1.5 years of learning unity gone down the shitter. here I come, godot
even if they backtrack, trust is ruined at this point. this only makes sense if you’re trying to destroy the company intentionally and short your stock on the way out. what the fuck
1.5 years of learning unity gone down the shitter.
And this is the real damage to their business here. They clearly lost sight of their business model: Create an army of developers who know their product very well, so that it’s on a short list of products studios are all but forced to consider.
A wave of developers who know soemthing other than Unity or Unreal has the potential to turn the games development ecosystem totally on its head. They didn’t shoot themselves on the foot, they possibly shot themselves in the femoral artery.
They didn’t shoot themselves on the foot, they possibly shot themselves in the femoral artery.
I myself have been describing it as them shooting themselves in the chest, and are now bleeding out on the floor asking how it happened.
6 years of professional experience for me, only engine I’ve used.
The CEO did sell a bunch of shares before this was announced, I hear.
That’s clickbait journalism.
He sold 2000 shares for $40/share, which he then immediately bought back for $1.42/share.
https://finance.yahoo.com/screener/insider/RICCITIELLO JOHN S
You’re describing something worse.
It’s actually neither of those, the biggest impact is free-to-play games. Hearthstone, Legends of Runeterra, virtually every Unity mobile game in the market… Having to pay per install has huge potential for abuse and can cost a fortune for games with millions of downloads.
JFC, I just learned that they are retroactively applying this new rule. This means that games that are out already or have been on sale for multiple years will have to pay the runtime fee too. Insane. They can bankrupt a studio before they even release their next game.
I still can’t believe that retroactive fees like that are legal.
They aren’t and likely won’t hold up in court.
Gotta pay the lawyers to go to court though.
Welcome to capitalism! Ain’t it grand!
Because they’re not charging for previous installs, not new ones, and they operate technically on a free “subscription” model it’s going to be hard to challenge legally
I don’t think they can enforce that, right? I assume that would be a change of the contract, which they can’t just do willy nilly.
Yeah, I think that’s straight up illegal and I would simply refuse to pay.
If they can retroactively change terms, why can’t I, as a bonafide counterparty in that agreement? Maybe something like a 100% discount on runtime fees for days that end with ‘y’.
Otherwise I could simply “retroactively apply” a 100% discount on my lease or new car purchase.
The correct answer and what all studios/devs should do: tell them to retroactively pound sand and ditch Unity for all future projects.
I don’t think this is true? Their site https://unity.com/pricing-updates says “The fee applies to new installs beginning January 1, 2024”
New installs not new releases. So if you put out a game a few years back and suddenly a bunch of people start installing it on their new PCs, you’d get hit with this fee… assuming it is legally enforceable.
Hell, even if it isn’t strictly legally enforceable, if you still need to deal with Unity in some way in future you could be forced into dealing with this fee in order to get Unity’s cooperation.
Oh yeah good point. The word “retroactively” just gave me the idea that it would apply to old installs, because this whole thing is about installs.
Still, that is a major dick move.
Pricing should protect indie and small businesses. When it destroys those, we need government to step in because we’re on track to create oligarchs in every industry that are too big to fail.
From their FAQ, looks like Unity doesn’t have any real way of dealing with pirated or fake installs. Their FAQ says you have to work with them when that happens so they can correct your bill. It doesn’t say Unity will automatically filter those installs out.
pirated? they want developers to pay Unity for people pirating their game???
Officially no, but the wording on the FAQ says it’s the developer’s job to take it up with them to resolve it. So it’s clear they don’t have any safeguard and only after you’re affected you can talk to them lmfao.
Does the Unity Runtime Fee apply to pirated copies of games? We are happy to work with any developer who has been the victim of piracy so that they are not unfairly hurt by unwanted installs.
Same thing goes for “install-bombing”:
We are not going to charge a fee for fraudulent installs or “install bombing.” We will work directly with you on cases where fraud or botnets are suspected of malicious intent.
So not only are the fees outrageous, but now devs are responsible for making sure this whole system isn’t being abused. It’s not gonna be long until people figure out how the install count is updated, and will proceed to weaponize it lmfao.
and don’t forget that this is “we’ll work with you” - i.e. you’d better build your own analytics into your game to prove your case otherwise unity can go “well assume 10% are bad installs - now pay for 90%”
Oh fuck no. Silksong is never coming out.
