https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv24RPSB0Ps&t=605s
I know, another Unity thread, but it's pretty significant news especially compared to the crap titles we've seen releasing left and right these days. There's been a huge developer backlash already and it seems that the trust is broken with a lot of large indie devs who have been lucky enough to make money of their games.
GamesFromScratch did some good coverage on this and tracked a bunch of developer responses and it seems the consensus is clear, leave Unity and don't come back. Loads of people have been making this point in dev circles that even if they do walk back this stupidity the trust is gone with the company because it shows that this has been on their mind this whole time and there's no reason they can't sneak it in some way when the heat has died down.
I'm somebody who switched from Unity to Godot as people here will know and there are so many things wrong with Unity beyond this but I think this will finally be what kills this company.
. They were dumb enough to put an ex-EA executive in charge who was allegedly responsible for the initial push for microtransactions in EA titles
. Unity has been a broken piece of mess for years with frequently deprecated code and especially quite broken multiplayer support, you often had to rely on third party plugins to even get things to work ( I know I went through the pain of learning this the hard way ) it was only until recently they've got multiplayer properly supported and working again
. To get an idea of how broken Unity is, even with the most basic base version and no extra plugins of the engine you would frequently get errors in the debugger while you were using the engine and it didn't seem like things were going to be fixed any time soon
. This was a bit of a minor one for me but even though the UI layout was fine, it also looked pretty ugly especially compared to modern engines, even the buttons were rather meh looking and everything is as grey as fuck
. They got rid of their in-house software for writing the actual code, instead opting for microsofts third party IDE, there's nothing wrong with this software by itself however in typical Microsoft fashion they try to make you sign up to their bullshit in order to get rid of pop ups and it was a clearly very deliberate choice on Unity's part to get rid of their completely offline software for writing code. Yes, you can technically hook Unity up to an IDE but this is me looking at the software as somebody who would just download the engine and work with what has been given
. The unity-ironsource merger, for those who won't know this particular bit of background, there's a company called Ironsource that has been involved with Unity fairly recently and everyone's alarm bells got set off when this company started to think they could do engine development. The reason being is they're a company that's allegedly notorious for putting telemetry in all their software and generally spying on people
. A Ukrainian activist somehow managed to hack Unity and Discord awhile back by exploiting a third party github tool for their auto-updating, apparently it targeted Russian IPs and what they did was wipe the drive through the auto-update which meant of course even if you were just somebody using a Russian server for your VPN you could be targeted and users who weren't on Russian IPs got a text file dumped on their desktop
Never heard of this? Then their PR team did their job, you weren't supposed to know, they swept it under the rug and the only reason I found out about it properly was because of alt-tech and I had to look into the forums and find an obscure official thread on the topic where a lot of the community was calling them out on it.
A very lengthy thread I know, but I thought this would give you guys plenty of background information on why Unity is bad beyond the meme shitposting. Unity's transgressions go way beyond this particular news story everyone is talking about. Which is why frankly anybody who tries to praise Unity as a great game engine and shits on other alternatives isn't very knowledgeable.
This is why I fanboi so hard for Godot, you've been doing the same sort of maths I have on steam itself and it's also why I'm against steam, there's so many costs even associated with putting yourself out there as an indie title then to make things worse they're trying to target your active installs as well.
My upload plan is to use Godot for development so I owe nobody money and it's a very capable engine so you can do what you want to do with your game and more and then Itch and GameJolt if necessary but Itch will probably be my main shill space. If worse comes to worse and the left tries to politically cancel me hopefully by then I'll be important enough to self-host to a degree and I'd probably use GabPay to get around any restrictions. Less to worry about when it comes to fees per sale that way too so that means lower prices for my customers.
Yeah, I think I should pivot to Godot, mostly used Unity because I paid for a Humble Bundle course a few years ago and learned from that. But I think I can handle GDScript especially since its close to Python based on the last 30ish minutes of learning it. Static typing for variables but can inference within dictionary variables... wtf? (not a big deal but it's like "You better be explicit as I cannot inference an int from a string but I totally could if its in a container!" made me chuckle)
Open source, free, I'm not working on anything atm, perfect time to pivot.
Feel free to ask me any questions about GDScript if you have any, I would recommend that over C# potentially just because it's built into the engine and you don't need visual studio or anything. You're right in that it works very similar to python, honestly I think once you try it you'll probably enjoy it and wonder how you put up with Unity because that's how I felt once I switched. Godot 4 especially is a way more flexible engine than people appreciate.