As a fellow college professor, I gave a very similar rant to my students today. I appreciate your thoughts on the matter. I'm still baffled by this move.
It's a money grab, and not just in the obvious way. Upper Echelon just published on their channel a bit of a behind the scenes look at the executive shenanigans.
He made interesting points but UE tends to be a bit conspiratorial. Tanking Unity stock so that Apple needs to take over would get Unity management behind bars pretty quickly.
@@michaelgwagner What's annoying is that AppLovin made a generous unsolicited offer awhile back, which would have let these upper management types get their quick payout, and Unity get put in better hands... and here we are...
@@michaelgwagner I don't think the Unity execs are done milking it yet. But I do believe they're not interested in growing the core business of the company. IMO, they are taking big compensation, driving up debt, and aiming to sell. It's the classic corporate raider formula.
It reminds me of the Oracle JDK pricing changes for Java 8 that Oracle announced in 2019. I was working at an investment bank at the time, and basically, overnight we were treating everything Oracle-related as cancerous tumors: Cut it out where you can. If it's too rooted, push that system waaay up the "to-be-replaced" queue... And since the most valuable thing in any business is predictability, the kind of behavior Unity is displaying now makes them a liability, and no one will touch it with a 10-foot pole.
Yeah. Even if they go back on everything, nobody will trust them again. Predictability is king. Who knows if they would try something else next, and potentially put everything based on it at risk.
The changes will scare away new devs who all dream to hit it big, because of fears unity will rob them when they do succeed,. Or even drive away existing developers when deciding what engine to use for next game. So... fewer new games, less chance of next big hit made with Unity, no subscription, no ad revenue and no runtime fees either. Unity will wither and die. And that affect education because it will decrease demand for unity courses.
I think you need to have predictability. New developers need to be able to understand clearly what they are getting into. Their business model needs stability.
@@michaelgwagneryep, and that's exactly the problem with that for both developers AND Unity. Unity became THE engine for indie and new developers because it was so accessible AND their business model was reliable. It was perfect. Disrupting that just disrupts its position and use as the go-to game engine for indie devs, beginners, and the thousands of small games being developed with it.
Great video, so many people aren’t discussing the fact that, under the new terms, Unity Personal will require network connection. This change rolls out this coming NOVEMBER (not even before the end of this semester cycle). I can understand that Unity wanting a revenue cut, but do they really need to spy on solo/small/student dev teams? I feel like the discussion of the new fee structure is overshadowing Unity Personal network requirement changes.
By the way, Sim City 2013 was such a fiasco because of his shenanagans, they fired him right before it's release, and that was the last version of the Sim City franchise. The guy destroyed many games and game studios, so one wonders why Unity hired him?
Thanks for voicing your opinion from an educational perspective, many people are minimizing or completely failing to understand the repercussions, this is the same company that used to pride itself on "democratizing" game development.
I'm one of those that thinks that it should have been taught in a more agnostic way from the get go. Of course, hindsight and all that, but part of the reasons that companies are in a position to be able to this, because they have market share is precisely because that got potential customers when they were young. I remember when I had to switch not only programs, but OSs due to changes that came in roughly a decade ago. After that, I always make sure that if I have to switch again (and it will be have to, not because I want to), I'm better prepared for it.
It’s a bit of a struggle tbh. Because the other side of the coin us that employers expect that our students are getting classes that teach exactly the software they need.
@@michaelgwagner If students get a lower level approach, they should be able to apply that to the more high level approaches of game engines. It's about not being bound to any one way of doing something.
@WildWestDesigns Our students are required to go on interships. A total of 18 month during their undergrad program. If they don’t have experience with an industry standard game engine, they have very little chance getting a good internship.
Unity will also be an "always online" (actually it's you have to be internet connected every 3 days but still) service now, a fact many missed; just that fact alone has removed my interest.
Very interesting point! If thst is true, we might have a another problem as I don’t think we are allowed to use such software. They are rolling out new features for education. I hope they know what they are doing and are at least providing tools that are in compliance with higher ed requirements.
Exceptionally said. To me, unity's reassurances that this new fee will only affect successful devs, sounds more like "don't worry about the fee as the odds indicate you will not find sucess". I know they don't mean to sound crass, but as a long time user who hasn't released a "hit game", this does not inspire hope 😅
Godot is about where Unity was a decade ago, but it is fully open source. IMO, this is the perfect solution for education. Also, Godot can be smoothly used with GIMP and Blender, and on Linux.
