Good video. I think Jonathan Blow is thinking along the same lines in his (Preventing the) Collapse of Civilization talk, just applied to the greater context.

And I think they are both right. The technology people take for granted today is incredibly complex and far from perfect. If there are not enough people willing to master that foundation and maintain & renew it, things will stagnate and quite possibly eventually collapse.

I already see people in the software world buildings layers on top of layers on top of layers, and not in the "using the lower layers for great leverage" sense, but desperately trying to fix problems and add missing functionality, in the only layer they are personally familiar with -- usually the topmost one. Usually the result is shoddy, buggy, inefficient, hard to maintain, etc. Rather than making things fundamentally better, they're just adding another turd on top of the shaky tower. Complexity just multiplies, and this is not the inherent complexity of the business logic, this is all accidental complexity...

You can of course observe the same thing in games even today. While earlier back in this thread I argued that developer time is expensive and that optimizing data file formats is probably not a good use of developer time, I still find it friggin insane that a simple pixel graphics game in unity with a handful of tiles and sound effects can take up hundreds of megabytes (if not gigabytes!) of storage and requires loading screens where you sit for (at least) a few seconds each time, and then they quite possilbly spin up your GPU fans... and then you find the bugs and missing features. Extreme shoddines all around -- not made better but worse by the foundation and all the attempts at solve these things at the top level (which is usually the only layer the developer understands at all and has access to).

This is the kind of stuff that should fly on a modern CPU without any hardware acceleration, and all the levels and assets and code should fit in a few hundred kilobytes -- or a few megabytes at most. Loading should be instant (faster than your typical screen can refresh). If the devs didn't spend so much time trying to fight the shoddy foundation they have, maybe there'd be fewer bugs and missing features.

There's some kind of learned helplessness at play. All of a sudden people started to think that you cannot make a game without using a Unity style engine. That kind of thinking sure is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yes, I don't doubt it. They are friends & worked a bit together on The Witness.

that guy is so bad, wonder how his channel still running

Instantly feeling remembering XKCD here
https://xkcd.com/2347/

Is he? What is bad about him?

I've only seen a video or two of his and my main issue was he took 1 million words to say what could be said in a few sentences. But I assumed that was just the nature of trying to make money on youtube.

From what i've watched of him, he's not bad at all (else i wouldn't watch him). He presents a lot of information on the topic with a bias towards users and players vs corporations. Probably he's a gamer first and a personality second, and game dev (or related) third.

You should who is here for simply just trolling, starving for any reaction to the small things he throws randomly into any kind of discussion.

Just don't care about anything he wrote and move on, like a lot of people do.

he doesnt look genuine and talks way too much

He's a reactionary and tends to play the "get angry, my mob" card.

Yeah doubt this will be a thing. Unity is probably feeling it out to see if they can monopolize on the new subscription model but its going to backfire badly on them if they go through with it.

First, charging devs for free downloads of a game only discourages them from using the Unity engine. Subscription models and game giveaways are a part of the gaming ecosystem only further worsens Unity as a game engine compared to its competitor Unreal. AAA games are moving toward the Unreal engine and Unity is only incentivizing them to go full force toward their competitor with this stupid proposal.

quote from Stephen Totilo:
"I got a major update from Unity about their new fees
Unity "regrouped" and now says ONLY the initial installation of a game triggers a fee
Demos mostly won't trigger fees
Devs not on the hook for Game Pass"

That said, I have no idea how they want to distinguish between a giveaway or gamepass and a normally sold game.

The thread for demos seems to be avoided. Probably a stronger separation between demo and final game is necessary, so that you can't use a store to upgrade the demo to full version for example.


The "first installation" ... I think they mean the first time it's started on a computer since they have no way of determining when it was actually installed. The problem I see here are Windwos updates. You know when you perform a firefox update and then the 'trusted device' is suddenly not so trusted anymore and you have to type in your two factor authentifications again? Same can happen when you upgrade or reinstall Windows. Sure, that's not THAT often, but it probably doubles or maybe even triples the number of installations counted during a games' lifetime. Then again they already chose numbers that already match the fact that there are more installations than sales.


ps: In my opinion Unity was never meant for AAA. Or better: not suited for it. It was always designed for small, cheap productions.

Funny enough it's them who push people to subscription models the most, where one has to keep paying :)

Looking at the numbers listed as threshold, I think this whole thing is designed to push developers towards at least paying for the pro version of Unity.
By doing so the numbers are high enough that it's very unlikely that anyone ever has to pay a lot unless he has at least medium success with his game. If no one plays the game, the limits won't be reached.

To make it clear: I find it more than fair that someone has to pay for the tools he uses to make money with. Just the number of installations ... I don't know, it doesn't seem right.
Makes me remember the limited number of allowed online activations of a game, which some games had in the early 2000s (I recall two: X-Blades and the Angry Birds series). Once the number was reached, you could not install it any more.

I bet they are quite surprised by this ad hoc panic change to the terms, nobody spoke about with them in advance.
The problem for Unity is, those are the big fishes, much bigger then Unity is. You can't play with them like with your customers.

There would have been many ways to do such changes right.
Like simply adding the Unreal Engine model, where very successfull devs pay an additional fee to from the profit they made.
Or adding an additional fee per sold licence of your game, when you are over certain numbers.

But for now, Unity seems to try out every way how not to do it, even expanding the circle of parties they take on by taking a piss at the big 3 (MS, Sony, BigN), which has been proven in the past, to be a very bad idea.

I have to say, this gets more and more entertaining.


And because I was reading it somewhere else.
There were people defending Unity, because "they need that money for their big number of people working on the engine."

At that moment I always ask myself how Epic managed to release the Unreal Engine and support it for Customers, beside some other "side projects" (Like being a Dev, Publisher and Onlinestore) with 2200 people, or how CD Project managed to build their Engine (beside some Side projects like being a Dev and owning an online Store) with only 1200 people.
While Unity had 7700 people at the same time, working only on the Unity Engine (with everything beside you need for your costumers - as Epic does)...

I call using a bloated company as justification for "I need more money" BS.

Quite a few findings and developments in the last few days :

1. People at r/gamedev found out that Unity has changed their ToS and removed Github repo that was tracking ToS changes : https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16hnibp/unity_silently_removed_their_github_repo_to_track/


2. Multiple mobile developer reported that Unity offered them not to pay Runtime Fee if they switch to Unity's User Analyitics (UA) platform : https://mobilegamer.biz/unity-is-offering-a-runtime-fee-waiver-if-you-switch-to-levelplay-as-it-tries-to-kill-applovin/


3. Company that helps with administrative and legal work to video and technology development companies thinks Unity's new pricing model and ToS might have some legal risk : https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sheridans-interactive-games-commercial-production-and-ar-vr_unity-gamedevelopment-activity-7108110372053606401-qcKQ


4. A number of mobile developers are turning off IronSource and Unity Ads monetization in their mobile applications and games : https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/82426/developers-issue-collective-ultimatum-to-unity-no-more-ironsource-or-unity-ads-until-runtime-conditions-are-reviewed/


5. A growing number of developers are leaving Unity (tracked by this Twitter account) :

https://twitter.com/FuckedByUnity/status/1702625653063852402