4 ms·
Setting aside whether or not this patent is silly or abstract or obvious or anything else, I have one important question: what does Unity plan to do with this?
by mabbo 5y ago
Setting aside whether or not this patent is silly or abstract or obvious or anything else, I have one important question: what does Unity plan to do with this?
Most big tech companies have a constant stream of patent applications, many of which are granted. But they rarely sue over 99% of them. Sure, Amazon had one-click for however many years and they cared about it. But the other tens of thousands of patents Amazon owns (a couple of which have my name on them as 'inventor') are never going to see a court room.
Why do they patent everything? So that patent trolls can't patent it first and then sue them for patent violations. It's a defensive patent.
Is ECS going to be Unity's "This is ours, no one else can use it without paying us" lawsuit-generating patent? I doubt it. They know they'd lose in court eventually, and along the way the entire industry would stop doing business with them. It would be a complete lose-lose move.
On the other hand, now that Unity owns this patent, no patent troll can go and patent ECS then start suing small-studio Unity customers, like parasites leaching off the success of Unity.
- the_duke 5y agoDefending against patent trolls is an aspect. But the flip side is that this gives corporations a great tool to handicap competition. If a competitor emerges, they can threaten legal action. And with a huge patent portfolio the big players can usually find a way to attack pretty much anyone. Many companies will easily get scared and cave, and so either lose competitive advantage by dropping the technology, or feel forced into agreeing to an aqui-hire by the corporation . Which further cements the corporations dominating position. This happens often enough, but rarely goes public.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gentleman11 5y agoLast year unity retroactively changed the license on assets from its asset store. Since then, you can no longer let freelancers or contractors use your assets while they do work for you, you end up having to buy them each a copy of everything in practice unless their work is really decoupled from the project. It’s a real killer for indies who are trying to collaborate who have not formed a company yet. This seems to apply to items you purchased before they changed the terms. They even promised they freelancers could use your assets in support forums days before the change I stopped using unity after that. They don’t act in good faith towards their users
- durbleflorp 5y agoGodot isn't quite as robust or mature as Unity yet, but it is open source and it has had the benefit of learning from Unity's mistakes when designing its own workflows. I think most Unity developers find the switch incredibly easy because most of the principles and many of the idioms are the same (and Godot is also more intuitive and has better documentation imo). Godot 4 looks like it should remove most of the last few pain points too. I'd say Godot is the superior prototyping/game jam tool, the superior 2d game engine, superior for building UI, and you don't have to deal with any licensing bullshit. It's also like 300 mb as a base install compared to Unity's 7 gb clusterfuck of spandrels. I'd say the only situation where I'd recommend Unity over Godot is if you already have a ton of Unity experience and want to build something quickly without learning new stuff, or if there is something critical in the asset store you can't find in Godot's (definitely less content and tutorials because of the smaller userbase)
- Buttons840 5y agoIndie game developers do seem like a group who wouldn't take kindly to being told they can't do what they want with their own computer.