Everyone can agree on VLC being the best video player, right? Game developers can agree on it too, since it is a great utility for playing multimedia in games, and/or have a video player included. However, disaster struck; Unity has now banned VLC from the Unity Store, seemingly due to it being under the LGPL license which is a “Violation of section 5.10.4 of the Provider agreement.” This is a contridiction however. According to Martin Finkel in the linked article, “Unity itself, both the Editor and the runtime (which means your shipped game) is already using LGPL dependencies! Unity is built on libraries such as Lame, libiconv, libwebsockets and websockify.js (at least).” Unity is swiftly coming to it’s demise.
Edit: link to Videolan Blog Post: https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html
Wait, people are still using Unity after they clearly demonstrated they’ll fuck you on a whim? Honestly, seems like everyone’s been given a fair warning about dealing with these scumbags. I get migrating a codebase is a motherfucker, and sometimes it is even easier to redevelop much or all of the project. But again, if you’re renting retail space from someone who is a psychopath, bipolar, and an arsonist (Unity in this case), and they might burn your shop down at any moment, sometimes you gotta move!
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when a company does something that shows it doesn’t have its customers’ best interests in mind, it’s imperative that it be immediately and wholly abandoned.
Companies have long since learned that we’ll ignore major red flags for the sake of convenience, and at this point they’re not even trying to hide the flags - they’re proudly flying them and laughing as we continue to give them business.
This is a good policy, but it’s not always that simple for people who have been making games on the engine. Many people have spent years of their lives working on projects using Unity, or have already released products using Unity which they are now supporting. Changing a project to another game engine is a massive undertaking, so Unity has a semi-captive consumer base in the short term.
This is the same reason oracle is still in business. AKA the ol’ trap and gouge.
That’s the price they pay for not doing things right the first time.
New stuff would go well to end up under Godot. Porting your old s*** over and replicating all the assets and plugins is an insurmountable feet for most.
Uh… Ofc they are?
Even after all this I’m about to start a new game using unity. Why?
Because there’s no way I can bring it to market with the ecosystems available in any other major engine given the type of game that it is. I’ve already prototyped for almost a year using various options to narrow it down.
I would be forced to build so much from scratch for the mapping tech that I’d never ship it in say Godot.
Do I want to use unity? Hell no, but am I going to give up on my dream because screw unity? Hell no. I’m not into pyric victories.
There are a lot of ways to bring a game to market without Unity or Unreal. But if you can’t envision doing an input mapping system yourself just stop right now. It’s only going to get worse, engine or not.
It is classic internet outrage complely disconnected from what smaller game devs have to go through. Don’t get in the way of a good internet outrage as a legit, actual gamedev who knows why this is damn near impossible, or you’ll get downvoted.
The whole argument of leaving Unity hinge on the fact that Godot is a close replacement, it is not.
This is the price they pay for not doing things right the first time.