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The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn't track for me. The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their

The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn't track for me. The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes makes less money than this so-called runtime fee. I beg to differ, I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no revenue share/royalty pledge they had earlier, and ironically came up with an even worse monetization scheme. In my opinion, the only reason this whole fiasco happened is because Unity the company has too many headcounts and has too much expense, and the reason for that is they grew too big, and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth, even if the company is much healthier if it had stayed smaller. Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we ended up here. I think that says a lot.

HeavyStorm 3y ago
Also Epic only needs to look to their closest competitor to see this is a terrible idea. That said, the author forgets to mention one more important advantage of open source alternatives like Godot: they avoid market manipulation simply by existing, as they block monopoly. Unity wouldn't risk _future_ customers if they were not as confident in their position (Unity is king on mobile, don't forget).
sigmoid10 3y ago
I don't think this is a problem of company structure. It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened. But if you hire the former CEO of EA - a guy with no low level industry experience and who left his last job because of poor financial performance - then this whole fiasco seems like it was inevitable.
- miragecraft 3y ago
  On the surface that is the case, but once you're a publicly traded company you're beholden to your shareholders, not your customers, so your goals and incentives changes drastically and "bad management decisions" gets made. You think the management made a mistake, I think the management (as a result of going public) is the mistake.
  - tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
    That’s a simplistic view. “Beholden to shareholders” does not mean prioritising short-term gain at all costs. That’s not just my ideology, it is how publicly traded companies work a lot of the time, including the one that I work for. To imply that there’s such a stark binary difference between a privately held and publicly held company misses a lot of nuance. Investors can want a quick out or be in for the long game in either case. The controlling parties pre-IPO have plenty of knobs they can turn to limit drive-by influence if they choose. If a company gets fucked by going public, it was already fucked before it went public, because the people behind the float either didn’t care about protecting the company, or didn’t know how.
    - miragecraft 3y ago
      Thanks for the insight. So I guess the conclusion is that Unity was fucked pre-IPO?
      - Iulioh 3y ago
        The fact that the CEO was slowly selling millions of shares was an indication
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        I would expect any CEO to continuously sell shares as they are awarded. Diversifying investments is a very recommended and common investment choice.
binarymax 3y ago
Epic/Valve are privately held now, but if you build a team and game series on a proprietary platform, you are at the whim of the platform owner. It might be a low risk now given they are looking to scoop up teams ditching Unity, but nobody knows what will happen in 2 or 3 years.
philipov 3y ago
> I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no revenue ... Not quite. Unity merged with a company that sells mobile ads: ironSource. They are direct competitors of AppLovin, the dominant player in that market. The terms and backroom deals that Unity is offering devs will waive these fees if they use Unity's ad products instead of AppLovin. This is clearly an attempt to abuse their position in one market (game engines) to bolster their position in another market (mobile ads).
- and0 3y ago
  That's fascinating, thanks. None of the various analysis I've read so far have hit on this point but it makes sense.
  - philipov 3y ago
    I think HoegLaw did a good rundown of the legal side of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGMrebXypJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGMrebXypJo
- antonjs 3y ago
  Kind of feels like this is the Boeing--McDonnell Douglas of game engine acquisitions.
- nugget 3y ago
  Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use their other (presumably inferior) products. As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course the new fees will remain. They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever. Based on the backlash, my prediction is that Unity either quickly reverses course (damaging their brand a little and perhaps costing the CEO his job) or stubbornly doubles down (damaging their brand a lot and giving Godot and others an opening to eventually rival them).
glenstein 3y ago
That all hinges on a motley combination of rationalizing, squinting, guesstimation of intentions and projecting future behavior of unpredictable third parties. One could have with equal plausibility made an assessment that Unity would not proceed with self-inflicted wounds, yet here we are. Just like the "I've got nothing to hide" argument fallaciously depends on assumptions about the coherence of motives on the part of people violating your privacy, "I've got nothing to worry about" depends on assuming reasonable motives from private actors. It is a lot less strenuous to reason from a place that is agnostic about future intentions of third parties.
danaris 3y ago
The problem is, this isn't a question of, "Will Epic do something like this tomorrow?" It's "Will Epic do something like this at any point in the foreseeable future?" Will Epic's leadership decide to IPO in hopes of more money? Will they take a lucrative private buyout from some other billionaire with more money than sense, like Musk? Will they hire new upper management that persuades them they need to do something like this for Serious Business Reasons? Will they retire and be replaced by people who do the same? The problem is, if you build your game on Unreal, you're essentially betting all its future commercial success on one for-profit company's decision to remain Less Of An Asshole Than The Other Guy. The choice of what engine you use has suddenly become about much more than just "what features does it offer?" "How many developers know how to use it?" or even "What's the pricing structure today?" You have to worry about whether they'll get it into their heads, for whatever reason, to retroactively change their pricing structure in a way that ruins you financially. On the other hand, if you build your game on Godot, or some in-house engine, you know you'll never need to worry about that. Also worth noting: If the gaming industry, and the public at large, send a clear enough signal to Unity now that this is unacceptable, that makes it much, much less likely that anyone else will try to pull bullshit like this in the future.
