@livingcoder Godot is pretty solid. It's got its quirks, though, which can make transitioning difficult. Stick with it.
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@LouisIngenthron Thinking about this it kinda makes sense. It isnt Unity's responsibility to handle anti-piracy, thats the developers job. It is the developers responsibility to write their code in a way that has effective anti-piracy measures in it.
@freemo Not necessarily. Some games are given away for free. It's the developer's *choice* whether or not they want to implement/integrate anti-piracy measures. Plus, many anti-piracy measures have bad reputations among the customer base, so choosing not to include them for even commercial games can be a legitimate decisions.
But now Unity wants to charge developers per-install regardless of whether the install was legitimate, duplicate, whatever. This costs Unity *nothing*, yet they choose to charge developers on such arbitrary and unnecessary grounds.
Even if they are given away for free, Unity isnt open-source. It costs if you want to use it. You cant give away something for free that you built if you are using a component that costs money. Its not like just cause you decided to give it away for free that anything i based my work on needs to waive their fees or something.
The truth is, there is good reason not to use Unity. Because it is a library that isnt open-source. That alone is a good reason and always has been. But for me it doesnt make much sense to complain that a for-profit product actually requires users of that product to pay.
@freemo It's not free. They already charge a subscription.
But more importantly, there are already established ways to do this better, like a straight revenue cut percentage. That doesn't unfairly punish developers for offering games to charity or selling their game at a lower price.
It’s not free. They already charge a subscription.
Never said it was free. In fact my whole point is that its not.
But more importantly, there are already established ways to do this better, like a straight revenue cut percentage. That doesn’t unfairly punish developers for offering games to charity or selling their game at a lower price.
Not sure why the price of my product should depend on the price of yours. If I sell premium high quality silk cloth, should I let you have it for free simply because you create shitty clothes that no one wants to buy so you give them away?
Not only can I not see the logic in pricing my product based on yours, but how would it even work? All I see as the library owner (assuming i bake it into the library) is who installs it. I have no way to verify or no what, if any, the price was you sold it for. Am I just supposed to trust you will tell me?
I dunno I mean i see where your coming from in trying to encourage developers to get on board. But I just cant see how your approach can actually be implemented in any reasonable way.
@freemo If the price of your product should not depend on the price of mine, then the price of your product should also not depend on the volume of my sales.
First, why not, thats how every product sold on this planet (more or less) has been sold since forever.
Second you are ignoring the fact that your approach literally doesnt work, whereas the approach of charging per-seat does.
Thirdly, It doesnt (depend on your volume of sales). It depends on Unity’s volume of sales, which you happen to be reselling to your own clients.
Not sure why you think that just because you paid to use a library you now have the right to let other people also use that library for free. You dont get royalty rights of redistribution, if you did it wouldnt make sense, and generally thats not how products even work.
Like literally think of any other software component that is sold at a fee.. they almost all work this way. If i buy a license to use oracle it doesnt mean that every business who uses my product now gets free oracle servers just because I, as the developer, paid to be allowed to use oracle servers during my development.
@freemo Unity isn't selling to my customers; I am. If Unity was selling to my customers, they'd get money from the customer for each Unity runtime license sold. Instead, they're demanding money from developers for each developer game installed. The difference is that if a consumer has three built-with-Unity games installed on their system, Unity would get one royalty if they were the seller, but they get three royalties if the developers are the sellers.... Then they get three more royalties when that player needs a new computer and reinstalls those games, even though the developers did not get additional revenue.
Unity has always charged a per-seat subscription for the use of the editor software. As long as they have been a company, rights to redistribute the runtime was offered free to anyone who had a valid license to the editor. Because the editor is built on the runtime and is useless without it.
No other game engine that I know of charges per-install, and very few APIs do.
This also opens up channels for abuse. Don't like a game company? You don't have to review bomb them anymore, you can just start a campaign to reinstall their game over and over to financially ruin them.
Plus you have to wonder what kind of spyware is being included to tally these charges up.
The whole thing is ugly top-to-bottom.
This article covers the topic well: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-death-of-unity?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon
The difference is that if a consumer has three built-with-Unity games installed on their system, Unity would get one royalty if they were the seller, but they get three royalties if the developers are the sellers….
Thats not how the libraries I’ve had to purchase in the past worked. If my product bundled the library I had to pay for each install by my users, typically. Usually there are different pricing structures, one to get a license that allows you to develop, and the second as a royalty attached to the final product.
Then they get three more royalties when that player needs a new computer and reinstalls those games, even though the developers did not get additional revenue.
This is a very valid concern IMO. Obviously you shouldnt have to pay if a system is wiped and the game reinstalled.
Unity has always charged a per-seat subscription for the use of the editor software. As long as they have been a company, rights to redistribute the runtime was offered free to anyone who had a valid license to the editor. Because the editor is built on the runtime and is useless without it.
I think precedence alone here is a good reason for you to be upset. You invested in this product and developed your systems on it. You did so with the expectation of a certain pricing model and now you are locked in.
While you have a right to be upset, and I’d even say you are right to discourage people from using the product this goes back to what I said before… you screwed up in picking a non-open-source library to begin with. Honestly it is negligent for any developer to code against a proprietary library because you will always be locked in and at the whim of the developer. Sure you can get upset when they use that leverage, and you may be right to be upset. But in the end this is exactly why it was a bad idea to ever go with a product that didnt provide you with garuntees against this very thing.
No other game engine that I know of charges per-install, and very few APIs do.
There are a few, but you are right that this is a bit unusual for a game engine specifically as the models usually want to encourage adoption. Like i said, its a stupid model, but not an unexpected one.
This also opens up channels for abuse. Don’t like a game company? You don’t have to review bomb them anymore, you can just start a campaign to reinstall their game over and over to financially ruin them.
Well the presumption is the cost the developer paid is just passed onto the buyer. So presumably if the engine is charging the dev per-install then the dev would charge the user per-install.
Plus you have to wonder what kind of spyware is being included to tally these charges up.
See my comment about the negligence of using proprietary libraries.
The whole thing is ugly top-to-bottom.
I mean yea, but thats what you get when you go proprietary. Its why the vast majority of software refuses to include a proprietary library if it can help it. It is always ugly in the end, intentional or otherwise.
@LouisIngenthron This is all I needed to check out Godot.