Rival developer? Please, I'm pretty sure the call is coming from within the house here - this is exactly the sort of thing 4chan would do because a game asked them pronouns or gave them a wetsuit skin instead of a bikini one
We need to make Godot the biggest engine for indie devs just like how blender is the go to 3d modeling software.
Godot is fantastic! I really want it to become the Blender of game engines.
Speaking of, it does have great integration with Blender. By default, you'll want to import 3D stuff as .gltf, but if you have blender installed, Godot/Blender will automagically import .blend files as .gltf
Just to add, there was a post i saw where someone got Geometry Nodes working in godot through .blends. They're static in Godot, but as soon as you save in Blender, it updates in godot without export
Shoutout to Renpy. I love me some VNs and I love that little engine. It's so user friendly (as in for the player) and it's open source.
Renpy is i believe already the most used tool for VNs.
It uses python so it allow far more customization than just a classic branching VN. Granted, you need to learn python, but at least it's the most used programming language in the world not some proprietary language that may die anytime.
A minute of silence to all actionscript 2/3 (the adobe flash programming language ) devs
The most used programming language in the world is Excel, not Python.
Not for programming
Irc brotato uses godot. I love that game.
Lucky character slingshot build ftw.
Do you know Maya?
I know it's one of those modeling software that cost the same as a car. There's 3ds max also.
Both are also characters in Ace Attorney.
-Congratulations on the kid sir. So what will this little fella be called ?
-Max, 3ds Max.
I never get tired of this.
Execs of a company that makes bajilions dollars a year want to buy a new yacht, so they make the most corrupt, greedy, and stupid decision imaginable. There is a mass exodus of consumers who pay these shitty execs in the first place, resulting in losses.
Being an exec is a job even the stupidest motherfucker can do and it shows
This isn't even the part that's supposed to make them money. This is investor bait. They announce this and idiot investors who have no idea how this will damage Unity's userbase jump on their stocks thinking it's about to earn a lot more money. The CEO of Unity just sold 2,000 shares. He fucked both his company, the industry and his investors for a quick buck.
The CEO of Unity is also the former CEO of EA. So that tracks
This is a symptom of the casino that is the stock market. No-one cares about revenue, as long as share prices increase and they can sell before prices drop again. The result is short-term decision-making, and everyone who "matters" likes it.
ooof
The call-home code can probably be disassembled, extracted and put on a loop, no need to actually install anything. Ddos the server with "install" messages.
the best part is that all of this is completely ethical
I believe that part is a joke
You never know. Some people ABSOLUTELY believe that using (insert thing they don't like here) makes people deserving of any and all abuse.
"Our telemetry software, which we developed, operate, and have complete control over with no accountability, says you owe us one hundred million dollars. Slaughterhouse time."
even running a few virtual machines on one host can take this further
edit: now I'm wondering if someone will make a botnet virus to do exactly this to send companies bankrupt
Just keep recreating the Proton prefix in Steam for Linux.
What’s the command for generating a new /etc/machine-id?
If you need an alternative for retro pixel-art games, then you can use my engine. Has its own weird quirks, but can be made work, also I still need time to hardware accelerate the sprite rendering.
Could I make a Text based game with this? And does it support android?
It has a text rendering subsystem for bitmap fonts, so as long as you either get the fonts for it (either by converting them from old bitmap fonts, or from new vector fonts), you can. It also has a GUI system, which might be good for either text-based games too.
Android support is planned, but currently low-priority due to other things I need to take care of. Audio is likely taken care of for the most part through ALSA (hotplugging would probably crash the audio thread as of now), and until I don't move things away from SDL to my own solution (iota), it wouldn't be too hard to port (also I will add Android support to iota, either by directly interfacing with it, or using an x11 translation layer). If someone would join, I could speed up the process to it, maybe even add things like MacOS and iOS support (D code has been successfully ran on PS4/5 and Xbone/XBS, reportedly even on the Switch).
Unity seems to imply that it only counts 1 install per user, but depending on how the phone-home works I'm sure this can be tricked somehow to get a similar result.
After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity'sWhitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.)
