It will be interesting to see how his Whitehurst's pedigree translates to this smaller-scale, higher-touch sales motion.
Forgoing the core Unity audience of game developers and gunning for studios / VFX when Unity is clearly not the graphically superior engine sounds risky at best, reckless at worst.
You misunderstand. They have different verticals but Jim’s mission is the same. Sell them tools at enterprise subscription prices. Per seat, per project, per shot if they can. Forget the indie game devs and their small studios. That bridge is burned beyond recognition or reconciliation.
And small indies may transform into large enterprises surprisingly fast. Mihoyo was a small indie only 10 years ago.
Its much much easier to repair bridges with indies, who don't really want to move off unity as much as you think, and can be placated by backpedaling and the CEO replacement.
Considering Unity's previous pricing model (per seat) it really didn't matter that much whether their client made 5, 10 or 50 mil unless they massively increased their hiring because of that, unless they can charge per install/% of revenue.
> Traditional industries rarely have such lopsided staff/revenue ratios.
A negligibly small proportion of indie developers are even close to that.
It's just so much easier to get your product ingrained into a company that is growing, as long as you are getting your revenue tied to theirs. Their growth becomes your growth. But it has to be done in a way that makes them not run away. Offer different funding models depending on the project on the other end, and let the customer pick their pricing plan. When the plan for the small company starts looking too expensive for the big one, you get to renegotiate when your tools are already everywhere, and moving away is a hassle.
It works for AWS, Stripe and the like. It should work here.
I think we both agree that small indie studios will not be returning no matter what promises are made, who is CEO, or what new shiny monetization idea they come up with next.
I wish him the best of luck.
One thing I agree on: more often than not, behind an interesting piece of art lies an interesting personality.
To advance the conversation based on some substantive facts, based on my conversations with creators of large free to play Unity games, all were already using IronSource and were not impacted by the changes anyway. As a game developer who publishes himself, I do not plan to migrate away from Unity, and I wasn't really impacted either. I can't speak for the 30 or so studios who posted pleas to revert the changes, but based on what happened, I believe they got what they wanted. So if their decision-making is rational / based on facts, I don't think they're migrating either.
This is all to say that when you have no budget, so you value your time at zero and you have no visual art you didn't author yourself, it's easy to put 100% of the personality into the product, and make that The Thing. There are people I know who turned 20,000 followers on a TikTok about games into a $1m check for a game studio! This is a viable strategy, it is uniquely suited to people to have opinions about game engines. But my facts-informed opinion is that this isn't representative of most game developers, and that they are actually really happy with Unity and relieved that the pricing changes found a middle ground that is less emotionally charged.
I've been using unity for almost a decade now and enjoying it despite the many caveats and idiosyncrasies I come across.
The bottom line is, I definitely don't want to throw away the decade of experience I have using Unity if I can help it. Ultimately I want them to learn from their mistakes and move forward. While Unity has had a fair share of missteps ultimately it's the devil I know.
I do think this is the right approach. This is the approach I took. I was dependent on an engine for a long time until I realized it was just a facade and that I already possessed the knowledge to do it myself. So when XNA died, and MonoGame wasn’t mature yet, I had no choice but to write my own. Some of that effort went into MonoGame’s early days, most of it didn’t (I respect keeping the API the same but we, devs, could have done better to improve it).
Unity made it easy to build games without having to know the underlying proponents that do what they do. Instead, it’s presented through a massively opaque interface called a MonoBehavior. Because of this opaque abstraction, it’s almost impossible for a Unity game developer to know exactly what’s going on under the hood.
My first game engine took me 3 years to get to a point where I could ship something. My second was 1 year. My latest was 3 months.
Eventually, it becomes just adding another interface to your GPU abstraction to support wgpu or DX14, or Vulkan2, or Metal, any graphics api becomes just a Buffer, a Queue, and a sync lock.
instead of indies, i think this applies much more to mid-level studios. Indies tend to be much more flexible and agile, esp. very small indies. Mid-level studios, with a dozen people that have gotten used to the toolchains and have existing investment in it (any custom plugins for example), would have a harder time switching away.
However, this whole debacle just goes to show that proprietary software may be a trap, unless the T&C explicitly clarifies and makes it _not_ a trap. This is what unreal engine has done (you at least will always remain on the same T&C for the version you signed it for).
Open source is a much safer bet for the long term for an indie, esp. if they're just starting out now and do not have toolchains attached to unity. And the godot ecosystem is just budding right now, which means the opportunities are also great there.
