[marcodiego]

>> We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.

I have no involvement and I'm not a game developer (except for small weekend projects). Please do not make any change "to the policy" you have announced! Your decision seemed to be the straw that was lacking for many people to support Godot and I'm rooting for them. Please don't let us down now.

[drpossum]

The best outcome if you're a Godot supporter and a developer supporter is Unity backs off the installation fees AND then everyone goes to Godot anyways.

[BryanLegend]

Best outcome would be they decide to open source Unity.

[copx]

Don't worry, even if Unity fully abandons these plans, trust has been irreversibiley destroyed, and everyone is now aware that their CEO is an EA scumbag.

I doubt many people will start new projects based on Unity after this..

[Macha]

The only defense against the door-in-face negotiating technique is that the perpetrators have to end up worse than they started to dissuade them for trying again. For every hasbro forced to back down and then some, that's more power and dissuasion power to consumers, but for every reddit who gets their way with some superficial concessions that's a point of reassurance for executives who might consider trying it,

[treprinum]

A peek into the future: "Godot engine after becoming successful due to Unity flopping a decade ago has decided to change its licensing terms, requiring retroactive payments as well as advance payments for future estimated sales. The new CEO from Microsoft Games has stated that this approach brings the most value to shareholders, developers and gamers and brings the long sought stability to the development of the engine."

[marcodiego]

That is an advantage of a FLOSS solution: if such a thing happens, we can fork it.

[johnnyanmac]

Yup, it's not that FOSS is immune to enshittification, it's that it puts power into the user's hands should that time some.

The worst case is that Godot forks, rebrands, goes private with the rebrand, and leaves the public branch unmaintained. But in that case your current game isn't screwed. It is still yours, can't be nickle and died, and you have source code access to fix any bugs (even if you lost a lot of support). Though, it is very likely someone else decides to maintain Godot as a result of this.

[xethos]

This kind of sellout is why we have OpenOffice vs LibreOffice, or Nextcloud instead of Owncloud. If the project stops respecting users, the users can and will leave. And they'll be no worse off, because they can pretty well start off right where they were.

[Guvante]

There is a reason open source is defined by the license. If all of the code is available with a permissive license it is impossible to do this without allowing people to fork your old version and maintain it in perpetuity.

[philipov]

I don't see anything here about firing the executives who forced through this plan. Rolling back the changes isn't enough when the biggest damage is the breach of trust in having a reliable business partner.

[thordenmark]

This reminds me of when Wizards of the Coast destroyed their D&D business by announcing they were cancelling the OGL. Many people had built a cottage industry around the OGL which helped to grow the player base, which in turn helped Wizards of the Coast make 5.0 the most popular D&D yet. Now everyone despises and mistrusts them, it doesn't matter that they backtracked.

[ninth_ant]

By what measure did WotC or D&D get destroyed? The vast, vast majority of public figures in that space seem to have moved on from any opposition, including those who were most vocal about the OGL.

WotC completely got away with it. People will queue up for their new VTT and then be shocked, SHOCKED when Wizards leverages that to achieve the lock-in that they've so desperately pursued for years.

[Macha]

Destroyed is probably over selling it, but they did get the original OGL content and more licensed under creative commons as a concession which would prevent Wizards from attempting the same stunt again and provides rival VTT confidence in their continued ability to offer D&D and derived systems like pathfinder 1e.

[ninth_ant]

No, pathfinder isn’t covered by this since the CC license was specifically only for 5e SRD content.

And wizards never retracted the claim that they could revoke the OGL. So pathfinder 1e in particular is directly in their crosshairs.

[riwsky]

laughs in Baldur’s Gate 3