Godot's development fund has nearly doubled over the last week thanks to all this lol And Re-Logic (yes the company behind Terraria) just donated 100k to Godot; things could not be better for FOSS 🤖🔪💠
13:15 I agree in principle but paying people also has lead to a huge amount of rage/engagement bait, which I would assume degrades data quality for LLMs somewhat, not sure if this is a good move overall.
I don't care if 99% of all game developers would have a cheaper time than with Unreal because Unity is now 100% unpredictable. Financial predictability is super fucking important!
If I had to guess, Unity will move to a rev share model and everything will be business as usual. How many of these devs are able to take the necessary downtime to become as skilled in another engine to continue building new games… would take someone subsidising it.
How the hell are you supposed to dispute the bill? If you sell 10,000 dollars worth of game, that's well documented assuming you're using a storefront like steam or itch. So if Epic says you owe x but you should owe y, you have the receipts to back it up. If Unity, and their magical algorithm, tells you that you have 30k installs and your metrics say 20k... How do you dispute what they have? What do you do if it's consistently wrong and they waste your time with this bullshit every month? With sales you can rely on a third party to provide you all the data needed to make your case. Installs? Sure, Steam probably keeps track of them but if your game is being pirated or if you use a storefront that keeps track of sales well but doesn't keep track of individual installs... Well what do you do then? Rely on internal metrics? I'm sure appealing the bill using numbers sourced from your own software will be super easy.
If we assume they are incompetent enough to believe this is reasonable it's very bad. If they are being intentionally criminal it's very bad. If they are crippling Unity for resale that's also very bad. There is no way to recover this without ejecting the current board and CEO, which isn't going to happen. What should developers do? Contact a contract lawyer to ensure old games are protected and Leave Unity.
@@NathanHedglinI don't think they'd need to make bots. They just put "+1m" into a spreadsheet somewhere. And yeah, if you're not a multi-million dollar customer to begin with, no chance they'll "investigate fraudulent downloads" to your satisfaction. No reason to.
You’d just need to have enough people complain about your bill. Then Unity would say you were confused and that the bill wasn’t actually the bill, it’s only half of what you thought… again - you’re just confused.
@@ThePrimeTimeagenbut I have 3 years of UE BP experience, rather enjoying learning the language was about time. Better than when i learnt objective C lol
@@sqwert654Everything is better that learning Objective C. What a shit heap of a language. The only good thing about it was its 100% seamless interoperability with C. Just write C instead of ObjC and cry when you have to talk to any of apples none C or C++ apis. Thank fuck for swift!
Yeah.. I'm taking my 5k lines of code in Unity and transitioning to UE5. Thousands of hours in Unity since 2011, no matter what they do now, that publicly traded company has permanently broken trust. At least I've been using Unreal a tiny bit since 2010
@@Nate-BreakingPoint-Interactive Unreal could do the same. I would invest in something you can have a semblance of control over ... if godot would get the job done I would go there. Hell you could fork it and easily make changes to the engine if you dont like them. No licensing fee. No risk of one. If its not mature enough I get it but you are only 5k lines in. Thats not that much code.
imagine having student debt, and then you are done and unity is like "you forgot all those test projects in university that you had installed, here is your student unity debt on top of it"
Surely that doesn't mean you have to use Unity though? Just use a different game engine. A decent course shoudl teach you how to design / dev games not how to design / dev unity games
The talk about using "a proprietary model" to determine how many installs you had sounds like a mechanism to allow them to simply just tell you how much you owe them.
@@ThePrimeTimeagen They claim that they can determine how many installs you had with a vague reference to "a proprietary model"; ie they're probably taking a page out of the RUclips handbook on AI algorithms and not going to tell you how it works just "bro, you owe me three fiddy".
It's almost certainly gonna be some mandatory tracking phoning home in their already mandatory Unity frameworks that are likely built into every project that's created in the Unity editor.
It's a funny thing to pitch to game development companies that would intimately understand how this is so bullshit. You could probably trick some non-tech-savy execs into believing it's a robust system based on your word, but not programmers.
"It's still cheaper than unreal's model" I mean... if you can just flip pricing structure without input or warning, that means nothing because when do they decide to implement another new pricing restructure that tops that scale even more.
*but they forgot unreal has a much better graphics engine and actually, just about better overall. People using unity really only because of its fame and presence in schools, but nothing more.
I don't get this argument at all... How could it be cheaper if Unreal's model is tightly coupled with actual revenue earned from the game made with their engine, vs Unity's model which they tried to decouple from actual revenue earned from the game. If you earn this much$ we take this fair percentage of your earnings for us letting you use our engine and technology, makes sense... Vs you pay us per non-trackable install regardless of the fact that a non-trackable install does not directly translate into a quantifiable amount of revenue. So it's like they wanted to steal from developers using their product more money than they were entitled to by using a metric that does not directly correlate to revenue. Very shifty, and people have smacked some sense back into them. :P
@@MIO9_sh I get what you're saying but isn't that quite a bit UNREAListic? Pun intended! lol. But also not even, because you could even sell your game for $400 a copy but they aren't charging $0.20 per copy sold, they are charging $0.20 per easily game-able metric of 'install' which can't be fairly counted no matter what they say or don't say how their system works! lol. If they're arguing that it's cheaper if your game is pretty much unsuccessful and doesn't meet the threshold, well not even then because you also wouldn't have to pay Unreal either in that case! ha Unity got pwned in every which way on this one!
Caseys point about this not being resolved until financials improve is excellent. Unity wouldn't do this unless they had pressure on them to do this and this was the best option they could see. Do we think plan B will be better?
What we're seeing from unity is a common strategy in business: 1) Announce a monumentally idiotic change 2) public outrage 3) Roll out a still monumentally stupid change, but just slightly less stupid 4) Public, for some reason, is satisfied that they got a little win against the big guy, except that what was rolled out is what the business was going to roll out from the get go.
@@phazechange3345 Two things. I don't think that works among professionals as well as it works in games. I've seen this a lot being a path of exile player (conflicts between power creep+game speed vs Developer desire to slow it down and weaken players for the game to be sustainable). Their efforts that actually worked to gain player acceptance in my view weren't the sneaky ones like what you describe it was an open and frank discussion about the problem. And they've not taken steps that are as extreme as they wanted, they compromise. Players now expect and broadly accept path of exile 2 to slow down a lot. Using a new launch to justify unpopular/large changes and un-seat players is common. I'm not in game dev. But I cannot possibly imagine I'd respond favorably to what you describe. It's very immature and irrational to not just look to the state you're in and consider "it could be worse" as justification for anything. And second. Now in retrospect we know they weakened the terms, as predicted. But they also seem to have managed to sneak a revenue share into their product despite promises in the past to never have one. Now it's opt-in and the ridiculous install fee is the default. Probably to avoid legal liability. I dont agree that it was easier to swallow because of the chaos but that did happen. I don't agree that this should even count as evidence of this being a common business strategy actually. There's nothing to indicate that was the intent. They've lost countless employees, the CEO left, the other big guy who's name I can't remember who was on the marketing side also left. If it were intentional they've selfishly sacrificed their positions for the company. I don't see that. Stock price is up, it's now above the pre-announcement level. It took a serious dip there (~40->~25). It could have been worse in principle. Maybe announcing 2.5% Rev share and sticking to it would be worse? I don't see that. It's a very low rev share compared to unreal.
It feels like a livestream of Unity base jumping off the International Space Station and plummeting towards the earth for an hour before it finally hits the stratosphere at 2 kilometers per second and reaches a temperature 3000 Fahrenheit.
"What happened to the bygone days when CEOs used their own product?" => That's why I put my trust in Tim Sweeney, Epic's founder, actual game developer, and CEO of a company that actually makes games.
TS is not much better, when Epic acquired Rocket League they completely ousted the Linux native version (that was there since the beginning) because Swineey does not believe it's a normal OS or something like that (something something twitter bad takes, tencent and r/fuckepic).
@@Taaz2 Because its not worth the effort. This has nothing to do with Tim, most game devs skip linux or port to it last, its not worth the market share for the amount of effort it can take to have it run without problems on Linux. This is not a "linux sucks" take, this is just the reality of the situation. Market share for desktop linux users who are gamers is very very very small (
@@Taaz2 in other words, you're saying that Tim Sweeney is a CEO that actually knows what Linux is? That's a level of competence and domain knowledge that many CEOs can only dream of
Hey I know that you show the creators in your videos, but it would be really great if you could also link them in your video description. Thank you boss.
Casey Muratori/Handmade hero runs the mollyrocket RUclips channel and twitch channel molly_rocket. But I've mostly seen him appear on substack right now at computerenhance (guess the domain) with his course material right now. The other guy I'm less familiar with. He's on twitch every day as he said at PirateSoftware. I'm sure there's socials somewhere there. Links really are important.
The TOS stuff he raised around not being able to do certain things because of previous language was really clever. For those who don’t know - his channel is Molly Rocket.
Open source engines need to make the commercial ones fight for their attention, not the other way around. That's how we are in this mess to begin with.
You can trust the people who sold shares in the company right before they decided to exploit developers. At least until the CEO decides he want's a 5th summer home in Italy. Then His Majesty will squeeze the peasant developers for more taxes. It was brazen, naked exploitation.
corpo goes through enshittification eventually, if they are big enough. kinda hope that it'll not happen but waiting for unreals turn next. probably when fortnite doesnt rake in big money anymore and they aren't able to deliver another big hit
I'd venture a guess that because Unity can't/won't do rev. share they can't do SaaS by itself because they have too many small devs that'd stop their subscriptions once their game is released/stable. Clearly some execs without industry experience thought this was the genius answer to that problem and were sorely mistaken.
57:39 Unity, despite having 7000+ employees, can _NOT_ build things quite quick. In fact, the most basic new features regularly take 3-5 years and are still broken and too risky to use in production
If it were really true that the video game design engine business in general were not profitable in the current market, then we should *absolutely* get these advertising grifters out of the industry so they stop driving it into even more unprofitable territory. Companies need to make money - this isn't a surprise. However, as a company it is wrong to undersell and then pull switch&bait tactics in the open market on your own consumers to have them start covering for losses in your pulled advertising money
When Richard Stallman was advocating for free software and warning everyone for software monopoly, everyone said he is crazy! Every other month a big project is closing its source code, adding up fees, and stealing more of your data... Stay happy everyone!
Richard Stallman is crazy for A.) Defending kiddy diddling B.) Picking crust from his toes mid talk and C.) Insisting that everything be his brand of free and denouncing OSS as evil. Closed source software being shitty doesn't mean Stallman is any more right.
I have always been interested in trying to make a game and I’m definitely not going to learn unity. Why would I learn a new skill and poor hours into an engine that will flip on a dime like this?
Let's be real here: Unity is, and has always been, a pretty terrible engine. Better than most, yes. Feature complete, yes. Easy to get going with etc, yes. But their target market is ultimately people who don't want to deal with C++. THOSE are the VERY people they're screwing over the most. Not a dev, but want to make a cool mobile game in your spare time? Unity was what those people used. No more. Buying godot "shares".
The age old story: 1. Tech company is nice to customers / users. 2. They grow cos ppl love the product and the terms 3. They go public cos they lack cash (flow) 4. Investors kill the niceness 5. Corporate milking of users cos switching away from something you rly know and love because of years of practice is painful and a giant waste of time
Very Upper Echelon Gamers to not get to the point (unity is pushing their ad network and a rev share would have been better) and then have his thunder stolen by the people reacting. I don’t watch UEG anymore cuz it feels like he wastes my time.
Damn does the Godot engine have a way to invest? cause that project is about to get mad focus. Unreal too, but I guess Game devs have had their fair share of proprietary nonsense right about now. It's a sad (but yet arguably better) world now where big platforms are now the riskier alternative to open source. But regarding the conspiracy antics, this feels alot like a couple of years ago where game companies purposely shotgun their own foot, so insiders can sell their stock. Yes you, activision/blizzard. Yes you, Bethesda right before the MS purchase.
The part about the path to profitability is applicable to the esports industry as well. Most of the esports orgs and organizers have no path to profitability.
That's guys math is not mathing UE starts charging 5% at $1M on sales made there after, Unity $0.20 per install at $200K regardless or reinstall that's gonna cost more mid size devs than UE would. If your game is $0.99 you're Effed-in-the-A!!!
i thought hard and long, the reason why unity did this and not rev share in my opinion is bc they want a piece of that genshin mobile gacha money. They probably cant add rev share retro actively onto that games. But pay per installs going forward was their way to still get them
Unity should've been able to prove they can identify piracy by embedding watermarks in the games demanding the payment of licenses. Unity also should've allowed game devs to show a counter of installs per license per ip before proposing this fee mechanism.
Bar-Zeev looks to have sold only about ~500k shares since November 2022 from the chart and still holds 1.26 million shares in direct ownership. His I don't see how this shredded any goodwill. @UpperEchelon is just flat out wrong about about Silver Lake/Durban having no stock. If it sounds so utterly absurd as to be unbelievable, maybe don't believe it.
The overall feel to all of this is "scam". A bunch of scammers have gotten into positions of power and are ruining companies to line up their own pockets. This is so eerie.
the way they originally discussed their own magical algorithm in their FAQ said they would charge on reinstalls. that literally means cost for no money made if you, say, wipe your pc, or delete and reinstall on steam
6:27 "It [executives selling shares right before bad news] doesn't always mean that [illegal insider trading]." I conjecture that it essentially NEVER means that. Illegal insider trading does happen, but it isn't done in such a painfully obvious smooth-brained manner that would get you caught by the SEC immediately.
Not sure if it's still the case, but when I looked into the UE pricing structure, Epic only starts charging you after you have made $3400 of revenue a month. Don't think that is included in the "better for 98% of game devs" argument bing made by Troy
5:00 "What happened to the old days of Blizzard" ... See current days of Blizzard for the answer then apply to the rest of the gaming industry. As soon as gaming became a Billion+ industry, the C-Level corpo types and investment only groups take over. It will be a very sad day when Lord Gaben finally leaves Valve/Steam
A couple of years ago I was offered a job at a startup using unity. They showed me their projects and I thought about it, but I decided that *the more I saw of Unity, the more I viscerally hated it* (as opposed to UE and godot, which can both be fully compiled from source, which in my opinion *reduces the technical control the engine designers have over the project* , though it doesn't necessarily reduce their legal control)
I'm not a huge fan of some parts of their take on whether you should get mad at workers at the company. I agree that you have to give them time to relocate of course, and this can be quite long if they need to reskill a bit. I also don't think you should really get "mad" at anyone beyond just saying they're engaging in immoral BS and should stop. But I really don't buy the whole "they have to feed their families" schpeel or the "I'm changing it from the inside" schpeel. Devs always try to pull this one whenever justifying working at these unethical comapnies. It's nonsense. It's so easy to find work as a developer. It's one of the most in-demand and well-paid professions in existence. I've rejected far more job offers than I've accepted on the basis that I've had ethical concerns with the companies making the offers. And I'm like a mid-level pretty average developer. Nope. Anyone who joins Unity now, or who doesn't leave in the next year, max, it's just greed. I wouldn't attack anyone now. I wouldn't "attack" anyone ever ideally. But we can and should, in general, morally judge developers who choose to work at unethical companies. They hold a LOT of power in this modern world and I believe they have a greater responsibility as a result.
But ... can you just add a firewall rule to block the unity servers or outbound connections to a pre-install script? Windows allows per-program rules. Linux is a bit more problematic, but can be done with users/groups and a freedesktop entry to start it as that user. Not sure about Mac, but probably possible. Android and iOS probably can't do that, though.
Just watching this now. Indie solo game developer. At the time this happened I had just completed a Unity course. As soon as this happened I switched to Godot. I'm now developing my game in Godot. 4 levels in and not looking back.
Stop saying “you should always dogfood”, it’s very easy to say when you work at Netflix, I have nothing against it, its great practice, it but it’s just not always feasible e.g. enterprise software and automations, neobanks (I work for one and I can’t legally use it lol but I can work as IC for it). There are plenty of other practices to know whether you’re doing a good job or not
"Why would you want somebody on your board who doesn't have stock"? You mean how almost zero employees of most companies have stock? Because they're paid to do a job. Not all board members of companies always have stock.
To expand on the "Unreal engine takes %5" yes they do but that is on your profit and it doesn't take effect on the little guys from their website "Under the terms of the standard Unreal Engine EULA, you are generally obligated to pay to Epic 5% of gross revenue on your product after it generates $1 million USD in gross revenue," this is for very successful games so to be charged 5% of your revenue you have to first make a $1m dollars this is not a small time indie developer studio they would ruin, these are big fish who are making hella money. So to compare the two is just disingenuous.
