7 ms·

Tough to hear. At a time it was the only company keeping Epic in check (after the horrors of UE3), probably the reason they had such an open and lax license for

by rawbot 4y ago

Tough to hear. At a time it was the only company keeping Epic in check (after the horrors of UE3), probably the reason they had such an open and lax license for UE4.

jpgvm 4y ago
This happens all to often though. Small company comes out swinging to upset the status-quo, essentially poking the bear. From there it either plays out one of two ways depending on how competent the management of the incumbent is. 1. They underestimate and continually disregard the startup. This generally leads to AMD vs Intel situation. Don't do this. 2. Understand the threat they pose and systematically match all of their advantages, smothering them with investment they can't afford to keep up with. This is essentially what Epic did here and generally what you should always do if you have a dominant market position and can afford it. Unity is left in a bad situation because accessibility to their engine was it's key draw. A few years ago people also felt it was an easier engine to develop games on but that viewpoint has been shifting back to UE4 as of late because of the difficulty studios have had "actually shipping" Unity based titles, let along long-term maintenance issues. In terms of pure quality Unreal has generally (but not always) been on top and definitely in terms of capability and performance. Doesn't help that Epic has an enormous cash-cow in the form of Fortnite while Unity has next to no income outside of it's in-game advertising business. They also bet heavily on VR and that hasn't panned out to be as profitable as people thought it would be with the majority of revenue in the VR/AR space being heavily skewed into the enterprise, government and military verticals which aren't where Unity performs well.
- largbae 4y ago
  Option 3: Buy the upstart a la Instagram.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jpgvm 4y ago
    Ok yeah I missed that one. That obviously happens more often than both of these actually.
- benstrumental 4y ago
  I feel like this happened to Gitlab / GitHub as well. Gitlab was gaining a ton of popularity and momentum with their free private repositories and built-in CI testing infrastructure. Then GitHub swooped in and offered all the same things, taking the wind out of Gitlab's sails.
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    Didn't those changes only happen after Microsoft sunk their money in to buy GitHub?
- Grazester 4y ago
  "...This generally leads to AMD vs Intel situation. Don't do this." Which situation is that? The one where the major player uses its power illegally to stifle its competition?
  - cruano 4y ago
    I think the one where AMD doubled [1] their market share in ~5 years [1] for x86, went from 17.8% on Q4 2017 to 39.7% on Q3 2021 as per https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-intel-amd-market-share/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-int...
- foobiekr 4y ago
  This is the first I've heard the claim that VR/AR revenue is skewed to enterprise and military. Can you share some links on this? I did a search and while I found a lot of discussion of _investment_ being skewed in that direction, I'm having difficulty finding any evidence that revenue is likewise skewed.
  - jpgvm 4y ago
    Anecdotal from knowing a lot of fellow entrepreneurs in the space that pivoted into things like hazardous environment training, etc don't have any hard supporting evidence sorry. Specifically most of these companies were originally trying to do games and/or consumer AR/VR apps but were forced to pivot due to lack of traction.
    - foobiekr 4y ago
      For what it's worth, I have a very, very hard time believing that the _revenue_ in the AR/VR space outside of games is even 5% of the total. If it was a big market, you wouldn't see companies like Microsoft and to a lesser extent WEbex etc. floundering so hard with their non-game-focused products. Even 5% seems unbelievable generous given that, for example, Webex Hologram has $0 revenue and Microsoft's DoD Hololens project is all but dead on launch.
      - gautamb0 4y ago
        I’ve been in the enterprise vr industry for almost 7 years, and you’re correct with your estimate being very close to where I’d put it. The vast majority of revenue is from gaming.
- kajaktum 4y ago
  >Doesn't help that Epic has an enormous cash-cow in the form of Fortnite while Unity has next to no income outside of it's in-game advertising business. Isn't Genshin Impact really, really, really massively profitable? It would be really sad if Unity takes a constant revenue instead of percentage-based off of that lol
jan_Inkepa 4y ago
I wonder if they're trapped in a Godot/Epic sandwich right now. I moved from Unity to Godot more or less and while it's not as good, and I'd not use it for commercial stuff (similarly, the Unreal Engine is for my purposes waaay too heavyweight/heavy-duty), it's probably eaten a lot of the good will/vibes audience that Unity enjoyed. (Also Epic donated 250k to Unity a few years ago - https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-was-awarded-epic-megagrant https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-was-awarded-epi... ). It might be the Godot side is insignificant, but I do wonder! Unity was and remains a cool engine on the whole, I think.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  Every time I see articles about Godot on HN I get the impression that it is much easier to beginner developers, hobbyists and amateurs. I think the only thing keeping Unity popular among these segments is popularity. This will probably be fixed after Godot 4.0 release.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Godot is insignificant but growing, that's the best way to put it. Godot has a lot of pain points, lack of knowledge and best practices which most Unity devs already figured out about Unity. Especially indie 3D is still kind of a pain in Godot. Mostly waiting for Godot 4 and hoping a lot of those pains will be solved, both 2D and 3D.
  - mattlondon 4y ago
    I recently just picked up Godot after years of tinkering with unity as a hobbyist. On the whole I like Godot and will probably continue to use it instead of unity I am not a pro, but it feels like there are a few rough edges in Godot that will trip up someone used to unity. E.g. the script editor UI is weird (it has reasonable actual code editing, but the layout and how you select files is weird and really unintuitive IMO - no tabs, shows you all scripts and not just the ones in the scene you are editing etc), you cannot easily "view"/"find" a node in the scene by double-clicking, you can easily dig into an instanced scene to edit it but there is no intuitive way of going "back up" so it is easy to get lost in the embedded scenes-within-scenes, you can't move the panes around in the editor how you'd like, you cannot pause the game and "view" the scene in the editor (making debug for collisions etc difficult). It is taking some getting used-to. I hope v4 sorts some of these niggles out.
oneoff786 4y ago
Seems like a weird way to frame things. Epic does a lot more for indie developers in terms of free stuff, transparency on the direction of the engine, the engine being source available, and so on. Unity is still the more common engine choice for indie games. Unity also generally seems to be terribly run whereas epic seems very solid, in no smal part due to having a huge cash cow with fortnite. It may have been true a long time ago but I would reckon it’s epic leading the charge these days for what we would want to see from an engine company.
- bootloop 4y ago
  Epic did nothing for indies before Unity3d distrusted their market. Before Unreal was a big player game engine with a high upfront cost.
- rawbot 4y ago
  This was only true from UE4 onwards. Unity started pressuring Epic when their latest product was UE3.
mupuff1234 4y ago
I'm surprised that neither of the big tech companies are building their own competing game/graphics engine.
- pid-1 4y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, Amazon has its own game engine.
  - mrec 4y ago
    That was Amazon Lumberyard, a licensed fork of CryEngine. I don't think it ever got much traction and has recently been rebranded as "Open 3D Engine" and handed over to the Linux Foundation.
    - jay_kyburz 4y ago
      I heard just yesterday that Lumberyard and o3de are different forks and that Amazons game teams are not using o3de. I'm interested in o3de, but the website needs to list games that have actually shipped on it. As far as I can see, nothing ever has.
Thaxll 4y ago
Epic is nowhere to be seen in the mobile space though.
- terafo 4y ago
  Highest grossing mobile game(PUBG mobile) uses ue4. I wouldn't say that's "nowhere to be seen.

