Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.
Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle::Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.
Good! Companies who let shitty people run it and let those people make shitty decisions should die. It’s time for there to be some actual risk involved in being C-suite.
The thing is, they don’t even have to lose all their developers. They just have to lose enough so that introductory gamedev classes start being taught in Godot, indie devs start seeing Godot as a viable option and employers start posting listings looking for Godot experience. Unity was the default engine for lower-budget games for years, and now that’s gone.
one of the best things out of all this is how many new people are now making youtube tutorials on Godot. The huge amount of new monthly donations to the Godot Foundation is also great
If you know C++ already, Unreal is a much more natural starting point than either Unity or Godot.
Unreal is what gets used in many AAA shops - it’s not a monopoly by any means but it is the most common off-the-shelf engine in the industry. Unity’s main edge is that it’s easy to learn but if you are comfortable in C++ then there’s no real benefit to Unity.
Godot uses GDScript, which is a custom scripting language that’s meant to be easy to learn. It’s FOSS so you don’t need to worry about being screwed over - but it’s a lot less mature than something like Unreal which can ship on everything you can think of.
But my advice is to make small things. Don’t hyperfocus on a dream game. Just make things that will take a weekend (maybe a week at most). Then move on to something else.
When I was getting into game dev, I made a couple simple projects then jumped into my dream game. I spent so long making that one game that I never finished.
When I got hired in the industry, they cared more about what I released than what my education or job experience was. Because that one big game was never finished, I wound up with my smaller “just getting started” games on my resume; stuff I had made but wasn’t proud of. But those games were at least finished and available to the public… and they were what got me hired, not my magnum opus overscoped unfinished indie game I never completed.
Thanks!
My C/Cpp knowledge is from embedded programming, arduino and now moving to just Cpp coding. I keep hearing people say python is easier or such thing is simpler but I just can’t see c/Cpp as unapproachable. Plus at least with embedded python gets translated to c for the core to run.
Right now I’m playing with LVGL for embedded screen interfaces. It’s fun.
I’ll dig into unreal when I get a moment of boredom/hyperfocus.
There is C# support in Godot. I’m not sure how many tutorials have been made with it in particular, but I think there’s plenty. Plus their docs go over the API differences so shouldn’t be hard to use in any case
I hope to see a lot of the features added to Godot that Unity refugees have been requesting and working on (because, yknow, open-source) and would expect to see at least 25% Godot 25% Unity 50% Unreal in the job market. Although honestly it is more likely that Unreal takes up a larger share of the market going forward, whereas in the past it has been like 60% Unity positions and 40% Unreal positions (due to Unity use on smaller projects, indie games, and use in the VR training industry).
I think it’s vital that the community now makes the effort to recreate what was made around Unity with the voluntary support material and everything that made it a reference of approachability, over with an open source alternative that may become definitive.
Going to Unreal Engine, even though it might look like the obvious move atm, might be near sighted, and unwise.
What’s preventing this from happening again down the line with another big corporation?
Monetary incentives always change.
Is it Godot? Maybe.
The community needs it’s blender, and now may be the best opportunity to do it.
It’s a matter of organization and foresight. It’s been proven to be doable.
Just wanted to point out that, actually, Blender has an integrated game engine. It’s not very feature rich, but it integrates it’s 3D renderer seamlessly. Just find it ironic, that Blender is really a candidate to be gamedev new Blender.
Of course they won’t. They basically took a hammer to their reputation and completely smashed it to bits. All for that gacha game scratch that will also diminish as those developers move future projects to a new engine.
They shouldn’t. They’re not apologizing for what they’re doing, but are behaving like politicians, changing the rhetoric to try to get people to like what they’re going to do anyway.
Are we sure it’s not the politicians behaving like they’re running a business? 😅
(It’s probably both groups behaving like they’re trying to manipulate a large populace to meet their goals, no big conspiracy, just coincidentally they’re both trying to accomplish the same thing.)