Stride is a far less steep learning curve and is also open source and written in c# natively... its cross platform like unity free and its api and workflow is very similar to unity... godot is not what I'd reccomend as a unity game dev with over 13 years experience its what I myself am migrating to
@michaelpalmer2143 My comparison was of course simplified. Some think Godot is better than Unity for 2D, for instance. I was thinking of general features. For instance, their 3D animation appears to be where Unity was when Mecanim launched. Anyway, I tend to agree that Godot seems better composed / more polished, probably because of fewer hands involved in generating it.
I wouldn't say that. Godot had the luxury to learn from the past mistakes of unity and has some better features in the 2D space. Something unity never delivered on. Also Godot has assets in its asset store. Very useful stuff. I'm not sure about 3D. Unreal might be good for that.
@@orangelimesky Yeah, it seems that people are dividing in their thought, thinking Unreal for 3D and maybe Godot for 2D. I think it would be great if added interest could boost Godot on 3D, but we'll just have to see.
This was such a strange move by Unity. In the last few years I was getting the feeling that Unity was starting to lose their monopolistic hold on indies, with Godot shooting up in popularity, several new game engines starting to take the limelight and Unreal engine making their tools easier for indies. (I suspect that's the reason why you were thinking of creating those engine agnostic courses.) Unity though, instead of going back to the basics of providing (and receiving) value from the indies that had given them their giant market share, they've gone and done something completely different and alienated their customers in a seemingly desperate attempt to make Unity profitable. Such a strange move by Unity
Unity also alienated its key engineers. Who weren't lured away by some other company, they just quit and retired very recently. Their star hire Acton (DOTS), Aras P and Rej, some of their founding architects.
At my college we are about to use a new Unity project for all of our Immersive room learning via VR headsets but also runs on desktop PCs for remote learning and to join other campus Immersive Rooms. Just in our group alone that would be several-hundred education licences and pretty sure it extends to many campuses across the UK as I assume it's government-led funding to build all these VR rooms across the country. Could be interesting as that project is very early in its development with Unity.
Interesting. We did a similar thing with Unreal. But it is true that Unity is particularly dominant in the VR space. And these developers are apparently hardest hit by the new business model.
@@michaelgwagner We're using ArborXR to manage headsets and then deploy to each headset/pc something called Class VR to each headset which is the Unity bit.
Well said Michael! We have been making a similar series of curricular changes to a software agnostic/open source approach for our game dev program. As you said, most software developers do not see the impact of students not learning their software until 5 years after their poor decisions are made. By that time there has been a complete change of leadership at the corporation and they don't understand why no one is using their software.
I'm glad that I dropped Unity years ago. The pricing structure even at that time was too much for my peanut brain to handle! You shouldn't need flowcharts and diagrams to figure out how much something costs!
Thanks for a fresh point of view. Its sad times for Unity developers, but at least I got to discover your channel, just because of this drama. Subscribed :)
I feel for the many students that have invested years of study time into Unity; many majoring in expensive Unity-centric game dev courses. This will set countless young developers back financially, emotionally and event psychologically. I've spoken to such students over the past few days, with many confiding that they are close to graduating and were planning to find game dev specific jobs, and now fear demand for this skill will evaporate. And that fear will be realised. Dark times for many developers. May a new culture emerge from this, where as a community we create the open source tools we need to free ourselves of corporate exploitation.
Yes, that is absolutely correct. This is what annoys me personally. We have a responsibility to make sure that our students are getting the most applicable skill set. The last thing I need is a company who upends their market for no apparent reason and without doing any due diligence on unintended consequences!
Great video touching some very relevant new points and that Asmongold clip at the end was the cherry on top. I did take a Game Design class in college where I got to learn Unity more in depth. The teachers, however, gave us complete freedom to choose the framework. Some of us turned to Unity, others to Godot and some even used vanilla Javascript. In my opinion the class went smoothly and the framework freedom allowed teachers to focus on the design process, rather than the ins and outs of a particular tool, which would sometimes happen in other subjects.
Correct. In an entire program consisting of dozens of different classes that need to work with one another, things get a lot more complicated. But it can be done.
Great video, thank you for sharing your thoughts! When I found your channel, it was to look at your videos pertaining to Wwise, which have been great to watch, but I had a question: Around the time this Unity drama started, I received an email from Audio Kinetic that they would be changing the pricing of their certifications, leading me to believe the certification courses may be getting revamped? Do you think if changes are made, they will change the game engine they demonstrate Wwise capabilities with?
