This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they’re switching engines on social media.
Unity Engine taking a leaf out of reddits book. Lol
This has always been the risk.
Now, I’m a Linux user and really don’t like Unity the game engine. Unity the desktop was cool, on a side note, even though I’ve never used it for long periods of time.
Everyone I know has been reaching about Unreal for the past few years anyway. I’m surprised Unity is pulling this controversial move in this situation, driving more customers to the competition. It’s like if it was 2013 and AMD suddenly started charging double for their graphics cards even though Nvidia was way better
founding your business on proprietary software is just a crazy gamble.
Developing a good and feature rich game engine which also runs performant is a huge effort. That alone can cost a good team 2 years at least. Even more if we consider todays graphic standards. That’s nothing which smaller studios can easily deliver. So yeah, it’s an obvious decision to buy a license for a proprietary engine, where a lot of work has already went into. That’s just business and nothing crazy about it. Companies using services or products of other companies is pretty ordinary.
People wrote their own game engines since the earliest of games, they just want the easy route today and a marketplace to monetize on. These are poisoned gifts, and always have been.
It’s not “the easy route”. Making a game engine is a tremendous investment these days. If you are making anything other than a game that looks like early 2000s or earlier, you need a pretty capable engine that takes years to develop. That’s on top of the time it costs to make a game, which is also typically years. Not to mention that your proprietary engine will have subpar tooling and make your game development slower.
For anyone but industry giants it’s not feasible to make a modern engine. Unless your game is not aiming to play and feel like a modern game, you have to run with an off-the-shelf engine.
🤔 So what’s stopping people from simply making games under the free license and selling them anyway without paying Unity ridiculous taxes and fees?
Also now would be a great time to just use Godot and be done with it.
Licenses and copyright laws. When you make a game with Unity, you’re using proprietary code from Unity which has a license stating that the free version can only be used under certain circumstances. You’d be braking this license agreement if you distribute a game outside those conditions
How could they enforce such a thing? Just incorporate in another country and put the money there. Accept payment for micro transactions in Bitcoin. It’s not like they could take a foreign company to court; you just have to pick the right country that doesn’t honor such things.
The thing about unity is that it’s not just a software you use to program the game. When you distribute the game, you also distribute the engine. Since the engine is licensed to you under a special license, distributing it in a way that’s not permitted is copyright infringement. You agree to the license when you use unity, it’s like signing a contract. And if you breach this contract, Unity has all the rights to take legal action against you for profiting off their proprietary engine without paying them.
It also just doesn’t make sense to even try that. If you’re at the point where you’d have to share your profits with unity, your game will be making enough sales that it’s probably big enough for unity to notice it. And if you manage to keep your copyright infringement hidden from them, then your game is probably so small that you wouldn’t be paying anyways.
So yeah, it’s simply illegal, and unity will take legal action if they’re losing out on enough money
Last time I checked out Godot it wasn’t exactly what you called fully featured. So really it isn’t an unequivalent replacement.
Unity was a massive pile of crap when it was first released as well. Hopefully Godot will improve over time like unity did.
Then it’s time for us to put our heads together and make it so. Godot’s open source.
Sure but then we just get back around to the whole “why don’t people just build their own engine” arguement.
If I am making a game then I don’t want to spend time building out an engine first. I am very grateful to the people who do spend their time updating the engine but I don’t actually have the time.
