Unity's Plan Won't Work, but Someone Else's Will | TechnoFeudalism in Games and Beyond

Frost Wolf@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 312 points – Unity's Plan Won't Work, but Someone Else's Will
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5196308

It’s scary that the Unity debacle is not just happening in games but a very real threat not just in digital and app space but in real life.

It can happen in medicine, housing, even the food we eat if the trend of subscriptions and lock ins continue.

Despite this, a global concerted effort towards Open Source tech is still not happening.

In Unity for example, there is a push to transition to Unreal but less so for Godot. We see this happening with reddit too. And soon maybe we’ll see it in real life. What’s stopping our hotels and landlords from charging us everytime we open doors.

We see this in the rampant mandatory tips. Where everyone is automatically charged per order.

It’s scary and frustrating at the same time that there may not be a clear remedy for this. As the world shifts to subscriptions and services, do we truly own anything anymore?

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Unreal is creaming their pants this week. They can't have imagined a better sales pitch.

they just have to unveil some new shiny tools to convert from unity to unreal and unity is kill

There will never be a tool to convert Unity projects to Unreal. However there are already several to convert Unity to Godot, because both use C#

Edit: And as a dev that has used both, I just converted my project to Godot.

Edit again: It actually may be possible or at least be made easier using LLMs to convert to Unreal

How much work was it to convert ?

I guess the tool didn't managed every single detail ?

Sadly it can’t work that way. From a programming perspective alone they are very different engines.

Unity uses C# while Unreal is C++.

We chose unity because we thought unreal model was shitty too.

Next time it's open source, godot or stride or i don't know, but not unreal.

They would have done the same shit if it worked

I've honestly been surprised that Godot's getting a lot of hype out of this. I had expected MonoGame/XNA to be the big beneficiary -- particularly for Unity's 2D users, but also 3D (though I expected Unreal to benefit the most there just because of developer familiarity).

Godot is the closest alternative to Unity.

Unreal is kind of a different beast on a different market, more complex and more geared towards big 3D games with high-end graphics.

Unity worked on consoles. Godot don't offer that.

Directly no but that's because its legally impossible to.

So a lot of services exist that'll do it for you, cheaper than unity pricing model yet (or you can do it yourself it just takes effort)

There's even a company created by the godot devs specifically to fill this void, and the profits go back to development

They have been at the right place at the right time.

Never heard of MonoGame but from what I see, it's much less noob-friendly, no editor etc. Looks too different

MonoGame/XNA used to be more relevant 10 years ago, but not so much any more (funnily enough, in large part because Unity ate their lunch).

It's still pretty relevant. Some of the biggest indie hits of the last several years used it (Stardew Valley, Celeste, Supergiant games pre-Hades).

MonoGame has the advantage of being used to ship a number of indie hits, though. Supergiant still uses an in-house fork of it for their games, if I'm not mistaken (ed. I guess they rewrote their engine for Hades).

MonoGame is basically a continuation of Microsoft's XNA which was their engine for the Xbox 360 era. It supports the full Visual Studio (not "Code") so that's the environment you get.

Except Unreal already had the same kind of pricing structure that Unity is trying to move towards, that’s why Unity thought they could get away with it.

Ticketmaster is another real world example we've got right now. Or any service that adds on arbitrary fees that aren't a part of the advertised price.

Do we know yet if unity's plan won't work?

Games take 3-5 years to make.. you can't change engine mid-development so it'll literally be years before they see any negative impact - during which time they'll be making bank.

From their point of view that's a success.. shareholders care little about long term sustainability.

Developers are on the hook for potentially infinite losses without gaining revenue in a per install fee system. Expenses are entirely unpredictable for developers and bad actors can run basic install scripts to cost the company a lot, so if Unity stays their current course for a few more weeks, many of the larger developers using Unity will begin switching engines even if it means delays. It's absolutely worth it for a developer to port their game over no matter the cost, because they are easily looking at no limits to their costs if they don't

It's quite the opposite.

Unity, like reddit, made a smart decision for sustainability that came with a bit of short-term outrage.

The people in charge at Unity can't just take over their customers project and boot the Devs out if they protest like Reddit did with Subreddits they protested for too long where they just banned the mods and took over the subs that had gone dark.

There's way more control in the Devs hands in this instance but Unity seem to be trying to rely on the fact that it's a massive pain in the ass to switch to a different engine mid development but that's definitely not stopping some people from making the migration still.

More links on the subject:

Article - Are We Living Under ‘Technofeudalism’?

Video: Technofeudalism: The End of Capitalism

The right-to-repair movement is showing us cyber-feudalism will fail in time, as is the failing BMW subscription seats thing. We may be moving into a golden age of service and media piracy in which households throughout the developed world simply resort on cracked services. We may be using cracked ink cartridges and illegally-jailbroken refrigerators until they realize the compound public resentment and ingoing war against pirates is cutting more into profits than is gained from rent seeking DRM

We've already seen how the efforts by the record lables to litigate against children and elderly can go poorly and just increase piracy (or worse, decrease engagement).

But it means we'll have to suffer more as the paradigm shifts. Capitalists are not allowed to relent when it comes to profit seeking, making them the enemy of the people. And a government that favors commercial corporations over the public (as is the case in the US) is also, by definition, the enemy of the people. It means any transaction is predatory unless there is a force acting in the interest of the worker and the consumer that effectively dissuades contracts without parity.

I would use open source but there are no open source game engines that support VR with controller and hand interactions, let alone online avatars. Open Source is just behind in a major way in the VR/AR space and I hope it makes closing that gap a priority.

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Techno -feudalism

Strangely enough, don't feel like laughing.

what's funny tho? dude has a point

The absolute absurdity of framing and drawing comparisons between the technology sector and feudalism.

Well that's why he called it "techno-feudalism" because he does recognise it's anachronistic

Have you watched the video? The point stands tho. Argument goes as follows: "just like in feudal times you were forced to pay a rent for the privilege of living on the land of your lord, likewise nowadays companies seek to establish a rent seeking position, like leeches, where you pay for the sole privilege of using their product. It's different from 'a price' because customers often have no other choice."