Mastodawn

DeadPand

Better off just cutting ties and moving on, true colors don’t really change

‘cutting ties and moving on’ would require a total rebuild of their games in a new engine. it doesn’t really work that way.

They’re going to try this bullshit again, or in another manner. Maybe having everything centralized onto a proprietary single point of failure isn’t a great idea.

Cutting ties and moving on is the right answer.

StarServal Sep 15, 2023

“Oops, we ratcheted up the heat too fast. We’ll need to do it again slower.”

No one wants this situation, but the reality is that you can not switch from one engine to another engine without rebuilding the product. This is true for every game development company on the planet, this is how the industry is.

we can sit and laugh at that and call them stupid for building an entire multi-billion dollar industry on this, or we can understand the realities of the whole thing.

The reality is they’ve shown their hand.

Why anyone would continue to do business with them is insane to me. You’re setting yourself up for future failure.

Why anyone would continue to do business with them is insane to me.

you have a mature stack built entirely on the engine, that stacks the only thing that powers your companies revenue, if that stack did not exist then you would fold quickly

you probably have an entire company of experts in this engine, an deep knowledge-base that you are throwing away if you move away, your ability to have speed and agility is likely crippled until you get up to speed anywhere else. good luck affording to pay for that monumental shift in your company. 3, almost all the talent in the industry (at your level) is on unity engine, good luck hiring for $obscure_engine

basically, it’s incredibly naive to just say “just switch, obviously they are bad, they will be bad in the future too so switch”. it shows deep ignorance. it’s worth trying to understand the situation before saying any of this stuff.

I’m saying that whole production concept is flawed. You’re at the mercy of a single company. You don’t need to explain it further than that. You’ve centralized and specialized too much. It’s naive to assume they aren’t going to squeeze developers again.

Good luck to those who stay on Unity, you’re going to have a similar issue later down the line until they wear you out.

Elderos Sep 15, 2023

That is just reductionism. The post above yours went above and beyond to explain why they can’t just change the engine. For a lot of business it would mean bankruptcy now. So you understand that given the choice between bankruptcy now or maybe being squeezed again by Unity later, the latter is still more an attractive option, right?

Hiccup Sep 15, 2023

Lose your business now or lose it later, what’s the difference? Unity is basically behaving like the mafia. The installation fee is protection money. Fuck 'em.

Elderos Sep 15, 2023

Calm down. It is a shit move and a break of trust but very, very few business will be bankrupted by those actual fees. You guys here are outraged but you have no stake in this, it is easy to claim that you’d burn your company to the ground to get rid of Unity, but there is a reason why only the rich indies are going to ditch Unity short-term.

They’ve got you perfectly situated for exploitation. You’re rationalizing sticking with an abusive partner.

Elderos Sep 15, 2023

So better go bankrupt and lose your business and everything you built right now without trying, right? How pragmatic.

That’s a false dichotomy, but it’s good for coping with your abusive relationship.

Hiccup Sep 15, 2023

This isn’t a normal scenario/ situation. This is an all hands on deck emergency, worst case situation. You cannot continue with unity under any circumstances. This is a pivot moment with unity endangering your whole existence, as well as showing their obsolescence. Anybody that sticks with unity now is setting themselves up for failure. This installation charge isn’t just bad for developers/ businesses, but consumers as well and consumers will need to avoid unity games. Unless you’re a dev or really into gaming, most people probably couldn’t even tell you what a game engine is or what their favorite games’ are built in. This will now force them to be conscience of unity games and to avoid them.

tvbusy Sep 15, 2023

The fact that it’s impossible to change game on an ongoing/completed game is exactly the reason why everyone is angry. This is distortion, simple, just like the example of car being charged for miles mentioned in the article. It’s no coincidence that games are advertised as “built on …” since game engine decides how the game is built.

Buddahriffic Sep 15, 2023

I think the word you’re looking for is “extortion”.

Honytawk Sep 16, 2023

The thing is that switching engines isn’t impossible, it is just an extreme amount of work.

The sad reality is that sometimes projects aren’t meant to last, most don’t even reach fruition. And I know it can be a hard pill to swallow, but it is sometimes necessary to rebuild an entire project, or drop it completely.

Whether that necessity is valid depends entirely on the developer.

downpunxx Sep 15, 2023

well, it does, it just means a great deal of time, money and effort

Potatos_are_not_friends Sep 15, 2023

Every company I worked in always had a plan B.

Being fully under the whims of a service is how companies die. And unity is going to put a financial stranglehold on so many businesses. So really if they aren’t planning to cut ties, they won’t survive in a few years.

Katana314 Sep 15, 2023

I’ve felt this same way about content creators complaining about YouTube. It’s far too risky to develop your life plan around a particular company continuing their service.

DrPop Sep 15, 2023

Most channels have a patreon because of that reason. Better to have the fans support you than whatever new monetization model YouTube comes up with. (No bad words in the first minute, reviewers have to play movies flipped so they won’t be copyright struck, ads can do whatever they want but if you make a video talking about said ads only using those ads you guessed it demonetized). Google (alphabet)is an empire at this point and we need the government to create a new branch of government to handle online businesses because our 80+ year old representatives came understand that Mark Zuckerberg has nothing to do with iPhones.

Hiccup Sep 15, 2023

Rip the band aid now. Stop all development in unity. Unity has shown that it’s obsolete.

Who’s going to pay salary for the year plus of retooling and retraining? You?

WhyJiffie Sep 15, 2023

Who’s going to pay the new fees imposed by unity?

AngryMob Sep 16, 2023

The company making enough money to trigger said fees?

I dont support this new structure, but its not like these fees are attacking game companies which have no profits

echo64 Sep 16, 2023

The companies will if they choose to, it’ll be a massive hit it’ll stop them coming to subscription services, it’ll stop them coming to cloud services, it’ll stop demos and free weekends, it’ll probably hinder experimentation and early access. But the companies can eak out a way of surviving.

Which they can’t without revenue because they downed tools for a few years to retool on something entirely new

Carlos Solís Sep 15, 2023

And that’s why tools to migrate to another engine are now a must, like this one! github.com/barcoderdev/unitypackage_godot

GitHub - barcoderdev/unitypackage_godot: Import assets from UnityPackage files into Godot

Import assets from UnityPackage files into Godot. Contribute to barcoderdev/unitypackage_godot development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

LanternEverywhere Sep 15, 2023

You can't just cut ties in this scenario. These games are already built on the unity engine, and now unity is going to apply new fees to all these already existing games.

DeadPand Sep 15, 2023

Can’t just pay these ridiculous fees either, I have no belief that Unity will back track in any way here unfortunately