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No love lost: AppLovin helpfully releases tool to switch from Unity to Godot or Unreal
(www.pocketgamer.biz)
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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There is a potential chance of unreal doing the same stupid shit afterall
According to https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/64901-80, there's over 100 investors in Epic, and of course there is Tencent holding a 40% share.
But those investors are not much of an issue either, because you forgot one important point in your list: Epic is swimming in money (and Unreal is just a side business for them).
I'm not saying it's going to happen. Still there's a chance of stupid COP shits happening when compared to open source.
It's a company, they can just say "fuck it, pay more". It would be weird, self destructive and illogical, but they can do it (like unity did it too.)
The thing is, this could change at any time. The problem with enshittification is that it spreads. A company that's doing great work today could be bought out by corporate profiteers and leeched of its actual value at any point in the future. We've had plenty of companies that started out with a vision and a set of strong principles who've been reduced to predatory business practices that are bad for everyone. You can't assume that because a company seems to have integrity now, that integrity will remain.
Remember Elon Musk 15 years ago? Wasn't quite the same, was it?
To me, sitting in a position of getting started in game development, that makes me want to sink my time and effort into an engine that I know can't be enshittified because it can't be bought out. I want to know that in a few years I'm not going to completely scrub every asset and mechanic that I make for the engine because somebody's pulled some Darth Vader shit.
OSS is not a panacea, especially when there are upstream dependencies. Even things you think are safe can be compromised or enshittified. It happens all the time. The important thing is to take a close look at the indicators.
Right now, as far as I'm concerned, Godot and UE are both very safe bets, depends on your project and business needs. Epic's license is not conducive to retroactive shenanigans the way Unity's was. Epic clearly invests heavily in fostering customer trust.
Unreal is safe now, but there are no guarantees under capitalism. A FOSS license does guarantee that enshittification won't be a factor because it literally can't become the exclusive property of some company with a greedy executive board. Unreal doesn't have that protection, Godot does.
Could Godot be compromised some how? Sure. Can it be enshittified? Not really.
The conspiracy theorist in me always thought stuff like this was the result of corporate espionage; a loyal employee of a rival firm joins their competitor's ranks and works their way up and finally gets the commanding role, only to announce something this dumb and then take it back (losing their reputation without anything in return) and then the guy leaves the company and finds a comfortable position on the board of their original rival company.
But... No? These people really are that stupid and actually did that to themselves.
And these are the people being paid 300x the salary of ordinary, hard working people!
Epic allows devs to stay under the license terms for specific versions of the engine. If they started charging for installs, devs can just use the older engine versions and avoid the charges.
They "don't" allow it, that's how licenses work.
I keep seeing comments like these on source available nonfree software, but it really doesn't factor in the fact that older software is NOT going to be used due to bugs, features missing, technical debt, secuity vulnerabilities, etc. So unless it is forked (i.e: OpenTofu), it is as good as useless for everyone but hobbyists.
It's allowed by a specific clause in their TOS which assigns a EULA version dependent on the engine version. The EULA itself is different for different versions.
The point is that devs choosing to stay on an old version would not be good for Epic, so they are unlikely to directly create the circumstances where that is the logical result.
Unity also had that clause
In fact, they tried to delete it after their announcement
Yup, they actually removed the entire GitHub repo that they made specifically to track those changes for transparency.
The clause is:
My understanding is this is fundamentally different to the Unity clause you're pointing out.
Another thing is that Unreal is ~~open source~~ source accessible. If there's a bug in 5.0 that is resolved in 5.1 but you don't want to accept the amended terms for 5.1, it's possible to fix the bug and build the engine yourself. In the event of a significant change like the one with Unity, I imagine some dev group would just fork it and maintain it themselves.
They do, though. Not only do they offer multiple, flexible licenses, their basic license specifically guarantees that it is irrevocable. In fact, if that basic license isn't good enough, they are open to license negotiation.
I strongly recommend reading their basic license. It's already one of the most fair and reasonable "out of the box" licenses in the industry.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal