This is really exciting to see. Enshittification is generating increasing backlash against incumbent monopolies, and encouraging more movement toward sustainable open source software.
See Blender, too.
I love how unity went from "we have a tech that can distinguish pirated copies with 100% accuracy, and also we exploit android and iOS sandboxing with 0-days to track reinstalls without fail, trust our numbers" to "we have no idea about the install numbers, you need to tell us"
They can't be trusted.
The execs probably went from „how hard could it be?“ to actually talking to their r&d department.
Honestly, one thing I'm seeing frequently in comments about this is a bit frustrating. That is, people saying that they vow never to buy any games in Unity ever again on principle.
Vendor lock-in is a real thing, and part of the reason they actually tried this play. Many of these developers likely want to switch to a different engine, but don't have the time or resources to do so. Honestly of all people hit by this situation, they probably need the help most.
Incidentally, if you are one of those devs reading this and feel you don't know anything other than Unity, go learn something else. Diversify your portfolio. Learning a new engine isn't hard if you know the fundamentals.
Also, can we get more love for Bevy. :P
Unity dev here. Will switch on our next game, but don't have the choice for the current game that we've already invested 4 years into.
Also, bevy looks nice code-wise but it desparately needs a proper editor and GUI to make it artist friendly
There is the blender_bevy_toolkit which aims to serve Blender as an editor for Bevy. I haven't tried it myself, but definitely will when I get to more artistic phases of my projects.
That looks like an interesting project, but it seems it hasn't been updated in over a year, and is only compatible with bevy 0.6. The current version is 0.11 or something. I've had my ass kicked before by relying on projects that didn't have a lot of support available, so I would stay out of this one.
Hopefully Unity doesn't disrupt your current project too much.
But yeah, I think this is the most extreme case of a company burning trust with their users overnight in recent years (worse than Twitter IMO). It's especially bad because many Unity users/devs have their livelihood depending on Unity, so of course they are going to change once they get a chance. The risks of not switching now massively outweigh the risks of switching.
It will just take a lot of devs/teams some time to transition. Unity will probably go under in 2-4 years, they can't recover from this.
I've played around with Godot a bit, and in my view it actually makes more sense than Unity. Probably has more limitations, but hopefully those can be overcome in the next couple of years.
Thanks. We're fortunately still on 2022, so it won't really affect us at this point.
I've been keeping an eye on godot for a while, it seems like a very interesting engine. I'm not sure if it's ready for prime time for the scale and rendering quality we're usually looking for, but it might be a great option for 2D and smaller-scale projects.
can we get more love for Bevy
I'm learning Rust right now, Bevy is totally next on the menu for me after I learned webdev.
That's a valid point. Games released in the next 2-3 years should be probably be given a pass. My admittedly layman's perspective is that any indie game deep enough into development that switching engines isn't feasible most likely wouldn't require another 4 years to ship.
That's pretty cool and I am actually a little excited to try and learn it just for fun. I did very little unity before and godot sounds very interesting
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One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising.
Certainly helps that Godot ended up launching their new funding platform on the same day Unity announced their hated Runtime Fee system.
Initially when the Godot developers announced their new funding platform they only had around €25K per month from 438 members.
A much better and more sustainable amount considering they're building an entire game engine.
Hopefully this is going to be a turning point, where developers look more to open source tools where feasible instead of locking themselves into proprietary game engines with predatory business practices.
Unity has proven multiple times now they're willing to break developer's trust like their messing around with Terms of Services.
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