Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle::Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.
Oh we’re well beyond “Find Out.” We’re at Uniexit
The thing is, they don’t even have to lose all their developers. They just have to lose enough so that introductory gamedev classes start being taught in Godot, indie devs start seeing Godot as a viable option and employers start posting listings looking for Godot experience. Unity was the default engine for lower-budget games for years, and now that’s gone.
one of the best things out of all this is how many new people are now making youtube tutorials on Godot. The huge amount of new monthly donations to the Godot Foundation is also great
I hope to see a lot of the features added to Godot that Unity refugees have been requesting and working on (because, yknow, open-source) and would expect to see at least 25% Godot 25% Unity 50% Unreal in the job market. Although honestly it is more likely that Unreal takes up a larger share of the market going forward, whereas in the past it has been like 60% Unity positions and 40% Unreal positions (due to Unity use on smaller projects, indie games, and use in the VR training industry).
Should I start learning Godot? I’m not a game dev, but I know C/Cpp and game dev has been interesting to me.
Nobody can tell you in advance how far your interest in game dev will take you. Only one way to find out: start small (some tutorials, build some crappy first) and see if your interest sticks around as you up the challange.
Maybe game dev in Godot will end up being a significant chapter in your life, maybe it will just be a small sidequest. But once you’ve given it an honest try, no matter the outcome, you at least will know if it’s something for you or not. That in itself is already worth something.
And who knows: maybe Godot is just your entry gateway to something else you discover along the way, which you wouldn’t have discovered if you hadn’t taken on the challange in the first place.
I side quested JS/React and went back to embedded. But the side quest definitely allowed me to understand more things and the variations in coding languages.
If you know C++ already, Unreal is a much more natural starting point than either Unity or Godot.
Unreal is what gets used in many AAA shops - it’s not a monopoly by any means but it is the most common off-the-shelf engine in the industry. Unity’s main edge is that it’s easy to learn but if you are comfortable in C++ then there’s no real benefit to Unity.
Godot uses GDScript, which is a custom scripting language that’s meant to be easy to learn. It’s FOSS so you don’t need to worry about being screwed over - but it’s a lot less mature than something like Unreal which can ship on everything you can think of.
But my advice is to make small things. Don’t hyperfocus on a dream game. Just make things that will take a weekend (maybe a week at most). Then move on to something else.
When I was getting into game dev, I made a couple simple projects then jumped into my dream game. I spent so long making that one game that I never finished.
When I got hired in the industry, they cared more about what I released than what my education or job experience was. Because that one big game was never finished, I wound up with my smaller “just getting started” games on my resume; stuff I had made but wasn’t proud of. But those games were at least finished and available to the public… and they were what got me hired, not my magnum opus overscoped unfinished indie game I never completed.
Thanks! My C/Cpp knowledge is from embedded programming, arduino and now moving to just Cpp coding. I keep hearing people say python is easier or such thing is simpler but I just can’t see c/Cpp as unapproachable. Plus at least with embedded python gets translated to c for the core to run. Right now I’m playing with LVGL for embedded screen interfaces. It’s fun. I’ll dig into unreal when I get a moment of boredom/hyperfocus.
If you want to use C/C++ you may be more interested in O3DE, although it’s a AAA specialized game engine that’s not very user friendly. If you’re new to game dev in general, then Godot is definitely the easiest to get started with, but you should use GDScript and not C/C++.
EDIT: or just make your own little game engine with OpenGL or Vulkan, That’s probably the most effective way to learn nearly everything…
There is C# support in Godot. I’m not sure how many tutorials have been made with it in particular, but I think there’s plenty. Plus their docs go over the API differences so shouldn’t be hard to use in any case
They shouldn’t. They’re not apologizing for what they’re doing, but are behaving like politicians, changing the rhetoric to try to get people to like what they’re going to do anyway.
Are we sure it’s not the politicians behaving like they’re running a business? 😅
(It’s probably both groups behaving like they’re trying to manipulate a large populace to meet their goals, no big conspiracy, just coincidentally they’re both trying to accomplish the same thing.)
Are there even distinct groups we’re talking about anymore?
insert “They’re the same picture” image here
Another fun thing to deal with thanks to Reagan’s worthless ass. The only good thing to come from that pile of shits presidency was his dementia.
Reagan should certainly be known as one of the worst people to occupy the Presidency, but I think for a bigger perspective on how we got to this place, the 1886 SCOTUS decision to recognize corporations as people is a good start.