Ugh I hate Upper Echelon Gamers -- this guy "sounds smart" but is really maybe slightly above average at best, and way below average when it comes to talking about real people subjects; or social issues that negatively impact anyone other than a predominantly white male gamer. As far as I know, he's not a software engineer either so he can't really get too much into the weeds when it comes to more deeply technical issues. I'm pretty sure I have his videos entirely removed from my RUclips because of a few videos he had about TLOU2 and an older Call of Duty or Battlefield game. The problem is the guy "sounds smart" so he'll make assertions that are empty and unsubstantiated, present it like it is the other side, and argue against it. Straw man basically. He doesn't do homework on what real people who oppose something he values is, he does the bare minimum to make the argumentative point he already wants to make.
As a person who doesn't even make videogames with Unity (I make assets for unity), I have pulled all my paid assets and now I'm only selling them & posting updates through my discord server. I'm now designing the same things I have already made, but reprogramming it for Unreal.
You'll pay more than 20 cents per click just for advertising your game -- whether they install it or not. If you happen to get a million users for your free game, you can afford to cough up $2K for a license and pay 2 cents / user for Unity. Or choose to use something else. Jerk move for changing the license though.
0:54 IANAL but destroying US currency in the US is not illegal in itself. It's all about intent, like melting pennies for scrap metal _is_ illegal, but just destroying one is not.
I wonder if some of these CEOs last experiences with videogames were sitting in arcades & having to put a quarter in to keep going. It's hilarious to me that modern arcades still work this way - and I'm guessing that's what they're trying to achieve with games that you already purchased. Silly to me though
40:30 wow. just wow. So a web crawl bot could bankrupt you. It's possible with a virtual machine installer too but more likely on the web. EDIT: 41:37 says it might have been rolled back
As an aspiring indie dev who was learning unity. I will never go back to unity unless every single executive and board member is replaced with trustworthy, reputable figures from the gaming space. That will never happen so as far as im concerned Unity is dead to me. The risk is too high. How can I choose to spend immense amounts of time and money building a game on a platform where I have to worry about being fucked over and basically robbed
Godot's development fund has nearly doubled over the last week thanks to all this lol
And Re-Logic (yes the company behind Terraria) just donated 100k to Godot; things could not be better for FOSS 🤖🔪💠
uhh, i liked terraria, but now their devs are even more likable ;D
I've always been a Godot fan! This makes me feel proud for them. Go Godot!
I love Godot
@@JazzyMaxine Go... dot
13:15 I agree in principle but paying people also has lead to a huge amount of rage/engagement bait, which I would assume degrades data quality for LLMs somewhat, not sure if this is a good move overall.
All Unity had to do to keep the entire mad max scheme and not implode immediately was to say "this is for games released after 2025".
I don't care if 99% of all game developers would have a cheaper time than with Unreal because Unity is now 100% unpredictable.
Financial predictability is super fucking important!
United against Unity
😂
That's some pretty smart slogan, huh? You probably should work on publicity, I guess 😂
If I had to guess, Unity will move to a rev share model and everything will be business as usual.
How many of these devs are able to take the necessary downtime to become as skilled in another engine to continue building new games… would take someone subsidising it.
Is this united front creating an open source game engine?
+1 reason to switch from unity
How the hell are you supposed to dispute the bill? If you sell 10,000 dollars worth of game, that's well documented assuming you're using a storefront like steam or itch. So if Epic says you owe x but you should owe y, you have the receipts to back it up.
If Unity, and their magical algorithm, tells you that you have 30k installs and your metrics say 20k... How do you dispute what they have? What do you do if it's consistently wrong and they waste your time with this bullshit every month?
With sales you can rely on a third party to provide you all the data needed to make your case. Installs? Sure, Steam probably keeps track of them but if your game is being pirated or if you use a storefront that keeps track of sales well but doesn't keep track of individual installs... Well what do you do then? Rely on internal metrics?
I'm sure appealing the bill using numbers sourced from your own software will be super easy.
Great point! The fee is whatever they want it to be. They could make their own bots do downloads to increase profits
If we assume they are incompetent enough to believe this is reasonable it's very bad. If they are being intentionally criminal it's very bad. If they are crippling Unity for resale that's also very bad.
There is no way to recover this without ejecting the current board and CEO, which isn't going to happen.
What should developers do? Contact a contract lawyer to ensure old games are protected and Leave Unity.
@@NathanHedglinI don't think they'd need to make bots. They just put "+1m" into a spreadsheet somewhere. And yeah, if you're not a multi-million dollar customer to begin with, no chance they'll "investigate fraudulent downloads" to your satisfaction. No reason to.
They have addressed this point specifically. Their answer mostly amounts to 'trust me, bro'.
You’d just need to have enough people complain about your bill. Then Unity would say you were confused and that the bill wasn’t actually the bill, it’s only half of what you thought… again - you’re just confused.
Being 98% on a project that is 20k of lines mostly game logic and starting to convert it to UE c++ is going to take time as a man dev for me.
this... is painful
@@ThePrimeTimeagenbut I have 3 years of UE BP experience, rather enjoying learning the language was about time. Better than when i learnt objective C lol
@@sqwert654Everything is better that learning Objective C. What a shit heap of a language.
The only good thing about it was its 100% seamless interoperability with C. Just write C instead of ObjC and cry when you have to talk to any of apples none C or C++ apis.
Thank fuck for swift!