Is there a way to convert it to use Godot or Unreal? I understand nothing about programming a game but… oh damn
Not really. Assets are more or less portable with some effort, but not the logic. There are tools to help you port your code but it more or less requires a complete re-write.
though to be fair, a big part of writing the logic is figuring out the logic, designing the system and interactions etc. so while it is a big task, its much smaller than starting over from scratch
Not necessarily since different toolsets have different logic operators and transformers and the logic isn’t always 1-1. I’ve moved enough code from even the same language but different implementations, nothing to say of entirely different system and languages.
Speedruns show how much of a bodge jobs a lot of games are and how much they could be broken.
Jist like in writing, you run the tool, you proof-read, repeat
Fair enough, but it’s still a massive time and resource sink. You also can’t really implement new features during the re-write lest project creep gets out of control, and even after the rewrite the product will be less stable than the original for quite a while until it’s had sufficient time to mature.
It might be worth the investment to ditch proprietary software from a predatory company and jump to open source though, which can’t really pull shit like this in its future.
Not instantly. This could take months or even years of additional work.
Someone has pulled off porting an Unreal map over to Unity before, but a lot of the maps lighting and other effects were completely lost. Look up Stanley parable rocket league. It’s definitely possible to port Unity maps to other engines and vice versa, but it would take a lot of work and a lot of rebuilding everything from scratch
So Davey Wreden, writer and creator of the stanley parable, has a brother who is a youtuber, DougDoug. When ultra deluxe dropped Davey joined his brother playing through the game again. Anyway, at one point in the video he mentioned that in order to port over the rocket league map they needed to hire an outside consultant to port it.
You can port over a lot of C# code into Godot, but there are things that are engine specific. However, they are similar enough that you can just work on refactoring without sgarting from scratch.
I’ve ported a few of my projects from Unity and it’s not impossible, it’s just a lot of copy and pasting and making a few changes
That’s good to hear! I’m thinking of learning Godot, so that means all the knowhow is transferable, yay
While it would potentially be easier to learn all the not-programming stuff that’s different whilst sticking with a programming language you’re familiar with, I would recommend also having a play with GDScript too. It’s well documented and pretty easy to get started with (syntactically it’s basically Python.)
It’s doable, but a tedious pain in the ass.
Probably not but the good news is a lot of the pains of developing a game is that unlike most projects you need 10 artists for every one programmer
So, while core logic will likely change, all the other assets and planning is done. It shouldn’t be as bad as remaking it from scratch
I’m not an artist but some of that work may be done in the engine, and so is not simple imported into it. I assume much is though.
I am not an artist either, so take this with a grain of salt, but a quick Google search suggests the two should be convertible
Migrating really large software is incredibly time consuming and difficult. My background is with backend servers, not games, but some large framework migrations we’ve done were a multi year effort and IMO they weren’t nearly as big or fundamental as game engines can be (though we did have to maintain near perfect uptime, which isn’t a concern for an unreleased game).
No, they’d have to start from scratch. They’re entirely different engines and everything is very specific to the engine, down to the tooling and languages used.
It depends.
I’m working on a game with Unity and the software design has been done in a way that keeps most the game itself as data, and uses the Unity stuff mainly as something to display multiple views on the state of the data (a 3D view of the game space, multiple UI elements diving into slices of the data an so on) - basically a Model-View-Controller Architecture, so moving from Unity to something else doesn’t require a rewrite (in fact such structure makes it possible, for example, to with some ease change the game’s visuals from 3D to 2D), though it would still be quite a lot of work.
However my game is survival-management in space (within one or more generated star-systems, so it was simplified down to a 2D plane) which doesn’t relly on Unity things like terrain, navigation meshes or even colliders to constrain the movement of objects in the game, so calculating “what happens next” (say, the movement of planets or the guidance of ships going from planet to planet) gets decided using Maths at the data level without going through the Unity layer, and Unity is mainly the means to get user input comes and the layer that gets updated with the state of the data at the end of each cycle (i.e. game objects get moved around) which it the uses for rendering.