Thanks! I doubt it. The Wwise learning material is really good and for the most part the fact that you use Unity isn’t all that important. Rewriting everything for Unreal seems impractical imho.
I don't think the Engine runtime will "call home". I read somewhere that they said that they "aggregated data from various sources", probably meaning App Store downloads.
This same concern about privacy is also one unintended consequence for people who play Unity games. I think students and devolopers need to be aware that as soon as players see the Unity logo, they may not want to install or play the game because of privacy fears.
i remember 5 years back when i saw unity offering a free version but they force the logo in your games , sort of saying "give me your money or else" since then i know its a sneaky hunting behavior and it wont stop there, i switched to unreal engine and i'm in peace since then .
RE: Unity blackbox algorithm, estimating installs based on unknown data points. ICYMI: Facebook settled with advertisers a lawsuit over inflated video view numbers - $40 Million. A larger publisher might take on Unity to dispute installation numbers. But indies? Thus, long term, as you've said, the industry will shift to an alternative product that is less feudalistic in its business model.
Very insightful and nice to give students choice. I hate that when I went to school they would shove Windows down your throat for some schools. My last school didn’t thankfully.
A lot of Unity's appeal was the sheer number of tutorials and other such information online. Given current events, I can see a lot of that drying up. Eventually, the old tutorials will apply less and less to newer versions of the engine, and less people will be making new ones. This will essentially remove one of Unity's main advantages over other engines.
Guess we're going to see a lot more Godot and Unreal projects. When you literally can't afford to publish a demo, your hands are seriously tied as a new studio.
07:58 This is incorrect. Unity can sell or rent their engine. But they don't sell the game or success, which is the blood and sweat of the developer. They can ask a price for their own engine, not for other's success.
If we are hurt by make a interaction with something, normaly we do not make this interaction again. Logic of natural survival. Same for all the other interactions of our life. If is a hurt possibility, we don't make again. RIP Unity. Your zomby corpse will survive, but you will be this for the rest of your existence. And I realy apreciate your vídeo. Thanks.
One thing I don't hear anyone talking about is that maybe it is counting as a mater of checking for updates to the Unity Engine, which most software does already through App stores, Platform software updates, etc. I am not saying this is the case, but could it be as simple as this?
@@michaelgwagner Agreed. I think my only point was that it might not be as privacy intrusive as many are making out. But that aside, the whole way this was rolled out and lack of any clarity screams poor upper-level understanding, direction and overall management.
some unity employee posted that they are still researching how to implement that install tracking and the development will probably last in to 2024. so after the changes takes effekt. not sure how trustworthy that source is though. @@michaelgwagner
I wish there was more support for open-source in education. Much of the world's academia missed out on Blender. I have the feeling it's going to be the same situation with game-engines, whether it's Godot that rises above the commercial engines or something else.
Switch to open source, we are. Godot for the game engine, MySQL for the DB, Mirror for the network code. All open source. Gimp instead of Photoshop. Blender instead of Maya/3DSMax. Entire stack open source
MySQL is owned by Oracle and have many problems, including licensing. That is also the reason why MariaDB, fork of MySQL, exists PostgreSQL, on the other hand, is truly open-source, much more powerful & feature-rich, and allows you practically everything with it's license In my experience, all medium/large-sized companies switched from Oracle to PostgreSQL (including the bank where I'm working), last time I heard about MySQL was in context of some student's PHP project
@@ea_naseer "Owned" but only about as much as you can own a GPL software. You can just switch to a fork MariaDB or some other if the governance of the project isn't to your liking. Being open source avoids a degree of vendor lock-in. Apropos Photoshop, Krita may be worth a look, that's the pixel image editor of the KDE project that has evolved more heavily towards painting and vector.
I find this a very insightful video. Long term strategies have become unpopular in the Anglo-Saxon way of doing business and the educational system is suffering for it. Games can also be made engine agnostic by moving the business logic of the game into a separate C# project using only Plain Old Class Object (POCO's).The resulting DLL can be used in Unity, Godot and even Unreal with the UnrealCLR. It's technically more difficult then building for one engine specific, but there might be some technically gifted students in gamedev classes that could handle it. The rules of a game, like for instance chess, should not have to be rewritten just because the game uses a different engine.
Part of the problem is we have normalized the software as a service mindset, rather than software as a product. What Unity is doing now is Software as a Service + revenue share based on install count. We need to go back to software being a product, you buy and if the developer wants you to pay more, they need to offer up something of value.