Yeah.. I'm taking my 5k lines of code in Unity and transitioning to UE5. Thousands of hours in Unity since 2011, no matter what they do now, that publicly traded company has permanently broken trust. At least I've been using Unreal a tiny bit since 2010
@@Nate-BreakingPoint-Interactive Unreal could do the same. I would invest in something you can have a semblance of control over ... if godot would get the job done I would go there. Hell you could fork it and easily make changes to the engine if you dont like them.
No licensing fee. No risk of one.
If its not mature enough I get it but you are only 5k lines in. Thats not that much code.
What a time to be learning game design and programming at a university that's partnered with Unity.
imagine having student debt, and then you are done and unity is like "you forgot all those test projects in university that you had installed, here is your student unity debt on top of it"
Well, I've been doing game development for 25 years and never once have I used the same environment for two projects in a row. So, get used to it.
good goyim
Skill issue
Surely that doesn't mean you have to use Unity though? Just use a different game engine. A decent course shoudl teach you how to design / dev games not how to design / dev unity games
The talk about using "a proprietary model" to determine how many installs you had sounds like a mechanism to allow them to simply just tell you how much you owe them.
proprietary... voluntarily .. they are the same right?
@@ThePrimeTimeagen They claim that they can determine how many installs you had with a vague reference to "a proprietary model"; ie they're probably taking a page out of the RUclips handbook on AI algorithms and not going to tell you how it works just "bro, you owe me three fiddy".
It's almost certainly gonna be some mandatory tracking phoning home in their already mandatory Unity frameworks that are likely built into every project that's created in the Unity editor.
It's a funny thing to pitch to game development companies that would intimately understand how this is so bullshit. You could probably trick some non-tech-savy execs into believing it's a robust system based on your word, but not programmers.
That is of course exactly what this is and simultaneously why it's actually illegal.
"It's still cheaper than unreal's model" I mean... if you can just flip pricing structure without input or warning, that means nothing because when do they decide to implement another new pricing restructure that tops that scale even more.
*but they forgot unreal has a much better graphics engine and actually, just about better overall. People using unity really only because of its fame and presence in schools, but nothing more.
I don't get this argument at all... How could it be cheaper if Unreal's model is tightly coupled with actual revenue earned from the game made with their engine, vs Unity's model which they tried to decouple from actual revenue earned from the game. If you earn this much$ we take this fair percentage of your earnings for us letting you use our engine and technology, makes sense... Vs you pay us per non-trackable install regardless of the fact that a non-trackable install does not directly translate into a quantifiable amount of revenue. So it's like they wanted to steal from developers using their product more money than they were entitled to by using a metric that does not directly correlate to revenue. Very shifty, and people have smacked some sense back into them. :P
@@plexterm "It's still cheaper than unreal's model, if your game is selling $400 for each copy"
@@plexterm now we clearly what unity is up to, basically, going completely against the entirty of their userbase, Indie game developers.
@@MIO9_sh I get what you're saying but isn't that quite a bit UNREAListic? Pun intended! lol. But also not even, because you could even sell your game for $400 a copy but they aren't charging $0.20 per copy sold, they are charging $0.20 per easily game-able metric of 'install' which can't be fairly counted no matter what they say or don't say how their system works! lol. If they're arguing that it's cheaper if your game is pretty much unsuccessful and doesn't meet the threshold, well not even then because you also wouldn't have to pay Unreal either in that case! ha Unity got pwned in every which way on this one!
Too late. Switched to Godot. It's pretty good. Unity juice not worth squeeze. VC's ruin everything.
That joke at 8:10 is actually masterclass: subtle and perfectly timed
Caseys point about this not being resolved until financials improve is excellent. Unity wouldn't do this unless they had pressure on them to do this and this was the best option they could see. Do we think plan B will be better?
B is for Bullshit™ after all
What we're seeing from unity is a common strategy in business:
1) Announce a monumentally idiotic change
2) public outrage
3) Roll out a still monumentally stupid change, but just slightly less stupid
4) Public, for some reason, is satisfied that they got a little win against the big guy, except that what was rolled out is what the business was going to roll out from the get go.
@@phazechange3345 Two things. I don't think that works among professionals as well as it works in games. I've seen this a lot being a path of exile player (conflicts between power creep+game speed vs Developer desire to slow it down and weaken players for the game to be sustainable).
Their efforts that actually worked to gain player acceptance in my view weren't the sneaky ones like what you describe it was an open and frank discussion about the problem. And they've not taken steps that are as extreme as they wanted, they compromise.
Players now expect and broadly accept path of exile 2 to slow down a lot. Using a new launch to justify unpopular/large changes and un-seat players is common.
I'm not in game dev. But I cannot possibly imagine I'd respond favorably to what you describe. It's very immature and irrational to not just look to the state you're in and consider "it could be worse" as justification for anything.
And second. Now in retrospect we know they weakened the terms, as predicted. But they also seem to have managed to sneak a revenue share into their product despite promises in the past to never have one. Now it's opt-in and the ridiculous install fee is the default. Probably to avoid legal liability.
I dont agree that it was easier to swallow because of the chaos but that did happen. I don't agree that this should even count as evidence of this being a common business strategy actually. There's nothing to indicate that was the intent. They've lost countless employees, the CEO left, the other big guy who's name I can't remember who was on the marketing side also left. If it were intentional they've selfishly sacrificed their positions for the company. I don't see that.
Stock price is up, it's now above the pre-announcement level. It took a serious dip there (~40->~25). It could have been worse in principle. Maybe announcing 2.5% Rev share and sticking to it would be worse? I don't see that. It's a very low rev share compared to unreal.
