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I get that they wanted in on the Pokémon Go and Genshin Impact money printers, but anyone could have seen how much damage to their reputation it was going to cause.
Too little too late. Personally I've moved to Godot and am loving it. Have I mentioned that they have stellar documentation yet?
AND that the documentation is built in to the engine, only a 60mb download!
Along with Krita's one of the best docs I know, it's so good!
Damage done. It became a great example of why it isn't a good idea to rely on an engine operated by a corporate entity, since there's always a chance your product will be directly affected by some external executive's random choice.
I got personally screwed by this when I sunk the cash into Substance Painter / Designer, and then they "joined the Adobe family."
At this point any software in my pipeline that's not FOSS would be considered a point of vulnerability.
D'awww, did someone's little cash grab not work out?
Great, but why were no one but the bean-counters consulted when coming out with the blatant money-stealing scheme in the first place?
You have a lot of trust to build back because Godot has come a decently long way.
But some won't consider it. I was 2 months into a project and abandoned it. I'm now knee deep into another project in Unreal. If this doesn't go well, it'll be Godot, or Bevy or Armory. Unity is dead to me. It's still the same company run by the same board and I do not trust them.
we’ve made the decision to cancel the Runtime Fee for our games customers, effective immediately. Non-gaming Industry customers are not impacted by this modification.
Unity Personal: […] Unity Personal will remain free, and we’ll be doubling the current revenue and funding ceiling from $100,000 to $200,000 USD. […] The Made with Unity splash screen will become optional for Unity Personal games made with Unity 6 when it launches later this year.
at its heart, it must be a partnership built on trust
well… as much trust as you can get back after such activities.
I remember so much pessimism last year that people's complaints will change nothing and that almost every Unity dev is too deep and won't be able to switch engines.
Well, guess what, so many people did switch and Unity did feel the hurt. The community really did take action.
Everyone's going to (rightfully) dunk on Unity but I think this is a great move and it's nice that the engine isn't going away. Competition is always good, and I'm happy for the devs that did stick with the engine. Lots of studios celebrating on social media with a sigh of relief. I still think Godot is going to eat Unity's lunch the next few years so they better step it up.
Did they though? I haven't heard of a single big name studio switching to an opensource game engine.
I only know about the developers of Slay the Spire switching to Godot. Not the biggest name, but still well-known.
Most don't switch as they have in house skills that would cost to retrain. The real kicker is the big studios of the future that started their projects on Godot. Those Godot games that succeed (like Cassette Beasts or Brotato) may fund the big studios of the future, and you know their leads will be Godot specialists looking for Godot devs.
Other big studios may trial Godot, but when the seed is planted, the trees take 2 to 5 years to mature.
Big names probably plan ahead and may have switched the projects that were not too deep into development or haven't started yet. But it's likely something to not be loudly announced
I tough they canceled it in the weeks after the outrage
I think they only cancelled the "this applies retroactively to previous versions" bit. They removed some of the egregious parts of the runtime free, but otherwise kept it.
Someone else saw the ldtk jam chart, huh?