[zzixp]

I'm pretty floored by Unity's decision. Even after their partial walkback (saying devs will only be charged for the first game install, not EVERY game install) it's still a crazy way to monetize instead of profit sharing.

Unity appeals way more to hobbyist devs getting into game dev, and from what I've seen has significantly more resources and tutorials online than Unreal. Hopefully we see the same resources start to be published en-masse for Godot.

[outworlder]

> devs will only be charged for the first game install, not EVERY game install)

I wonder how they will figure that out. It is not trivial. And if they don't disclose how they are doing it, it has a large potential for abuse.

[hnlmorg]

I suspect the potential for abuse is the reason they’ve walked back. The problem is that data will be private and the gatekeepers are the ones who stand to profit. So you’ll have another situation like those ad companies who underplay bot impressions

[wlesieutre]

Unity merged with a "your flash player is out of date" adware company, I'm sure device identification is nothing new to them

[itiro]

Nothing changes until January 1, 2024.

Would not surprise me if it was a heavy handed management decision dumped on engineers laps last minute, and is barely implemented at this point.

[Operyl]

Which is literally _next quarter_ and retroactively applies to all current games. That's _really soon_, and is going to cause headaches for any publisher/developer looking to release soon.

[itiro]

Eh, yeah. Once had a service provider promise their new API would “easily” handle our needs (I still remember the tone the sales rep used every time he said easily; it so reliably came out sounding the same every time, it seemed practiced).

3 months of integration dev later, we start load testing, the external API fails spectacularly. They tell us to redesign to use their old batch API 35 days before our deadline. We tried, failed, ate shit with our customers. Provider was too big to pick a fight with. Startup failed.

Welcome to software engineering.

[KaoruAoiShiho]

The obvious way is hardware ID, which can work okay for 80% of cases.

[giancarlostoro]

I've been telling people Godot is better and requires zero loyalties. I'm hoping this makes Godot explode with the attention it deserves.

[bathtub365]

What’s better about it? It seems to ship to fewer platforms and requires you to learn a language that isn’t used anywhere else.

[giancarlostoro]

The language is insanely familiar to anyone whose done Python, but that is fair. My understanding is that it does not deploy officially to those platforms due to NDAs or something like that. If you look you will find Godot versions maintained by maintainers that do in fact run on all the missing mainstream gaming console platforms (the switch, etc).

It's actually free, the license is MIT for the editor, so you can download the code, and change just about anything. You can also code native plugins in any other language. It has a build that supports C# and unlike Unity (idk if they ever fixed it) it supports modern C#, which Unity at the time did not support.

I would argue if your only concern is GDScript, you're asking for the C# build, but really GDScript is mostly Python-esque, I would be shocked to hear that anyone who knows basic Python cannot use GDScript.

[happytoexplain]

>charged for the first game install, not EVERY game install

While still terrible, is this an enormous walkback or was it always going to work this way and their initial communication was enormously incompetent?

[readyplayernull]

They got creative and should have provided a calculator for that fee scheme. Even so they can't really measure installs per user without deep data gathering which could be illegal.