The Demise of the Unity Game Engine 

The ones that are trying to be "sensible" and "moderate" got played by this so called "death threats". I sincerely hope they felt a bit of an ass from this "sympathy baiting".

Unity's even trashier than before, trying to act like the victim while being the instigator and villain.

I wouldn't be surprised. I can imagine a few software enginers in that company being mad that no one is going to use the tools they spend time and blood creating, because the higherups are asking an unteasonable prices.

When the exec sold there stocks ahead of the announcement they were also screwing investors. SEC should look into Insider Trading of the company.

Insider trading!

That's hilarious considering no one's going to want to use Unity after this breach of trust. Looks entirely more likely this is a "pump and dump", or rather a plan to completely destroy a company and get out rich.

considering we are talking about the same CEO that wanted to charge money for virtual ammo, i believe its just plain stupidity and out of touch behavior.

Instead they've prompted a mass-migration and probably the rise of Godot and the increased dominance of UE5, and who knows what else? Red Hat Linux went bonkers a couple of months ago and caused a bunch of people to pull out of THAT dev community too. It's like a corporate disease going on.

@@Wolfrich666 From what I've heard, many of the higher-ups have done some form of insider-trading before, so it's actually plausible for this to be chalked up to malice. We're also getting word from devs that they voiced the very same qualms we've been, but months ago, and they just went right on ahead with it anyway.

i hope it won't stay like this because Godot is NOT ready yet

@@scarm_rune "yet" the influx would probably result in faster progress in its tools and features. that said yeah definitely not "yet"

@@scarm_rune Why not?

@@scarm_rune Well..... People would or will probably going to assist or at least the sheer mass of numbers will force Godot to BE ready.. at least they're not alone, but we'll see.

@@scarm_runeThis is an unattainable ideal that people need to stop saying. It is really dumb. There is no such thing as a piece of software being ‘ready’. Because it is both subjective and arbitrary. You can say this with literally any piece of software, both FOSS and not. This comment might as well read “I don’t know anything and I don’t like change.” Sorry if this is harsh, but if we were to judge software for being ‘not ready yet’, I would judge it based on general stability and capability, not something subjective like when is it ready like an egg about to hatch under incubation. Hell, I think Adobe is not fucking ready, their software is a glitchy mess, it is a CPU and RAM hog and yet it is the industry standard even with all the bugs. I don’t actually mean this, since this is a subjective opinion, but that is my point. No thanks, I will stick with Resolve and Blender. Not like Adobe products work great on Linux anyway…

if it's a genuine worry, you cannot afford to release freemium games using Unity you need to be able to guarantee that the income per install at least pays the fee

Hi, I just start to do my dream game to, since 2 month. And I stop every think last week with this new. I was desapointed and i search a solution. I think about UE and Godot. It's hard to choose. You think Godot it's Ok for professionnal game ? I see game like Halls of torment or Brotato but I want to do a game with more finished design style, what did you think about ? And what about your adaptation ? It's easy to pass from Unity ? Have a good day ! Thx !

I don't know, Godot seem to be inferior to Unity and Unreal in terms of performance, especially for 3D games, I'm still on the fence about switching to godot.

@@armandostockvideos8386 in some ways your correct, godot 4 just officially came out about 4-5 months ago and the 3D performance and features are vastly improved over godot 3. As far as dev cycle godot is in its infancy compared to unity. With all the new devs on board lots of new.changes will be coming. A new official terrain editor is. Eing worked on and an asset store

​​@@romainbiouthe engine you use is highly dependent on what type of game you want to make. If it's 2d use Godot or gamemaker (to publish a gamemaker game you need to buy the subscription for a month) but if it's 3d definitely go with UE. I'm not sure on the transition from Unity to UE but the transition from Unity to Godot is very easy. You can even use c# in Godot if you want but I recommend just learning gdscript bc it's simple and more up to date in Godot as an engine.

@@armandostockvideos8386use Source Engine KEK

Better to root for open source Godot and other alternatives than the same corporate suits that helped make gaming horrible.

Don't go UE, they are awfully quiet about this, more than sure they will do te same after unity

20GB download on Linux keeps me away from UE5.3

@@jboadas that's really not that much these days.

​@@user-tp5yb4hr4wNo, but Godot's full package clocks in at less than 100 MB. Which only shows how bloated UE has become.