and0 3y ago
Bingo re: Unity going public. Once you have a stock price (and assuming your early investors aren't the most aggressive type in the first place) the goal then shifts to infinite growth, and lately tech companies (even Google Netflix etc) have had to make user-unfriendly decisions to justify ever growing valuations in the face of rate hikes. Unity isn't the first, but it has maybe done it the worst. One of the "analysis" threads by a VC on Twitter mentioned the engine not making as much money as the ad business as "unsustainable". But it's the same nonsense Musk spouted with Twitter not being sustainable or "making a profit" -- it made a profit but not given the market realities deliberately hoisted upon it.
harles 3y ago
I think this comes down to ambitions. Unity wanted to be an advertising company and when that goal started slipping away, they did something drastic. Epic wants to be a store and a virtual production platform. Who knows what they’ll do if those goals seem impossible. It’s also worth remembering that Epic isn’t the good guy here. When incentives align, most corporations are capable of some pretty awful stuff. With Epic specifically they made accidental purchases in Fortnite very easy and then intentionally buried the refund button outside the store under an obscure settings page [0]. [0]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/fortnite-video-game-maker-epic-games-pay-more-half-billion-dollars-over-ftc-allegations https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  Unity didn't always want to be an advertising company. Epic didn't always want to be a store and virtual product platform. Ambitions change. And you're subject to the whims of the ambitions of those with more power.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > Unity wanted to be an advertising company and when that goal started slipping away, they did something drastic. Epic wants to be a store and a virtual production platform. Epic "being a store" just happens to allow them to collect a ton of personal data and push a whole lot of ads. Seems like they want to be in advertising too.
bitcharmer 3y ago
> In my opinion, the only reason this whole fiasco happened is because Unity the company has too many headcounts and has too much expense, and the reason for that is they grew too big, and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth, even if the company is much healthier if it had stayed smaller This can be simplified to: "The only reason are MBAs"
darklycan51 3y ago
"who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split" Yeah, I wonder why, almost like they're trying to slowly gain market share lead to then have a monopoly. Arguing that just because right now there's alternatives that don't seem like they'll do that, right now. Is not a good argument against open source. if any of those engines can retroactively destroy your livelihood, or make games unavailable forever for users because of $ reasons, then that is a huge enough reason to simply drop the engine. Unreal will get eventually damage from this unity move as well, if I was a game dev I would seriously consider Godot right now, luckily I am a software dev not a game dev, only game dev I do is modding warcraft 3 so I don't have to bother about that stuff
- gochi 3y ago
  Epic will never have a monopoly as long as Steam exists. They aren't complete fools here, they realize this but are aware that even having a slice of that massive pie is enough to fuel numerous positions in the future.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    A duopoly isn't much better
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      It's actually a lot better. At least the two companies check and balance each other naturally. Not ideal, but better. The big issue is if those two companies collude, but for storefronts there's less incentive than other industries.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - darklycan51 3y ago
    When I was talking about monopoly, I was talking about 3rd party engines, not storefronts.
_hypx 3y ago
There is a secondary argument in favor of home-grown engines too. It's been very disappointing to see so many game companies abandon their own rendering technology in favor of Unreal. Terrible licensing rules might drive companies to go back to having their own engines.
- dvngnt_ 3y ago
  I feel like each year makes it harder as demands increase
  - _hypx 3y ago
    Never every game needs to have insane graphics. For a lot of games, “good enough” graphics is fine.
    - gochi 3y ago
      It's not just graphics, it's everything. Look at Frostbite for example from EA. While a good shooter engine, they had to make significant changes over the years to adapt the engine to other genres of games, and that significantly bloated timelines. Jason Schreier has reporting on this if you're interested. We kind of forget that a lot of custom engines aren't universal ones like Unity or Unreal that can adapt to anything you throw at it. Custom engines are largely hyper specific to the type of game they were making with it, everything else is experimental, untested, undocumented, or non-existent!
      - _hypx 3y ago
        Frostbite is a weird example because they focused heavily on graphics over gameplay. It is also an FPS engine that was forced into powering an RPG, and without any real input from the developers in question. I'm sure most larger gamedev companies can make a decent game engine on their own if extreme performance is not needed. The recent Baldur's Gate is a good example.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      Honestly I prefer games with a strong sense of style over those with high quality graphics but a bland/generic look.
pxoe 3y ago
