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.
The enshittification continues.
Watch for more products that enable normal people to do great things to become paywalled. Only your gatekeeper masters may direct the market, and the creativity. In their infinite wisdom, they demand the control of gods.
Billionaires are a mistake.
EDIT: and I love the bait-and-switch of charging anyone who ever used Unity, even under different terms. Electric chair for the CEO.
Surprised nobody mentioned here, but Godot Engine people. It’s FOSS and will never charge you for anything. Don’t stay in an abusive relationship
They’re going to back off on this and replace it with something bad but not as horrible. This is testing the water, and opens the door to charging everyone money every time you install a game, not just devs.
Have an install saved on your external and want to install it next week? You’ll get charged for it as of you didn’t already pay for it.
Games you have in your steam/gog backlog? Get charged again for it when you decide to play it.
I guarantee there are investors/publishers/whoever hitting themselves right now screaming “why didn’t I think of that?”.
I’d pirate the fuck out of everything if that happens.
The second Steam charges me for an install… Back to the high seas.
Not even about the money.
That’s part of the problem; they aren’t charging you for the install, they are remotely tracking that you’ve done so and then billing the dev for it.
If you grab a cracked version, did the person cracking that game also remove the install telemetry, or did they just make it functional? Can you be sure?
In many cases, the dev would still be billed for you installing the game you didn’t even pay for. Unity has no incentive to ensure each install is legitimate, as they profit from failing to catch that.
Sounds like pirating a copy and then trying some network fuckery… Fun!
But also if they make it bad enough I’ll just do something else. I love games but if they wanna fuck that up bad enough then there are always other ways to kill time.
Maybe the gaming industry needs another collapse.
AAA needs a shake up, that’s for sure, if it’s just going to continue on it’s current trajectory of “nothing new but costs more”.Most of the AAA’s can’t even be bothered to include as much content and as many systems as games from decades ago. You can play PlayStation 1 & 2 games that are just as complex or more complex than games releases recently. It’s all the same stuff but with more pixels and larger localization folders.
Why is Skyfield 130 GBs when at it’s core it has all the same functions as Oblivion or Fallout? Why does Octopath Traveller have a sliver of the in-game content that games like Star Ocean and Final Fantasy 9 had? Sports games and Shooters were lost causes years ago.
Indie devs have been making games that are far more fun and original than most AAA teams of multiple hundreds have been able to do in awhile.
The big guys need to return to focusing on fun. Some AAA’s can still do it. BG3 and Zelda are the current obvious examples. Those games are Fun. That’s what games are supposed to be.
Also, battle passes and season passes and everything that horse armor spawned can all go in the trash when there is another video game collapse.
Nevermind PC games, think about how this would impact mobile games. Where you get TONS of transient installs, and very few consistent players.
You could actually go into debt by using unity, and accidentally being successful if you aren’t abusively monitizing your game.
That’s what this is about. The CEO said that devs who don’t put ads in their games and monetize are “fucking idiots”
Unity isn’t a game engine company anymore, they’re an advertisement company that owns the rights to a game engine.
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.
And if everyone invented their own wheel every time they wanted to build a new cart all we’d ever have is various different wheels and very few carts.
Great analogy, but this is a wheel you’re being charged for, after you’ve installed it on your product. Maybe you would have been better suited with your own wheel.
You’re not picking an existing good wheel solution that you can use forever, you basically took a promise for a free wheel that you’re now being charged for, and you’re sad because the free wheel isn’t free anymore. Well, maybe you should have picked an actually free wheel to begin with.
Unity is not the only solution to your cart problem. You’re just using it, because it is convenient.
Are you being obtuse on purpose?
This isn’t a case of “I use unity because it is free,” because outside of recreational game developer use-cases, it isn’t free. There are very real costs associated with monetization that any developer, team, and studio should be aware of.
Developers who have been using unity with knowledge of their pricing mechanisms are being blindsided with new pricing, that you can’t opt-out of, with a little less than 3 months notice. Going back to the wheel analogy, these teams have designed entire vehicles around these wheels, with application-specific knowledge and workarounds to be told that “Hey, regarding that product which underpins your entire project, one with which we’ve already entered into a sales agreement… we decided we want to change the agreement and track its usage and charge you more money. You have 11 weeks to get over it. Your continued use of our product implies consent to the new terms of this agreement.”
You can’t just move to a different platform without significant amounts of rework.
Developers who have been using unity with knowledge of their pricing mechanisms are being blindsided with new pricing
I get that, and it sucks. But too many offerings on the market are nowadays accepted as normal operating procedure, when they seem like such obvious traps to me. There is no financially-driven company out there that you can rely on with your project. Go with an open-source project or write what you need yourself. I fully understand the challenge of writing a product from scratch and bringing it to market. Your dependencies can break your neck one way or the other.
You can’t just move to a different platform without significant amounts of rework.
I know and feel that. I am no longer in entertainment, but I also see these exact same patterns in my current line of work (IT infrastructure). People use “free” tools that they take for granted, and then they’re surprised by rug-pulls. This has been happening for so long in so many areas that it’s almost tiring.
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.
I think you’re comparing apples to orchards here.
I’ll grant you, Unity has been a commercial standard that many large and good games have been made in, Godot hasn’t. Godot has been used largely by solo creators or small teams which has limited the scope and detail of the artwork in Godot games thus far.
This begs the question: What’s the best looking solo-developed Unity game?
Does that game include a lot of purchased/sourced assets? Should that count as “solo” developed then? Given the contents of Steam’s catalog, by sheer volume of titles it seems that Unity is THE engine for creating low effort shit-tier asset flip “games” that are little more than a tutorial project file with a retail price. “Games made in Unity” is a LOT of rough to look for diamonds in.
Once you’ve found the best looking solo-developed Unity game, ask yourself this: Could this game be remade in Godot? Is Godot technically capable of running a game like this?
I’m also unconvinced that Godot is inherently a poor choice for larger development teams. It has built-in support for versioning systems such as Git, and its modular node-in-scene system mean that different team members could work on different components independently, then bring their work together as a whole. There’s also that whole aspect where the Godot editor is itself a Godot “game” that runs in the Godot engine, which means it’s possible for developers to create their own extensions to the editor using the same skills needed to make games.
Beyond that, much of the work on graphics–3D art, level design, character/creature design, rigging, animation–a lot of that is going to be done in an art package like Blender rather than Godot. And yes I would suggest Blender for the same reason I’d suggest Godot, because Adobe and Autodesk are also pulling the same kinds of enshitification that Unity is.
The real reason that Unity is the industry standard? Because it’s what they teach in school. “Learn Unity because that’s what they use in the industry.”
Sorry but if large teams could pick up Godot and make next-gen games with it just like that, they would. You can’t. You can find absolutely stunning looking projects from solo creators in Unreal Engine. Sure you have assets from the asset store. That’s the point - you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
I said this in other comments earlier, you don’t need to rewrite Unity to build your game. Build what you need, or pick up an open source product and add what you need. I don’t understand why people bring up financial feasibility if you’re being charged now for a wrong choice in the past. This was to be expected. It’s always the same pattern. If you can’t figure out how create your game without some false promise product, then don’t build your game. It’s really as easy as that.
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.
Yeah, and people nowadays don’t even rewrite basic libraries! Everyone should have their version of glibc or they are just lazy!!!1!!1!
C implementations are available as open-source. The glibc especially is a great example of this. This comparison is not good. I’m all for using open source