So they're trying to track it per device, which can also be exploited fairly easily.
Why aren't they doing it per purchase? I guess GamePass and similar services?
Edit: I guess live service games are a problem too. Just charge per initial download.
There are a lot of games that are available as free downloads on the app stores and rake in lots of cash, partially with ads, but mostly with microtransactions (think games like Clash of Clans). Can't charge per purchase if so many games are "free".
I'm having trouble phrasing it, but like when you "add to account" for the first time with a free game.
When you first obtain a copy would be how I'd phrase it, or when a copy is first attached to an account. I think that'd require Unity to actually talk to each shop their games are available at to know for sure when it happens, or maybe not.
Also, that'd open a loophole for games that don't require an account anywhere to download and play, or even games that you can play straight from the browser, Friday Night Funkin' being a prime example of those situations. Also, you -can- download and install a bunch of games from the Google Play Store without having an account, so that'd be another way to skirt that account check.
They changed it to try to detect the same PC, probably by assigning a token.
Easily manipulated, though, so it's still a shit idea
It is. I wonder how it is gonna detect different Steam Proton prefixes, because if they are all different PCs a bad actor can simply keep recreating the prefix. On powerful enough CPUs you can create a prefix in seconds.
Sounds like unity doesn't want any new devs to go over to them and for the ones who did to start moving away to other engines.
Ask for x per purchase would at least get less backlash but I guess they couldn't track that as easily
Im convinced this is a pump and dump by the former EA CEO
breaking news: if you spend thousands of hours building a house of cards on top of a rug controlled by a company whose best interests do not align with yours, don't be surprised when they hold your work for ransom and threaten to pull it out from under you
Imagine that I sell you the materials for building a house, you build the house and start living in it, I knock on your door and tell you that I'm going to start fuckin you in the ass every month, because you know, I gave you the materials.
"Breaking news" no it's not, it's just insane, and probably as others have pointed, an investment scam from the CEO.
I can see a lot of people switching away from unity due to this.
It's sad that I wasted my time learning the engine a few years ago.
Same for me, ah well, I suppose there's a joy in learning something new
Any C# coding skill won't be wasted, so there's that silver lining, unlike navigating through the editor.
Godot supports C# and is IMO also not as dissimilar to Unity as other engines.
Yup. There's also Stride, which uses C# as its main language and is heavily focused on high performance 3D games.
Are you kidding? Parallelize that shit. 64 threads simultaneously, 64x the cost. (Okay probably like 20x but hey.)
Developers need to stop using Unity AND Unreal. I miss in-house engines.
And watch games prices/microtransactions skyrocket as every studio making a 3D multiplatform game needs a huge team of in house developers to develop their engine...
Engines have gotten way more complicated since the 2000's. There's a reason only a few AAA studios have their own robust in-house engine nowadays
And are starting to abandon them (CDProject Red)
I think it's hard to make an engine that lives up to today's gamers standards. I mean, engine building is hard either way.
There is always Open 3D, but having some association with AWS probably sullies it's name.
Go play Farming Simulator or DCS World for 10minutes and you'll change your mind
Or any Bethesda game.
Farming Simulator 22 was the game that ran the worst on my PC. Performance was even worse on lower settings and the graphics weren't any good. I had a Ryzen 7 5800X and RTX 3080. Luckily I just played it using Xbox Game Pass and didn't buy it.
I miss in-house engines.
Eh, they're not always a good solution. CDProjekt ditched their own, which led to a lot of bugs in Cyberpunk 2077, to move towards Unreal. Bethesda's notorious for their very buggy mess of an engine. And people working under EA complained to hell and back about having to use the Frostbite engine for everything.
Thank you for the link, that was an interesting read
As a former indie game dev who made their own in-house engine for a reasonably popular game, this is generally a bad idea. Just use Godot imo.
just use godot jfc
btw i predicted the whole thing a month ago
i fucking had the whole system in mind and it matches my thoughts exactly. (i was trying to come up with the most developer-unfriendly monetization strategy for unity... while in shower... for some reason)
Yeah I can't see this policy staying legal for long. Even if it wasn't blatant Highway robbery, Don't these tech companies have lobbyists that can push to ban this kind of shit? Because this screws over the company and not the fan base. I mean Publishers are going to have a hard time finding Talent if they want a game based in unity, but the developers are worried about being bankrupted simply because too many people are trying to get the game working by uninstalling and reinstalling it.