people trusted in unity for years, enough to build their products and careers on it and around it, and something like this still happened. was it foreseeable? even if it was, well what then, 'great, i have no options besides sucking it up or switching, since i built upon this'. what guarantees do epic/unreal customers have? oh wait, this isn't about 'what worth does 'trust in company' even have', but more like 'public companies bad'
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  > was it foreseeable? Has Unity ever said anything about turning their software into a platform, for instance asking for monthly/yearly subscriptions instead of a one time fee ? If they did, that's when the devs (and especially teachers of future devs !) should have dropped it as soon as feasible.
  - pxoe 3y ago
    platform isn't just about subscriptions, subscriptions don't really make a platform, and overall it'd be kind of a poor tell of whether it's time to jump ship. epic/unreal is kind of a platform (there's a bunch of stuff in their ecosystem that plugs in, etc.), so what, should people jump ship from unreal now
    - BlueTemplar 3y ago
      You're right, it's not a sufficient condition (pretty sure Red Hat offers Linux support in subscription form), you also need to have closed source software for a platform. I don't know about the situation with Unreal, but I would be very wary of using it, considering Epic has been pushing a game Store. (And Unreal's source code is merely source available ?)
doctorpangloss 3y ago
I get that you're writing stylized speculations but in my experience in the games industry, every single point is wrong. It is the most upvoted comment because it touches on a bunch of first-principles-know-nothing boogeymen, but so it goes with Hacker News nowadays. You can keep reading to find out why, or whatever, my dog in this race is (1) I use Unity (2) I don't think they're going to change anything about these terms except maybe the installs issue (3) and the vast majority of people will continue to be unaffected by these pricing changes. If people want to spend their breath agitating for something, it's to get Unity to share the source code for a lower price. That would actually help me make better games. At the scale where Unity pricing matters, the engine costs will take away from marketing spend. > ...the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to... break the promise of no revenue share/royalty pledge... too many headcounts... privately held [is good and public is bad]... says a lot. Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine. You can certainly believe there is. It's a complex piece of software and target platforms and technology are always changing, so it's understandable that it is expensive to develop.
- Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
  >Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine. How can you say that when unreal exists? They are dominant in PC and even used in many large mobile games.
  - doctorpangloss 3y ago
    They simply serve very different audiences of both developers and end users. Their coexistence is evidence of how different they are from one another, not how fungible they are.
    - tomtheelder 3y ago
      They really don’t at this point. Unreal has reached a point where it’s a better choice than Unity for nearly every single project. There’s still these pervasive beliefs that Unity is better for 2D or better for small teams, and it just isn’t true. The one exception is junk mobile games, and even then I think Unreal is a completely reasonable choice. Unity has been well and truly left behind with the gap widening every day and they know it. Their coexistence is a legacy of a time where Unreal had not widened its viable use cases beyond triple A style 3D games, but that hasn’t been the case for years now. It’s just taking a whole for developers to catch up, and obviously there’s a lot of inertia with Unity projects and experience.
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
>hinges on the premise that Epic ... is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit Bahaha. Epic would eat their own grandmother if it got them an increase in profit. You better hope the Epic never becomes the only game in town, because then you will see what happens to who takes home what revenue.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
> and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth Why is "growth" always interpreted as "higher headcount" and not "higher profits"? Certainly a company that has continually growing profits without increasing costs would be seen as more valuable than a company that constantly increases their costs with revenue? Does Unity hiring more Engineers actually increase revenue?
- bmer 3y ago
  Perhaps because it is generally well accepted that you can maintain stable profit margins with a fixed employee count, but increasing profits with a fixed employee count is not possible beyond the maximum potential of that fixed set of employees? (Not sure, this is an amateur's guess on my part.)
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  very generalized answer here but it comes down to: 1. you want to make sure product A is profitable 2. at some point Product A will reach a steady state (in some utopic future, but let's pretend). i.e. Product A will hit a point where its excitement will taper off. 3. How do you get that explosive growth back? New product. But you want to maintain old product. 4. hire more people to work on Product B. Have it launch, big growth! 5. then recession hits and it turns out you need stability. Product A is fine, everyone on Product B is fired profits are important, but it's not the end all be all for how the stock market works. It may not even be the most important factor. You want to build excitement and become the thing big thing, even if it turns out to be a check you can't cash. So in that lens, Unity hires (or hired) more engineers or acquires companies to increase excitement, not necessarily to increase profits. "Product A" is ads, and right now even that isn't very stable for them, so I guess they are trying to find a new Product A. Back in the old days, Game studios used to simply make games to build this excitement. It has a set track, a big time to announce and release for spikes, and your existing teams works on the next game. But more studios want to get that "Product A", so even games are investing more in GaaS for that steady income. It's what ended up happening to Epic with Fortnite, where their "Product B" is actually announcing exciting engine features.
somenameforme 3y ago