You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback. This way, even if they decide to do the unpopular thing anyway because they have to for financial reasons or something, at least they’re not springing a sudden surprise on their fans.
People really don’t like negative surprises. They can usually handle plain old negative news though, especially if they got time to prepare for the idea first.
I think they sometimes try to use focus groups to collect feedback, but members of a focus group may exhibit unique behavior simply because they’re in a focus group. It’s not an actual representative sample of the public.
You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more . . .
Not even their fanbase in this scenario, but the majority of their paying business customers. Pissing off your fanbase/hobbyists is one thing, but completely alienating your biggest profit generating consumers is just beyond incompetent.
Minor quibble that game devs are actually a smaller fraction of their overall revenues, as their tech has uses far beyond games. They have industrial product lines too.
Kinda like how Amazon’s main thing isn’t selling shippable products anymore, it’s cloud computing and digital infrastructure. Or was last I checked anyway, it might’ve changed again.
Ahh, I always forget that Unity has industrial product services/solutions, that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying that!
And yes, AWS is Amazon’s bread and butter (unfortunately). I can only hope that one day they’re completely dethroned, but I doubt anyone could ever compete with them and Microsoft at this point (and even if a startup managed to make a vastly superior product, either of those two would just buy them out anyway). I think even Google’s cloud service is only a fraction of what AWS and Azure pull in, I could be wrong though.
You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback.
Good news: Apparently Unity did engage with its developers behind closed door for a whole year, they told them this was a bad idea; internally the execs were told this was a bad idea, and here we are.
I’m sure even floating the idea would have been bad. One of the biggest problems with the unity changes was that they were retroactive. That they can even change the fee structure so dramatically after you’ve already built and shipped your game should give anyone using them pause. I don’t think people really considered that as a possibility before.
I feel like it’s pretty obvious this was a greedy and terrible idea. The fact they proposed this at all alone is enough to never trust them again. It’s not that they didn’t know. They knew. No one would be okay with this cash grab and they know it. They just didn’t realize HOW big the pushback was going to be but they DID know what they were doing was wrong.
This is probably going to improve, not decrease, their profitability. They wouldn’t have been so blase about burning all those bridges otherwise.
Yeah, they make revenue from game devs, but there’s costs there too. If the costs are too high compared to their industrial contracts, then the smartest move is to kick all their game dev customers out. While preserving as much general public goodwill as possible.
So, how else could they escape the game engine business? The method they chose would be more effective than any other I can think of. It preserves a trickle of game dev revenue and makes them look silly instead of backstabbing. When a proper backstab was actually the desired result, but too bold to actually say they wanted.
I think it’s time to revisit the question of why these corporations exist as “people” under the law, when they clearly operate without humanity. The perversion of justice that granted them this right was taken directly from the 14th Amendment in 1886. That amendment was written to grant citizenship to freed slaves. What a coincidence that slavery ended, but was immediately replaced with a new structure called corporations.
It’s a practical policy. You want corporations to be able to enter into contracts, pay taxes, have legal responsibilities, etc.
Corporations already existed before the 14th amendment. So many valid critiques of capitalism but I don’t understand the fixation with this one.
If they weren’t “persons” then contracts would simply change their wordings but would still be functionally the same. It’s like changing the color of a sports team jersey.
You should be more concerned with the workers owning the means of production. That can happen with or without corporate personhood. And that will be what actually brings us an equitable society.
It’s certainly “practical” for shareholders with controlling interests in these publicly traded companies, but very impractical for everyone else.
The word corporation may have existed before the 14th Amendment, but the legal definition was entirely different. The word “Country” was also used to describe the state a person was from in the 19th century, if asked about one’s country, one would would reply with the name of their state of residence. The meaning over a word can change entirely in a couple generations.
What criticism of capitalism is more relevant than the abomination of corporate personhood? Toss a few more right-wing Supreme Court rulings into the mix like Citizen’s United giving corporations the ability to spend unlimited and unregulated money lobbying (buying) the legislative system and you have a nation in decline with a failing economic system.
