[hesdeadjim]

It’s the problem with this whole Unity crisis. Every other engine out there is… small. I have a 50+ person team with a big open world game and I’m basically fucked into accepting whatever Unity wants. I can’t just switch engines with four years of tech and team experience. And Unity knows this. It’s so fucking slimy and malicious.

[ensignavenger]

This is why I only use Open Source... if you build on a proprietary platform, the owner of that platform can change the terms at any time and you are stuck with a massive cost to change, or you just pay the ransom.

[gorjusborg]

In a competitive marketplace it can be hard to accept less than state-of-the-art.

That said, we are seeing that it might be worth starting out on an open source platform and dig in to make it state-of-the-art.

Not everyone is interested or capable of doing that, though.

[treyd]

Godot is well on its way to replicating the same kind of phenomenon Blender has succeeded at.

[andersa]

This can't happen to you if you use Unreal Engine.

[whateveracct]

Can't Unreal change their pricing model overnight?

[andersa]

Only for future engine versions - you are able to continue developing and release your project with the one you already have under the previous version of the terms.

[ensignavenger]

That is nice and all... but you still have to invest significant resources into building and training your team to use Unreal, and then if they change the terms for future versions, you are stuck on an old version if you don't accept those terms, until you retrain everyone.

Of course, open source projects regrettably become closed source projects sometimes too (see Hashicorps recent moves), locking you into the previous version of the project.... but, with Open Source, you can fork the project and continue- or ally with other members of the community to fork- often at a lower cost than re-training and re-tooling. An option that does not exist in the proprietary world.

[andersa]

The thing is though, there is no open source project even close to what Unreal Engine currently offers. It's just lightyears ahead in everything kinda? Editor tooling, asset pipelines, advanced rendering features, ... While you could build on open source tech and implement all the missing pieces yourself, that is just not going to be a sensible investment for most studios.

You'd be hard pressed to compete with Epic Games' investment in the engine for their own games and others, too. I don't think this situation is comparable with Hashicorp. Epic has more than a hundred engineers continuously improving the engine, doing research on new technologies like Nanite and similar, and all their improvements are available to you immediately. You have full source code available and are able to modify it as needed, you can also fork it under the current terms. As far as I know there were never any forks with significant traction, only to implement random features people needed in their game.

This is just a guess, but I truly don't believe we are going to see Epic Games turn evil like Unity has as long as Tim Sweeney holds more than 50% of the shares. Going public was Unity's death sentence - the tech no longer mattered, now it was all about extracting the maximum value possible before the company is run into the ground.

[whateveracct]

My goal is to make some really good games in my 40s - a decade from now. So I might as well learn skills and build up on open source now. That fits that timescale.

[cdumler]

_"Today is the first day you have make changes."_

Unless your team's business model is to _be a Unity team_, it is a matter of determine your goals, evaluate options, get buy-in then start making changes every day to generate that outcome. Don't sell it as a "I hate Unity." Sell it as "it is time to consider how we maintain our future by diversify our skills."

[ingonealan3]

For someone who's completely out of the loop, what changes are the Unity peeps doing to their business model?

[stevekemp]

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/sep/12/unity-engine-f...

And later

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/sep/13/unity-seeks-to...

Covered on this site, but downtime makes linking to the threads hard - I'm 50/50 on whether this comment will be accepted!

[cpeterso]

Unity plan pricing and packaging updates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344

[raincole]

If Unity isn't so big it won't be a crisis, obviously.