There's another strong argument in favor of this point. This [1] is from Unreal's license: --- "7. The Agreement Between You and Epic a. Amendments If we make changes to this Agreement, you are not required to accept the amended Agreement, and this Agreement will continue to govern your use of any Licensed Technology you already have access to. However, if we make changes to this Agreement, you will not be allowed to access certain Epic services or download the Licensed Technology unless you have accepted the amended Agreement. If we make changes, we will provide you with notice, such as by sending an email or giving you notice when you next log into an Epic service." --- So in other words, if they do a bait and switch, you're free to keep using the old license for older versions of the engine. The reason I think this is telling is because they did this in the day and age where basically every EULA comes down to "We can do anything at any time, for any reason, and you can do nothing." For them to actually have this in their terms is a tremendous display of good faith. [1] - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  I can't see how anything less favorable to the devs would not be instantly rejected in court, especially in the EU ? Speaking of which, I don't see why the Unity using devs can't just keep using the old version of Unity, and therefore never have to accept the new license ? (Of course I assume that Unity would have made it extra-annoying, because these changes don't just come out like that, but the point here is to give themselves time to find an alternative to Unity.)
- das_keyboard 3y ago
  If you go to this Unity blogpost from 2019 [1] it states: > When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS. > Moving forward, we will host TOS changes on Github to give developers full transparency about what changes are happening, and when. The link to the mentioned GitHub repo just recently became dead :/ [1]: https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitment-to-being-an-open-platform https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-an...
eestrada 3y ago
> Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we ended up here. I think that says a lot. I've been thinking a lot about private versus public companies. Most of my favorite products come out of privately held companies. There is something about the incentives for publicly traded companies that encourages them to make poor choices. I think it is because there are effectively two forms of revenue: selling products/services and selling stock. And those two things often conflict with eachother to the detriment of the customer. However, with a privately held company, the loyalty is primarily to the customer. Thus the products are better because they need to be to keep the company afloat. I don't think that means that public companies shouldn't exist, but I wonder how an individual can structure their publicly traded company to avoid having the company misalign its incentives with those of the actual paying customer. My current theory is to focus more on revenue sharing instead of stock price. For example, dividend stocks. I don't think it completely solves the problem, but it at least moves things in the right direction.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  It just depends on the business in question, and the external pressures on the business. Jeff Bezos managed to not pay dividends for years by focusing on value, but also by zooming ahead of the pack in a greenfield environment that was ludicrously profitable. Low margin businesses, private or public, will struggle and have to do something to offer value for money; e.g. make a smaller chocolate bar that's the same price, and a larger chocolate bar that costs more. On selling stock: I think this is a bit silly. A company can't just sell its stock as a viable strategy. What happens when it runs out? And who would buy it anyway?
  - eestrada 3y ago
    In the USA, corporations just do stock splits or run a corporate vote to issue more shares. Also many large tech companies use stock as total compensation for employees, so the "selling" of stock can be indirect as a form of revenue. Instead of paying employees cash, they pay in stock, which frees up more cash for other things. Thus they don't need to have as high of true revenue margins to pay employees well. Big corporations understand that a lot of paper value is fungible one way or another.
georgeecollins 3y ago
Nothing against Epic, but they have a strategic incentive to encourage people to use their store. Getting a discount to use the engine in exchange for a store “exclusive” is a cost that I see developers not really appreciating. There is no free lunch.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  I don't think that's unusual. When Valve announced Source 2 for free, there was a similar discount to use the engine: the game must release on Steam. Maybe that has changed in the 8 years of no news about the release of Source 2 for developer though. https://www.pcgamer.com/source-2-will-be-free-wont-ask-for-royalties/ https://www.pcgamer.com/source-2-will-be-free-wont-ask-for-r...
ubertaco 3y ago
The question is not "do we _suppose_ that it's _likely_ that they _would_ do something similar?", but rather "is it _possible_ that they _can_ do something similar?" If you're using a proprietary engine made by a for-profit company, the answer to that second question is always "yes", and the answer to that first question is always subject to change. If you're using an open-source engine, the answer to the second question is "no" (because in the worst-case you can fork it to buy yourself time), and the answer to the first question is totally moot, because the first question is no longer a thing. It's about risk management: optimism is not a strategy. Mitigation by removing the attack vector _is_ a strategy.
majormajor 3y ago
That assumes that the motivations won't ever change for Epic, like how they changed for Unity.
akhosravian 3y ago
I think it is unlikely Epic or Valve will adopt something as overtly hostile to business users in their ecosystems as long as they are controlled by Tim Sweeney and Gabe Newell (respectively). I think it’s anyone’s guess what will happen when that stops being true, but anyone under the age of 40 or so should recognize they will almost certainly outlive those individuals. Closed source means you are beholden to what their successor’s decide even if you (like me) are confident their current leadership will make good decisions.