Legally only citizens are allowed to lobby congress, if corporations were no longer considered people, then real people would have more access to power than their corporate overlords.
Corporations have existed since before the USA was even a thing. It’s a group of men with part ownership in some type of organization designed to make profit. Hell, corporations were arguably much more powerful back then. Just look at the British East India Company. It had over 260,000 troops and owned massive swathes of territory.
If corporations weren’t persons and couldn’t lobby for that single reason, then they would funnel money into actual persons and then those people would lobby.
The solution if you don’t want people to lobby (which I agree, is a goal you should aim for) then get rid of lobbying altogether. Changing the legal mechanics by which it happens accomplishes nothing. Which is what I mean by changing color of a sports jersey. It’s focusing on trivial details and ignoring the fundamental issue. Missing forest for the trees.
Thanks for the civil tone of your reply, I have to agree that even if corporate personhood was abolished the oligarchs would just find another way to control the political system keeping rigged to favor their interests. Lobbying in the US started during the Civil War from what I understand, this lad to the creation of a Military Industrial Complex that continues to lobby US lawmakers into conflicts motivated by greed and not diplomatic interests. If you don’t believe me, please listen to the warning from President Eisenhower in his farewell address.
Do you think it’s in the people’s best interest to keep the current corporate structure in tact and legislate lobbying reforms instead?
I think unfortunately democracy lends itself to oligarchy. It’s a constant war of back and forth between democracy trying to fight back and then the oligarchs taking back control. Eternal struggle, essentially.
Look at for examples in the 1800s with the expansion of the railroads. We realized monopolies were dangerous so we create anti-trust laws. For a while, the government enforces this to break monopolies. This is good for democracy- it reduces the power of large corporations controlling policies.
Eventually, however, they sneak back in. Look at the original AT&T. I forget the name but it was Edison’s company. They became massive, were broken up, but then slowly merged together over a long period of time.
However by the time they combine together again, there is little public will to break them up. We’re at the point today where we have powerful anti-trust legislation but our politicians either have no will to change it or are too scared to change it.
We could break up Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. They buy up their potential competitors before they are any risk and we live in a world where vast majority of internet traffic gets routed through the big 5. Google (YouTube, search), Meta (Facebook, Instagram, whatsapp), Twitter, reddit, tiktok.
Instead of breaking these companies up to maintain a free market with competition - we don’t do anything. Why? It’s a pendulum and corporate interests are in the driver’s seat right now.
There are many other industries where a few big companies control everything. Internet like Comcast & AT&T… Media - I remember reading in 2019 half of all movies that came out in theaters was owned by Disney. Airlines are another example. 80% of trips happen under 4 companies. American airlines, delta, southwest, and United.
There are similar oligopolies in many industries that are less visible. Pharmaceuticals, defense contractors, cloud infrastructure, etc.
As long as these companies have such power… they will find a way to manipulate our democratic system. You can change the rules and they will get around them. For example we have anti-trust and depending on your interpretation many of the companies above can be broken up.
Yet we don’t do it. So the law doesn’t actually matter. What matters is where the real power is currently located. The laws are guidelines…
So the solution? I have no idea, really. I think there is no ultimate solution as long as there is capitalism. It will always be a war between people trying to assert their own private power and the institutions trying to keep the system legitimate.
However, I think we can make the situation better by breaking up the power of these companies by actually enforcing anti-trust laws and making it harder for them by for example getting rid of legal lobbying and making them do it illegally. That will incur extra costs for them, ultimately making them less effective.
When you launder money, you lose a good chunk of it. Somstimes a significant chunk.
We’re here on lemmy and mastodon, but Reddit and twitter still have waaaay more users. Unities move has boosted the popularity of other (open source) alternatives, sure, and if I was a game dev I would transition, but most of the devs and studios are going to need a lot more incentive to abandon the tool they spend decades getting to know
Unfortunately, this is likely true. If people can keep using Twitter after all that has happened, people will certainly continue to use Unity and for more legitimate reasons.
