Louis Ingenthron @LouisIngenthron@social.cleverlibre.org
Software engineering contractor/consultant in Florida specializing in .NET C# #WebDev, plus #Indie #GameDev in #MonoGame, #Stride, and #Godot.
I like complex simulations and enjoy writing procedural generation algorithms for fun.
#Pilot in training. Burgeoning fan of #Aviation in general.
Fan of #1A jurisprudence and the kind of #FreeSpeech that applies to everyone equally.
Pro-Democracy. Pro-Rights. Pro-Freedom. In that order.
He/Him 🏳🌈
High risk of rants, especially with the lack of character limit.
Joined Nov 2022
@freemo Unity isn't selling to my customers; I am. If Unity was selling to my customers, they'd get money from the customer for each Unity runtime license sold. Instead, they're demanding money from developers for each developer game installed. The difference is that if a consumer has three built-with-Unity games installed on their system, Unity would get one royalty if they were the seller, but they get three royalties if the developers are the sellers.... Then they get three more royalties when that player needs a new computer and reinstalls those games, even though the developers did not get additional revenue.
Unity has always charged a per-seat subscription for the use of the editor software. As long as they have been a company, rights to redistribute the runtime was offered free to anyone who had a valid license to the editor. Because the editor is built on the runtime and is useless without it.
No other game engine that I know of charges per-install, and very few APIs do.
This also opens up channels for abuse. Don't like a game company? You don't have to review bomb them anymore, you can just start a campaign to reinstall their game over and over to financially ruin them.
Plus you have to wonder what kind of spyware is being included to tally these charges up.
The whole thing is ugly top-to-bottom.
This article covers the topic well: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-death-of-unity?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon
@freemo If the price of your product should not depend on the price of mine, then the price of your product should also not depend on the volume of my sales.
@andrewt Although, fwiw, I don't think they expect the platforms to actually foot the bill. I think they'd extort them into basically doing their collections for them.
@andrewt Correct. And I wouldn't put it past Unity's current leadership.
@freemo It's not free. They already charge a subscription.
But more importantly, there are already established ways to do this better, like a straight revenue cut percentage. That doesn't unfairly punish developers for offering games to charity or selling their game at a lower price.
@freemo Not necessarily. Some games are given away for free. It's the developer's *choice* whether or not they want to implement/integrate anti-piracy measures. Plus, many anti-piracy measures have bad reputations among the customer base, so choosing not to include them for even commercial games can be a legitimate decisions.
But now Unity wants to charge developers per-install regardless of whether the install was legitimate, duplicate, whatever. This costs Unity *nothing*, yet they choose to charge developers on such arbitrary and unnecessary grounds.
Holy shit. Back when I was in college, I was a very active member and developer for a #gamedev framework published by Microsoft called #XNA. After they shut down XNA, I moved to #Unity.
But apparently... XNA never died. It was reborn as the open source project #MonoGame. If this is half of what I'm remembering it is... it'll be amazing.
I can't believe I hadn't heard of this before today... Gonna try it out tonight.
@livingcoder Godot is pretty solid. It's got its quirks, though, which can make transitioning difficult. Stick with it.
So, #unity is essentially going to start charging developers for even pirated copies of their games?
They did not think this through at all. Officially going to start recommending to my clients that they abandon Unity with due haste.
Louis Ingenthron
boosted
This is fucked up. No other words for it. A REINSTALL is charged to game devs. #Unity
@peterdrake Except not always. If you don't write your editor scripts properly, it can silently *not save* changes to prefabs and you can not even realize it until you restart the whole editor program. It's a nightmare.
Louis Ingenthron
boosted
Also, I have to say, this whole Unity thing is completely unsurprising. The writing was on the wall
https://80.lv/articles/unity-stopped-the-production-of-its-sample-game-gigaya
Louis Ingenthron
boosted
A couple free & open-source Engines and game frameworks you can use today as alternatives. Feel free to comment with more.
Godot - https://godotengine.org
Defold - https://defold.com/
FNA - https://fna-xna.github.io/
SDL - https://www.libsdl.org/
SFML - https://www.sfml-dev.org/
Adventure Studio - https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/
bgfx - https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx
armory3d - https://armory3d.org/
ogre3d - https://www.ogre3d.org/
Renpy - https://www.renpy.org/
Louis Ingenthron
boosted
@peterdrake There's a good reason behind this one, though. It allows it to only hook those functions up if they exist, through the magic of Reflection. If they were virtual or abstract, there would be massively increased overhead calling every function on every object, 90% of which are just empty braces.
Just finished my second solo flight. Six landings with nobody in the plane but me! Wasn't even nervous this time, just followed my training and tried to improve each attempt. I can't believe I've only been doing this 5 months, nor that I waited so many years to get started!
Follow your dreams, folks.
@jann It was quite a little squall. Got some hail over here.
#Florida really is beautiful, even when (or especially when) it's dangerous.
Software engineering contractor/consultant in Florida specializing in .NET C# #WebDev, plus #Indie #GameDev in #MonoGame, #Stride, and #Godot.
I like complex simulations and enjoy writing procedural generation algorithms for fun.
#Pilot in training. Burgeoning fan of #Aviation in general.
Fan of #1A jurisprudence and the kind of #FreeSpeech that applies to everyone equally.
Pro-Democracy. Pro-Rights. Pro-Freedom. In that order.
He/Him 🏳🌈
High risk of rants, especially with the lack of character limit.
Joined Nov 2022