HeavyStorm 3y ago

Also Epic only needs to look to their closest competitor to see this is a terrible idea. That said, the author forgets to mention one more important advantage of open source alternatives like Godot: they avoid market manipulation simply by existing, as they block monopoly. Unity wouldn't risk _future_ customers if they were not as confident in their position (Unity is king on mobile, don't forget).

sigmoid10 3y ago

I don't think this is a problem of company structure. It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened. But if you hire the former CEO of EA - a guy with no low level industry experience and who left his last job because of poor financial performance - then this whole fiasco seems like it was inevitable.

miragecraft 3y ago
On the surface that is the case, but once you're a publicly traded company you're beholden to your shareholders, not your customers, so your goals and incentives changes drastically and "bad management decisions" gets made. You think the management made a mistake, I think the management (as a result of going public) is the mistake.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
  That’s a simplistic view. “Beholden to shareholders” does not mean prioritising short-term gain at all costs. That’s not just my ideology, it is how publicly traded companies work a lot of the time, including the one that I work for. To imply that there’s such a stark binary difference between a privately held and publicly held company misses a lot of nuance. Investors can want a quick out or be in for the long game in either case. The controlling parties pre-IPO have plenty of knobs they can turn to limit drive-by influence if they choose. If a company gets fucked by going public, it was already fucked before it went public, because the people behind the float either didn’t care about protecting the company, or didn’t know how.
  - miragecraft 3y ago
    Thanks for the insight. So I guess the conclusion is that Unity was fucked pre-IPO?
    - Iulioh 3y ago
      The fact that the CEO was slowly selling millions of shares was an indication
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        I would expect any CEO to continuously sell shares as they are awarded. Diversifying investments is a very recommended and common investment choice.

binarymax 3y ago

Epic/Valve are privately held now, but if you build a team and game series on a proprietary platform, you are at the whim of the platform owner. It might be a low risk now given they are looking to scoop up teams ditching Unity, but nobody knows what will happen in 2 or 3 years.

philipov 3y ago

> I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no revenue ... Not quite. Unity merged with a company that sells mobile ads: ironSource. They are direct competitors of AppLovin, the dominant player in that market. The terms and backroom deals that Unity is offering devs will waive these fees if they use Unity's ad products instead of AppLovin. This is clearly an attempt to abuse their position in one market (game engines) to bolster their position in another market (mobile ads).

and0 3y ago
That's fascinating, thanks. None of the various analysis I've read so far have hit on this point but it makes sense.
- philipov 3y ago
  I think HoegLaw did a good rundown of the legal side of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGMrebXypJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGMrebXypJo
antonjs 3y ago
Kind of feels like this is the Boeing--McDonnell Douglas of game engine acquisitions.
nugget 3y ago
Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use their other (presumably inferior) products. As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course the new fees will remain. They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever. Based on the backlash, my prediction is that Unity either quickly reverses course (damaging their brand a little and perhaps costing the CEO his job) or stubbornly doubles down (damaging their brand a lot and giving Godot and others an opening to eventually rival them).

glenstein 3y ago

That all hinges on a motley combination of rationalizing, squinting, guesstimation of intentions and projecting future behavior of unpredictable third parties. One could have with equal plausibility made an assessment that Unity would not proceed with self-inflicted wounds, yet here we are. Just like the "I've got nothing to hide" argument fallaciously depends on assumptions about the coherence of motives on the part of people violating your privacy, "I've got nothing to worry about" depends on assuming reasonable motives from private actors. It is a lot less strenuous to reason from a place that is agnostic about future intentions of third parties.

danaris 3y ago

The problem is, this isn't a question of, "Will Epic do something like this tomorrow?" It's "Will Epic do something like this at any point in the foreseeable future?" Will Epic's leadership decide to IPO in hopes of more money? Will they take a lucrative private buyout from some other billionaire with more money than sense, like Musk? Will they hire new upper management that persuades them they need to do something like this for Serious Business Reasons? Will they retire and be replaced by people who do the same? The problem is, if you build your game on Unreal, you're essentially betting all its future commercial success on one for-profit company's decision to remain Less Of An Asshole Than The Other Guy. The choice of what engine you use has suddenly become about much more than just "what features does it offer?" "How many developers know how to use it?" or even "What's the pricing structure today?" You have to worry about whether they'll get it into their heads, for whatever reason, to retroactively change their pricing structure in a way that ruins you financially. On the other hand, if you build your game on Godot, or some in-house engine, you know you'll never need to worry about that. Also worth noting: If the gaming industry, and the public at large, send a clear enough signal to Unity now that this is unacceptable, that makes it much, much less likely that anyone else will try to pull bullshit like this in the future.