by rawbot 4y ago

Tough to hear. At a time it was the only company keeping Epic in check (after the horrors of UE3), probably the reason they had such an open and lax license for UE4.

jpgvm 4y ago

This happens all to often though. Small company comes out swinging to upset the status-quo, essentially poking the bear. From there it either plays out one of two ways depending on how competent the management of the incumbent is. 1. They underestimate and continually disregard the startup. This generally leads to AMD vs Intel situation. Don't do this. 2. Understand the threat they pose and systematically match all of their advantages, smothering them with investment they can't afford to keep up with. This is essentially what Epic did here and generally what you should always do if you have a dominant market position and can afford it. Unity is left in a bad situation because accessibility to their engine was it's key draw. A few years ago people also felt it was an easier engine to develop games on but that viewpoint has been shifting back to UE4 as of late because of the difficulty studios have had "actually shipping" Unity based titles, let along long-term maintenance issues. In terms of pure quality Unreal has generally (but not always) been on top and definitely in terms of capability and performance. Doesn't help that Epic has an enormous cash-cow in the form of Fortnite while Unity has next to no income outside of it's in-game advertising business. They also bet heavily on VR and that hasn't panned out to be as profitable as people thought it would be with the majority of revenue in the VR/AR space being heavily skewed into the enterprise, government and military verticals which aren't where Unity performs well.