And what if the company is already defunct, but their game is still on Steam because the publisher owns the ip? Who exactly is going to Pony up?
I mentioned this in a thread on the news article posted somewhere around here and it was pointed out that they do claim to have preventative measures for this exact scenario. They didn't detail what that was, however. It could still be (and likely would be) inadequate and certainly not fool proof.
the best game engine is bevy, exclusively because it gives you the right to tell everyone else that your game is made in rust
And then they recommend using Godot for serious projects on their own website
everyone knows bragging rights > utility
And bragging about utilities is the absolute pinnacle. For example, heat and water is included in my rent 😎
Wait im out of the loop, what did unity do?
Everytime someone install a Unity game. Dev have to pay the Unity.
Didnt unity already take a bit of the sales? This sounds fucking stupid. Guess im learning Godot now
Yeah, Godot is best alternative to unity.
Not unreal engine?
(I honestly have no clue, they're the only two I've used)
Godot can use C# like unity does and it's FOSS.
Unreal uses C++, so you have to learn a different language if you're coming from Unity. And they also take part of the profits you make. Unreal has its advantages obviously, it's an amazing engine with amazing graphics, but if you're used to writing code in C# and don't want to learn something completely different, Godot is a very nice alternative
Ah I see! Neat! I'll have a look into it.
So I've seen that things like UnrealCLR exist. Now I know it's not official, but are adapters like that actually worth looking at as a sort of stepping stone for a c# dev wanting to use unreal?
Godot is FOSS
sure, switch to unreal engine, then when they pull some equally dumb move you get to do this all over again!
Unity used to take a royalty if you earned over a certain amount, I think it was 100k USD/yr. I couldn't tell you the exact percentage, but I seem to recall it was significant, similar to your platform fees which on Steam is like 30%
They discontinued that years ago though. Now it's free if you're under the $100k threshold, but once you go over you have to upgrade your license at a cost of a couple grand per seat per year.
The per-install fee is taking effect Jan 1, 2024, but I believe you're still going to have to get an upgraded license after you hit the threshold. This is a fee on top of fees.
Unity don't take royalties, this is their piss-poor attempt at doing that.
Only occurs after the game reaches a certain amount of revenue within the last year. Not defending it this is a terrible change but there is still a degree of wiggle room for free games or VERY small indie games.
True, but then compare it to terraria. Everyone can agree it’s been a massive success. But games like it and stardew valley have an interesting quirk here. People are likely to download them again when they get a new computer. That doesn’t get the dev more money, you bought it once. But many people will redownload to try the newest free final expansion.
In practice it mostly affect studio making over 1M in sales per year. The download fee only occur on pro users past that threshold. The fee is so ridiculous that they're basically forcing devs to get pro, but that was kinda already a thing anyway. For studios malong over 1M a year, well they gotta pay up unfortunately. Unfortunately 1M per year ins't that much for a middle-sized studio, but small studio are barely affected by this change.
The download fee only occur on pro users past that threshold
Free (Personal) and Plus users also have to pay, and their threshold is lower than for Pro/Enterprise users: 200k lifetime downloads and 200k dollars earned in the past year, vs 1million for the pro.
Its weird that the moment my game reached that threshold that my studio suddenly became insolvent and wrrapped up, and a very similar but different studio opened in the same offices.
Hope that new studio comes with a whole new set of IP because: "Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated..." and "Each game or app’s cumulative install amount cannot be reset or reduced even if it has been sold, transferred to a new party, changed its name, been republished as a new version.... Additionally, a change in publisher or distributor does not reset the cumulative install amount.
https://unity.com/runtime-fee
Rival developer? Please, I'm pretty sure the call is coming from within the house here - this is exactly the sort of thing 4chan would do because a game asked them pronouns or gave them a wetsuit skin instead of a bikini one
We need to make Godot the biggest engine for indie devs just like how blender is the go to 3d modeling software.