The prime has magical powers, he literally summons developers
It feels like a livestream of Unity base jumping off the International Space Station and plummeting towards the earth for an hour before it finally hits the stratosphere at 2 kilometers per second and reaches a temperature 3000 Fahrenheit.
"What happened to the bygone days when CEOs used their own product?" => That's why I put my trust in Tim Sweeney, Epic's founder, actual game developer, and CEO of a company that actually makes games.
Game devs try not to be large if to open source challenge ( impossible )
@@PanosPitsiWhat
TS is not much better, when Epic acquired Rocket League they completely ousted the Linux native version (that was there since the beginning) because Swineey does not believe it's a normal OS or something like that (something something twitter bad takes, tencent and r/fuckepic).
@@Taaz2 Because its not worth the effort. This has nothing to do with Tim, most game devs skip linux or port to it last, its not worth the market share for the amount of effort it can take to have it run without problems on Linux. This is not a "linux sucks" take, this is just the reality of the situation. Market share for desktop linux users who are gamers is very very very small (
@@Taaz2 in other words, you're saying that Tim Sweeney is a CEO that actually knows what Linux is? That's a level of competence and domain knowledge that many CEOs can only dream of
They are putting tracker malware on your device and charging the developers for the server costs lmao.
18:35 - PirateSoftware joins stream
26:36 - Casey Muratori joins stream
Hey I know that you show the creators in your videos, but it would be really great if you could also link them in your video description. Thank you boss.
I know! I’ve been trying to find them, so far unsuccessfully.
Casey Muratori/Handmade hero runs the mollyrocket RUclips channel and twitch channel molly_rocket. But I've mostly seen him appear on substack right now at computerenhance (guess the domain) with his course material right now.
The other guy I'm less familiar with. He's on twitch every day as he said at PirateSoftware. I'm sure there's socials somewhere there.
Links really are important.
@@jdsmedley @arcynic5404 long haired one is piratesoftware on twitch and Casey is mollyrocket on youtube
I love Casey! Next time please bring Sensei JBlow as well!
The TOS stuff he raised around not being able to do certain things because of previous language was really clever.
For those who don’t know - his channel is Molly Rocket.
The rich seems to love feudalism.
Open source engines need to make the commercial ones fight for their attention, not the other way around. That's how we are in this mess to begin with.
Open source is the only way forward
Cassey has such great takes, awesome to see him joined in on this topic.
If you use Unity it's your own fault. Use Flash like a person that is intelligent.
Soon: Github charging per commit or push?
😂
26:36 "I'm gonna get Casey Muratori on stream, is that cool?"
My brain: *Avengers music starts playing*
The whole thing, to me, feels like a poison pill to set Unity up for a sale... lower that price and offer the "fiduciarily responsible" amount
Interesting take, I can see it.
Just Israeli things, not a surprise.
You can trust the people who sold shares in the company right before they decided to exploit developers. At least until the CEO decides he want's a 5th summer home in Italy. Then His Majesty will squeeze the peasant developers for more taxes. It was brazen, naked exploitation.
Thanks for putting me on to some smart gamers. When prime printed out, "My camera is written in typescript." I almost chucked my drink. LOL..
Godot is a good alternative for many. It can use c#, so your code will be easier to port from Unity and it uses a component system.
For fun, I made an ECS for LÖVE/love2d over the weekend. Definitely would not want to do 3d games in Lua, but 2d stuff is pretty fun.
Godot uses nodes, not components.
@@filiformis What is the difference? Just curious.
@@filiformisGodots node model is a type of component system.
Porting from Unity to Godot requires re-designing your architecture because of no ecs. It's way easier to move to Flax or Stride.
Stuff like this continues to prove to me that worker cooperatives and open source are just better than traditional corporations.
corpo goes through enshittification eventually, if they are big enough. kinda hope that it'll not happen but waiting for unreals turn next. probably when fortnite doesnt rake in big money anymore and they aren't able to deliver another big hit
Open source yes. But how does any of this relate to coops?
I'd venture a guess that because Unity can't/won't do rev. share they can't do SaaS by itself because they have too many small devs that'd stop their subscriptions once their game is released/stable.
Clearly some execs without industry experience thought this was the genius answer to that problem and were sorely mistaken.
57:39
Unity, despite having 7000+ employees, can _NOT_ build things quite quick. In fact, the most basic new features regularly take 3-5 years and are still broken and too risky to use in production
I just use my own engine so I make 100% money minus the store's fee
Jonathan?
You forgot taxes
I love Casey, awesome to see him featured here
I've been learning Godot and honestly enjoying it. It's not as fleshed out as Unity, but it's dymn close
The CEO is the EA lootbox guy, right?
Funny that this comes out right before Terraria devs donated 100,000 USD to the Godot project.
If it were really true that the video game design engine business in general were not profitable in the current market, then we should *absolutely* get these advertising grifters out of the industry so they stop driving it into even more unprofitable territory. Companies need to make money - this isn't a surprise. However, as a company it is wrong to undersell and then pull switch&bait tactics in the open market on your own consumers to have them start covering for losses in your pulled advertising money
When Richard Stallman was advocating for free software and warning everyone for software monopoly, everyone said he is crazy! Every other month a big project is closing its source code, adding up fees, and stealing more of your data...
Stay happy everyone!
:(
Richard Stallman is crazy for A.) Defending kiddy diddling B.) Picking crust from his toes mid talk and C.) Insisting that everything be his brand of free and denouncing OSS as evil. Closed source software being shitty doesn't mean Stallman is any more right.
@@anarchoyeasty3908based, also great profile pic ;)
@@anarchoyeasty3908 A broken clock is right twice a day. If it runs backwards it's right four times a day, and that's Stallman.