Other games which are not reliant on Unity to do the heavy lifting for objects interactiong with other objects on a 3D space, such as 2D platformers, can probably use a similar architecture, but for example something like Valheim or Planet Crafter (were the player controls a humanoid avatar on a 3D world which is mainly terrain) is probably much harder to move out from Unity,
Not to mention I’m sure they use third party tools to help with things. Bigger games like Genshin Impact for example, are on an older version of Unity where they heavily modified the engine to suit their needs. That would take a tremendous amount of work to move, and they’d have to redesign their entire graphics pipeline. Which also Godot has gotten better, but is still far behind the others in terms of high end graphics. That’s why it’s usually seen as the go to for indies, and not so much high end games. Also they don’t plan on making anything like DOTS, but I’m not sure how relevant that actually is.
Third-party tools might or not be a problem depending on whether those tools also support other frameworks or there being equivalent tools for other frameworks.
Again, it depends how tightly coupled the game is to the framework (directly or via 3rd party tools), but yeah, the more work you’ve sunk into the Unity-specific side of things and the more tightly coupled your game is to it (i.e. doing everything via Unity rather than, as I did, make the game run as a data model which then dictates how the visual layer - which is where Unity mainly is - is updated) the harder it will be to move.
Mind you, the Unity guys really pushed for devs to go via it for everything (it’s software design and architecture aren’t exactly great) in a sort of spaghetti design, so I expect a lot of indie devs using Unity who don’t have quiet as much experience and/or it’s not really broad, will get burned due to falling into that specific trap.
The Godot tools are significantly behind Unity. Unity has a much bigger community and a built in store for their addons. Godot has neither, and has been around for less time. Godot doesn’t even have a built in terrain tool for example, and the most advanced plug-in for it is still pretty basic.
I don’t think one can say “it will be a problem” because there are so many different ways to do a game (do you really think “terrain tools” matter in something like Terraria???!), all one can say is that “it might be a problem”, which is what I’m saying, and judging from my experience with it it will be more of a problem for people doing 3D worlds with terrain, pathing and so on than for people doing 2D or, like me using 3D as a sort of moving gallery to show in a nice way what would otherwise be pretty bland.
Whilst I’m currently on vacations, next week I’ll have to start evaluating both Godot and Unreal for my project - which, as I said, whilst it does show things in a 3D view, is architectured so that the game essentially runs in data space with user-input coming from the framework (and it’s pretty easy to change that because it’s centralized) and on the other side the framework rendering visual views of the data.
My plans to upgrate to the latest Unity are now shelved and I’ve already planned how I’ll remove the last pieces of Unity influence (basically Vector2) from my data layer and make sure it’s totally separate.
Oh my…what a waste of time, money, old games will be removed I imagine, knowledge. All to gain what? Developers are already moving away from Unity. It’s one company after another going to hell and causing damage.
I love OSs and I contribute to a few projects, but using godot for a project of silksong calibre is asking for a disaster
I’m desperate. I loved Hollow Knight so much.
Have you worked with Godot? The developers of Cassette Beasts seem pretty happy with it.
I don’t want Silksong developed on Unity. Scrap it, start fresh. I’ll wait.
Scrap it. Start fresh.
The number of games that should do this is too damn high
The number of games that can do this is too damn low
The number of gamed that want to do this is pretty much nil
Pain, suffering and debugging
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The difference here is that it’s pissing off businesses, not users.
Yeah businesses can sue you for pulling out the rug like this.
Users cannot.
Pokemon is made on the unity engine, so one of the scariest legal teams in the world. Nintendo doesn’t like it when people take a little whipped cream off of the mcflurry, and this threatens to take the whole McFlurry.
Oh that’s gonna be a treat to watch, assholes punching each other
What exact grounds would a business sue for?
Retroactive change of terms for already released unchanged products? I don’t know the legal details but it seems pretty strange that they can just say they will charge over something for products that were finished and released under different terms before all this. The devs may not even be opening those projects on Unity anymore.
There’s nothing implicit about “opening the project in unity” that needs to be a trigger for terms to change.