I still resent the people who said "well you don't have to buy the armor!" Look where their complacency has us now.

It’s so painful to look back and always see that in every case the worst thing you feared would happen is what *has happened*

They have nothing to say in a capitalist system as they don't own the company

Yeah somehow he didn't hear the full story on that part. The threats were indeed from workers within the company itself.

Given that all their jobs are at risk if the company goes under because of one imbecile at the top who's so detached from reality that he thought any of this would actually fly - I can't image that many of them went along with this idea internally.

@@Vastinanyone in their right mind wouldn't agree to what Unity intends on doing. And with the massive amount of backlash resulting from this mess, Unity is effectively dead in the water. No amount of backpedaling would ever help regain the trust that Unity broke. Yes, this truly is a case of "late stage capitalism". I'm all about making money, but not at the expense of everyone else who helped grow the foundations of a business and company.

@@ResidentWeevil2077 This is the part of capitalism that I despise. It's a great system in many respects - but this point where a company's executive incentives can become so completely divorced from what their consumer base wants or needs, or even what's remotely healthy for THEIR OWN COMPANY is a devastating indictment of the economic model. I remember in the 80's where there was a phase where 'vulture capitalists' just destroyed companies one after another because they could make a few million quick bucks off of the corpse of an otherwise perfectly functional company worth far more than that - just because it a quick way to make money for themselves personally. Still happens of course - this might even be a case of that here.

Well it is being ran by the former CEO of the company ranked the worst company in America for the years he was in charge.

TBH I think part of the problem is publishers and platforms. There is trade-offs but from my understanding, the devs themselves trading significant portions of profit. Correct me if I'm wrong but... Publishers handle marketing and the logistics of getting the game to consumers. They also staple their branding on the game. This use to mean higher quality bigger games. In return of their resources, they obviously want to profit off of the game. With the platforms like steam, app stores, console app stores, selling your game there also takes a significant cut of profit. Of course in the past, there was the cost of doing business with retailers. Still based on numbers from other youtubers, I'm hearing that devs only see like 50% (give or take 10-20%) of the revenue... Before having to pay their own employees. The actual people building the game. It very much sounds like a trickle up economy. Now unfortunately, the visibility that comes with using established platforms, especially platforms that are designed around distributing video games like Steam, is extremely powerful in generating sheer quantity in sales. Such a thing may be extremely difficult to avoid or work around. Publishers handle a lot of legal work and logistics and perhaps even translating to other languages, but really I wonder how much work they are saving and the total cost of that work. Besides, many publishers are extremely greedy and don't necessarily care about the game. They care about shareholders. Combine with extremely predatory contracts between dev studios and the publishers that sometimes comes up... Things like the publishers owning the IP instead of the people who actually came up with the idea and made it. On top of dependency on the publishers giving them power to basically force devs to add certain kinds of monetization, not that it's always the publisher. Sometimes a higher up in the dev studio might want the same monetization anyways. Either way, going without a publisher is likely difficult, but I do wonder if what they provide are really worth the cost that dev studios pay - Independence, revenue and profits, and security of their own IP.

Wow, very ignorant take.

​@@jackstrife3821are you trying to be unhelpful?

godot

it was an employee in social media, I think it was mentioned in an official police report.

​@@armandostockvideos8386It would suck to be Unity's social media person right now. I sympathize with them, even though they did make that threat.

Exactly

With the number of studios leaving Unity, I think it will be inevitable Godot grows in leaps and bounds from here.

I 100% concur! Hope godot becomes the blender of games! 🤯🤯🤯

I'm betting the gatekeepers are gonna head straight to Capitol Hill and cry about "safety violations" from this evil, unregulated thing called open source.

I think the majority will go with unreal 5 though since epic has an incredibly favorable program for small studios trying to get into game development as well as their engine. But yeah Godot will get a massive boost as well compared to unity just slowly increasing their chokehold on the market.

I'm a SWE student and was just getting ready to hop into Unity. Nope. Lol. Was looking for an excuse to learn Godot instead anyways. The difficulty with console ports, current levels of adoption/ease of finding learning resources, etc. pale in comparison to the level of stupidity I'd display by learning/using Unity after this clusterfuck. Possibly the worst business decision I've ever seen a company make.

Yeah, the lawsuits regarding this change would be thick and furious - and no question that MS, Sony, and likely Valve would be there in the mix, given that they are somehow supposedly on the hook for install fees thru their platforms despite the fact that they agreed to NOTHING regarding any of this.