Switch to Godot or one of the other free/fully open source engines. It will take time, but it will gain freedom.
This is one of the most entertaining talks about the business side of games I've ever watched and listened to. More of this, plz!! :)
This has been the fastest information download into my brain about the industry of all time. Incredible. Shared everywhere.
If I made a mistake this big I would be fired. Why is no one on the executive team getting fired?
It's just crying imbeciles with shit games that cry like it's community thing when it is not. Trash kids developers that nobody giveshit about
I think all piracy release creators will cut out that garbage as it technically allows tracking who installs the whatever.
I have always been interested in trying to make a game and I’m definitely not going to learn unity. Why would I learn a new skill and poor hours into an engine that will flip on a dime like this?
i have uninstalled and installed games 3-4 times. uninstall re-install is troubleshooting step 1...
Next big startup - AI agents that watch ads instead of your gamer customers
5 months later... Reddit sells data to AI company for $60 million.
Let's be real here: Unity is, and has always been, a pretty terrible engine. Better than most, yes. Feature complete, yes. Easy to get going with etc, yes. But their target market is ultimately people who don't want to deal with C++. THOSE are the VERY people they're screwing over the most. Not a dev, but want to make a cool mobile game in your spare time? Unity was what those people used. No more. Buying godot "shares".
Imagine fee per install counted from number of unit tests you have.
This could all just be a strawman ploy that they will then unwind and switch to something else.
Ironsource.. those names remind me of the secret program names in Jason Bourne 😂😂😂
Great session. All three had interesting takes and information. Thanks
I'm literally sitting here with unity open listening to this and im reconsidering.
The age old story:
1. Tech company is nice to customers / users.
2. They grow cos ppl love the product and the terms
3. They go public cos they lack cash (flow)
4. Investors kill the niceness
5. Corporate milking of users cos switching away from something you rly know and love because of years of practice is painful and a giant waste of time
Very Upper Echelon Gamers to not get to the point (unity is pushing their ad network and a rev share would have been better) and then have his thunder stolen by the people reacting. I don’t watch UEG anymore cuz it feels like he wastes my time.
Same!
I think he researches a lot, gathers lot of information and don't want any of it to be wasted. So he tries to add them in the video somehow
Damn does the Godot engine have a way to invest? cause that project is about to get mad focus. Unreal too, but I guess Game devs have had their fair share of proprietary nonsense right about now. It's a sad (but yet arguably better) world now where big platforms are now the riskier alternative to open source. But regarding the conspiracy antics, this feels alot like a couple of years ago where game companies purposely shotgun their own foot, so insiders can sell their stock. Yes you, activision/blizzard. Yes you, Bethesda right before the MS purchase.
they do accept donations, yes
I'm looking at the description and don't see the links for those 2. I thought you said you'll post these
The part about the path to profitability is applicable to the esports industry as well. Most of the esports orgs and organizers have no path to profitability.
Hang on, that CEO sold his stock before the announcement.
...Isn't there a name for that?
That was blown out of proportion. It wasn't a significant amount
what a great stream and conversation
Hint: Look for Glassdoor reviews for Unity Helsinki 🤑
That's guys math is not mathing UE starts charging 5% at $1M on sales made there after, Unity $0.20 per install at $200K regardless or reinstall that's gonna cost more mid size devs than UE would. If your game is $0.99 you're Effed-in-the-A!!!
This was fantastic, really enjoyed the guests.
i thought hard and long, the reason why unity did this and not rev share in my opinion is bc they want a piece of that genshin mobile gacha money.
They probably cant add rev share retro actively onto that games.
But pay per installs going forward was their way to still get them
Unity should've been able to prove they can identify piracy by embedding watermarks in the games demanding the payment of licenses.
Unity also should've allowed game devs to show a counter of installs per license per ip before proposing this fee mechanism.
this will never work, sufficiently skilled pirates can remove any watermark 😂
excellent vid. nice to hear these pros discuss this cluster duck.
rip unity. feels bad man
Bar-Zeev looks to have sold only about ~500k shares since November 2022 from the chart and still holds 1.26 million shares in direct ownership. His I don't see how this shredded any goodwill.
@UpperEchelon is just flat out wrong about about Silver Lake/Durban having no stock. If it sounds so utterly absurd as to be unbelievable, maybe don't believe it.
Did not expect a Bofa joke, but i can't be mad at that
What a cool diagram at 14:46! Would love to also actually see how many companies fall in each region :)
Lets sell game using CDs & DVDs.
The overall feel to all of this is "scam". A bunch of scammers have gotten into positions of power and are ruining companies to line up their own pockets. This is so eerie.
great stream. @ThePrimeTimeagen did you pay your camera fee by now?
The ads industry needs to die.
8:16: SEQUOIA?!?! The company responsible for the voting machines in Venezuela and for the the voting machines in USA?!?!?!
the way they originally discussed their own magical algorithm in their FAQ said they would charge on reinstalls. that literally means cost for no money made if you, say, wipe your pc, or delete and reinstall on steam
Cohost has an awesome voice
6:27 "It [executives selling shares right before bad news] doesn't always mean that [illegal insider trading]." I conjecture that it essentially NEVER means that. Illegal insider trading does happen, but it isn't done in such a painfully obvious smooth-brained manner that would get you caught by the SEC immediately.
godot❤ godot is the way
Not sure if it's still the case, but when I looked into the UE pricing structure, Epic only starts charging you after you have made $3400 of revenue a month. Don't think that is included in the "better for 98% of game devs" argument bing made by Troy
the only thing in common with these services / tools is that they are unprofitable, and now exist in an economy where debt is no longer free.