I don’t think so. Twitter doesn’t fundamentally change the finances of your business. People are unlikely to feel safe building their entire passion project around an untrustworthy corporation.
Unity also doesn’t have the network effects that Twitter has. People use Twitter because the people they follow use Twitter, and those people use Twitter because enough other people use Twitter that it’s the easiest place to build an audience. Network effects do exist for game engines (it’s a lot easier to use a tool when enough other people use it that the solution to any given problem is likely just a web-search away) but the critical mass that needs to be overcome to become competitive is a lot lower.
I could still use Reddit for free. At any point, I can easily decide to install the app and use it in parallel. I can go back-and-forth with 0 consequences. My income is not dependent on my ability to access Reddit.
Developers have made the business decision to use Unity or not, and this debacle pretty seriously impacts that decision.
They’ll see longtime customers start to divest, I’m sure. I’d imagine most of the damage done was to their future new customer numbers. Anyone starting a project today would be pretty foolish to even consider Unity, and they’ll feel that more and more going forward. The death rattle’s begun.
I’d personally seek out any good open source alternatives before trying anything else nowadays. I’m pretty happy with blender and krita now I’m starting to get back into animation and drawing. But I’m old, I don’t know if joung people would not simply choose the one that is free-ish and more popular and better supported
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If I was a developer, I wouldn’t give them a second chance at this point.
deleted by creator
Oh we’re well beyond “Find Out.” We’re at Uniexit
Good! Companies who let shitty people run it and let those people make shitty decisions should die. It’s time for there to be some actual risk involved in being C-suite.
The thing is, they don’t even have to lose all their developers. They just have to lose enough so that introductory gamedev classes start being taught in Godot, indie devs start seeing Godot as a viable option and employers start posting listings looking for Godot experience. Unity was the default engine for lower-budget games for years, and now that’s gone.
one of the best things out of all this is how many new people are now making youtube tutorials on Godot. The huge amount of new monthly donations to the Godot Foundation is also great
Should I start learning Godot? I’m not a game dev, but I know C/Cpp and game dev has been interesting to me.
If you know C++ already, Unreal is a much more natural starting point than either Unity or Godot.
Unreal is what gets used in many AAA shops - it’s not a monopoly by any means but it is the most common off-the-shelf engine in the industry. Unity’s main edge is that it’s easy to learn but if you are comfortable in C++ then there’s no real benefit to Unity.
Godot uses GDScript, which is a custom scripting language that’s meant to be easy to learn. It’s FOSS so you don’t need to worry about being screwed over - but it’s a lot less mature than something like Unreal which can ship on everything you can think of.
But my advice is to make small things. Don’t hyperfocus on a dream game. Just make things that will take a weekend (maybe a week at most). Then move on to something else.
When I was getting into game dev, I made a couple simple projects then jumped into my dream game. I spent so long making that one game that I never finished.
When I got hired in the industry, they cared more about what I released than what my education or job experience was. Because that one big game was never finished, I wound up with my smaller “just getting started” games on my resume; stuff I had made but wasn’t proud of. But those games were at least finished and available to the public… and they were what got me hired, not my magnum opus overscoped unfinished indie game I never completed.
Thanks! My C/Cpp knowledge is from embedded programming, arduino and now moving to just Cpp coding. I keep hearing people say python is easier or such thing is simpler but I just can’t see c/Cpp as unapproachable. Plus at least with embedded python gets translated to c for the core to run. Right now I’m playing with LVGL for embedded screen interfaces. It’s fun. I’ll dig into unreal when I get a moment of boredom/hyperfocus.
There is C# support in Godot. I’m not sure how many tutorials have been made with it in particular, but I think there’s plenty. Plus their docs go over the API differences so shouldn’t be hard to use in any case
I hope to see a lot of the features added to Godot that Unity refugees have been requesting and working on (because, yknow, open-source) and would expect to see at least 25% Godot 25% Unity 50% Unreal in the job market. Although honestly it is more likely that Unreal takes up a larger share of the market going forward, whereas in the past it has been like 60% Unity positions and 40% Unreal positions (due to Unity use on smaller projects, indie games, and use in the VR training industry).