I’m reminded of a motivational poster at my first job. “Unhappy customers may not complain. They just won’t come back.”
That’s how I do. I don’t like to publicly complain unless I was clearly ripped off.
‘90s: “And that’s why we need to make sure they’re happy with our products and services”
2020s: “And where the F they wanna go? We’re a monopoly and they’re locked into our tech ecosystem”
Your first job had a weird idea of motivation.
“You might suck, but no one will tell you!”
Why should anybody trust their livelihood to this company now, knowing that the rug could get pulled out from under them at any moment? Building up good faith takes years, losing it only takes one day.
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Right? Do they think executive compensation grows on trees?
❤️shareholder value❤️
Yeah I can’t imagine why I would start a project with Unity at this point. That’s just asking to get screwed over later with no warning.
You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback. This way, even if they decide to do the unpopular thing anyway because they have to for financial reasons or something, at least they’re not springing a sudden surprise on their fans.
People really don’t like negative surprises. They can usually handle plain old negative news though, especially if they got time to prepare for the idea first.
I think they sometimes try to use focus groups to collect feedback, but members of a focus group may exhibit unique behavior simply because they’re in a focus group. It’s not an actual representative sample of the public.
You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more . . .
Not even their fanbase in this scenario, but the majority of their paying business customers. Pissing off your fanbase/hobbyists is one thing, but completely alienating your biggest profit generating consumers is just beyond incompetent.
Minor quibble that game devs are actually a smaller fraction of their overall revenues, as their tech has uses far beyond games. They have industrial product lines too.
Kinda like how Amazon’s main thing isn’t selling shippable products anymore, it’s cloud computing and digital infrastructure. Or was last I checked anyway, it might’ve changed again.
You’re otherwise totally right though.
Ahh, I always forget that Unity has industrial product services/solutions, that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying that!
And yes, AWS is Amazon’s bread and butter (unfortunately). I can only hope that one day they’re completely dethroned, but I doubt anyone could ever compete with them and Microsoft at this point (and even if a startup managed to make a vastly superior product, either of those two would just buy them out anyway). I think even Google’s cloud service is only a fraction of what AWS and Azure pull in, I could be wrong though.
You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback.
Good news: Apparently Unity did engage with its developers behind closed door for a whole year, they told them this was a bad idea; internally the execs were told this was a bad idea, and here we are.
I completely agree, old school RuneScape does this very well and I wish more companies tried to engage their users as much as those devs do
Jagex has supposedly been barely successful forever tho, unity takes in billions by being shitters. In the end that’s all some companies care about
Unity hasn’t been profitable ever. Jagex is marginally profitable.
That’s not true, Unity was profitable FY2022 (for the first time ever as a public company, not necessarily ever in their history): https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2023/Unity-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2022-Financial-Results/default.aspx
I’m sure even floating the idea would have been bad. One of the biggest problems with the unity changes was that they were retroactive. That they can even change the fee structure so dramatically after you’ve already built and shipped your game should give anyone using them pause. I don’t think people really considered that as a possibility before.
I feel like it’s pretty obvious this was a greedy and terrible idea. The fact they proposed this at all alone is enough to never trust them again. It’s not that they didn’t know. They knew. No one would be okay with this cash grab and they know it. They just didn’t realize HOW big the pushback was going to be but they DID know what they were doing was wrong.
This is probably going to improve, not decrease, their profitability. They wouldn’t have been so blase about burning all those bridges otherwise.
Yeah, they make revenue from game devs, but there’s costs there too. If the costs are too high compared to their industrial contracts, then the smartest move is to kick all their game dev customers out. While preserving as much general public goodwill as possible.
So, how else could they escape the game engine business? The method they chose would be more effective than any other I can think of. It preserves a trickle of game dev revenue and makes them look silly instead of backstabbing. When a proper backstab was actually the desired result, but too bold to actually say they wanted.
My hypothesis anyway.
They were willing to fuck over some people and drive them completely out of business.
Which people? Developers. The very people that helped make Unity what it is. Unity wanted to completely crush their own developers. Some estimates put Unity’s fees higher than 100% revenue in some scenarios.
Them back-tracking and saying “wow! we didn’t expect this to be so hated!” shows that they either don’t understand numbers (they do) or that they think their users are idiots.
So why would developers want to come back to them?
