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Why is it a liability? It’s how every other commercially licensed engine was built in the past. Unity is actually unusual in that respect. See id, valve, unrea

Why is it a liability? It’s how every other commercially licensed engine was built in the past. Unity is actually unusual in that respect. See id, valve, unreal, crytek.

sombremesa 5y ago
Because you're competing with the businesses who decide your fate as an engine. If you're Valve, you want games to be on Steam - and you'll push for that when games use your engine, even if it isn't explicitly stated or even intentional. This doesn't make Sony and Microsoft happy, obviously. You might argue that the platforms are different, but that continues to become more and more irrelevant as it becomes easier to release the same game on many platforms and crossplay becomes more commonplace. As a result, these marketplaces will try and favor some other engine, such as Unity. I think it's tough for the average techie on here to really grasp the nuances of business (mostly due to lack of direct XP), so I'm not going to belabor the point.
- socialist_coder 5y ago
  In theory you have a valid point, but in practice it just hasn't been an issue. See the previous commenter who pointed out that every engine company, with the exception of Unity, has always released games on their own engine. I have literally never seen any complaints about that.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- initplus 5y ago
  I understand that there is potential a conflict of interest involved... but Unity's customers also want an improved product. It's a competitive disadvantage compared to unreal that they don't dogfood their own product. Direct product flaws in Unity are more likely to push customers away to a competitor compared to nebulous business relations conflicts.
- simion314 5y ago
  You seem concerned about app stores, I think this is a different topic, I do not remember of any engine that is forcing developers to use a specific app store but I could see it happening that some engine will get features that would create such a dependency if used. A different solution I think works is to have the developers do support , you have your regular support handle the first contact but then have support forward non trivial stuff to developers and have them respond to customers. After a dev has to tackle same weird issue over and over again with support he will have the idea on how to make the thing more intuitive or less buggy.

Why is it a liability? It’s how every other commercially licensed engine was built in the past. Unity is actually unusual in that respect. See id, valve, unreal, crytek.

sombremesa 5y ago

Because you're competing with the businesses who decide your fate as an engine. If you're Valve, you want games to be on Steam - and you'll push for that when games use your engine, even if it isn't explicitly stated or even intentional. This doesn't make Sony and Microsoft happy, obviously. You might argue that the platforms are different, but that continues to become more and more irrelevant as it becomes easier to release the same game on many platforms and crossplay becomes more commonplace. As a result, these marketplaces will try and favor some other engine, such as Unity. I think it's tough for the average techie on here to really grasp the nuances of business (mostly due to lack of direct XP), so I'm not going to belabor the point.

socialist_coder 5y ago
In theory you have a valid point, but in practice it just hasn't been an issue. See the previous commenter who pointed out that every engine company, with the exception of Unity, has always released games on their own engine. I have literally never seen any complaints about that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
initplus 5y ago
I understand that there is potential a conflict of interest involved... but Unity's customers also want an improved product. It's a competitive disadvantage compared to unreal that they don't dogfood their own product. Direct product flaws in Unity are more likely to push customers away to a competitor compared to nebulous business relations conflicts.
simion314 5y ago
You seem concerned about app stores, I think this is a different topic, I do not remember of any engine that is forcing developers to use a specific app store but I could see it happening that some engine will get features that would create such a dependency if used. A different solution I think works is to have the developers do support , you have your regular support handle the first contact but then have support forward non trivial stuff to developers and have them respond to customers. After a dev has to tackle same weird issue over and over again with support he will have the idea on how to make the thing more intuitive or less buggy.