Picture taken from their Twitter

  • nul9o9@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    474
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    They should honestly just move their engine anyway. Unity has played their hand, and showed they are willing to make changes to their pricing retroactively.

    • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      134
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yep, they might roll back the changes this time but they’ve shown where they want to be and now we know. They’ll work their way slowly towards it instead of a sudden change now and it will be less noticeable and harder to fight legally when they do that

      • slumberlust@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        126
        ·
        1 year ago

        They’re cranking the bad PR to 11 so they can dial it back to 9 and point to it as a compromise.

      • Godnroc@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        70
        ·
        1 year ago

        I think most developers can see the writing in the wall there, but switching mid-way through a project will be costly and time consuming. If the changes were fully rolled back, I would still bet many would finish what they working on and then switch for their next game.

        • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          37
          ·
          1 year ago

          Problem is that if your current unity game is successful this year, and then they reimplement the retroactive charge next year, you’re still screwed. If you can afford it then it’s best to change now in order to avoid that mess that might mean you have to delist your game

          • frickineh@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            34
            ·
            1 year ago

            I’m not sure it’s legal to implement it retroactively. I’d be very curious to get an attorney’s perspective - seems a lot like trying to unilaterally change a contract after both parties have signed. But I have a hard time imagining anyone being willing to develop using Unity going forward.

            • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              14
              ·
              1 year ago

              There’s no way this is legal unless it’s already in a contract – and even then, it might still be illegal. The notion of charging people more money because you’ve raised your prices after they’ve already bought something just breaks economics completely. You’d be able to sell a bunch of a product for cheap, and then later say sike and charge everyone a lot more.

              I’m sure companies would love to do that, but no company exists in isolation. Every single company is buying something from another company to sell their product. If they could do this to their buyers, then their suppliers could do it to them. It would probably end up cancelling any gains you’d get.

              I’m guessing this was a move their executives made without any consultation with legal, because it’s the kind of idiotic move only they could think of.

            • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              11
              ·
              1 year ago

              I feel like any company with a legal department would surely check with them before announcing something like this. But maybe unity is so poorly ran they don’t have a legal team or didn’t check idk

              • zaphodb2002@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                19
                ·
                1 year ago

                I think you overestimate how much they care about doing illegal things. They will try it, and if someone can prove it’s illegal, they’ll pay a minor fine and stop, maybe. Otherwise they’ll get away with it. That’s how corps look at laws.

              • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                6
                ·
                1 year ago

                I mean you’d think so, but look at how often companies get into lawsuits for clearly illegal shit. Plenty of places will still try to enforce arbitration/NDA clauses that have no actual legal basis or consequence.

              • frickineh@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                1 year ago

                I would think so too but this entire decision has felt like the company is shooting itself in the foot, so who even knows anymore.

    • Gamey@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      105
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I bet they will do so for their next game but reimplementing a entire game is FAR easier said than done, something like that could very well bankrupt a smaller studio!

        • AeonFelis@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          1 year ago

          Not moving is what they’ll do if “changes are completely reverted and TOS protections are put in place”. In such a case, while punishing Unity is still desirable, there won’t be installation fees that justify the costs of rewriting the game.

      • dog@suppo.fi
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        95
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        I mean it’s easy to reimplement entire games if you’ve built it modularly. Just swap your core game logic to run on another library and the game works the same it did before.

        Edit: 'course, exceptions exist like if you wrote everything using their proprietary coding language, instead of using something universal.

        Edit 2: It MAY still be possible that a translation/compiler exists that’ll run as a plugin in a proprietary engine, and converts it into something universal.

        • Overwrite7445@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          24
          ·
          1 year ago

          Game Dev isnt just code. Remaking a project from scratch is a massive undertaking. Porting the code could be difficult too especially if relying on core unity libraries.

          • dog@suppo.fi
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            11
            ·
            1 year ago

            Not downplaying the effort, it still takes time. But not impossible.

            How you made it all matters in situations like this.

        • BURN@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          22
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Technically you’re not wrong. The work is done, the logic already exists.

          But systems like Unity aren’t like other code where you can rip one section out and still have 80% of a working codebase. Game engines are as fundamental to most of their game code as the language it’s written in. It’s not like you can just drop things into unreal or godot, connect a few interfaces and call it good. You still have to write the whole thing from the ground up.