John Riccitello literally called developers “fucking idiots” in an interview, so yeah, it’s the second option.
We’re here on lemmy and mastodon, but Reddit and twitter still have waaaay more users. Unities move has boosted the popularity of other (open source) alternatives, sure, and if I was a game dev I would transition, but most of the devs and studios are going to need a lot more incentive to abandon the tool they spend decades getting to know
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Good point. All unity users are basically (small) businesses, which does make a difference in how they might react. But I still think the entire platform going under because of this decision is more wishful thinking (wishing that corporate greed is punished) then an inevitability at this point in time
They were losing money even before this happened. The platform was already on its way to going under, This just sped things up.
The cynic in me says nothing significant enough changed.
Not all Unity devs are small. Especially the ones Unity is prominently targeting this for. A good example is Niantic. They made 650 million in revenue last year.
Unity has a market share of 75% in mobile. Many major mobile titles with hundreds of millions in revenue are Unity. Plus a vast number of big publisher funded “indies”, however the revenue to gain there is chump change in comparison. Ranging anywhere from 0-200k depending on annual sales and number of installs.
Unreal’s business model is taking 5% of your revenue, which is more than Unity’s new cap of 4%. Which only activates at 1 million in annual revenue.
One might argue even that small indies are not small if they reach 1 million in annual revenue. While not neglible, it’s still just 40 000 if you managed to get like 200 000 installs.
Obviously it’s understandable why devs would rally to the barricades. It’s their money to lose. Unity’s value proposition is in how much development time they save. Which is often than not worth a lot more than 40 000 dollars given the amount of time it takes to develop an engine.
I think Unity also offers a wide array of added value services compared to Unreal in the form of easy-to-implement IAP and ads. Both are the cancer of mobile games, but also the de facto business model on the platform.
Their initial plan was poorly communicated and shit, but the adjustment is fair.
I could still use Reddit for free. At any point, I can easily decide to install the app and use it in parallel. I can go back-and-forth with 0 consequences. My income is not dependent on my ability to access Reddit.
Developers have made the business decision to use Unity or not, and this debacle pretty seriously impacts that decision.
They’ll see longtime customers start to divest, I’m sure. I’d imagine most of the damage done was to their future new customer numbers. Anyone starting a project today would be pretty foolish to even consider Unity, and they’ll feel that more and more going forward. The death rattle’s begun.
I’d personally seek out any good open source alternatives before trying anything else nowadays. I’m pretty happy with blender and krita now I’m starting to get back into animation and drawing. But I’m old, I don’t know if joung people would not simply choose the one that is free-ish and more popular and better supported
Unfortunately, this is likely true. If people can keep using Twitter after all that has happened, people will certainly continue to use Unity and for more legitimate reasons.
I don’t think so. Twitter doesn’t fundamentally change the finances of your business. People are unlikely to feel safe building their entire passion project around an untrustworthy corporation.
Unity also doesn’t have the network effects that Twitter has. People use Twitter because the people they follow use Twitter, and those people use Twitter because enough other people use Twitter that it’s the easiest place to build an audience. Network effects do exist for game engines (it’s a lot easier to use a tool when enough other people use it that the solution to any given problem is likely just a web-search away) but the critical mass that needs to be overcome to become competitive is a lot lower.
GOOD
you mean all the people who said they weren’t coming back even after the obvious rollback of the policy aren’t coming back? 😱
breaking news: betrayed devs arent coming back
And they never should, the fact that they can push this outrageous policy in the first place just means that they can do it again in the near future
Of course they won’t. They basically took a hammer to their reputation and completely smashed it to bits. All for that gacha game scratch that will also diminish as those developers move future projects to a new engine.
I think it’s vital that the community now makes the effort to recreate what was made around Unity with the voluntary support material and everything that made it a reference of approachability, over with an open source alternative that may become definitive.
Going to Unreal Engine, even though it might look like the obvious move atm, might be near sighted, and unwise.
What’s preventing this from happening again down the line with another big corporation? Monetary incentives always change.
Is it Godot? Maybe.
The community needs it’s blender, and now may be the best opportunity to do it. It’s a matter of organization and foresight. It’s been proven to be doable.
Just wanted to point out that, actually, Blender has an integrated game engine. It’s not very feature rich, but it integrates it’s 3D renderer seamlessly. Just find it ironic, that Blender is really a candidate to be gamedev new Blender.