largbae 4y ago
Option 3: Buy the upstart a la Instagram.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jpgvm 4y ago
  Ok yeah I missed that one. That obviously happens more often than both of these actually.
benstrumental 4y ago
I feel like this happened to Gitlab / GitHub as well. Gitlab was gaining a ton of popularity and momentum with their free private repositories and built-in CI testing infrastructure. Then GitHub swooped in and offered all the same things, taking the wind out of Gitlab's sails.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  Didn't those changes only happen after Microsoft sunk their money in to buy GitHub?
Grazester 4y ago
"...This generally leads to AMD vs Intel situation. Don't do this." Which situation is that? The one where the major player uses its power illegally to stifle its competition?
- cruano 4y ago
  I think the one where AMD doubled [1] their market share in ~5 years [1] for x86, went from 17.8% on Q4 2017 to 39.7% on Q3 2021 as per https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-intel-amd-market-share/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-int...
foobiekr 4y ago
This is the first I've heard the claim that VR/AR revenue is skewed to enterprise and military. Can you share some links on this? I did a search and while I found a lot of discussion of _investment_ being skewed in that direction, I'm having difficulty finding any evidence that revenue is likewise skewed.
- jpgvm 4y ago
  Anecdotal from knowing a lot of fellow entrepreneurs in the space that pivoted into things like hazardous environment training, etc don't have any hard supporting evidence sorry. Specifically most of these companies were originally trying to do games and/or consumer AR/VR apps but were forced to pivot due to lack of traction.
  - foobiekr 4y ago
    For what it's worth, I have a very, very hard time believing that the _revenue_ in the AR/VR space outside of games is even 5% of the total. If it was a big market, you wouldn't see companies like Microsoft and to a lesser extent WEbex etc. floundering so hard with their non-game-focused products. Even 5% seems unbelievable generous given that, for example, Webex Hologram has $0 revenue and Microsoft's DoD Hololens project is all but dead on launch.
    - gautamb0 4y ago
      I’ve been in the enterprise vr industry for almost 7 years, and you’re correct with your estimate being very close to where I’d put it. The vast majority of revenue is from gaming.
kajaktum 4y ago
>Doesn't help that Epic has an enormous cash-cow in the form of Fortnite while Unity has next to no income outside of it's in-game advertising business. Isn't Genshin Impact really, really, really massively profitable? It would be really sad if Unity takes a constant revenue instead of percentage-based off of that lol

jan_Inkepa 4y ago

I wonder if they're trapped in a Godot/Epic sandwich right now. I moved from Unity to Godot more or less and while it's not as good, and I'd not use it for commercial stuff (similarly, the Unreal Engine is for my purposes waaay too heavyweight/heavy-duty), it's probably eaten a lot of the good will/vibes audience that Unity enjoyed. (Also Epic donated 250k to Unity a few years ago - https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-was-awarded-epic-megagrant https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-was-awarded-epi... ). It might be the Godot side is insignificant, but I do wonder! Unity was and remains a cool engine on the whole, I think.

marcodiego 4y ago
Every time I see articles about Godot on HN I get the impression that it is much easier to beginner developers, hobbyists and amateurs. I think the only thing keeping Unity popular among these segments is popularity. This will probably be fixed after Godot 4.0 release.
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Godot is insignificant but growing, that's the best way to put it. Godot has a lot of pain points, lack of knowledge and best practices which most Unity devs already figured out about Unity. Especially indie 3D is still kind of a pain in Godot. Mostly waiting for Godot 4 and hoping a lot of those pains will be solved, both 2D and 3D.
- mattlondon 4y ago
  I recently just picked up Godot after years of tinkering with unity as a hobbyist. On the whole I like Godot and will probably continue to use it instead of unity I am not a pro, but it feels like there are a few rough edges in Godot that will trip up someone used to unity. E.g. the script editor UI is weird (it has reasonable actual code editing, but the layout and how you select files is weird and really unintuitive IMO - no tabs, shows you all scripts and not just the ones in the scene you are editing etc), you cannot easily "view"/"find" a node in the scene by double-clicking, you can easily dig into an instanced scene to edit it but there is no intuitive way of going "back up" so it is easy to get lost in the embedded scenes-within-scenes, you can't move the panes around in the editor how you'd like, you cannot pause the game and "view" the scene in the editor (making debug for collisions etc difficult). It is taking some getting used-to. I hope v4 sorts some of these niggles out.

oneoff786 4y ago

Seems like a weird way to frame things. Epic does a lot more for indie developers in terms of free stuff, transparency on the direction of the engine, the engine being source available, and so on. Unity is still the more common engine choice for indie games. Unity also generally seems to be terribly run whereas epic seems very solid, in no smal part due to having a huge cash cow with fortnite. It may have been true a long time ago but I would reckon it’s epic leading the charge these days for what we would want to see from an engine company.

bootloop 4y ago
Epic did nothing for indies before Unity3d distrusted their market. Before Unreal was a big player game engine with a high upfront cost.
rawbot 4y ago
This was only true from UE4 onwards. Unity started pressuring Epic when their latest product was UE3.

mupuff1234 4y ago

I'm surprised that neither of the big tech companies are building their own competing game/graphics engine.

pid-1 4y ago
If I'm not mistaken, Amazon has its own game engine.
- mrec 4y ago
  That was Amazon Lumberyard, a licensed fork of CryEngine. I don't think it ever got much traction and has recently been rebranded as "Open 3D Engine" and handed over to the Linux Foundation.
  - jay_kyburz 4y ago
    I heard just yesterday that Lumberyard and o3de are different forks and that Amazons game teams are not using o3de. I'm interested in o3de, but the website needs to list games that have actually shipped on it. As far as I can see, nothing ever has.

Thaxll 4y ago

Epic is nowhere to be seen in the mobile space though.

terafo 4y ago
Highest grossing mobile game(PUBG mobile) uses ue4. I wouldn't say that's "nowhere to be seen.