Piracy Games saying your enemies would just create alternative servers to just install your games 😮 crazy
5:00 "What happened to the old days of Blizzard" ... See current days of Blizzard for the answer then apply to the rest of the gaming industry. As soon as gaming became a Billion+ industry, the C-Level corpo types and investment only groups take over. It will be a very sad day when Lord Gaben finally leaves Valve/Steam
Step one, lock out LLM's from accessing X. Step two, Grok, trained on exclusive data source. Step three, profit.
A couple of years ago I was offered a job at a startup using unity. They showed me their projects and I thought about it, but I decided that *the more I saw of Unity, the more I viscerally hated it* (as opposed to UE and godot, which can both be fully compiled from source, which in my opinion *reduces the technical control the engine designers have over the project* , though it doesn't necessarily reduce their legal control)
this all makes me wonder how they feel about this situation, after i dodged it 😂
Godot is MIT licensed so cannot really yank control out of your hands like Unity or Unreal could.
I'm not a huge fan of some parts of their take on whether you should get mad at workers at the company. I agree that you have to give them time to relocate of course, and this can be quite long if they need to reskill a bit. I also don't think you should really get "mad" at anyone beyond just saying they're engaging in immoral BS and should stop. But I really don't buy the whole "they have to feed their families" schpeel or the "I'm changing it from the inside" schpeel. Devs always try to pull this one whenever justifying working at these unethical comapnies. It's nonsense. It's so easy to find work as a developer. It's one of the most in-demand and well-paid professions in existence. I've rejected far more job offers than I've accepted on the basis that I've had ethical concerns with the companies making the offers. And I'm like a mid-level pretty average developer. Nope. Anyone who joins Unity now, or who doesn't leave in the next year, max, it's just greed. I wouldn't attack anyone now. I wouldn't "attack" anyone ever ideally. But we can and should, in general, morally judge developers who choose to work at unethical companies. They hold a LOT of power in this modern world and I believe they have a greater responsibility as a result.
But ... can you just add a firewall rule to block the unity servers or outbound connections to a pre-install script?
Windows allows per-program rules.
Linux is a bit more problematic, but can be done with users/groups and a freedesktop entry to start it as that user.
Not sure about Mac, but probably possible.
Android and iOS probably can't do that, though.
Just watching this now. Indie solo game developer. At the time this happened I had just completed a Unity course. As soon as this happened I switched to Godot. I'm now developing my game in Godot. 4 levels in and not looking back.
Stop saying “you should always dogfood”, it’s very easy to say when you work at Netflix, I have nothing against it, its great practice, it but it’s just not always feasible e.g. enterprise software and automations, neobanks (I work for one and I can’t legally use it lol but I can work as IC for it). There are plenty of other practices to know whether you’re doing a good job or not
"Why would you want somebody on your board who doesn't have stock"?
You mean how almost zero employees of most companies have stock? Because they're paid to do a job.
Not all board members of companies always have stock.
To expand on the "Unreal engine takes %5" yes they do but that is on your profit and it doesn't take effect on the little guys from their website "Under the terms of the standard Unreal Engine EULA, you are generally obligated to pay to Epic 5% of gross revenue on your product after it generates $1 million USD in gross revenue," this is for very successful games so to be charged 5% of your revenue you have to first make a $1m dollars this is not a small time indie developer studio they would ruin, these are big fish who are making hella money. So to compare the two is just disingenuous.
Ugh I hate Upper Echelon Gamers -- this guy "sounds smart" but is really maybe slightly above average at best, and way below average when it comes to talking about real people subjects; or social issues that negatively impact anyone other than a predominantly white male gamer. As far as I know, he's not a software engineer either so he can't really get too much into the weeds when it comes to more deeply technical issues. I'm pretty sure I have his videos entirely removed from my RUclips because of a few videos he had about TLOU2 and an older Call of Duty or Battlefield game.
The problem is the guy "sounds smart" so he'll make assertions that are empty and unsubstantiated, present it like it is the other side, and argue against it. Straw man basically. He doesn't do homework on what real people who oppose something he values is, he does the bare minimum to make the argumentative point he already wants to make.
Fantastic video. Wonderful to see this being discussed from so many educated viewpoints
As a person who doesn't even make videogames with Unity (I make assets for unity), I have pulled all my paid assets and now I'm only selling them & posting updates through my discord server.
I'm now designing the same things I have already made, but reprogramming it for Unreal.
Musk was there to enable the term Pay Pal Mafia. He is the boss of the clan.
You'll pay more than 20 cents per click just for advertising your game -- whether they install it or not.
If you happen to get a million users for your free game, you can afford to cough up $2K for a license and pay 2 cents / user for Unity.
Or choose to use something else. Jerk move for changing the license though.
0:54 IANAL but destroying US currency in the US is not illegal in itself. It's all about intent, like melting pennies for scrap metal _is_ illegal, but just destroying one is not.
I wonder if some of these CEOs last experiences with videogames were sitting in arcades & having to put a quarter in to keep going. It's hilarious to me that modern arcades still work this way - and I'm guessing that's what they're trying to achieve with games that you already purchased. Silly to me though
40:30 wow. just wow. So a web crawl bot could bankrupt you. It's possible with a virtual machine installer too but more likely on the web. EDIT: 41:37 says it might have been rolled back
As an aspiring indie dev who was learning unity. I will never go back to unity unless every single executive and board member is replaced with trustworthy, reputable figures from the gaming space. That will never happen so as far as im concerned Unity is dead to me. The risk is too high. How can I choose to spend immense amounts of time and money building a game on a platform where I have to worry about being fucked over and basically robbed