I would argue that this is nit a clean SAAS model. The runtime is provided to the customer of a developer and bit the developer. It is not a service the developer receives.
Great video, but I disagree that Unity can do whatever they want with the pricing model and with the focus almost entirely on privacy. Apart from the reasons that you mentioned, the pricing model itself is horrible. Also, I apologize for my English in advance, it's not my native language. Firstly, initially they directly said that every installation will count. And with WebGL games, every initialization (basically every pressing of F5 without cache) is counted as installation. Now they backpedaled it, but only after immense backlash. And installations on different devices from one user are still charged multiple times. But even with an updated model, there are a lot of issues apart from various loopholes for exploitation and the lack of transparency. This is basically a death sentence for f2p/freemium games. For any game where install count is substantially higher than revenue. And the fee is based on REVENUE, not PROFIT. So the platform (App Store/Google Play/Steam etc.) is taking 30% cut, then publisher is taking 50-70% cut… and from 200k$ revenue you have 70k-42k$ remaining. Even before any taxes/salary etc. And then Unity will charge you for your installations. A lot of devs pointed out that this fee will charge them more than they earned in their entire life, let alone from one game. So, this change will actively punish successful indie devs, who is successful enough to pass the threshold, but don't have as much money as big over monetized companies to pay this fee. Also, for mobile games. People are regularly buying new phones (new iPhone every year etc.) and transferring data and app (and games) from the old ones. And the new phone is a new device. So, a new charge for devs. So, every Apple/Samsung/Xiaomi release will be another death sentence for f2p Unity games Imagine the company that manufactured a hammer charging you every time somebody sits on a chair that you built with that hammer (which you bought). You will go bankrupt if you won't introduce mandatory charges for sitting on that chair. And this is exactly what Unity wants, but worse, since you are also paying their subscription. Remember, the current CEO of Unity was CEO of EA and was fired for being too greedy (even for EA). The man who wanted to charge players a dollar per reload in Battlefield, the same man who introduced loot boxes into FIFA. The same man who called “the f***ing idiots” devs who don't want to focus entirely on monetization. Also, a note about trust. Unity deleted the GitHub repo that tracked license changes, and added it back, only without the bit that allowed devs to use the license shipped with their version of Unity. Now everyone is subject to a new license, even if the game came out years ago and devs not agreed to this. And there is a lot more, such as Unity plans to also charge Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Apple and Google at the same time (good luck with that), always-online editor, offers to devs to reduce fee if they stop using Unity's competitors' services, tens of millions of dollars of insider trading of Unity executives right before this changes, and more
Good points. There is so much out there and I did not want to regurgitate things that have already been said many times. The privacy issue is an overlooked one and also a potential no-go for educational use. That’s why I focused on that.
For me as a developer, it feels like Unity is weaponizing the sunk cost fallacy. They knew how unpopular this change would be, but they trust that developers are too wedded to the engine after having spent so much time and money learning it, buying assets and so on and won't take their business elsewhere. Well, I have no tolerance for that kind of manipulative behaviour and will switch to Unreal, even though it's going to cost me a lot in the short run.
What's frustrating is that this drama detracts from the normal unity engineer's work. It massively slows down the development of new features/fixes etc.
My inference is that a lot of engineers don't even want to work there any longer. A few key personalities in the engineering quit this year or rather recently - weren't hired off to a mightier company, no, just straight up retired from all commercial software development. Jono Forbes has quit early over the announcement (was quitting anyway) and he reports that there are numerous resignation letters piling up at the management's desks.
Fellow educator here; I teach a GPU Programming for Video Games class at Georgia Tech. I used Microsoft's XNA from 2007 to 2012, and then from 2014 to this past summer I used Unity. I need to find something else, since even though Unity still fulfills my educational goals, I could never recommend anyone use it in a commercial context and hence would not feel comfortable using it in a classroom setting. I ranted about this here: th-cam.com/video/AFtllMcz3uI/w-d-xo.html
If XNA was good, then what about Monogame/FNA? Godot supports a GLSL variant for custom shaders, if that helps. And perhaps for shader experiments and the like, the low complexity and high interactivity of the engine might be just the thing.
Many of his comments are spot on. What I particularly like about his videos is that he often communicates philosophically sound comments in a language that is spoken today. And that even though he does not seem to have any formal training in philosophy.
For educators, preference should be given to free open source projects. Linking to commercial products and private companies is inherently risky and expensive.
Also consider that educational communities and institutions can even create the software that they need themselves. One famous example is the game Oregon Trail which was created by a contract for a local school system in the US State of Minnesota.
