Unity is trying to get rid of indie developers using the Unity Engine, here is what’s happening and my thought on the whole situation. I really can not believe that this is an actual thing which is happening, but on the other hand also not surprised that Unity pulls a stunt like this. I’m sorry for my frequent laughing in this video, but this whole situation sounds so dumb that I still have trouble believing that this is actually true.

What did Unity do?

For the people who are not up to date on what’s happening in Unity land, well take a look at these pricing changes. basically the main point of Anger from the Unity Community is that developers will be charged for installs of their game. Honestly I’m kind of glad that I’m a Godot developer so I don’t have to deal with all those financial fees.

One of the main reasons why I want for Godot was because of it’s pricing which doesn’t exist and the fact that I can have the code of any version in case I need to make specific changes for my project to the source code.

But I do actually have a little bit of a history with Unity, because a couple of years ago I was mainly using Unity to develop my games and software. I’ve always preferred using Game engines for making software because the UI tools are soooo much better compared to other solutions out there. ^^”

The fee

Something I didn’t mention in the video was if this change is actually that bad. The way they introduced it and started changing things for previous versions is not acceptable. But if they were to say that this would be for future versions of Unity … well I think that would be better. Financially better for Unity which could fund them more to improve the editor so they can stay competitive against Unreal engine.

Competition

I personally think that Unity and Unreal engine are the biggest players. Of course Godot is growing and there is also Bevy and some other open source game engines. But there is no doubt that these are the 2 biggest players. Now imagine Unity disappearing … Means that Unreal engine will get a monopoly. As much as you’d like to trust companies, they are still out for money so they would increase their income as well as there wouldn’t be any competition.

Especially in the market of game engines, this would be quite bad as it isn’t easy to build a top-notch game engine in a short span of time, so new competition isn’t likely to come anytime soon. Yes Godot and some other engines are free, but we should be realistic. Yes they can do what we want most of the time, but there is no denying the technology and advancements of the Unreal engine which are far ahead of Godot (for now :p ).

Indie devs

Now this will mainly hit indie devs. If they make a game and some people dislike them, people can decide to just install and uninstall their game a couple of times to financially hit them. Unity says that this won’t be possible, but their system isn’t exactly open for people to see so how can game developers trust them after they already broke our trust?

My prediction

They will most likely revert these changes because of all the backlash. But we should be ready as they will most likely still introduce these changes afterwards again but hopefully more in a game dev friendly way.

Let’s see what they will do, I don’t really think this will cause too many problems from them in the long run. Big companies tend to bounce back up after releasing new shiny things anyway. Look at Samsung with their exploding phones by example. Look at Premiere pro with the amount of crashing their editor does. Look at Cyberpunk with how their launch was, people still play it to this day, maybe not as many as it could have been but still.

Moving to Godot?

Because of this situation there was a very large increase in both Godot users and Unreal engine users. Not certain if this will have a big impact on Unity in the long run though as the Unity game engine still has a very active community, a plentiful asset store, and lots of custom tools which were made for it. Lots of those tools are paid, that together with skill doesn’t easily transfer as money and/or time will be required.

So will many people switch to Godot in the long run? Probably, will many people give up and return to Unity and accept that the future is unstable? Of course!

Future edit (2 months later)

They have since changed their stuff. Still, the fact that they attempted this and made the changes that they did really hit the gamedev community in a big way and I honestly don’t think that many people will be using Unity anymore without a fear of future events. They will still do the pricing changes but only from future versions.