Unreal is creaming their pants this week. They can't have imagined a better sales pitch.
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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they just have to unveil some new shiny tools to convert from unity to unreal and unity is kill
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).
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).
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.
Ticketmaster is a monopoly that should have never been allowed.
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
I am a strong supporter of open source tech. Specifically the proper FOSS flavor.
It is NEVER going to be a valid alternative when there is a massive multi-million (if not billion) dollar alternative with an affordable license. Because it takes time to develop these feature sets and time is money. Even someone working in their spare time can't put in a full day of work.. and are likely burned out FROM a full day of work.
And that ignores the tendency for GPL-like licenses that are straight up cancer as far as companies and products are concerned. I respect the ideology but... that is WHY companies are less likely to pull a Valve and dump massive amounts of money into supporting open source projects. Like, every time someone pushes a cool piece of software with a GPL-like license I just think "Cool, you are actively making sure your feature set never improves anything"
The best we can hope for is the model used by Ubuntu and the like. An open source project backed by a corporation that sells support. And... the open source community almost instantly turns on that and decides they are evil and starts going out of their way to shit on it at every step of the way.
As for the overall idea of "do we even own anything in this world of subscriptions?". That, much like with the "I bought the disc so I own this game" mindset is very much a fallacy. Because you can get a life time license to version 1.2315151651616 of FooSoft. hell, you can even get 1.x of FooSoft. That... doesn't matter because the moment a CVE is found in FooSoft or its dependencies you need a new version. Which is WHY we tend toward these subscription models because we know we need the updated version.
Like, as a good example: Basically ANY new hardware or software suite needs support for Red Hat, and to a lesser extent Ubuntu, if they are planning on selling their products. Because any company worth its salt is picking a distro with a support model. Which basically means RHEL and whatever the paid Ubuntu is. Because even ignoring any tech support aspects, a support contract is a guaranteed timeline for fixing vulnerabilities.
A universal basic income would allow more developers to choose to work on software they actually like, rather than the demands of business and their proprietary models.
Most UBI solutions (which I very much support and voted for Yang in the primaries for...) tend to be built around the idea of providing cost of living for "free" but encouraging people to still suck capitalism good if they want more money on top of that. Which is "good" because it is how you get those rock star developers focused on major products.
But that more or less makes the same problem. Sure, there are going to be people who genuinely want for nothing more than three meals a day and spend the rest of their time doing hardcore development. But, even then, they likely are never going to be "challenged". I've worked with some AMAZING developers over the years and have learned a lot from them. And I would hope they learned from me. Because, during a code review, you see how Nancy solved a problem and might try to incorporate that pattern into your own workflow and so forth.
But when you are more or less the sole "ninja" developer on a project and are mostly working with college kids who can remember what the various design patterns are called? You are likely not being challenged in the slightest and you "stagnate".
And most people who live and breathe "awesome code" are doing so because it lets them do fun stuff on the weekend. Which, until we live in a post scarcity society, needs money/resources.
Hell, if I haven't already pissed off more than enough people with this, I'll add on that I have never met what I would consider a "good" software engineer who doesn't "work for the weekend" as it were. Because if all you want to do with your entire life is code? You never stop iterating. You always want to make the code better and I need to regularly "check in" with you to make you push code to a repository or remove the WIP from your MR. Whereas the people who want to finish their job so they can go climbing or take a trip to the beach with their family or just blow money on hookers and blow? They are able to realize when something is "good enough for production" and they get a LOT more done.
There are free OS nowadays that are Better than the paid ones (especially the most used one for desktops).
What do you need your PC to do? If it's word-processing and spreadsheets you are already ready to go free. Other software or "solutions" will come later.
It just takes time because the money is pushing hard the payment models.
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.
