I don't know, just seen this go bad with lots of other companies, that leaves me skeptical about how this will go and nervous about making games using their platform in the future.
My observation was a bunch of people in places like the HN comments being angry, but no meaningful mass protest, or exodus from GitHub to competitors, etc.
I don't really know why MS would bother unless not doing so would risk a Unity collapse and a loss of a lot of C# development.
As others have noticed, there's been a (coincidental?) increase in their SaaS line of products.
It doesn't help that there have already been some recent stories of developers being given the cold corporate treatment,[0] and the recent issue with Improbable.[1]
[0] https://sipreadrepeat.com/2018/12/16/unity-email-controversy... [1] https://gamedaily.biz/article/507/improbable-disputes-unitys...
If you are a hobbyist or you are making 2D games, Godot is fantastic right now and I highly recommend that you check it out.
If you are a professional game studio or you care about 3D, Godot might work for you right now, but you will probably hit some rough edges. These edges get smoother every day and now is a fantastic time to help Godot reach the next quality bar, either via donating[2] or contributing code[3].
The whole industry will benefit if we have an open-source toolset without licensing terms and fees. Godot seems to be our best bet right now. There are SO many talented developers in this space and right now most of their efforts go into improving ecosystems that they are PAYING to use. If even a small portion of that group redirected their efforts to improving the commons we would have a top tier product in no time.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxW4PcX0fa8 [1] The 3D asset pipeline and renderer are my biggest pain points right now. Both of these are being addressed as we speak. [2] https://www.patreon.com/godotengine [3] https://github.com/godotengine/godot
I would rather bet on Unreal or similar engines with equal features.
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/getting_started/workflow...
Now I'm worried that this will start driving them toward short-term gains more than anything.
I'm predicting that if they go public, they'll ape Epic's storefront model within 3-5 years.
It does not seem to me obviously better (for developers or their customers) for Unity to stay private or be acquired. Acquisition could threaten the cross-platform appeal and perpetual private state would not deliver a return to investors.
And I don't think there is an inherent threat to either the freemium model or a perversion of the roadmap. There seems to be real competition between game engines and the value the free offering provides is one of the easiest entry points to game development. This delivers a huge number of potential developers, which is the foundation that sustains the paying developers above it.
Somebody there told me once that their mission was to 'have half the world's creative content created in Unity', meaning not only video games, but films and presumably traditional CAD markets such as architecture and product design. If this is true, I think the real threat to developers irrespective of IPO is one of focus. Can Unity evolve the product for their core market, or will they become too horizontally committed and lose focus?
This is a place where the market could 'correct' a land grab strategy by driving the company to focus on the core business.
I wish they were in a position to actually open up the core runtime source code so that it can be ported and maintained independently in the future. The tools - the commercially important part of the engine - can stay closed for all I care. I wonder if we would see such a move with shareholders crying for quarterly results.
Unity3D is an implementation detail for games that would be closed source anyways.
The games that are the biggest part of mainstream culture today like Fortnite, GTA, CoD, AAA games in general are not open source.
If a creator is interested in open source they won’t use Unity, but since open source is very far from the “default” for games there’s no difference between a game written in Unity and a game written in some in-house engine.
Not one culture defining game interested in being open source has come out on Unity3d because you don’t start an open source project by building on a closed source engine...
And as an aside, Unity3D is not that opaque either, increasingly large parts of it are being opened up and the Unity executable setup is not designed to be particularly opaque to someone trying to access a specific game's assets.
On the technical side, most game code is present in the final distributable as abstract MSIL, running inside a VM. So you wouldn't need the game source code to port a game in 99% of the cases.
Big budget titles use engines for which they have source code access. So studios can just go and update thesw titles whem they want and that is what they are doing. Small studios and indies don't have that luxury. They use Unity because it isncheap to get locked into that plarform and get the game out. If Unity ever goes under, there is simply no engine code that they can maintain. No indie can afford a Unity source license - it's multiple of their entire budget. They would have to recreate their games almost from scratch on a different engine if they ever want to re-release them. And the results will always be subtly different from the original. This is a fate that awaits about half of the games of the Steam catalog.
I've just started work on a new game using their new ECS system. It's not ready for anyone who's not either a very seasoned programmer or very patient, but so far I like it much better than the standard MonoBehaviour workflow.
Would be interesting if both go IPO around the same time and confuse the heck out of everyone:
- "Did you hear Unity went IPO?"
- "Unity? the Technologies or the Biotechnology?"