Unity could get them back if they fired their CEO, John Riticello
Nope, don’t care.
Yeah, I know. I just want them to fire the asshole anyway.
Understandable
you mean all the people who said they weren’t coming back even after the obvious rollback of the policy aren’t coming back? 😱
breaking news: betrayed devs arent coming back
I think it’s vital that the community now makes the effort to recreate what was made around Unity with the voluntary support material and everything that made it a reference of approachability, over with an open source alternative that may become definitive.
Going to Unreal Engine, even though it might look like the obvious move atm, might be near sighted, and unwise.
What’s preventing this from happening again down the line with another big corporation? Monetary incentives always change.
Is it Godot? Maybe.
The community needs it’s blender, and now may be the best opportunity to do it. It’s a matter of organization and foresight. It’s been proven to be doable.
Just wanted to point out that, actually, Blender has an integrated game engine. It’s not very feature rich, but it integrates it’s 3D renderer seamlessly. Just find it ironic, that Blender is really a candidate to be gamedev new Blender.
Of course they won’t. They basically took a hammer to their reputation and completely smashed it to bits. All for that gacha game scratch that will also diminish as those developers move future projects to a new engine.
They shouldn’t. They’re not apologizing for what they’re doing, but are behaving like politicians, changing the rhetoric to try to get people to like what they’re going to do anyway.
Are we sure it’s not the politicians behaving like they’re running a business? 😅
(It’s probably both groups behaving like they’re trying to manipulate a large populace to meet their goals, no big conspiracy, just coincidentally they’re both trying to accomplish the same thing.)
Are there even distinct groups we’re talking about anymore?
insert “They’re the same picture” image here
It’s the trust thermocline again. When will companies learn to do more ground level research before pulling bullshit like this?
You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback. This way, even if they decide to do the unpopular thing anyway because they have to for financial reasons or something, at least they’re not springing a sudden surprise on their fans.
People really don’t like negative surprises. They can usually handle plain old negative news though, especially if they got time to prepare for the idea first.
I think they sometimes try to use focus groups to collect feedback, but members of a focus group may exhibit unique behavior simply because they’re in a focus group. It’s not an actual representative sample of the public.
Not even their fanbase in this scenario, but the majority of their paying business customers. Pissing off your fanbase/hobbyists is one thing, but completely alienating your biggest profit generating consumers is just beyond incompetent.
Minor quibble that game devs are actually a smaller fraction of their overall revenues, as their tech has uses far beyond games. They have industrial product lines too.
Kinda like how Amazon’s main thing isn’t selling shippable products anymore, it’s cloud computing and digital infrastructure. Or was last I checked anyway, it might’ve changed again.
You’re otherwise totally right though.
Ahh, I always forget that Unity has industrial product services/solutions, that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying that!
And yes, AWS is Amazon’s bread and butter (unfortunately). I can only hope that one day they’re completely dethroned, but I doubt anyone could ever compete with them and Microsoft at this point (and even if a startup managed to make a vastly superior product, either of those two would just buy them out anyway). I think even Google’s cloud service is only a fraction of what AWS and Azure pull in, I could be wrong though.
Good news: Apparently Unity did engage with its developers behind closed door for a whole year, they told them this was a bad idea; internally the execs were told this was a bad idea, and here we are.
I’m sure even floating the idea would have been bad. One of the biggest problems with the unity changes was that they were retroactive. That they can even change the fee structure so dramatically after you’ve already built and shipped your game should give anyone using them pause. I don’t think people really considered that as a possibility before.
I feel like it’s pretty obvious this was a greedy and terrible idea. The fact they proposed this at all alone is enough to never trust them again. It’s not that they didn’t know. They knew. No one would be okay with this cash grab and they know it. They just didn’t realize HOW big the pushback was going to be but they DID know what they were doing was wrong.