​@@VastinDont forget Pokemon GO is unity. Nintendo may have to suck it up and throw its weight around for the good of the industry this time.

@@macdaddymario Yeah. This whole thing is... it's just insane. That's pretty much the only word that encompasses it. I don't get it.

Correction, they CAN take you to court. You can file a lawsuit for anything you want, warranted or not. They are unlikely to win, but this could still costs thousands in attorney and court fees. If they file a lawsuit, bad or not, and you don't respond - they win by default, even if they had no standing.

To be accurate: "Use their lucrative side service and put ads in your game, or else *go bankrupt* ".

Which is super scummy of them.

"Nice game you got there, would be a shame if you got install bombed and went bankrupt from these fees. Tell you what, since I like you so much, I'll just waive these silly little fees if you do something for me. Don't worry it's nothing important, just need you to install some telemetry and spyware into your game and we'll make all these problems disappear..."

it's not so simple though consoles have the closest paradigm to software to exist in the retail consumer market, they will have to compromise parts of Godot or interfaces to be non-FOSS to be compliant to console licensing

@@user-uq2ko4jq2v i know for a fact they did, I owned a copy of Spore and that was one of the things I griped hard about to my friends

@@deadmeme897*graphics card*

And also like having limits bugs me. If we had that back then I wouldn't have choosed unity. I know I am probably never going to reach that threshold but I keep going dreaming that maybe someday I will. If you take that away from me I have no reason to stick around

I understand him

embrace godot engine

I have a RTS/RPG game that I've been making on Unity for 3 years. I was like "fuck it", I ain't compromising my baby for this shit. I'm now learning "RPG in a box", an engine specialized on RPGs made with Godot (a game engine made with a game engine lol). Recommend it for beginners. I'll make a demo with it, testing features and playability of it all. And if I feel limited, I can always go to Godot, which is Open Source.

@@VysairI actually am :) since a while im messing in GODOT and I'm happy because i was hesitating awhile back which engine should i tackle and learn and I'm happy with my choice .

Their publicist will be on the curb soon for not communicating better.

Which you should never do. The media should have said, "show us the police reports" and then followed up on them.

@@macmcleod1188 if you were looking for someone to disagree with that I'm afraid you're out of luck lol. I'm mostly trying to abide by Hanlon's Razor: it probably wasn't malice, it was probably incompetence.

@@zackmackeil3754 It's a good principle along with Occam's. And nope-- don't tend to seek disagreement tho I won't shirk from it.

The ship needs to sink. And maybe some years down the line, either a better company takes over Unity or some ex employee releases the source code and makes Unity open.

@@_fawkes you didn't paid much attention, did you? the ship is already sinking and they need to focus on surviving the trip now

It definitely changes the ecosystem. Unity's trying to look like the victim here.

@elhazthorn918 yeah, it either shows that the changes were so unpopular that an employee became deranged, or they tried to distract everyone with a hoax to cover themselves, distract the public, and play the victim. Either way it's bad, and I'm not sure what's worse (I guess the former is better since nobody was actually at risk, but still)

Nah, all the C-suite people in Unity have already been regularly their stocks in the company before this announcement for the past three-ish years. If this is about manipulating stock price, then the idea is probably to either short their own company (which will probably end with not just criminal charges but also the other shareholders suing their pants off) or to crash the stock really low so they can buy up a controlling interest when the price bottoms out. More likely though, what they were really looking for was to blackmail indie devs to package their ad malware into their products in exchange for waiving the runtime install fee, so they start getting value from buying that malware developer for something like 4 billion a few years back.

how about they fix the buggy mess godot is first?

I agree. Godot CAN export to consoles, it's just a rigamarole, needing to apply for console SDKs and stuff. And getting another company to help you with that means a huge chunk of money to them.

Pretty sure you can. Or you could just capture the auth messages that are being sent out during an install and send a bunch of them with fake randomized data. Much easier and faster than constantly installing a piece of software.

20 cent's is just wayyy too high per runtime. It should cost the runtime spammer significantly more money in terms of power usage than the fee they are gonna add to the devs bill. Runtime does not cost that much to run.

