this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Really though, what were they thinking. Why would anyone risk staying with unity after all their bad decisions, especially when they clearly have no intention to stop being dumb.
I went to a game dev meetup in Seoul last year. Everyone was using Unity.
I went again last month. Half the people were using Godot.
For a bit more context, I used to work in the gaming industry. We used Unity because it was great for making money - drop in ads and tracking, you're good to go. The Godot ecosystem isn't as mature for that yet. However, even we were considering switching to Godot. It wasn't worth switching for a number of reasons (besides the above mentioned ones, Godot is also "laggier" and we have some heavier games), but had we started shop yesterday, it's safe to say we would have used Godot too.
Unity just laid off 25% of their workforce. That is not a small number. Their days are numbered.
Small correction they haven't fired 25% of us yet, it is a work in progress
Good luck. It's a stressful time. I hope you get yourself sorted in whatever you plan to do.
Yep, I started my own game dev journey a year ago after a decade in the tech industry.
My gamer friends: Use Unity Bro its so easy to learn!
Hrm but uh what about cost structure, licensing, all that kind of stuff?
Doesnt matter bro, you can just port it all if it doesnt work!
Well uh, porting is actually a lot of work and burnout is a serious concern so wouldnt it make more sense to-
Youre making this too complicated, what you need to do first is-
...
And that conversation was obviously useless.
Anyway yeah, I picked Godot after doing, you know actual research on all the benefits and limitations of various engines.
See, Godot, being open source, and myself, not having a huge amount of money to throw at this, and also not just knowing any reasonable or reliable people that could contribute... I can afford to work with Godot at a comfortable pace and not be driven insane by budgetary concerns and a timetable, and Godot is likely to only improve, and I can improve with it, expand the scope or add new features as they become better supported by engine updates or freely usable nifty tools and techniques proliferate.
Also at this point I am planning on really only supporting linux users, as I am again looking to do this as a hobbyist that isnt really concerned about making a ton of money, and also at this point I just literally despise every technically incompetent person non FOSS user I have ever known, so Godot suits that well.
Oh and linux gaming marketshare is growing rather rapidly.
Those are strong words for people that just didn't dedicate 90% of their lives to tech like we did. Some people actually do have other interests you know.
Is it okay to hate you simply for not knowing what a flyback diode, colpitts oscillator, phase-locked loop, or regenerative receiver is? That's my hobby. And there are not as many of us as there are software devs. There are not many here who I can discuss electronics engineering with. But I don't despise people because of that.
You gotta realize, WE are the weirdos, not them. A very high interest and obsession over tech is not an average human quality.
You conveniently left out the qualifier of my statement.
That I have ever known.
Probably unlike the field of electrical engineering, every /single/ person I have known in my life has relied on me to provide free expertise in software related issues of all possible kinds, and also simultaneously mocked my expertise and ability any time I suggest they do something or use something that will actually work, but they do not think it will because -insert utterly nonsensical concern about issue they do not even know how to use basic vocabulary to describe-.
This is apparently a rather unique phenomenon that happens to those who are programmers and know software.
Software and programming is in every modern computerized device, but an astounding amount of people who use such devices both realize they are not experts and will seek the help of a software expert for assistance, but will also feel as if they are better able to solve a problem when -literally any random thing they do not like for any random reason is different in any other way-.
If you attempt to explain anything to these people at this point it does not matter if you are correct, they will be angry and abuse you quite often.
I do not hate the tech illiterate people I have known because they are ignorant.
I hate them because they are abusive.
Finally, when it comes to the kind of game I want to make?
I want to make something I would enjoy playing.
And I have found that I enjoy games that offer a mix of skill based challenge in the sense of being able to quickly execute exact commands to the controller rapidly and with precision, but also with a larger sense of strategy, and also with multiple possible ways to solve a problem, some that are obvious, and some that are non obvious and encourage thinking outside the box.
And I have also found that every technically incompetent person I have known is utterly incapable of enjoying this kind of gameplay.
And that is fine. As I said, I want to make a game for myself and people with similar game preferences, and mental capacities.
I have been surrounded by abusive morons my whole life and I have no interest in making a game that appeals to such people.
This is the key thing IMO. If they ever do anything like try to make it a paid framework with huge fees, or just move in a direction the community disagrees with, the existing open source code remains open source and someone can just fork it.
Ding ding ding, winner winner chicken dinner.
Sure if you are a bigger entity and have more money to throw around, there are other engines that'll probably be a much better fit.
If youre a broke ass indie dev, I am not really seeing a better choice than Godot right now, as youre not gonna be able to afford a more expensive engine without /usually/ pulling some kind of asset flip scam type thing.
