This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they’re switching engines on social media.
founding your business on proprietary software is just a crazy gamble.
Until a few years ago there was barely any alternative afaik
People wrote their own game engines since the earliest of games, they just want the easy route today and a marketplace to monetize on. These are poisoned gifts, and always have been.
It’s not “the easy route”. Making a game engine is a tremendous investment these days. If you are making anything other than a game that looks like early 2000s or earlier, you need a pretty capable engine that takes years to develop. That’s on top of the time it costs to make a game, which is also typically years. Not to mention that your proprietary engine will have subpar tooling and make your game development slower.
For anyone but industry giants it’s not feasible to make a modern engine. Unless your game is not aiming to play and feel like a modern game, you have to run with an off-the-shelf engine.
Well, it doesn’t matter if it’s hard, the companies that did it are using it to control you and so now you don’t have a choice.
So get cracking or don’t complain.
Also Godot is a thing.
You’re not listening. It’s not that it’s hard (although it definitely is), it’s literally just infeasible financially and time wise. You cannot spend millions developing an engine unless you are a large AAA studio. You can’t pull up your bootstraps your way into making a modern game engine within the budget you have to make a game.
As for Godot:
- While games like Domekeeper and Luck Be a Landlord are great, they are made by two people and one person respectively. It has not proven itself as an engine capable of supporting the type of development cycle and team necessary for larger projects.
- The best games released in Godot are visually vastly inferior to anything you can whip up in other commercial engines. Its focus has been on 2D, and the 3D games released in it don’t look great. Users expect more from bigger budget games.
- Godot is very new. Many games started development in its infancy, and some before it was even released as open source. Not to mention that most studios have existed much longer and are already established in an older engine, with lots of capital and knowledge locked up in those softwares. There is a lot of inertia to adapting new technology.
It’s not that it’s hard (although it definitely is), it’s literally just infeasible financially and time wise.
And yet somehow Godot exists.
Somehow, they managed to build a viable 2D and 3D open source engine without a massive AAA studio so clearly your assumptions are just wrong.
You just don’t like being told you have to take responsibility for a problem someone else caused, and to that, I don’t blame you. It’s not right that we have to go through any of this. But honestly, it’s time for us millennials to realize that putting in the elbow grease to build alternatives to what others have done to us isn’t doing that, it’s us building the infrastructure to allow us to move on from the powers that be, and if you want to break away from them, you have to. Your abusers will not liberate you for you.
It’s time to nut up and do it now.
You sound like you dont know anything about programming (at least engine programming). Most Engines have to run in something like assembly, else they would be too slow. (They use others too but Assembly is in like all, i am a junior dev so i could be wrong)
Assembly is already a large hurdle.
I mean it is “simple” as the arch linux type of “simple”. (Nothing more than you need to run it and nothing more)So the option is to learn assembly or hire someone (or multiple) who can, good luck by finding one that is capable of developing an engine that does not suck and does not cost a fortune.
Then you need to know what the engine should do.
If you “only” need 2D or even only some system to interact with the console you will be fine, maybe.
3D is a bit more complicated, the reason why there are so much 2D/2,5D games out supports this claim.Then particle support if you want it…
Every feature you want has to be supported!
And every feature costs and maybe needs maintenance when bugs occur. Supporting an operating system is a feature too :)So the engine has to be updated when a mayor OS update comes out
There are more points for why not to make an own engine and use one of the marked that fits ones needs even if it is closed source.
You where so fond of Godot so trying to help them might be a good starting point for you to life your ideals. I sincerely dont want to mock you with the sentence. If you can successfully help a larger open source project everyone is happy. If you can learn something new i am sure it can benefit you. I was only a bit mad because it felt like you are comparing engines with “weekend projects” what they are definitely not in the slightest.
Developing a good and feature rich game engine which also runs performant is a huge effort. That alone can cost a good team 2 years at least. Even more if we consider todays graphic standards. That’s nothing which smaller studios can easily deliver. So yeah, it’s an obvious decision to buy a license for a proprietary engine, where a lot of work has already went into. That’s just business and nothing crazy about it. Companies using services or products of other companies is pretty ordinary.
🤔 So what’s stopping people from simply making games under the free license and selling them anyway without paying Unity ridiculous taxes and fees?
Also now would be a great time to just use Godot and be done with it.
