Nah, this was mass hysteria.

Nah, people in position of picking the engine for the next project are not going to pick Unity.

At least one publisher jokingly (but not jokingly) said "developers: make sure you include which engine you're using next time you pitch us a game!"...

That's normal and has been for years. Your choice of engine affects your business model.

Yes but a very public tweet about it in the middle of this Unity debacle was not accidental timing or just a random reminder of this fact.

When they tell you that you have to report your installs and sales each month just like you do your taxes, that's when you notice there are other free engines.

It's not "mass hysteria" to observe that your business partner is willing to attempt to retroactively change the terms of your arrangement with them, and therefore decide they aren't trustworthy as a business partner. The actual monetary cost to developers is actually quite inconsequential compared to the lack of integrity Unity showed in trying to make this apply to games which were already released.

I think the concern is real but I don’t think there is another viable competitor to Unity

Unreal

"EVERYBODY disliked that" is not hysteria

> I follow a lot of game developers online. Every single one that uses Unity today is planning to switch engines for their future games.

Will all of them switch to Unreal, or are there other viable options?

The biggest share of Unity is 2D mobile games, something Unreal is not particularly suited for and I very much doubted that segment of the market will switch to Unreal.

Defold, the engine by King that powers Candy Crush, is a solid free contender for 2D mobile games.

Unless a very major rewrite happened in the last few years, Defold absolutely does not power Candy Crush, in fact to my knowledge King has never shipped anything in Defold and it's fallen almost entirely out of favor internally.

All the Candy Crushes as well as several other games use variants of a custom internal engine that's managed by a fairly sizable central team.

Ah, you are correct about Candy Crush. After being promoted by your comment to investigate further, I see that King seems to only ever have released one game using the engine: Blossom Blast Saga in 2016, at least according to the showcase[1].

It seems that Candy Crush predates the engine by a few years and that the engine was originally created as a hobby project by one of the King employees, although it’s seen commercial use on mobile by a number of studios and has received backing from King and others over the years. King are not currently listed as a backer of the Defold Foundation, but one of the board members is the “director of engines” at King.

[1] https://defold.com/showcase/

most of the 2d ones are looking to Godot

I use Unreal professionally but on the side when I make smaller 2D games I am using Haxe/Heaps currently (although haxe/heaps can do 3d perfectly fine I'd probably stick with Unreal in that case due to experience).

Godot seems to be the way people are going right now though (I haven't tried it).

I also recommend for people to take a look at the haze library called Kha, if they are after the same kind of low level rendering that libraries like Monogame and Raylib offer.

Interesting, neat that you can run it inside a WPF app. I'll read up on that. I was a huge fan of monogame/xna back in the day.

How is Haxe in 2023? I tried to get into it a few years back but somehow I couldnt quite break the barrier to entry where it was fun to use

It is very alive! The Discord is where most of us hang out, but there are quite a lot of new stuff to mess around with and use :). Check out...

- https://ceramic-engine.com/

- https://github.com/RobertBorghese/reflaxe

I just started using it after not using it for about 5 years. I used to use HaxeFlixel for making small pixel art games but moved on to heaps.

I'd say it's better than ever! I'm not a big VSCode user but it has some really nice integrations that it convinced me to use VSCode.

Here's an article on a neat stack that Shiro games uses https://haxe.org/blog/shirogames-stack/

Godot ia gaining market share like crazy and I wouldn't be surprised to see it overtake unity in the future.

Doesn't really matter if they're mostly indie game devs that weren't contributing major revenue to Unity anyway.

Indies aren't limited to single-digit sized teams, and even if they were, devs "graduate" out of indie studios into AAA ones (through growth or migration). The skillset of the next decade of new indies deliberately excluding Unity will influence the decisions made by the AAAs that they move to. Anybody too small to be negotiating custom license terms with Unity just learned that they can't be trusted.

In my spheres (full-time game dev), I've already seen ripples down to teachers/professors switching from Unity to Unreal in their courses. Many of the content creators I've enjoyed in Unity are also either switching or considering switching to another engine for their videos. Brackeys allegedly even said he might come back and start a Godot series. It's a long tail of ripples that reduces the number of "Unity devs" at every stage of their lifecycle (learning, starting out, graduating to small studios, etc) which doesn't bode well for Unity long-term.

Most A/AA devs I follow are planning to switch to another engine when they can (e.g. not mid-project), but I know a few who immediately started porting to Unreal/Godot. Most AAA devs I know already don't use Unity.

Unreal is even more expensive and requires reporting your revenue to pay for it. How is that a better option than Unity?

Even though the walked back the price change this time, Unity still contends that they have the authority to increase the price and apply that price increase to old versions even if the users don't agree [1].

Unreal lets users stick to a license with predictable fees.

By using Unity you are still agreeing to a liability with no limit that can change at any time and your only recourse is to cease development or stop selling your already-complete game.

1. https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packa...

doesn't address the initial comment's concerns

It directly addresses it: the single-digit % cash difference in profit-sharing between Unity and Unreal's programs aren't what most people are worried about with Unity's changes.

The bigger issue is that Unity is trying to assert (again) that they can retroactively change your licensing agreement at any time, and for any reason -- and have explicitly said they reserve the right to increase these fees (which, yes, are less than competitors right now) in the future.

> Unreal is even more expensive and requires reporting your revenue to pay for it. How is that a better option than Unity?

With their new changes, Unity also requires reporting your revenue/installs. In terms of the cost difference, the consensus seems to be that people will pay a little more to lock into a predictable license that can't infinitely add unpredictable fees later, even on games for sale that are no longer in development.

Unreal has yet to state that they have the authority to alter the terms of the deal at their whim. Who would ever choose to do business with someone who believes they can unilaterally change the business agreement?

Yeah, there probably won't be any second-order effects.

- John Riccitiello

It's not about revenue, it's about mindshare.

This is why Microsoft doesn't care if people pirate Office tools for private use, because if they get to a position where they can decide what tools to use for a company, they'll pick what they know. Office.

The same works for Unity, if an indie company becomes a AAA level studio, they'll use what they know and what they have been using for years.

Now there's a risk that it'll be something that's not Unity.

Hold on, unity did not mishandle the announcement. They mishandled the whole policy. It was poison that no game developer would have accepted.

Both fit - the announcement was a massively confusing mess, with slightly different information in many locations and none of it clear, leaving everyone guessing what their soon-to-come-due cost would be for days while they completely failed to get their shirt together.

Unity didn't mishandle the announcement. They were actually quite clear about their brazen rentseeking, and that made the decision to switch pretty easy for new development.