Replacing Unity with Godot by default and the option to use most others is reasonable. But I would suggest banning Unity entirely because it could potentially open up the institution itself to financial and legal problems. If students want to use a major commercial product then there are other options available such as Unreal. Class lectures and examples should probably use mostly Godot.
There is some argument to be made in that direction. We need to balance needs though because on the other hand we need to make sure that our students get the skills industry expects and that usually points to either Unreal or Unity.
The recent developments in import tools such as those explained by gamefromscratch in his Unity to Godot in Seconds video should make migrating projects less painful. A combination of Godot and Unreal instruction seems like a pretty solid foundation for future employment. I suspect that “must have Unity experience” is going to quickly disappear from new job listings within a few months.
Educators should use open source tools, especially if some of them are shitty at the moment EOT. E.g. Blender couldnt become one of the best 3D software without the growth of their userbase and support from community. It's not an easy path, but there are no other known mechanism that can protect us from greedy corporations becoming techno feudalistic overlords. Educators who doesn't use free software are literally manufacturing techno peasants!
I feel like Unity is trying to act like it's some kind of baked-in, Enterprise software companies usually get stuck with. EG: A company may become a Windows shop stuck with SQL Server, or an Oracle shop with Oracle DB, or they bought into SAP as their ERP system and are stuck with it. In these situations, you have a whole business infrastucture built up, and can't easily pivot away from it. But, in the game development industry... games are stand-alone. You make it using a certain dev tool, and then maybe, b/c you like that dev tool or got good with it, you stick with it. But, if you don't like it, or it doesn't offer features you need in the future, or (in the case of Unity) it drastically changes the B2B relationship you have with it... you can just pivot to something else. Maybe in the future, a game studio will want to remaster a game. Ok, then maybe they'll need to crack it open in Unity again to fluff it up. But, that's outlier scenarios. Changing a game dev environment is a bit more complicated than changing your preferred word processor program... but it's possible and doable. You're using MS Word one day. Next day you're using Google Docs. It's not exactly embedded into your company the same way all your databases are using SQL Server or Oracle, or your ERP system is via SAP. I'm currently thinking of doing a VR game. And, Unity has been the main one Meta and a lot of VR devs have been pushing as the easiest/best one to use. But, it's just boggling. I'm not planning on becoming a millionaire with my game if I make it. But, I don't want some dark cloud lurking over my head if I do make a game and it does hit it off and blow out the $ caps Unity put in place. I don't want to have to worry about upgrading to a professional license w/ yearly fee. I don't want to have to worry about folks installing the thing a lot and some weird thing bites me in the butt with Unity sending me a bill. The game I want to make is a stand-alone, non-network game. So, I don't want a "phone home" internet-required junk always running. So, now I'm looking at Godot. I just want to make a simple VR game. Unreal engine is way too over the top for what I want to do. And, I don't want to deal with pay-for licensing and other weird stuff. There's a LOT of folks that want to explore game development, but don't want all the corporate BS bogging them down on the off chance they really get into it and do something good.
interesting. will you say this is reasonable?: another consideration for which tool to teach depends also on how used it is on the market? E.g. will you teach unity if you knew its gonna give the students less chance of getting hired assuming companies would move to other engines? i mean i know carnegie univ teaches panda3D (which i love) but it does so for other reasons (same reson minix was created and used, to learn). but if the goal of the education is to have 'practical skill knowledge' will this be a factor? (btw i love ypur university focuses on practical experience) in other words, i dont think people will still think is that much valuable to teach flash.
We are more career oriented than CMU, so we do need to expose students to what industry uses. But even with that, there are many options. Unreal, Unity, …
Switched from game programming to artificial intelligence this semester but would like to hear what my college professor's opinion on this. Also I have a unity game programmer certification exam that i haven't taken yet and not sure if that will be worth anything after this whole mess is resolved.
Well, AI is a good choice right now. And that knowledge would also help you in game development if you want to go that route. If you already spent energy into the Unity cert, I would complete that. Unity is not going to disappear and you never know how things turn out long term.
I am more concern on why academia needs to force brand X into education in the first place. As long as the needed functionality exist it shouldn't matter what brand you use. You are basically giving this companies a user base in detriment to other companies with similar, and in some cases superior, software. Education should be based on STANDARDS. Not BRANDS.
This is technofeudalism, look it up. This came from two directors of unity that worked this with twitter APIs, then it moved to reddit APIs and now its in unity.