and0 3y ago

Bingo re: Unity going public. Once you have a stock price (and assuming your early investors aren't the most aggressive type in the first place) the goal then shifts to infinite growth, and lately tech companies (even Google Netflix etc) have had to make user-unfriendly decisions to justify ever growing valuations in the face of rate hikes. Unity isn't the first, but it has maybe done it the worst. One of the "analysis" threads by a VC on Twitter mentioned the engine not making as much money as the ad business as "unsustainable". But it's the same nonsense Musk spouted with Twitter not being sustainable or "making a profit" -- it made a profit but not given the market realities deliberately hoisted upon it.

harles 3y ago

I think this comes down to ambitions. Unity wanted to be an advertising company and when that goal started slipping away, they did something drastic. Epic wants to be a store and a virtual production platform. Who knows what they’ll do if those goals seem impossible. It’s also worth remembering that Epic isn’t the good guy here. When incentives align, most corporations are capable of some pretty awful stuff. With Epic specifically they made accidental purchases in Fortnite very easy and then intentionally buried the refund button outside the store under an obscure settings page [0]. [0]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/fortnite-video-game-maker-epic-games-pay-more-half-billion-dollars-over-ftc-allegations https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...

bcrosby95 3y ago
Unity didn't always want to be an advertising company. Epic didn't always want to be a store and virtual product platform. Ambitions change. And you're subject to the whims of the ambitions of those with more power.
autoexec 3y ago
> Unity wanted to be an advertising company and when that goal started slipping away, they did something drastic. Epic wants to be a store and a virtual production platform. Epic "being a store" just happens to allow them to collect a ton of personal data and push a whole lot of ads. Seems like they want to be in advertising too.

bitcharmer 3y ago

> In my opinion, the only reason this whole fiasco happened is because Unity the company has too many headcounts and has too much expense, and the reason for that is they grew too big, and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth, even if the company is much healthier if it had stayed smaller This can be simplified to: "The only reason are MBAs"

darklycan51 3y ago

"who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split" Yeah, I wonder why, almost like they're trying to slowly gain market share lead to then have a monopoly. Arguing that just because right now there's alternatives that don't seem like they'll do that, right now. Is not a good argument against open source. if any of those engines can retroactively destroy your livelihood, or make games unavailable forever for users because of $ reasons, then that is a huge enough reason to simply drop the engine. Unreal will get eventually damage from this unity move as well, if I was a game dev I would seriously consider Godot right now, luckily I am a software dev not a game dev, only game dev I do is modding warcraft 3 so I don't have to bother about that stuff

gochi 3y ago
Epic will never have a monopoly as long as Steam exists. They aren't complete fools here, they realize this but are aware that even having a slice of that massive pie is enough to fuel numerous positions in the future.
- autoexec 3y ago
  A duopoly isn't much better
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    It's actually a lot better. At least the two companies check and balance each other naturally. Not ideal, but better. The big issue is if those two companies collude, but for storefronts there's less incentive than other industries.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- darklycan51 3y ago
  When I was talking about monopoly, I was talking about 3rd party engines, not storefronts.

_hypx 3y ago

There is a secondary argument in favor of home-grown engines too. It's been very disappointing to see so many game companies abandon their own rendering technology in favor of Unreal. Terrible licensing rules might drive companies to go back to having their own engines.

dvngnt_ 3y ago
I feel like each year makes it harder as demands increase
- _hypx 3y ago
  Never every game needs to have insane graphics. For a lot of games, “good enough” graphics is fine.
  - gochi 3y ago
    It's not just graphics, it's everything. Look at Frostbite for example from EA. While a good shooter engine, they had to make significant changes over the years to adapt the engine to other genres of games, and that significantly bloated timelines. Jason Schreier has reporting on this if you're interested. We kind of forget that a lot of custom engines aren't universal ones like Unity or Unreal that can adapt to anything you throw at it. Custom engines are largely hyper specific to the type of game they were making with it, everything else is experimental, untested, undocumented, or non-existent!
    - _hypx 3y ago
      Frostbite is a weird example because they focused heavily on graphics over gameplay. It is also an FPS engine that was forced into powering an RPG, and without any real input from the developers in question. I'm sure most larger gamedev companies can make a decent game engine on their own if extreme performance is not needed. The recent Baldur's Gate is a good example.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    Honestly I prefer games with a strong sense of style over those with high quality graphics but a bland/generic look.

pxoe 3y ago

people trusted in unity for years, enough to build their products and careers on it and around it, and something like this still happened. was it foreseeable? even if it was, well what then, 'great, i have no options besides sucking it up or switching, since i built upon this'. what guarantees do epic/unreal customers have? oh wait, this isn't about 'what worth does 'trust in company' even have', but more like 'public companies bad'