Sure there are some very good more niche 2D only development engines, but even with a lot of them youve still got some kind of liscensing to deal with.
That basically leaves Unity and ... OGRE, as far as I am aware for possibly good choices for a 3D game.
Unity is currently self destructing, and OGRE, at least as far as I have tried, is pretty hard to get a native dev environment working on linux. Maybe I missed something or got confused, but I kept running into error after error trying to set up its more advanced features, which seem to require windows specific dependencies.
I guess you could run it in a VM but that seems basically insane, and even if I was to set up a dedicated Windows machine just to develop on OGRE, it is far more clumsy to work with than Godot.
I've told this story countless times, but I think it's the perfect example of why I'll always choose Godot given the chance.
Do you know when you're playing a single-player game and you have to switch controllers and now your new controller doesn't work? Or when the menu can only be navigated by Player 1? Well that happens because the game is only looking at input for the first controller. Story time, a few years back I was playing around with making a single-player game, I tried Unity and Godot, both suffered from this, you had to duplicate the input for any controller you wanted to make sure worked for all of them. So I took a look at Godot's code, and in a couple of hours I had an "all controllers" option in the combo box to select which control to get input. I opened a PR, maintainers thought it was a neat feature, and now everyone can use this, and afaik Unity still suffers from this and there are dozens of assets on the store that try to fix it in different ways.
That is a neat story, thanks for sharing!
Best I've got doesn't have to do with Godot, but I think its neat.
The year is 2003 or 4, and I am beta testing the 0.5 release of Project Reality, which later more or less evolved into Squad.
I know nothing about coding at this point being still in middle school.
What I do possess is apparently pattern recognition.
We are in a last minute waaay overextended beta testing session trying to iron out a mystifying bug:
The whole new feature of implementing squad specific kit bags that are only obtainable at certain in game locations is working.
But... sometimes it is not. At all. Sometimes you can grab an unlimited number of kits without restriction, sometimes you cant and have to follow the newly coded rules that limit kits by being in a squad, and having a total pool of requestable kits per squad and per your whole team.
We get in vehicles, we get out of vehicles.
We go to different parts of the map.
We die then respawn via suiciding.
We die then respawn via being shot, killed as infantry with different weapons, killed inside different vehicles.
We join and leave amd create and disband squads.
We die on the water, we die on the land.
We die on islands, we die on beaches.
We shall never surrender!
Er, well the goof off testers wont, the devs are getting frustrated.
Absolutely none of this has any discernable effect on the problem.
After what must have been about 3 hours... we are basically just fucking about as testers as the actual devs including the one who actually coded the new system is in despair, we are gonna have to push back the massively advertised release date of about 8 hours from now.
Fucking about a bit and watching random zany attempts at most impressive suicides with those who we are at this point joking are just the chosen ones able to spawn unlimited specialist kits with c4 and anti tank weapons...
Something clicks.
I hold down the tab button to bring up the scoreboard with player names.
I start telling a few of the testers who have not already left to try spawning kits at various locations.
Everyone goes sure man why not.
After doing this with myself and 5 other people... I have a theory.
Everyone who has non alphanumeric characters in their name is able to break the kit limitation rules, everyone else is bound by them.
The lead dev is skeptical, but checks the code again anyway.
About a minute later he screams over the mic on teamspeak.
About 10 minutes later, he has fixed what was probably a really simple but easily overlooked bug in how early python parses string values and passes them to other functions or data types.
The server is back up, everything works correctly now, and Project Reality 0.5 is released only a few hours behind schedule, instead of the next week or two when the team would be able to organize another large scale testing bout.
Lol and thats the story of how i saved a mod release date wooo!
It's 25% of their swelled up post COVID workforce it's not that bad.
x * 1.25 = 1.25x
1.25x - (1.25x * 0.25) = 0.9375x
(I know you're memeing, but growing 25% then cutting 25% is actually a significant net-cut)
You tell those people who left good jobs and now need this to put food on their table and pay the bills. You have the empathy of a CEO.
They're mostly banking on the cost of change being higher than the inconvenience of staying.
They probably are, but it's not really about cost, it's about fear. I fear that while it costs $x to switch to Unreal Enigne now, it'll cost $x+10 after a few weeks when they do their next decision, and $x+20 a month or so after that.
Like buying a reverse lottery ticket. If you're unlucky, you suddenly have to pay a big amount somewhere in the future.
That description really fits all kinds of technical debt.
Agreed.
Except, you don't win a negative lottery prize so much as you take on someone's loanshark debt and now have to service it at insane interest rates.