Would probably be more involved than that. The runtime doesn't phone home, so they are probably getting installs more like how Nielsen ratings are collected, where a subset of people are chosen to see what games are installed. Merely creating new machines and installing won't do anything. However, unlike Nielsen, they almost certainly won't be reaching out to individuals to sign them up. Instead, they are probably going to get the data from a data broker, who gets the data from some spyware that tells the central server all the programs it sees, and then some factor is applied that relates the sample to the full population. So, when you create your VMs, make sure to install them with as much adware, dodgy system utilities, and social media apps as possible.

Porting over to Godot isn't an impossible task, Caves of Qud Developer did it in 10 hours

With regards to all of your efforts, this is a good lesson to keep in mind - never put all your eggs in one basket. Learn alternative programmes for situations like this.. apply it anywhere in your life.. its much less stressful. good luck and keep going!

If people accept it, then everyone else will do it to the consumer, the key is, is to go cold turkey on it, and have nothing to do with unity, which would send the message that it won't be tolerated, but, I may only dream, for we as people, are nowhere near united, dedicated, or persistant enough to go through with anything that would actually help us, instead we'll moan and complain as it happens while paying money for it, and start a never ending cycle of allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of.

@@xSkittlesxNewbx A lot of indies and mobile developers seem to be uniting. I haven't heard anything about the biggest players though.

@@RiftTraveller There's a reason we have a nickname for Nintendo lawyers of ninjas....

Oh, and regarding the ability to contest the install count: 1. What makes anyone think Unity will give them a fair trial? Unity has already said they believe their algorithms to be accurate and that the developers are the ones who have to appeal with evidence if they disagree. Translation: all of the burden of proof will be on you, the developer, to prove that certain installs are not legitimate. 2. Why would we expect Unity to respond fairly and quickly to such appeals with a real, unbiased, competent investigation by humans rather than just having a bot that replies and pretty much dismisses 90% of cases.

Yes, this is an extremely important point! Unity is trying to look like the victim, despite being the instigator and villain.

I've always wanted to try and learn XNA but was immediately confused haha

​@@ByteOfMichaelyou could always try FNA 😂

I too, am having a stroke upon hearing this news

My language is not there either, even in text form, even in the game menu

They waive the fee for games sold on the epic games store, though charging a royalty there is kind of redundant as they already get the revenue share on the sales.

It's supposed to be a one time install fee per install of the game. Besides the fact that unity is dipping into the dev's revenue multiple times, no one actually trusts unity's means of determining this. Especially considering that unity is not incentivized to be accurate in determining it. As a web and mobile dev, I struggle to imagine a system that is capable of doing this without 1 of 2 things. 1-Unity's servers storing data that fingerprints the customer's device, and storing this data for billions of customers. I highly doubt this is the case because of cost of servers and data storage, on top of servers that vary between low traffic and extremely high traffic. Imagine a unity game that is highly anticipated on release date. The first hour of release, 500K installs occur. That will completely thrash a small server, what if unity's server crashes because of that and then the install fails on the client side. Also what if the server crash fucks up the counting of installs and somehow an extra 10k installs are counted. Or maybe it will be closer to 50k. Look I may not be a big enough of an expert to accurately predict the risk on this, but I can still foresee potential serious concerns about cost and risk, especially when unity is not necessarily incentivized to accept that cost and mitigate that risk. 2-Unity leaves flags on the customer's system that indicates if their install has been counted or not. The thing is, a simple flag is not trust worthy. Wipe the drive and re-install the OS? That flag is gone. If you backed up user files it might be in the backup. In addition, this flag is on the user's computer. A malicious actor would have all of the power and time in the world to go find that flag and mess with it, perhaps to harm the dev studio. Setup a few bots and let that run for a couple of days 24/7, suddenly there's an additional 20k installs. Putting that aside, there's also the part where unity makes more money if more installs happen. They are not incentivized for this system to actually work well nor are they incentivized to quickly fix problems in it. Now let's say that unity actually does a really good job in implementing this system. They find a way to account for all of these details. There's a extremely highly likelihood that they've installed spyware to do so and are grossly overreaching in user privacy. Not to mention that if they did install spyware to do so, what stops them from collecting user data for ad networks or something? And "it's illegal" is a bad argument if the consequence of getting caught is a slap on the wrist.

They can try, but what court will accept retroactive changes on a pre-existing agreement, without express agreement to the new one by all parties? None will.

on the bright side they must have it as ready to swap engines as it gets