This is probably going to improve, not decrease, their profitability. They wouldn’t have been so blase about burning all those bridges otherwise.
Yeah, they make revenue from game devs, but there’s costs there too. If the costs are too high compared to their industrial contracts, then the smartest move is to kick all their game dev customers out. While preserving as much general public goodwill as possible.
So, how else could they escape the game engine business? The method they chose would be more effective than any other I can think of. It preserves a trickle of game dev revenue and makes them look silly instead of backstabbing. When a proper backstab was actually the desired result, but too bold to actually say they wanted.
My hypothesis anyway.
I completely agree, old school RuneScape does this very well and I wish more companies tried to engage their users as much as those devs do
Jagex has supposedly been barely successful forever tho, unity takes in billions by being shitters. In the end that’s all some companies care about
Unity hasn’t been profitable ever. Jagex is marginally profitable.
That’s not true, Unity was profitable FY2022 (for the first time ever as a public company, not necessarily ever in their history): https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2023/Unity-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2022-Financial-Results/default.aspx
I think it’s time to revisit the question of why these corporations exist as “people” under the law, when they clearly operate without humanity. The perversion of justice that granted them this right was taken directly from the 14th Amendment in 1886. That amendment was written to grant citizenship to freed slaves. What a coincidence that slavery ended, but was immediately replaced with a new structure called corporations.
It’s a practical policy. You want corporations to be able to enter into contracts, pay taxes, have legal responsibilities, etc.
Corporations already existed before the 14th amendment. So many valid critiques of capitalism but I don’t understand the fixation with this one.
If they weren’t “persons” then contracts would simply change their wordings but would still be functionally the same. It’s like changing the color of a sports team jersey.
You should be more concerned with the workers owning the means of production. That can happen with or without corporate personhood. And that will be what actually brings us an equitable society.
It’s certainly “practical” for shareholders with controlling interests in these publicly traded companies, but very impractical for everyone else.
The word corporation may have existed before the 14th Amendment, but the legal definition was entirely different. The word “Country” was also used to describe the state a person was from in the 19th century, if asked about one’s country, one would would reply with the name of their state of residence. The meaning over a word can change entirely in a couple generations.
What criticism of capitalism is more relevant than the abomination of corporate personhood? Toss a few more right-wing Supreme Court rulings into the mix like Citizen’s United giving corporations the ability to spend unlimited and unregulated money lobbying (buying) the legislative system and you have a nation in decline with a failing economic system.
Legally only citizens are allowed to lobby congress, if corporations were no longer considered people, then real people would have more access to power than their corporate overlords.
Corporations have existed since before the USA was even a thing. It’s a group of men with part ownership in some type of organization designed to make profit. Hell, corporations were arguably much more powerful back then. Just look at the British East India Company. It had over 260,000 troops and owned massive swathes of territory.
If corporations weren’t persons and couldn’t lobby for that single reason, then they would funnel money into actual persons and then those people would lobby.
The solution if you don’t want people to lobby (which I agree, is a goal you should aim for) then get rid of lobbying altogether. Changing the legal mechanics by which it happens accomplishes nothing. Which is what I mean by changing color of a sports jersey. It’s focusing on trivial details and ignoring the fundamental issue. Missing forest for the trees.
Thanks for the civil tone of your reply, I have to agree that even if corporate personhood was abolished the oligarchs would just find another way to control the political system keeping rigged to favor their interests. Lobbying in the US started during the Civil War from what I understand, this lad to the creation of a Military Industrial Complex that continues to lobby US lawmakers into conflicts motivated by greed and not diplomatic interests. If you don’t believe me, please listen to the warning from President Eisenhower in his farewell address.
Do you think it’s in the people’s best interest to keep the current corporate structure in tact and legislate lobbying reforms instead?