If you make and distribute a game made in unity, then you are distributing some unity IP. You would need the license holder to grant you permission to do that. The terms you agree to with unity are what grant you the right to distribute this.
So this has very little to do with “have you opened the editor lately”, and is more similar to when e.g. Dead By Daylight has to stop selling a dlc character because they don’t renew an agreement with the rights holders.
That’s because digital media licensing is a whole circus. We aren’t talking of using someone else’s likeness or characters. What if Microsoft Office decides that they will charge retroactively about every file previously created with those tools regardless of what compensation they may already have agreed to and received? Does that seem even remotely reasonable in the least?
Do publishing houses need to pay leases to printer manufacturers per page printed on top of their own material costs? Do they need to pay every time a new reader opens the book the first time?
It’s not reasonable to just go “the company said so, therefore this is how it has to work”, that’s just being a chump.
No it is not - those businesses ARE the users. Unless by user you mean consumers
My real point is that one of these userbases has lawyers and are highly risk-averse.
Pedantically though, yes.
Unity games include Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, Pokémon GO, Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail and Marvel Snap.
I doubt The Pokémon Company, MiHoYo and Marvel/Disney will just let Unity shove this decision at them, especially when some of these are have tens of millions of players and many more downloads per player.
Add Hearthstone and Legends of Runeterra to that list as well
We barely had a mass exodus from Reddit. It was quite modest lol
That being said, I popped my head in on reddit last week to find something, and it definitely seems noticeably worse at a glance. Or maybe I’ve just had enough distance from it now that I see the warts more plainly.
No we did have a mass Exodus from reddit, it’s just people stopped using the platform altogether instead of coming here.
Do you have any numbers? The only stats I saw were in the early throes of the black out. I haven’t seen anything lately showing a significant drop in DAU’s.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just haven’t seen anything indicating that
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I imagine it will get a bump. I’d love to see more developers using Godot, more tutorials, more in the asset library. The engine itself is quite good, but it doesn’t have a huge ecosystem built around it the way Unity does.
Plus unlike unity, being closed source, devs can actually contribute to the engine for others to benefit, as well as go in a fix problems they used to have to wait for unity to fix.
FOSS makes so much more sense when the people using the software, are devs themselves.
Not to mention that they eat their own dog food. The Godot application is itself running on Godot engine (which is also super useful for people wanting to add to it or make changes. eg. if you can make a UI for a game in Godot, then you can mod the actual Godot interface quite easily.)
Unity did something like this before with built in advert data or such, and some left. Now is drawing a new line, perhaps too far for many more.
My hope is that this backlash extends to all proprietary software eventually. Discord banned 3rd party apps before Reddit thought it was cool to overcharge for the privilage.
The thing is that something like this and further similar actions were clearly in the future back when companies decided they didn’t care about the last scandal enough to leave. There will be a few companies this pisses off enough to leave but fewer than people might be hoping for.
I don’t know the figures but it appears the trend is slow. Who is to say all the people trying out Godot will continue on it and not go back to using Unity (assuming they don’t go through with this).
If W4 doesn’t enshitiffy it to push people to their proprietary fork (which is unfortunately required because Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft don’t allow making their APIs public).
Do W4 have a publically available fork they want people to switch to? I was under the impression they were just offering third party porting to consoles. I don’t really understand how they would be able to even offer a proprietary version with support to directly build console versions.
Ive been making my game in Godot for a few months now. Its a really good engine after the 4.0 update.
I’m looking forward to try it out next time I get the energy to do game development for fun.
I’d heard Godot 4.0 made massive improvments to multiplayer systems.
You mean that Silksong could be delayed? pikachu face
It’s going to be the new Duke Nukem Forever…
Except it might be good :p
I encourage people here to check out Stride too, for something open sourced, C# based, and if Godot isn’t your cup of tea for some reason.
Doesn’t Godot have C# extentions available?
It does! But this is for people looking for more alternatives. Different people like different things.
Fair enough.
Also, speaking of alternatives, people should check out O3DE. It’s based on Amazon Lumberyard, which itself it based on CryEngine, but it’s FOSS and managed by the Linux Foundation.