Also I think there’s a vast majority of crap in app purchase games that will happily pay money to unity as they run their gacha systems. Real, honest developers care about stuff like this, but international game farms (the kind that always seem to be sponsoring YouTubers and streamers) are just running calculations on what it will cost them to keep using Unity.
And now that unity has backed down on pricing those devs are still raking in money, so they, as potentially unity’s biggest customers, and unity themselves, don’t care what more indie devs think as they push forward higher growth targets.
ah the mainframe strategy
The microsoft strategy.
Which signals to investors that there is little to no expected growth. If you aren't attracting new customers to grow your user base, then you only have the option to milk your existing customers to increase revenue.
That may work short term, but long term it signals a death knell for the company, since as the old customers retire or the studios close down, the new crop of game developers would have been trained on or adopted a different engine so aren't going to switch to Unity. Eventually they just run out of customers.
Especially in a competitive market where compelling alternatives exist.
Especially in tech.
And especially in software.
Yep, but the best part is because their core demographic is moronic, know-nothing-about-how-any-technology actually works, start-up indie game devs with basically only a dream and prayers combined with 'i have played some video games, it cant be /that hard/ to make one!' kinds of people...
...you can expect discussion around everything going on with Unity to be filled with irrelevant and infuriating opinions/beliefs/concerns that will eat up most discussions in most communities while also mocking and downplaying actually correct and actually relevant things.
It never fails to amaze and infuriate me how confidently completely wrong nearly all video game players are about literally everything about /creating/ video games.
Quick! Let's talk about supply-chain risks in modern tooling with app coding on enterprise platforms and the jeering techbros who downplay the risks as some personal attack to their tribe.
And any talk about moron-pushed software coding that seems to have survived in spite of itself, its techbro wunderkinder coders, best practice, and aggressively-spun critical concern from experienced experts, needs to include a concern about the "we tell ourselves to ignore its construction and lie about its ease of use and speed" vomit called systemd.
I worry that game coding is by no means the outlier here. And that we are at the edge of a Clue Precipice, about to take a momentous step.
Whew, wont lie, I am getting tired and I had to reread that a few times till it clicked.
SystemD... and Linux gaming.
I am far from an expert on systemd and its alternatives, but so far all what I at least think I know is:
SystemD is not as efficient as other paradigms could be,
It could potentially be a massive security vulnerability, or maybe not, or maybe so, or no one seems to agree on this and then everyone starts yelling,
I am reasonably confident that at least currently there are not any existing alternatives to SystemD that allow one to play much less develop basically somewhere between any to most games that involve 3d graphics.
Again, I could be completely wrong about all of this, absolutely beyond my experience and skill set to comment much more than:
A systemd alternative that would allow for modern kinds of multiplayer 3d online games would be really neat, but it seems like it would take a massive amount of effort that is at least nearly certainly beyond my ability to contribute to in any meaningful way.
That's all that matters. The next quarter's growth is more important than the year-end P/L sheets.
I moonlight as a small app developer. This is absolutely correct. I have a handful of legacy apps which uses Unity, and makes so little that moving them would cost more.
That said, if/when I do another project, it won't be in Unity.
edit: The following is off topic, but I'll.leave it as a testament to my gray-beardedness. In my defense: Unity isn't Unity anymore. Don't get old.
I've been using Linux for 30 years now, and for a while I was an advocate for Ubuntu and Canonical (among others, I'm pan-distributive). Then things changed: GNOME 3, Wayland, Unity, something-sonething, Snaps... All too much.
As an advocate, I'm apt not to emerge with favorites, or to yuck others' yums. Neverthekess, Canonical is a press beyond the pale, many days.
In the end, I don't recommend Canonical distros. LMDE is solid, as are most of the *bian and redhat downstreams. I don't recommend the others because I don't know them, but more importantly I couldn't help a friend un-bodge a bad installer on them (likewise for "BSD or Darwin).
But really, no love for Canonical. They went to some Dark Side, and I'll have a hard time forgiving them for it.
I also thought of Unity the DE before reading the article
I understand the confusion. This doesn't belong to a Linux community. I mean, I see the relation with FOSS but I'm sure there are FOSS communities out there. The article doesn't even mentions Linux, just Windows and Android.
You do realize this is about the Unity game engine, right?
I do now. See edits upthread.
This is about the Unity game engine, not the unrelated Unity desktop shell from Canonical.
Well said nevertheless. Both suck.
Yes understood. See edts up thread
With ibm working hard to enshittify redhat even faster than newredhat themselves, we should consider avoiding them as a first-class porting and work target.
Look at OpenEL as a successor to the RH and an upstream for the other ELs once RH starts eating from that tasty "free stuff they can sell" trough. Having made bank on TheForeMan without actually making an effort to support it, they have a model they can use for everything.