I think unfortunately democracy lends itself to oligarchy. It’s a constant war of back and forth between democracy trying to fight back and then the oligarchs taking back control. Eternal struggle, essentially.
Look at for examples in the 1800s with the expansion of the railroads. We realized monopolies were dangerous so we create anti-trust laws. For a while, the government enforces this to break monopolies. This is good for democracy- it reduces the power of large corporations controlling policies.
Eventually, however, they sneak back in. Look at the original AT&T. I forget the name but it was Edison’s company. They became massive, were broken up, but then slowly merged together over a long period of time.
However by the time they combine together again, there is little public will to break them up. We’re at the point today where we have powerful anti-trust legislation but our politicians either have no will to change it or are too scared to change it.
We could break up Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. They buy up their potential competitors before they are any risk and we live in a world where vast majority of internet traffic gets routed through the big 5. Google (YouTube, search), Meta (Facebook, Instagram, whatsapp), Twitter, reddit, tiktok.
Instead of breaking these companies up to maintain a free market with competition - we don’t do anything. Why? It’s a pendulum and corporate interests are in the driver’s seat right now.
There are many other industries where a few big companies control everything. Internet like Comcast & AT&T… Media - I remember reading in 2019 half of all movies that came out in theaters was owned by Disney. Airlines are another example. 80% of trips happen under 4 companies. American airlines, delta, southwest, and United.
There are similar oligopolies in many industries that are less visible. Pharmaceuticals, defense contractors, cloud infrastructure, etc.
As long as these companies have such power… they will find a way to manipulate our democratic system. You can change the rules and they will get around them. For example we have anti-trust and depending on your interpretation many of the companies above can be broken up.
Yet we don’t do it. So the law doesn’t actually matter. What matters is where the real power is currently located. The laws are guidelines…
So the solution? I have no idea, really. I think there is no ultimate solution as long as there is capitalism. It will always be a war between people trying to assert their own private power and the institutions trying to keep the system legitimate.
However, I think we can make the situation better by breaking up the power of these companies by actually enforcing anti-trust laws and making it harder for them by for example getting rid of legal lobbying and making them do it illegally. That will incur extra costs for them, ultimately making them less effective.
When you launder money, you lose a good chunk of it. Somstimes a significant chunk.
I thought competition is supposed to be good?
Not like that I guess.
We’re here on lemmy and mastodon, but Reddit and twitter still have waaaay more users. Unities move has boosted the popularity of other (open source) alternatives, sure, and if I was a game dev I would transition, but most of the devs and studios are going to need a lot more incentive to abandon the tool they spend decades getting to know
Unfortunately, this is likely true. If people can keep using Twitter after all that has happened, people will certainly continue to use Unity and for more legitimate reasons.
I don’t think so. Twitter doesn’t fundamentally change the finances of your business. People are unlikely to feel safe building their entire passion project around an untrustworthy corporation.
Unity also doesn’t have the network effects that Twitter has. People use Twitter because the people they follow use Twitter, and those people use Twitter because enough other people use Twitter that it’s the easiest place to build an audience. Network effects do exist for game engines (it’s a lot easier to use a tool when enough other people use it that the solution to any given problem is likely just a web-search away) but the critical mass that needs to be overcome to become competitive is a lot lower.
I could still use Reddit for free. At any point, I can easily decide to install the app and use it in parallel. I can go back-and-forth with 0 consequences. My income is not dependent on my ability to access Reddit.
Developers have made the business decision to use Unity or not, and this debacle pretty seriously impacts that decision.
They’ll see longtime customers start to divest, I’m sure. I’d imagine most of the damage done was to their future new customer numbers. Anyone starting a project today would be pretty foolish to even consider Unity, and they’ll feel that more and more going forward. The death rattle’s begun.
I’d personally seek out any good open source alternatives before trying anything else nowadays. I’m pretty happy with blender and krita now I’m starting to get back into animation and drawing. But I’m old, I don’t know if joung people would not simply choose the one that is free-ish and more popular and better supported