Godot is fantastic! I really want it to become the Blender of game engines.
Speaking of, it does have great integration with Blender. By default, you'll want to import 3D stuff as .gltf, but if you have blender installed, Godot/Blender will automagically import .blend files as .gltf
Just to add, there was a post i saw where someone got Geometry Nodes working in godot through .blends. They're static in Godot, but as soon as you save in Blender, it updates in godot without export
Shoutout to Renpy. I love me some VNs and I love that little engine. It's so user friendly (as in for the player) and it's open source.
Renpy is i believe already the most used tool for VNs. It uses python so it allow far more customization than just a classic branching VN. Granted, you need to learn python, but at least it's the most used programming language in the world not some proprietary language that may die anytime.
A minute of silence to all actionscript 2/3 (the adobe flash programming language ) devs
The most used programming language in the world is Excel, not Python.
Not for programming
Irc brotato uses godot. I love that game. Lucky character slingshot build ftw.
Do you know Maya?
I know it's one of those modeling software that cost the same as a car. There's 3ds max also.
Both are also characters in Ace Attorney.
-Congratulations on the kid sir. So what will this little fella be called ?
-Max, 3ds Max.
I never get tired of this.
Execs of a company that makes bajilions dollars a year want to buy a new yacht, so they make the most corrupt, greedy, and stupid decision imaginable. There is a mass exodus of consumers who pay these shitty execs in the first place, resulting in losses.
Being an exec is a job even the stupidest motherfucker can do and it shows
This isn't even the part that's supposed to make them money. This is investor bait. They announce this and idiot investors who have no idea how this will damage Unity's userbase jump on their stocks thinking it's about to earn a lot more money. The CEO of Unity just sold 2,000 shares. He fucked both his company, the industry and his investors for a quick buck.
The CEO of Unity is also the former CEO of EA. So that tracks
This is a symptom of the casino that is the stock market. No-one cares about revenue, as long as share prices increase and they can sell before prices drop again. The result is short-term decision-making, and everyone who "matters" likes it.
ooof
The call-home code can probably be disassembled, extracted and put on a loop, no need to actually install anything. Ddos the server with "install" messages.
I believe that part is a joke
You never know. Some people ABSOLUTELY believe that using (insert thing they don't like here) makes people deserving of any and all abuse.
"Our telemetry software, which we developed, operate, and have complete control over with no accountability, says you owe us one hundred million dollars. Slaughterhouse time."
even running a few virtual machines on one host can take this further
edit: now I'm wondering if someone will make a botnet virus to do exactly this to send companies bankrupt
Just keep recreating the Proton prefix in Steam for Linux.
What’s the command for generating a new /etc/machine-id?
as root
https://github.com/ZILtoid1991/pixelperfectengine
If you need an alternative for retro pixel-art games, then you can use my engine. Has its own weird quirks, but can be made work, also I still need time to hardware accelerate the sprite rendering.
Could I make a Text based game with this? And does it support android?
It has a text rendering subsystem for bitmap fonts, so as long as you either get the fonts for it (either by converting them from old bitmap fonts, or from new vector fonts), you can. It also has a GUI system, which might be good for either text-based games too.
Android support is planned, but currently low-priority due to other things I need to take care of. Audio is likely taken care of for the most part through ALSA (hotplugging would probably crash the audio thread as of now), and until I don't move things away from SDL to my own solution (iota), it wouldn't be too hard to port (also I will add Android support to iota, either by directly interfacing with it, or using an x11 translation layer). If someone would join, I could speed up the process to it, maybe even add things like MacOS and iOS support (D code has been successfully ran on PS4/5 and Xbone/XBS, reportedly even on the Switch).
Unity seems to imply that it only counts 1 install per user, but depending on how the phone-home works I'm sure this can be tricked somehow to get a similar result.
Edit: After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity’sWhitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had “regrouped” to discuss the issue.)
Didn't they literally clarify that an user reinstalling the game multiple times on the same machine would count every single install?
I believe they changed their mind.
So they're trying to track it per device, which can also be exploited fairly easily.