Licenses and copyright laws. When you make a game with Unity, you’re using proprietary code from Unity which has a license stating that the free version can only be used under certain circumstances. You’d be braking this license agreement if you distribute a game outside those conditions
How could they enforce such a thing? Just incorporate in another country and put the money there. Accept payment for micro transactions in Bitcoin. It’s not like they could take a foreign company to court; you just have to pick the right country that doesn’t honor such things.
The thing about unity is that it’s not just a software you use to program the game. When you distribute the game, you also distribute the engine. Since the engine is licensed to you under a special license, distributing it in a way that’s not permitted is copyright infringement. You agree to the license when you use unity, it’s like signing a contract. And if you breach this contract, Unity has all the rights to take legal action against you for profiting off their proprietary engine without paying them.
It also just doesn’t make sense to even try that. If you’re at the point where you’d have to share your profits with unity, your game will be making enough sales that it’s probably big enough for unity to notice it. And if you manage to keep your copyright infringement hidden from them, then your game is probably so small that you wouldn’t be paying anyways.
So yeah, it’s simply illegal, and unity will take legal action if they’re losing out on enough money
If you’re at the point where you’d have to share your profits with unity, your game will be making enough sales that it’s probably big enough for unity to notice it. And if you manage to keep your copyright infringement hidden from them, then your game is probably so small that you wouldn’t be paying anyways.
From my experience that is not true. Unity has a very dedicated team of lawyers who are constantly looking out for possible licence infringiments. And they would rather inquire twice than to ignore someone for being “too small to notice”.
How I made this experience: In univeristy I worked on a research project regarding immersion in gaming. We used Unity for creating virtual environments to conduct our experiments. For that we acquired a couple of education licenses which were strictly bound to non-profit usage. In return we got them for free. Some months later we received mail from Unitiy lawyers who suspected that we broke the terms of our license. The matter was cleared up after a while. But still, I was astonished by the dedication and energy they invested. It makes sense though. Their business depends on it.
Last time I checked out Godot it wasn’t exactly what you called fully featured. So really it isn’t an unequivalent replacement.
Unity was a massive pile of crap when it was first released as well. Hopefully Godot will improve over time like unity did.
Problem is back then no better alternative existed. Now it does
Another problem is that Unity has a team of paid engineers and Godot doesn’t. Or does it?
Then it’s time for us to put our heads together and make it so. Godot’s open source.
Sure but then we just get back around to the whole “why don’t people just build their own engine” arguement.
If I am making a game then I don’t want to spend time building out an engine first. I am very grateful to the people who do spend their time updating the engine but I don’t actually have the time.
And then we just go back around to the “too bad, we don’t have a choice” argument. We don’t have a choice. The fact that it’s hard or inconvenient to make one doesn’t change the fact that we have to. Stop being lazy and focus on making or improving a free open-source engine so you can make games. Priorities first. You can’t make a game without a suitable engine so you don’t have a choice regardless of any other consideration or circumstance.
Life is not always easy or convenient. Often, it’s the opposite. And you have to deal with that.
The fact that it’s hard or inconvenient to make one doesn’t change the fact that we have to. Stop being lazy and focus on making or improving a free open-source engine so you can make games.
You seem to underestimate the immense amount of work a good quality engine requires. It’s not about being lazy or having some neglectable inconveniences. For a lot of, especially smaller, developers this is a matter of financial survival.
Open source is cool, but requires dedicated regular contributors. The more work there is to do, the more important this and the number of contributors is. And there are not enough good engineers who like to dedicate their free time for such unpaid work. This just doesn’t work very well with such a capitalistic economy system that we have now.
I gotta ask, considering the “per install” pricing, what exactly is an installation in the eyes of Unity?
A game download? In which case would a cancelled and restarted download result in two installations being logged?
Is it an API call during first start-up? What would keep malicious actors from simply modding their game to repeat this call a thousand times?
What about pirated copies? Do they count as being “installed”?
Everyone I know has been reaching about Unreal for the past few years anyway. I’m surprised Unity is pulling this controversial move in this situation, driving more customers to the competition. It’s like if it was 2013 and AMD suddenly started charging double for their graphics cards even though Nvidia was way better
Oh damn the whole day I was thinking it was about Unreal Engine, not unity. Was pretty sad that some of the projects I follow could be abandoned. Now I’m so glad, holy shit. Reading the articles caffeine starved at 5 am in a tram probably was the culprit for misreading