BlueTemplar 3y ago
> was it foreseeable? Has Unity ever said anything about turning their software into a platform, for instance asking for monthly/yearly subscriptions instead of a one time fee ? If they did, that's when the devs (and especially teachers of future devs !) should have dropped it as soon as feasible.
- pxoe 3y ago
  platform isn't just about subscriptions, subscriptions don't really make a platform, and overall it'd be kind of a poor tell of whether it's time to jump ship. epic/unreal is kind of a platform (there's a bunch of stuff in their ecosystem that plugs in, etc.), so what, should people jump ship from unreal now
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    You're right, it's not a sufficient condition (pretty sure Red Hat offers Linux support in subscription form), you also need to have closed source software for a platform. I don't know about the situation with Unreal, but I would be very wary of using it, considering Epic has been pushing a game Store. (And Unreal's source code is merely source available ?)

doctorpangloss 3y ago

I get that you're writing stylized speculations but in my experience in the games industry, every single point is wrong. It is the most upvoted comment because it touches on a bunch of first-principles-know-nothing boogeymen, but so it goes with Hacker News nowadays. You can keep reading to find out why, or whatever, my dog in this race is (1) I use Unity (2) I don't think they're going to change anything about these terms except maybe the installs issue (3) and the vast majority of people will continue to be unaffected by these pricing changes. If people want to spend their breath agitating for something, it's to get Unity to share the source code for a lower price. That would actually help me make better games. At the scale where Unity pricing matters, the engine costs will take away from marketing spend. > ...the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to... break the promise of no revenue share/royalty pledge... too many headcounts... privately held [is good and public is bad]... says a lot. Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine. You can certainly believe there is. It's a complex piece of software and target platforms and technology are always changing, so it's understandable that it is expensive to develop.

Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
>Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine. How can you say that when unreal exists? They are dominant in PC and even used in many large mobile games.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  They simply serve very different audiences of both developers and end users. Their coexistence is evidence of how different they are from one another, not how fungible they are.
  - tomtheelder 3y ago
    They really don’t at this point. Unreal has reached a point where it’s a better choice than Unity for nearly every single project. There’s still these pervasive beliefs that Unity is better for 2D or better for small teams, and it just isn’t true. The one exception is junk mobile games, and even then I think Unreal is a completely reasonable choice. Unity has been well and truly left behind with the gap widening every day and they know it. Their coexistence is a legacy of a time where Unreal had not widened its viable use cases beyond triple A style 3D games, but that hasn’t been the case for years now. It’s just taking a whole for developers to catch up, and obviously there’s a lot of inertia with Unity projects and experience.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

>hinges on the premise that Epic ... is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit Bahaha. Epic would eat their own grandmother if it got them an increase in profit. You better hope the Epic never becomes the only game in town, because then you will see what happens to who takes home what revenue.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago

> and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth Why is "growth" always interpreted as "higher headcount" and not "higher profits"? Certainly a company that has continually growing profits without increasing costs would be seen as more valuable than a company that constantly increases their costs with revenue? Does Unity hiring more Engineers actually increase revenue?

bmer 3y ago
Perhaps because it is generally well accepted that you can maintain stable profit margins with a fixed employee count, but increasing profits with a fixed employee count is not possible beyond the maximum potential of that fixed set of employees? (Not sure, this is an amateur's guess on my part.)
johnnyanmac 3y ago
very generalized answer here but it comes down to: 1. you want to make sure product A is profitable 2. at some point Product A will reach a steady state (in some utopic future, but let's pretend). i.e. Product A will hit a point where its excitement will taper off. 3. How do you get that explosive growth back? New product. But you want to maintain old product. 4. hire more people to work on Product B. Have it launch, big growth! 5. then recession hits and it turns out you need stability. Product A is fine, everyone on Product B is fired profits are important, but it's not the end all be all for how the stock market works. It may not even be the most important factor. You want to build excitement and become the thing big thing, even if it turns out to be a check you can't cash. So in that lens, Unity hires (or hired) more engineers or acquires companies to increase excitement, not necessarily to increase profits. "Product A" is ads, and right now even that isn't very stable for them, so I guess they are trying to find a new Product A. Back in the old days, Game studios used to simply make games to build this excitement. It has a set track, a big time to announce and release for spikes, and your existing teams works on the next game. But more studios want to get that "Product A", so even games are investing more in GaaS for that steady income. It's what ended up happening to Epic with Fortnite, where their "Product B" is actually announcing exciting engine features.

