Having a disliked corporate daddy definitely has its knock on effects

When Unreal had those super expensive licenses in the order of +$200k most indie devs moved to Unity, so the average Unity dev doesn't have lots of resources to spend on a pricey headset and the expectation of very high quality titles. Either too few devs will ship anything or quality will be low.

Apple _really_ holds grudges.

After the Nvidia blamed them for their failing GPUs, they literally never shipped anything Nvidia ever again. There’s probably an alternate universe where metal does not exist because Apple and Nvidia became friends and just optimized cuda for macOS

That's fascinating. I wonder how formalized and widespread this logic is -- did economists tell leadership, or did they just happen to organically hire spiteful leaders?

Anything except tit for tat loses in game theory, so it's just spiteful

This is such a weird example because of how not true it is

The most classic game theory example ever, the Prisoner's Dilemma, is solved by cooperation when played iteratively instead of one-shot

In general, lots of systems can reach an equilibrium of cooperation

That is tit for tat - cooperate first and then only defect if your opponent defects, otherwise keep cooperating.

Holding grudges is what Apple does.

I remember Jerry Pournelle on Twit.TV saying he reviewed the original Mac and said it was a bold vision but ultimately a toy. A great idea but with not enough RAM to make it really useful. Steve jobs saw the review and took action. Jerry said the 512KB Mac was excellent but that point it was too late.

He was black listed for life from having any early access to hardware for review and was never allowed to an Apple conference ever again. This was in place until Jerry's death 33 years later.

Remember in the 90s when he wrote a book about science fiction fans saving the world from the evil of "people who believe in climate change"?

Sure? Why would you do anything to help someone who’s trying to tear down your business?

Don’t expect long term love for UE from Amazon or Sony or Microsoft, either. They all know that Epic’s end game is to get regulators to force platforms to allow Epic as a competing app store. Let others take the risk, swoop in and undercut once there are profits to be had.

Nobody is going to want to fund that. It will take a decade or more, but UE is doomed unless Epic divests it or gives up on the predatory app store / regulatory business model.

Wow, you seem to have a lot of love for walled gardens...

Take the risk? What risk? By now both surviving mobile platforms (iOS and Android) are well established, and especially the iOS app store is raking in obscene profits for Apple out of the work of others. I would have been ok with a 30% "app store tax" a few years ago, but nowadays it just feels like milking the cash cow...

No need to get personal.

I’m just saying that Epic is using a legal strategy to attack markets with vertically integrated hardware and software distribution (phones, consoles). The owners of these platforms are not thrilled, and we should expect UE to be a casualty.

I’m surprised that’s emotionally charged for you.

I’ll care when Tim stops being a lying douche. He’s a terrible person and I’m happy Apple won’t support him.

I'm still wondering if they choose Unity only as initial partner and will allow other to integrate their 3rd parties engines by themself. Otherwise they would alienated not only Unreal Engine game makers but also:

- godot - bevy - flutter - qt

since all those above render their own ui widgets - you need to integrate somehow this eye tracking to be able to select it.

I bet that if you wanted to jump into Unity, it would be relatively easy for you and, if you enjoy this kind of stuff, fun.

VR developer here.

Politics aside, nobody should ever choose Unreal Engine for standalone VR anyways. It's clear that Epic doesn't prioritize VR, so it's more easily explained as an efficient use of resources.

In concrete terms, Unreal Engine's VR support is awful; you can't get a good looking game running at high framerates on mobile hardware with it. Its forward renderer is severely lacking on mobile VR, and deferred is untenable.

I don't want Unity to be as dominant as it is, but it's the only sane choice for VR. Epic is very clearly not interested in being a leader in this area.