Picture taken from their Twitter
Get fucked, you could have use godot to develop your game or any other free engine
Yeah, fuck console sales, amiright?
@Voyajer is either a jackass or doesn’t understand sarcasm.
They are technically correct in that it’s the developers fault that they tied themselves to a proprietary game engine.
In the other hand Godot was nowhere near mature when the slay the spire devs most likely started development. They would be dumb if they used unity for their next game 🤷
2014: “You guys should be careful building your industry around proprietary tools, you really should think about open source-” “Blah blah blah stop your moralizing, open source software isn’t 100% ready to go right now so we absolutely can’t use it, instead we’re just going to pay money for this turnkey solution.”
2023: “Help! The proprietary turnkey solution we’ve been paying for this whole time is enshitifying! Subscription models, mandatory cloud services, more and steeper fees!” “Open source tools are still a thing, you know.” “Yeah but we’ve spent a decade telling an entire generation of talent to learn the proprietary stuff so it’s hard to migrate, and we didn’t contribute any code or money to FOSS projects this whole time so it still isn’t up to snuff.”
Well I guess you can slide over to Unreal and kick that can down the road a bit waiting for Epic Games to enshitify their product as well, you can use and contribute to Godot, you can develop your own in-house engine, or you can keep taking it up the ass from Unity.
Just let me ask this: If even a few smaller games, something like Unrailed or Papers Please, used Godot and contributed what they paid to Unity to the Godot team…where would the engine be today?
I think many would agree that it’d be great for FOSS engines to get more attention and contributions, but this is the most asinine way to get that message across
Unity: Successfully implemented a product strategy that floods the market with game developers that know how to use its product.
You, an insufferable prick: “Why would they use a product they could find ready-trained developers for when they could use a niche product no one has any skills in??!?”
The Unity training materials are amazing. I took their beginner programming course and even made a tiny little game of my own afterwards. I had plans to make a real game later for fun. It’s awesome software and they have a great ecosystem for beginners with no experience.
So it’s a huge loss, but why would I support them now when Godot exists? The only prospective user I can think of now is someone with no experience that needs all the tutorials, so they’re only using them to learn and have no dreams of making a successful game. All the wannabe devs who think they’re going to make the next great indie hit (and trust me based on game dev forums - there are a ton), why would they set themselves up to pay a ton of money to Unity when starting out? The people they’re going to hold onto are those who don’t have the skill or resources to switch, which probably coincides fairly well with those who don’t have the skill or resources to make a commercially successful game. So they’ve limited the amount of money this move makes to existing games they can squeeze some money out of, and maybe some potential breakout hits from people who are pot committed to Unity and not skilled enough to switch. It’s a crazy move.
Godot has just recently began to gain steam. I don’t think it was a viable option when StS was in development.
the “just don’t do it” argument ignores the problem. it’s like replying “just don’t buy Apple products” to people complaining about right to repair. the key part is that regular people won’t know beforehand until they need to notice. by that point, it’s profitable enough to show other companies like Samsung and Motorolla that restrictions are profitable, so jumping around brands will also never work when the intention is to have your phone for a long time.
back in the context of game dev, add that to the part where not only people don’t anticipate the retroactive changes of a license they have to rely on when choosing an engine, but there’s the added weight of having to learn an entirely new library and oftentimes even an entire new programming language, so you have to commit to it if you want to make a commercial product or else you risk losing literal years of development just from rewriting the same thing over and over.
not to say that there’s a reason why a lot of people chose Unity. Godot may be in development since 2014 but they are still relatively new in popularity. not only they have less total instructions resources from the community due to it obviously being smaller than Unity’s, but people also look for already known games as one of the first factors when choosing something, which is something Godot is still catching up on. knowing legal jargon to even comprehend the difference between free and proprietary is the least of their worries when someone wants to jump into game development and build stuff with it.
Why stay at all whether they revert it or not? They’re egregiously incompetent and if they’ve done this sort of thing once, they’re going to do it again. Developers should go where their support will help make something better (Godot) and not stick with the crusty old Unity hag that is constantly pawing at their pockets hoping for the jingle of coins.
Cause it’s probably not worth it for them to migrate and learn/train on a new engine unless Unity goes forward with their plans.
But you’re right, this completely destroyed Unity’s reputation. Even if they revert, who’s to say they won’t try something like this in the future.
Because changing the engine in an existing project is a huge pita that requires many, many hours and possibly in some cases a full rewrite.
This also applies to games that would be released in 2023 or 2024.
Nobody should be considering Unity for a new project, but it’s understandable to make either decision for many existing projects.
Ripping out the engine of your game isn’t a trivial thing.
I agree, although a lot of the work going into a game is the game design, art, and iteration, and not just the programming and rigging. And it may actually be a catalyst to rewrite parts better
Strongly disagree. While a lot of work does go on to art assets which should be simpler to migrate, the code is absolutely what makes the game. There are tons of very successful games with low quality or stock assets, there are very few popular games with broken code.
Even then, it’s still a lot of effort to check every asset you’re using to ensure they work as expected in your new engine.
In this case it sounds like they were talking about their next game rather than a current project.
“has been hard at work these past 2+ years”
That doesn’t sound like a current project to you?
Many many hours is a massive understatement.
Thousands and thousands of hours is more appropriate
I don’t know how you could change the engine without rewriting the entire thing basically from scratch.
- It’s a significant effort to change engines
- Even though it’s just one dev, they’re giving Unity a reason to revert. If you just say “Yo, I’m OUT!” then they’ve already lost you and they have no reason to revert on your behalf.
Slay the Spire is currently -66% on steam… just saying
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The surface area is huge. This is not an SQL database where you can just change the ORM’s backend.
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
They’re cranking the bad PR to 11 so they can dial it back to 9 and point to it as a compromise.
The exact same thing was said about Reddit execs like Huffman. They never cared enough to compromise. We’ll see if the Unity execs are similarly terrible people, whose greed will destroy the company. Seems like the trend these days.
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.
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
Exactly. They should take this as the warning it is, and start work on moving to an engine not run by morons.
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.
Why does Nitter.net block VPNs? Literally worse than Twatter.
