It doesn't take desperation though. All it takes is the having the opportunity and a bunch of greedy suits whose incentives are to increase the bottom line. Or a CEO who wants a new yacht..

I think you should, by default, assume that any corpo who gets in a position to do so will eventually try to exploit and milk the market they've captured. I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who take the gamble and get screwed. Usually those are the same people pushing proprietary tech instead of demanding and working towards better free & open source solutions with no strings attached.

Reading all the posts got me thinking, maybe the goal is actually to alienate most small dev teams and hobbists and work exclusively with big-ish studios.
In the past Unity games were associated with trash shovelware because it was free (and easy to get assets), after some time, plenty of good games started appearing and even with the price model change, it seems they are stuggling financially.

I remember back when I got to know Ori and the Blind Forest thinking it couldn´t be a good game since it was built on Unity. Yeah, nowadays Ori, Hollow Knight, Shadow Tactics, Superhot, Broforce, CupHead, Fell Seal or even Kerbal Space Program and Cities Skylines are excelent games (there are others probably, those are what I've played and enjoyed a lot), I mean, some of the best games released in the last few years. The "indie scene" couln't prosperate without the help of Unity.

"Curating" the games that use Unity with a dumbfuck price model that uses installation number as a metric may indeed be very tempting to larger studios since DRM is already embedded in the engine, with a very nice incentive to devs to use it in creative ways.
This opens the door to all kinds of shenenigans, including crosschecking the install and persons account to limit piracy, offloading all the work, support and "dark moves" on to the devs themselves.

On that topic, I recently had a go with Gran Turismo 2 using DuckStation and after some tweaking is like entire new experience, even if me and my brother 100% the game several times back in the day. Not only increasing 3d rendering resolution, texture upscaling and 16:9 ratio but fixing distortion and flickering, to actually be able to use analog turning, throttle and breaking. It's like playing a modern driving title but with fun gameplay, except maybe the small draw distance.

Also, Zelda Wind Waker is turning 20 and with nothing but upscaling rendering resolution, via emulator, it looks better (IMO) than half of the games recently released, wich are nothing more than color saturated, generic and Unity-Feel.
By Unity-Feel, I mean most 3D games can pretty much be imediately identified as Unity built, just by looking at the graphics, specially thge low-poly stuff with that "hazy" and purple-ish tone.

True, I love that ad as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YvgUouPio0

Just because these games happen to be built on Unity doesn't necessarily mean they exist thanks to Unity. For all we know, they might exist in spite of Unity. And we'll never know what died thanks to Unity.

As far as I'm concerned, the indie scene prospered long before Unity had any mainstream-indie appeal. Unity is one for the "indiepocalypse" era.

doesn't change the fact that it would be a waste of time and resources if every company would develop their own engines all the time.




edit: But we're making the problem bigger as it is anyway. Apparently the dev does not have to pay for every installation until a certain number is reached and until his game generates a certain revenue.

Then why haven't you mentioned any of these amazing games? It's not the GOTY title that matters. Don't get hung up on that. I probably should not have said it that way. I'm talking about big important games in the landscape. People are not setting new standards using Unity. They are generally making cookie cutter stuff. The important titles are generally in house engines.

And it probably is too extreme to say everyone needs to write their own engine. But it's concerning when so many don't have a clue.

If you can't make your own engine YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO MAKE GAMES. You just know how to use Unity. Or you know how to use Unreal. But take those products away or the people who made them die off and they can't be maintained and guess what? You can't make games anymore. Because you don't know how.

We need people who know how.

Godot is already in its 4th major version.

Incidentally, Unreal seems to be more of a special purpose engine. For example, I've heard there's a function to make the player character crouch, something that only makes sense in certain types of games. (It wouldn't work in something like Tetris, for example.)

What an elitist statement.

It's a literal fact. You might be able to design game ideas, etc. and that's great. A lot goes into a full game beyond programming. But you literally don't know how to make a running video game. That's just true.

That's like saying a writer doesn't know how to write a book if he wrote it using a word processor he didn't create.

Bingo!

No, actually that analogy makes no sense. The fact you can't see how flawed it is means there's really no point discussing it.

Damn, there goes the highlight of my day.