I'm talking about industry adoption. You can count Unity's AA AAA projects by fingers, and no one has enough fingers to count UE based games in that field.

 

Sure, but, why do we care about that? I am not a AA or AAA studio, so why do I care what the adoption rate for those is?

 

The people at Unity Technologies know what they are doing, don't you think? What is your real reason for asking?

 

Because that is the clear indication of trust to the technology.

I stated my reason a little while ago. And if we will look at the state of Unity as a cutting-edge 3d engine (not a mobile 2d one) I won't say UT people know what they are doing too well by the very adoption rates I'm talking about above.

What do they know very well is a business side of things and oh my god Asset Store is awesome, you actually can achieve an AAA look by spending a ton there. And I did and I do. But once again that proves the statement: Community > Company.

 

Ah, I don't know. The needs of a AAA studio and my needs are quite different so adoption rate by AAAs doesn't seem like an important statistic for me. But maybe that's just me.

 

While I have no doubt that many talented people are working at Unity Technology, I don't think the company could be the only place where you can find skilled developers in game industry.

Over the past decade, we saw even such software giants like Oracle or Microsoft losing significant number of their customers to open source alternatives, and it wasn't because they had fewer number of talented developers than Unity Technology has.

I know that the game industry hasn't been very eager to embrace the open source movement as other sectors in the IT industry did. But being slow in adoption doesn't mean it will never happen.

In the days when even C#/.NET itself is actively developed on Github by so many contributors, it's hard to believe Unity Technology alone has such a monopoly of talents that will secure them from any open source competitions.

 

Unity has already started on the path required to make more source available. It's a generic engine and they have been working on making it more modular, which are two things that inherently lend themselves well to opening more of it up.

So over time I think you will see it open up more and more. Probably never the core engine, but the core isn't what most people need or want access to anyways. But overall more open is a given I think.

When it comes to open source, the main thing I have to say is open source is driven by individual developers and developer culture more then anything. We don't have more open source because all of you people making games aren't contributing anything much. And that's where it starts. You want big companies to open source, look in the mirror for why they aren't.

 

I would argue it's clear indication for tool for the job. It merely means that they chose UE4 because they want to work with a C++ driven engine 9 times out of 10. They might want it all C++ and they don't want the middleware Unity builds in or C#.

Basically UE4 is an ideal template engine. Teams need to rip half of it out still and change it, but it's great for teams like that. A lot of boilerplate is done and there aren't any surprises. For that reason they can't use something like Unity which makes some pretty strong decisions for the engine (C#, middleware). Source is not the issue, but with Unity they would remove a lot more than they would remove from UE4.

This isn't quality, it's based on requirements they evaluate. And I think if we want to be picky, AAA roll their own but A+ will use off the shelf and heavily mod it.

TLDR? Unity decides for the developer on a lot of things. That's something that can be really welcome or not welcome at all. Unity can't really be both, unfortunately. It's the area of development Unity sits in and it can't be relocated, only modified or worked with.

Yeah of course. It's not one or the other as Unity also benefits from that in addition to having people paid to work full time all of the time on it as opposed to the occasional github activity when the mood strikes.

 

That's exactly why number of contributors, or more importantly code frequency is such an important metric in open source projects.

Whereas the ability to improve code quality and scope in commercial projects tend to depend on the budget, it usually depends on the momentum in open source projects.

If an open source project has only a few contributors, it's usually abandoned when their motivation dies out. In that case, a full time, paid development team can easily outperform it since money is such a strong motivator.

But once an open source project gains momentum and hits a certain threshold it begins to roll on its own. For instance, more than 4,300 developers have contributed to Linux kernel last year, and few company can put that much development resources and remain profitable.

So, as you said it's not one way or the other, and Unity is already benefiting from various open source technologies. All I'm saying is that having a full time development team, or very skillful developers doesn't necessarily mean it won't get any serious open source competitors ever.

 

Without turning it into an observation of semantics, I'd love Linux to be in most homes instead of Windows but I don't think that will ever happen, and there are several reasons why it won't which should probably be another (or several) threads

 

If you really want to know why larger studios pick Unreal instead of Unity, and they always will, I can give you with a single word:

Control.

Larger development houses need to take control of everything running each frame of the game executable.
A) C++ is absolutely needed to achieve that; C# is forbidden as it takes control out of your hands.
B) Unity is heavily reliant on C# and .NET libraries that major studios judge unnecessary overhead.

After studio considering such obstacles, that's pretty much game over already for Unity in that matter, studio will simply download UE4 source and integrate internal proprietary C++ libraries and custom tools made in-house.
Source access is a nice-to-have, but the real reason is simply C++ and level of control it provides, really.

 

I...don't think you actually read my post.