          • dog@suppo.fi
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            9
            ·
            1 year ago

            As I said, it depends on how it’s built. And how proprietqry the engine is.

            Unity from what I know supports universal code/mesh/texture formats, but if the devs opted for the “easier to use” proprietary systems- well, that’s a problem.

            Now what I don’t know is how easy are scenes to export in Unity. They’re probably built with Blender or something else though in most cases, unless Unity has drastically changed.

            • BURN@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              16
              ·
              1 year ago

              Assets are safe, but they often need to be re-rigged or re-formatted. It’s still a non-trivial task though. Levels will need to be rebuilt, open worlds have to be started almost from scratch, and a lot of other things I can’t think of off the top of my head.

              The real problem is underlying systems. Unity often handles networking, render engines, game logic and most other things. The reason Unity was so popular was because it was easy to use (and free). Game code will need to be at minimum heavily refactored, if not rewritten, as anything that interfaces with the engine needs to be changed over. Just like you can’t just port c++ -> c# without major changes, you can’t port a game engine without major changes too.

              Unless theyve built everything as a separate code bundle, only interacting with the engine at a bare minimum, there’s no way to change with minor impact. It’ll be a huge project that will also require the engineers to learn a new stack that behaves differently, further slowing down the process.

        • Cypher@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          18
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          I’ve written game engine wrappers and converters for all sorts of code and file types.

          It would honestly be easier to fire up Unreal Engine 5 or Godot and start again.

          • dog@suppo.fi
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            15
            ·
            1 year ago

            Well I’d say that was true 5 years ago. Is it still? I’d not be so sure.

            Small projects might as well start from scratch.

            But projects with years of devtime are best ported.

        • Natanael@slrpnk.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          ·
          1 year ago

          It also depends on how many engine unique features you used, and what optimizations you applied. It’s certainly possible, but doing it without changing any game logic will require very complicated translation layers which will likely cause performance issues. It might very well be easier to treat it as a porting and refactoring project. You might not even realize which behaviors are unique to each engine if you don’t regularly develop in multiple engines.

          • dog@suppo.fi
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            10
            ·
            1 year ago

            This is true, and I vouch for gamedevs to first test other engines to see the differences.

            Calculating for the future is extremely important in pretty much everything.

            Also I wouldn’t say there would be performance issues, unless you somehow completely screw up coding and compiling said code.

            Projects should work on top of a bottom layer, or translation layer as it’s sometimes called; game logic calls for functions from there, instead of directly from the engine. This is also important for code security.

            _move_entity might be calling the proprietary unity_move_object with a different reg stack, but when compiled the performance should be +/- 0.

            • bane_killgrind@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              5
              ·
              1 year ago

              The things you are suggesting are adding complexity and therefore cost.

              It does take a higher level of expertise to adequately abstract away engine specific limitations and requirements.

              It’s again an even higher level of expertise and therefore expenditure to account for performance issues with these abstractions.

              • dog@suppo.fi
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                4
                ·
                1 year ago

                Not untrue, but it helps to adapt your future projects if done in such a way.

                It does require more expertise, and it takes more time, thus it’d have to be the first thing done for the project, not something you do after everything’s done already.

        • AeonFelis@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          ·
          1 year ago

          The surface area is huge. This is not an SQL database where you can just change the ORM’s backend.

            • AeonFelis@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              11
              ·
              1 year ago

              If you don’t use anything from the engine itself, implement everything from scratch, only using the engine as an entry point that launches your own code, and pay unity two thousand dollars per year per seat for that privilege - I guess porting should be fairly easy.

              • dog@suppo.fi
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                2
                ·
                1 year ago

                If you ask me engines should be free for most indies (UE, Godot?), because they’re not making millions. But yeah. I get it’s not feasible for most new devs especially, and senior devs have better things to focus on.

                It’s more a code principle you’d stand behind.

      • SupraMario@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        1 year ago

        I have a feeling a lot of the engine devs from unity are seeing the writing on the wall and looking for places to jump to. Betting they have a brain drain soon

    • darkeox@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      This. It’s not easy or trivial but as a long term strategy, they should already plan investing efforts into consolidating something like Godot or another FOSS engine. They should play like you calm down an abuser you can’t just escape yet while planning their demise when the time has come.