Why aren't they doing it per purchase? I guess GamePass and similar services?
Edit: I guess live service games are a problem too. Just charge per initial download.
There are a lot of games that are available as free downloads on the app stores and rake in lots of cash, partially with ads, but mostly with microtransactions (think games like Clash of Clans). Can't charge per purchase if so many games are "free".
I'm having trouble phrasing it, but like when you "add to account" for the first time with a free game.
When you first obtain a copy would be how I'd phrase it, or when a copy is first attached to an account. I think that'd require Unity to actually talk to each shop their games are available at to know for sure when it happens, or maybe not.
Also, that'd open a loophole for games that don't require an account anywhere to download and play, or even games that you can play straight from the browser, Friday Night Funkin' being a prime example of those situations. Also, you -can- download and install a bunch of games from the Google Play Store without having an account, so that'd be another way to skirt that account check.
They changed it to try to detect the same PC, probably by assigning a token.
Easily manipulated, though, so it's still a shit idea
It is. I wonder how it is gonna detect different Steam Proton prefixes, because if they are all different PCs a bad actor can simply keep recreating the prefix. On powerful enough CPUs you can create a prefix in seconds.
Sounds like unity doesn't want any new devs to go over to them and for the ones who did to start moving away to other engines.
Ask for x per purchase would at least get less backlash but I guess they couldn't track that as easily
Im convinced this is a pump and dump by the former EA CEO
breaking news: if you spend thousands of hours building a house of cards on top of a rug controlled by a company whose best interests do not align with yours, don't be surprised when they hold your work for ransom and threaten to pull it out from under you
Imagine that I sell you the materials for building a house, you build the house and start living in it, I knock on your door and tell you that I'm going to start fuckin you in the ass every month, because you know, I gave you the materials.
"Breaking news" no it's not, it's just insane, and probably as others have pointed, an investment scam from the CEO.
I can see a lot of people switching away from unity due to this.
It's sad that I wasted my time learning the engine a few years ago.
Same for me, ah well, I suppose there's a joy in learning something new
Any C# coding skill won't be wasted, so there's that silver lining, unlike navigating through the editor.
Godot supports C# and is IMO also not as dissimilar to Unity as other engines.
Yup. There's also Stride, which uses C# as its main language and is heavily focused on high performance 3D games.
Are you kidding? Parallelize that shit. 64 threads simultaneously, 64x the cost. (Okay probably like 20x but hey.)
Developers need to stop using Unity AND Unreal. I miss in-house engines.
And watch games prices/microtransactions skyrocket as every studio making a 3D multiplatform game needs a huge team of in house developers to develop their engine...
Engines have gotten way more complicated since the 2000's. There's a reason only a few AAA studios have their own robust in-house engine nowadays
And are starting to abandon them (CDProject Red)
I think it's hard to make an engine that lives up to today's gamers standards. I mean, engine building is hard either way. There is always Open 3D, but having some association with AWS probably sullies it's name.
Go play Farming Simulator or DCS World for 10minutes and you'll change your mind
Or any Bethesda game.
Farming Simulator 22 was the game that ran the worst on my PC. Performance was even worse on lower settings and the graphics weren't any good. I had a Ryzen 7 5800X and RTX 3080. Luckily I just played it using Xbox Game Pass and didn't buy it.
Eh, they're not always a good solution. CDProjekt ditched their own, which led to a lot of bugs in Cyberpunk 2077, to move towards Unreal. Bethesda's notorious for their very buggy mess of an engine. And people working under EA complained to hell and back about having to use the Frostbite engine for everything.
Thank you for the link, that was an interesting read
As a former indie game dev who made their own in-house engine for a reasonably popular game, this is generally a bad idea. Just use Godot imo.
just use godot jfc
btw i predicted the whole thing a month ago
i fucking had the whole system in mind and it matches my thoughts exactly. (i was trying to come up with the most developer-unfriendly monetization strategy for unity... while in shower... for some reason)
Yeah I can't see this policy staying legal for long. Even if it wasn't blatant Highway robbery, Don't these tech companies have lobbyists that can push to ban this kind of shit? Because this screws over the company and not the fan base. I mean Publishers are going to have a hard time finding Talent if they want a game based in unity, but the developers are worried about being bankrupted simply because too many people are trying to get the game working by uninstalling and reinstalling it.
