I respect creators. I am not pirating any games. The games in my Steam account set me back thousands of dollars.
If you think that I am only tying to make copying games easier, you are dead wrong. In another post I was proposing a source escrow scheme for the runtime. This doesn't square with a desire to pirate anything.
I am trying to find a reasonable stance here:
- The true stength of any major game engine offering today is the integrated toolset, not the runtime. The Unity Editor is an amazing piece of software in that regard. I am explicitly not calling for that to be opened up because (a) its job is done once you hit the export button, (b) it is very extensible through scripting and (c) it is how Unity as a company earns money.
- I only called for the runtime to be be made available for future maintainance. That in itself won't make existimg Unity games magically available on future platforms. There are multiple reasons for that. The most obvious one is that games may contain contain other native code components. They would need to be updated or replaced by someone with access to the game source code. Im the vast majority of cases, I do not expect such a task to be particularly hard or time consuming.
- Essentially, I want a world where games are no longer transient experiences. This is why I am singling out Unity because it has the potential to be either the one big enabler of that or the largest roadblock. The way the engine architecture enforces most game code to be platform independent could give games a much longer life than ever before. Yet the risk that the engine is eventually fading away without a meams to keep it updated could rob the platform of that very greatness.
- Windows is extremely complex and emulating it is hard. Wine is only a thing because it "only" needs to act as a system call translator. No hardware emulation is required. And getting that right has taken decades of work and it is still shakey. I don't see this as a viable way forward.
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