somenameforme 3y ago

There's another strong argument in favor of this point. This [1] is from Unreal's license: --- "7. The Agreement Between You and Epic a. Amendments If we make changes to this Agreement, you are not required to accept the amended Agreement, and this Agreement will continue to govern your use of any Licensed Technology you already have access to. However, if we make changes to this Agreement, you will not be allowed to access certain Epic services or download the Licensed Technology unless you have accepted the amended Agreement. If we make changes, we will provide you with notice, such as by sending an email or giving you notice when you next log into an Epic service." --- So in other words, if they do a bait and switch, you're free to keep using the old license for older versions of the engine. The reason I think this is telling is because they did this in the day and age where basically every EULA comes down to "We can do anything at any time, for any reason, and you can do nothing." For them to actually have this in their terms is a tremendous display of good faith. [1] - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal

BlueTemplar 3y ago
I can't see how anything less favorable to the devs would not be instantly rejected in court, especially in the EU ? Speaking of which, I don't see why the Unity using devs can't just keep using the old version of Unity, and therefore never have to accept the new license ? (Of course I assume that Unity would have made it extra-annoying, because these changes don't just come out like that, but the point here is to give themselves time to find an alternative to Unity.)
das_keyboard 3y ago
If you go to this Unity blogpost from 2019 [1] it states: > When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS. > Moving forward, we will host TOS changes on Github to give developers full transparency about what changes are happening, and when. The link to the mentioned GitHub repo just recently became dead :/ [1]: https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitment-to-being-an-open-platform https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-an...

eestrada 3y ago

> Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we ended up here. I think that says a lot. I've been thinking a lot about private versus public companies. Most of my favorite products come out of privately held companies. There is something about the incentives for publicly traded companies that encourages them to make poor choices. I think it is because there are effectively two forms of revenue: selling products/services and selling stock. And those two things often conflict with eachother to the detriment of the customer. However, with a privately held company, the loyalty is primarily to the customer. Thus the products are better because they need to be to keep the company afloat. I don't think that means that public companies shouldn't exist, but I wonder how an individual can structure their publicly traded company to avoid having the company misalign its incentives with those of the actual paying customer. My current theory is to focus more on revenue sharing instead of stock price. For example, dividend stocks. I don't think it completely solves the problem, but it at least moves things in the right direction.

robertlagrant 3y ago
It just depends on the business in question, and the external pressures on the business. Jeff Bezos managed to not pay dividends for years by focusing on value, but also by zooming ahead of the pack in a greenfield environment that was ludicrously profitable. Low margin businesses, private or public, will struggle and have to do something to offer value for money; e.g. make a smaller chocolate bar that's the same price, and a larger chocolate bar that costs more. On selling stock: I think this is a bit silly. A company can't just sell its stock as a viable strategy. What happens when it runs out? And who would buy it anyway?
- eestrada 3y ago
  In the USA, corporations just do stock splits or run a corporate vote to issue more shares. Also many large tech companies use stock as total compensation for employees, so the "selling" of stock can be indirect as a form of revenue. Instead of paying employees cash, they pay in stock, which frees up more cash for other things. Thus they don't need to have as high of true revenue margins to pay employees well. Big corporations understand that a lot of paper value is fungible one way or another.

georgeecollins 3y ago

Nothing against Epic, but they have a strategic incentive to encourage people to use their store. Getting a discount to use the engine in exchange for a store “exclusive” is a cost that I see developers not really appreciating. There is no free lunch.

ThatPlayer 3y ago
I don't think that's unusual. When Valve announced Source 2 for free, there was a similar discount to use the engine: the game must release on Steam. Maybe that has changed in the 8 years of no news about the release of Source 2 for developer though. https://www.pcgamer.com/source-2-will-be-free-wont-ask-for-royalties/ https://www.pcgamer.com/source-2-will-be-free-wont-ask-for-r...

ubertaco 3y ago

The question is not "do we _suppose_ that it's _likely_ that they _would_ do something similar?", but rather "is it _possible_ that they _can_ do something similar?" If you're using a proprietary engine made by a for-profit company, the answer to that second question is always "yes", and the answer to that first question is always subject to change. If you're using an open-source engine, the answer to the second question is "no" (because in the worst-case you can fork it to buy yourself time), and the answer to the first question is totally moot, because the first question is no longer a thing. It's about risk management: optimism is not a strategy. Mitigation by removing the attack vector _is_ a strategy.

majormajor 3y ago

That assumes that the motivations won't ever change for Epic, like how they changed for Unity.

akhosravian 3y ago

I think it is unlikely Epic or Valve will adopt something as overtly hostile to business users in their ecosystems as long as they are controlled by Tim Sweeney and Gabe Newell (respectively). I think it’s anyone’s guess what will happen when that stops being true, but anyone under the age of 40 or so should recognize they will almost certainly outlive those individuals. Closed source means you are beholden to what their successor’s decide even if you (like me) are confident their current leadership will make good decisions.