So this will apply to games that have already been distributed on stores as well? How the fuck is such a change in the terms even legal?
I guess this will mostly impact F2P mobile devs since they will lose most money from installs. The good news is that Godot is more than capable for those types of games.
Rule 4: get fucked by better and cheaper products (Unreal/Godot) Rule 5: make an obituary presentation on what went wrong (hint: it’s always management)
Unreal engine will probably do the same shit than Unity, Unreal engine might be opensource (not FOSS), I think there’s the same clauses about production royalties.
I think Godot will not win simply because Unreal is so much better for 3D games what most comercial games use. I think Godot will become the indie favourite for 2D. Where it goes from there I’m not sure. Is the revenue sharing not enough to carry the game engine? Unreal/Epic is a special case. But is Unity mismanaged so hard? It still has huge market share.
Just a reminder that if Unity developers with pro licenses coming to Godot contribute even a small fraction of what they might have paid for those licenses on Unity, Godot can develop even faster.
You know, at some point Microsoft and Apple are going to enable developers to charge people to uninstall software, and that’ll be the driving force that finally forces the public to adopt Linux en masse.
as someone who was reasonably deep with unity, the alternatives really are quite thin - Godot is a big contender or otherwise it’s time to pick up some Rust game development
Thanks for sharing, I’ll check it out. Games in rust could help that whole endeavor in finding insecurities and whatnot even faster with game hackers and whatnot too
This is absolutely mad vendor lock in. I’m doing the maths and if you create the next flappy bird and it goes viral and gets 50 million downloads in a month, you’d owe unity $10 million dollars before you’d even received your first monetization cheque (you did launch with a full monetization plan, right? right? oh.)
edit: i forgot they had moneitzation limits too, so no - this situation wouldn’t quite happen until they earned $200,000 in revenue. Though the potential to go viral and find yourself underwater because of the massive unity bill in comparison to your income is still a possibility
Godot, definitely. Or GDevelop, if you want an experience akin to Construct3 and an end product that’s entirely javascript+html, but with a FOSS alternative
depends on your platform and your level of experience. Both unreal and godot have steep learning curves depending on where you come from. GDevelop is very accessible but also caps out quite fast. Great for making prototypes and getting simple games out there but depending on your level of ambition you will probably outgrow it sooner or later.
It is chargeable if you have made a certain amount of income on the game in the last 12 months, which should hopefully prevent too much impact on existing games.
Not content with their subscriptions, they now want a revenue share.
I sure feel glad to never have gotten into developing with it. When I saw that a blank project generated a ~231MB executable back in 4.1 or so, I simply ditched it.
Licenses that allow retroactive changes are terrible for the end user, fuck up the company’s image and might give a significant boost to competition. Hasbro trying to pull that shit with DnD earlier this year comes to mind.
Our terms of service provide that Unity may add or change fees at any time. We are providing more than three months advance notice of the Unity Runtime Fee before it goes into effect. Consent is not required for additional fees to take effect, and the only version of our terms is the most current version; you simply cannot choose to comply with a prior version. Further, our terms are governed by California law, notwithstanding the country of the customer.
Yup lol.
What’s funny and sad is that about 3 years ago on r/godot, I had an argument with a Unity fanboy over this exact thing. He was demanding someone give him a reason that Godot should exist, when, in his humble opinion, Unity did everything and did it better.
My take was that you don’t actually own your Unity-made game. You might own the assets and trademark, but as long as you’re licensing the engine, you are subject to the whims of Unity.
I’m pretty sure that even if the license agreement does have such language that it won’t uphold in court. And there are enough big companies using Unity for this to go to court if they try to come to collect.
I mean seriously, if that would be legally possible, nothing would prevent them from uping the charge to $10, $20 or even $100 per installation, applied retroactively.
I think they have the web play question in their FAQ somewhere and it does include as a download. There’s no real way to know how their telemetry is calculating this though.
A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included
As someone who’s using Godot and giting gud at it, I hope you enjoy it. For programming, you can go with either its GDScript (python) or C#, so Unity veterans shouldn’t have much trouble.