Interestingly enough, Epic Games is a premier member, along with many other companies.
Epic games funds a lot of open source game projects, they’ve funded blender and Godot multiple times.
I wonder what their motive is.
The more game developers there are, the more potential talent they have. The more game developers there are, the more games there are to sell.
They also understand that Unreal isn’t super accessible for beginners.
Could also be to prevent a potential antitrust lawsuit, since they have a de facto monopoly on AAA game engines.
Kind of like Google funding Mozilla.
That’s excellent to know, thank you.
Contributors need to sign the following Contribution License Agreement.
How moral is this license? Im not good with legaleze
Pretty standard really. You don’t want contributions to the codebase come under questionable copyright concerns, or the original creator to revoke the code 4 years later causing huge headaches potentially.
You typically have to sign these types of CLA’s whenever you need to contribute to any serious project. I’ve had to do it for Google and Microsoft recently, and I’ve done it for various other open source projects as well.
Still that shouldn’t concern users/gamedevs as they don’t contribute to the engine code typically. Only if they want to upstream changes back into the engine publicly they would need to sign it ofcourse
Oh thats good.
If Silksong is delayed because of this I’m going to riot!
I understand the controversy, especially in light of the recent Reddit bullshit. But I don’t think I understand the tech.
For the sake of it, let’s focus only on games that are paid for, installed on a system (or downloaded using Game Pass), and do not involve a multiplayer element. (Hollow Knight, Cuphead, etc)
Is there some ongoing resource use (on Unity’s end) when people download or play these games? Like, when I play Hollow Knight, my system isn’t connecting to Unity to use their servers to run the game on my home system, is it? When I download a game to my system, an I downloading the engine separately from the software, thereby using Unity’s servers?
As abhorrent as the Reddit API change was, at least they were charging for the ongoing consumption of some digital resource (Reddit data). Unless I’m misunderstanding something, this just seems more like trying to collect a residual after the fact.
No, there are no costs for Unity in this situation. The way they’ll need to track installs is with the unity runtime, which gets packaged with games made using Unity.
This is what economists call “rent-seeking”, where companies seek to extract more profit by charging subscriptions, rather than introducing desirable products. Adobe, AutoCAD, Microsoft Office, and the Reddit API are all high profile examples of rent-seeking.
Unity Revenue reporting has always been “self-reported” by users. If they think you’re lying and aren’t on the right license they send the complkance team to make sure you’re giving enough. Unity has no way of knowing installs because as you said it doesn’t connect to Unity.
You don’t download anything separately, the runtime is included with the game.
The runtime could be updated with a phone home feature to track the install
No because this goes against GDPR. They aren’t allowed to have anything identifying users “phoning home” without explicit consent/logging into a launcher.
without explicit consent
Couldn’t they just add another ToS checkbox to click when installing the game?
TOS is given through the publisher who would be bound by GDPR by all sorts of regulations about storing that stuff.
If it included identifiable information then yeah it would be a breach. This is just using a mac address most likely that will also if they do it right will be hashed client side so even if a bad actor could do something with that info they won’t actually get it anything from it anyway.
Then we just fall back to the issue of them not being able to identify installs, reinstalls, bad actors spoofing the source etc…
If they could track installs properly they would have solved piracy already
Well they’ve mainly said (recently) that they’ll count new device installs, but not reinstallations on the same device. Which i believe. It’s the whole, exemptions of charity sales and pirate copies is where they’re spouting bullshit, or is PR/ higher ups making quick premises to placate without the engineers saying that that’s possible, but now they’ve got to find a way. Which I don’t think they will without heavily bloating the runtime into super shitty DRM realms
Is there some ongoing resource use (on Unity’s end)
Nope. The engine is part of the game once compiled. So all hosting and bandwidth cost goes to steam/gog/whoever is selling the game.
They are just trying to get more of that sweet viral game money.
Unity hasn’t been very profitable, for most of its users it’s completely free. I don’t blame them for needing money to improve the engine, but not like this
How do they track installs then?
I’d assume they’d amend the contract to require that a tracker be added to the binaries of the game. Or something.
This is basically like if John Deere started following everyone around so they could charge a farmer 1 cent every time you bite into a vegetable you bought at Walmart.