Opportunities to spend significant amounts of time working on tooling and other engine features (with a non insignificant likelihood of still ending up with something inferior to Unity depending on your use-case) instead of actually making your game?
Yes, what Unity's management tried pulling off was stupid. However The engine itself is remarkably cheap from the perspective of many developers compared to any open source options.
> unless the T&C explicitly clarifies and makes it
Funnily enough IIRC Unity had a similar issue with the T&C back in 2019 when they promised to never change it retroactively again. Somehow they managed to "forget" it in a couple of years...
I guess one important difference with Unreal is that Epic has way less bloat (several times less employees) and make huge amounts of money from Fortnite so they don't need to try and squeeze as much as possible from their engine clients (currently anyway..)
it's not about changing it, it's about including a clause in the T&C that the version they signed is the version in perpetuity for their version of software (obviously, an upgraded version may have the T&C changed).
Unreal has this clause iirc, but not in unity.
Their founder/CTO (who seems to be MIA these days) published this back in 2019:
https://blog.unity.com/news/updated-terms-of-service-and-com...
"For this reason, we now allow users to continue to use the TOS for the same major (year-based) version number, including Long Term Stable (LTS) builds that you are using in your project."
Which is something they presumably "forgot" about...
The unreal terms[1]:
> 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.
vs the unity terms[2]:
> 23.2 Changes to Terms
> To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Unity reserves the right from time to time to (and you acknowledge that Unity may) modify these Terms (including, for the avoidance of doubt, the Additional Terms) without prior notice.
I never implied it was otherwise.
However if we look at their TOS from 2019 (the time of this blog post) they do have this:
> if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1)
I don't think the section is still there anymore? But presumably it still applies to you if you haven't upgraded past 2018/2019 versions. But it was actually in the TOS (just like for Unreal) which I didn't expect.
*https://github.com/thaliaarchi/unity-termsofservice/blob/243...
maybe if this happened two years down the line and W4 Games had more time to establish itself (maybe even make it's own game to inspire confidence) it'd be a different story, but I can still see indies coming back. If they ever left to begin with. And this isn't even talking about the corporate giants in the mobile space.
Why are you so certain that a significant proportion of them even left in the first place?
> As an employee at Unity
I don't think they are even remotely close to being as transparent internally as they used to be a few years ago. Also as far as I'm aware sales data wasn't accessible to every single employee even back in those days?
Give it 5+ years and another screw-up from Unity at the tail-end, and I 100% agree that Unity is sunk for indie devs. But as it is, Unity has a grace period where devs are locked-in and if Unity can demonstrate stability over the next few years, then people will forget it.
And yes, if. Unity's current PR position is in a fully-stocked rope warehouse, but they could navigate out relatively unscathed.
I wholeheartedly disagree. There’s more choice than ever. A search on GitHub would show you.
Unity has had one thing going for it. It was easy to get started and it had a ton of learning material. It is NOT the only choice. Off the top of my head there’s:
- Ogre3D
- O3DE
- MonoGame
- GameMaker
- Godot
- Cocos2d
- GDevelop
- Pandas3D
- Reactor
- Stride3D (formerly Xenko)
- Three.js
- Babylon.js
Unity’s editor first approach and their C# “everything’s a behavior” is why so many think it’s the only game in town. It’s not. It never was.
And I love Godot -- love it-- but it doesn't do all the things Unity does. Even if it did, it would take years to get all the teams to switch. Think how long it took people to move away from Flash!
I'm not sure about that. Unity itself is not at all a particularly modern engine (just like most engines being iterations of something designed in the 00s or early 10s)
But I'm probably just daydreaming.
You can also see that the Urho3d repo is readonly on Github. I don't know which fork is the most active but there are a few that sprung out of the mess.
If there weren't people at Unity that could influence or stop the former CEO, the problem probably also didn't vanish with his termination.
This is said by someone who wants nothing more than to see Unity die.
Whitehurst was pretty instrumental in getting Red Hat sticky in places where it was just RHEL. Open Shift, Open Stack, etc all drove value-add for the business and for their customers. Cloud is fickle though so selling tools to studios and trying to compete with Unreal in the VFX space is how Unity moves forward. Take your lashings from the game devs. Shore up your presence in VFX, Movies, Film. Evolve.
The tsunami has squarely landed on Godot’s doorstep. It will be up to them on how they manage the swell.