And what if the company is already defunct, but their game is still on Steam because the publisher owns the ip? Who exactly is going to Pony up?
I mentioned this in a thread on the news article posted somewhere around here and it was pointed out that they do claim to have preventative measures for this exact scenario. They didn't detail what that was, however. It could still be (and likely would be) inadequate and certainly not fool proof.
the best game engine is bevy, exclusively because it gives you the right to tell everyone else that your game is made in rust
And then they recommend using Godot for serious projects on their own website
everyone knows bragging rights > utility
And bragging about utilities is the absolute pinnacle. For example, heat and water is included in my rent 😎
Wait im out of the loop, what did unity do?
Everytime someone install a Unity game. Dev have to pay the Unity.
Didnt unity already take a bit of the sales? This sounds fucking stupid. Guess im learning Godot now
Yeah, Godot is best alternative to unity.
Not unreal engine?
(I honestly have no clue, they're the only two I've used)
Godot can use C# like unity does and it's FOSS.
Unreal uses C++, so you have to learn a different language if you're coming from Unity. And they also take part of the profits you make. Unreal has its advantages obviously, it's an amazing engine with amazing graphics, but if you're used to writing code in C# and don't want to learn something completely different, Godot is a very nice alternative
Ah I see! Neat! I'll have a look into it.
So I've seen that things like UnrealCLR exist. Now I know it's not official, but are adapters like that actually worth looking at as a sort of stepping stone for a c# dev wanting to use unreal?
Godot is FOSS
sure, switch to unreal engine, then when they pull some equally dumb move you get to do this all over again!
Unity used to take a royalty if you earned over a certain amount, I think it was 100k USD/yr. I couldn't tell you the exact percentage, but I seem to recall it was significant, similar to your platform fees which on Steam is like 30%
They discontinued that years ago though. Now it's free if you're under the $100k threshold, but once you go over you have to upgrade your license at a cost of a couple grand per seat per year.
The per-install fee is taking effect Jan 1, 2024, but I believe you're still going to have to get an upgraded license after you hit the threshold. This is a fee on top of fees.
Unity don't take royalties, this is their piss-poor attempt at doing that.
Only occurs after the game reaches a certain amount of revenue within the last year. Not defending it this is a terrible change but there is still a degree of wiggle room for free games or VERY small indie games.
True, but then compare it to terraria. Everyone can agree it’s been a massive success. But games like it and stardew valley have an interesting quirk here. People are likely to download them again when they get a new computer. That doesn’t get the dev more money, you bought it once. But many people will redownload to try the newest free final expansion.
In practice it mostly affect studio making over 1M in sales per year. The download fee only occur on pro users past that threshold. The fee is so ridiculous that they're basically forcing devs to get pro, but that was kinda already a thing anyway. For studios malong over 1M a year, well they gotta pay up unfortunately. Unfortunately 1M per year ins't that much for a middle-sized studio, but small studio are barely affected by this change.
Free (Personal) and Plus users also have to pay, and their threshold is lower than for Pro/Enterprise users: 200k lifetime downloads and 200k dollars earned in the past year, vs 1million for the pro.
Its weird that the moment my game reached that threshold that my studio suddenly became insolvent and wrrapped up, and a very similar but different studio opened in the same offices.
Hope that new studio comes with a whole new set of IP because: "Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated..." and "Each game or app’s cumulative install amount cannot be reset or reduced even if it has been sold, transferred to a new party, changed its name, been republished as a new version.... Additionally, a change in publisher or distributor does not reset the cumulative install amount. https://unity.com/runtime-fee
Unity is getting sued.
Wouldn't be surprised if there was already multiple lawyers lining up to take the case
Is steam charging for re-installs?
Unity is apparently planning to starting next year
Unity engine was planning on it, though they still say they'll charge for a new device, so you could probably still do this.
No, Unity will charge developers for installs, not users
That is the best part, anon.