Can they go retroactively? Aren’t there contracts?
Apparently they snuck a clause into an update to the ToS at some point, after years of saying they’d never do such a thing. So people agreed to a loophole without realizing. The legality of such a thing is highly questionable, hence the rumblings of potential lawsuits are already brewing.
If you want to change the terms of contract then you have to contact every affected individual or company and make it explicitly clear what terms of contract are being changed and then get explicit approval that these changes can go ahead. Obviously you do otherwise we live in a world of anarchy and business couldn’t possibly happen.
When companies want to renegotiate tiny intricate details of contracts it often takes months because of these requirements, even when both parties are already in verbal agreement.
They can’t just announce they are changing the contract and then provide less than 2 months worth of warning and say you don’t get a choice this is the new contract now and forever and also in the past. They have to get explicit approval of this change, and obviously no one’s going to give them it.
You click a check box with a really long user agreement that does in fact allow them to make these changes.
Damn, it works with anyone. I should find a way to make one too.
By reading this comment you agree to send me one bitcoin.
God dammit loch Ness monst- oh, wait, you’re not asking for tree fiddy
If they kill Cult of the Lamb over this. There will no longer be any reason to live.
The devs followed up indicating that the tweet about delisting the game on Jan 1st was a joke, but it’s still a shitty situation for developers
Cult of the Lamb did come out and say they weren’t serious about delisting.
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Cult of the Lamb has always been shitposty with their marketing. It would be a little silly to take them seriously immediately and buy on the spot.
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Nah dude, don’t be so eager to jump on people’s throats like this. They were being sarcastic about a difficult situation that they and many other indie developers might have to deal with, that in January 1st they might be sent a massive bill over a deal that they never agreed with.
If your conclusion here is Cult of the Lamb/Massive Monster/Devolver is being greedy rather than Unity, you are missing the point. Unity is the one actually making it so that the most sensible decision for many smaller developers barely making ends meet will be to delist before January 1st.
Sometimes people become so cynical that they go back around at losing perspective by always assuming the worst out of everything and everyone, that’s not great.
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Here we go back around to where I started with. They always been silly with their marketing. They also said they would sacrifice their players and they both have beef and flirted with Angry Birds. Nobody would take that seriously.
A quirky indie studio going “welp, better pack up and leave next year” at the Unity situation just seems par for the course. No reason to jump the gun unless they confirm that later.
I’m defending them because I think you are making too much of an issue out of it.
This, jumping on massive monster is definitely victim blaming. The real massive monster is unity
This is going to get so bad…Go godot.
Can Steam buy Unity and end this nightmare?
I know Valve has a good reputation but I really don’t want another company owning both a major storefront and a major game engine. It’s not great to have Epic in that situation, but at least they provide competition to Steam.
If Unity fails hopefully that means another game engine company can grow and take their place and keep market competition strong.
Valve already owns Source 2 which I assume is better than unity
Source 2 is ancient and doesn’t even come close to modern Unity. Unity added a lot of modern stuff in the last few years (obviously) like physically-based rendering, which make a world of a difference in games.
How do you know, source 2 isn’t publicly available yet if I’m not mistaken.
You’re never going to see Source 2, you will see S&box though which is based on Source 2
I’m pretty sure valve has stated source 2 will be publicly available in the future just like source 1 is. They haven’t ever really betrayed or misled me in the 10+ years I’ve been on steam so I’m going to believe Valve.
Valve’s really slow to announce anything and given that there’s only I dunno, three games right now using Source 2, they’ve probably forgotten about it. Furthermore, looking at how S&box is shaping up, they could always just buy Facepunch and make it the ‘licensable’ option because it looks more feature complete. I wouldn’t be surprised if S&box shakes out to be the Source 2 you can use at home. Source 2’s featureset is more or less dictated by what Valve wants to build, which makes it a poor choice unless you wanna make a VR FPS game or a Moba.
Well, to be fair the Epic Games Store is not a major storefront.
The only way I see Unity being saved is by developers buying it out, only to render it Open-Source. And for the purpose of an open-source 3D game engine, you’ve got Godot.