--Eric

 

Sorry for the off topic question. But do you mean game logic written in C# usally has prohibitive overhead, compared to that which is written in C++?

I'm not really experienced in game development, but I'd be surprised if typical video games have a bottleneck in game logic, rather than in rendering process.

 

I'm guessing garbage collection.

 

Unreal has Blueprints, which is 10X slower than C++, and therefore slower than C#. Garbage collection is generally avoidable, so overall I doubt using C# for game logic would really be an issue for anyone. If you're using it to replace a major, performance-critical part of the engine, such as the terrain system, it might be more of an issue, although these days you'd be using shaders to do a lot of the heavy lifting for that sort of thing anyway.

--Eric

 

(I was just guessing what he probably meant. I as well think that C# for game logic is fine, even great)

 

I want to echo this as well. AAA developers rely heavily on custom tools, middleware, and workflows that rely on having this control. When these devs run into a Unity bug that they can’t dig into the source to fix you can see the veins pop out of their forehead. This is why a lot of the bigger ones still have their own engine. However, with Unreal being the only commercial engine with this level of control the answer is easy for them.

I’m a Unity guy and I have worked at larger and smaller studios that have used it. However, when you use it you need to accept a loss of control. You may be unable to ship due to a Unity bug without upgrading and breaking everything. Or you may be unable to reduce start-up times to match a native application. Unity as a final product is a black box that can be impossible to fix to reach native performance/control.

The sooner a unity dev accepts that, the happier the dev will be. However, larger devs aren’t willing to make that sacrifice, and I don’t really blame them. Unity is a shortcut and there is a price to pay for that shortcut. For smaller/medium teams that would never be able to spend the time to manage the controlling factors that a AAA dev expects it can be a valuable way to get a cross-platform product released. Which is why I am still a fan.

Plus as others have mentioned, Unity hires some amazing talent (especially recently). I have hope they can continue to evolve the product. With the new ECS and data driven code design, the engine is definitely keeping things interesting.

 

I can see how some studios may want to retain maximum control of a game engine they use. But I think the quoted post is a bit misleading in blaming it on C#. It's mainly an issue of how much of platform API or source code is exposed to the public, rather than in which language it is written.

And I think just releasing the source code is not sufficient to ensure that level of control. When a framework or platform is not designed to be extended, modifying its source code is simply asking for trouble, especially if you ever want to upgrade it in future.

If big studios indeed prefer Unreal for its freedom of control, I suppose it's specifically designed that way to allow such extensions. But as I don't have much knowledge of the game engine, so I can't really tell if it is actually true.

At any rate, what binding language a game engine uses is quite irrelevant to the problem. So, if it is indeed such a big problem with AAA studios, I suppose similar things can be done in Unity without its dropping the support for C#.

 

Let's be realistic though. How many AAA developers have a license that doesn't include source access? Unless Unity Tech charges a truly exorbitant fee the cost of licensing source code is a relatively minor investment compared to the overall costs of developing a game that is typically labelled as AAA.

 

Plus, Unreal Engine 4 implements a Garbage Collection as well:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/lates...ture/Objects/Optimizations/#garbagecollection

 

Oh relative to the whole project the price is small. However, it is a cost that isn't typically thought of upfront by the production/business side. The problems usually rear their head late in development when tensions/frustrations/cost overruns are high. Having engineers work to try to diagnose difficult issues, then requesting to get the source code later is typically an "unexpected" cost to the development late in the process. Also Unity tries to get companies like this to pay for enterprise support in addition to source code support which is a pretty hefty price tag to swallow. After factoring in all of the seats, source code, and enterprise support, Unreal's 5% is typically a much better financial prospect. Plus it gives them the source "out of the box" without all of the seat management problems that come with Unity. It just doesn't make sense for AAA development to be honest.

 

The game industry has a thing with control. It's understandable but it's often not balanced. And very often we do a bad job at evaluating the cost/benefit in the larger business context.

It was one of the first things I noticed when I got into game dev after a decade in web dev. The environments we work with in games, limited resources, has ingrained into the industry a natural bias towards more low level control. While web dev with basically unlimited resources put it's focus on productivity.

So while there are times when you need it, that large companies just defacto need it at this point in time, I don' buy into. I've been tech lead on large games so I know the context. I know it well enough to know that if anyone can screw it up, it's a larger company. The bias is just inherently more strong there, to almost ridiculous levels actually.

 

I agree, I think you make a very good point about control sometimes being a detriment to productivity during development. Which is why I'm fine with using Unity. It's a tool that quickly moves me forward.

I'm sure this could be an entire thread in its own, but I would guess the controlling mentality stems from games historically being written to very specific hardware. The hardware often did not have cross-platform APIs and required very specific engineering to get the game functional. Where web development (I imagine), cross browser/device support is a fundamental tenant of their development process.