We won't see the effects of these bad decision until a couple years from now unless Unity scraps them. There's already a lot of studios abandoning Unity for future projects.
Its a fee at a non transaction. You buy, you get the rights to install. An exchange. Runtime installs on the user end is bonkers. Esg, required interent for editor, retroactive, extra enforcement and departments. People know this is bad business and follows the other bad decisions of Unity.
Well royalty based licensing models for intellectual property are actually historically quite common! They aren't per se a problem, like, if you don't agree with the terms, you just pick something else. In some situations they are strongly preferred as they can distribute the risk. The problem is retroactive nature, and even if they announced it a year in advance and only applying to future versions, It would still feel like a bait and switch, since investment in engine and assets is generally much longer term. "I am altering the deal; pray i don't alter it any further". Scifi villain grade business antics.
Sad thing for us devving on Unity for pc or consoles, we are now just unwanted trash that doesn't matter, we can all just disappear and their board of directors won't even notice. I wonder if even the mobile devs they are targeting now want to stay with Unity, they need game building tools too, and there are better options available. I had worked for years on my game project, and demo release was supposed to happen in 2024, but they are not seeing a cent from me now. I rather just start over on Unreal, even if I don't like Epic, but compared to how disgusting Unity has become they're good guys
I would be careful not to overreact. Switching engines after years of development is not something I would recommend. I would finish the game and then re-evaluate what engine to use for the next one.
Unity is over. Even if they 100% U-turn on their stupid decision, no sane developer would dare to touch Unity again. No sane developer would risk years of development just for Unity to pull some bullshits again on its payment model in the future. Please support Godot's free open-source model. Blender is the proof that free open-source model DOES work, as Blender (with the help of the community) nowadays rival fully funded proprietary modelling software like 3DS Max. Please contribute your skills and knowledge to improve Godot to attract as many ex-Unity developers as possible to make Unity obsolete and to make it disappeared on the face of the Internet altogether.
I would not say it is over, but it will be difficult to recover. They could retreat into a niche though, like, for example become the required engine for Apple Vision. 😉
@@michaelgwagner I think the education may need to change its approach. Like you're there to convey the insight and the inherent skill; not necessarily a tool dependent skill, because tools of the trade will necessarily drift and change every few years. Once Renderware was THE toolkit of choice, where is it now? The first subject i studied was computer science, and they started with OCaml. Because it was a different approach to everything else and it was virtually guaranteed nobody had touched it before. It has been challenging and it has generated the right type of universal insight. Of course choosing obscure tooling and subjects can backfire as well. We were taught machine language on the VAX, and the VAX machine, well it hadn't really been operational. There was no logic or reason for this, they just did it because it was enshrined as the pride of an institution, because it wasn't some off the shelf VAX, it was a student and professor developed VAX clone existing in Qty 1! Which also meant nobody was left who could repair it and keep it running and nobody got the hands-on experience that we'd ideally like to have. Heck 68000 would have been more fruitful.
I appreciate seeing your thoughtful insights on how this change may affect the use of Unity in an educational setting. I expect this is something that has been considered, though in the current climate of misinformation and ephemeral "outrage" I don't think there are any clear answers yet. I don't think this is being helped at all by the many content creators who stand to earn money by stoking the confusion and generating views. Additionally, there seems to be a bit of selective criticism where it concerns the "trust us bro" commentary, when most of our society operates at the whim of corporate black boxes that have far worse consequences than video games.
You are correct, of course. My point was that in a world full of options most people will move on quickly. Quite often they have to. I do not have tge luxury yo wait for Unity to make up their mind. And regarding black data boxes, you are somewhat correct on a personal level. However, on a corporate level this looks different. I need to adhere to strict data security standards. I cannot even make that choice.
I think you underestimate how much businesses try to avoid risk. You can see it in the game dev responses... its not so much the new model Unity have introduced, it's that they've shown themselves to be unreliable/untrustworthy. That is like kryptonite in the game dev communitry. That lack of clarity you mention just makes it worse. Most developers will just move on to a different platform they see as stable.
Since you are not bothering to make a video of the new proposal here it is. new cap 1000 000 in past 12 months and the 20c may not exceed 4% revenue cap! Negotiations work child like tantrums do not!
Very well explained, thank you. As so far as Unity? In the long term they're finished. Unless they completely backtrack on this and fire the entire board. The CEO is ex EA. Responsible for adding "microtransactions". imho. They're done.
I wonder if Mr.Wagner read the material he's talking about? You only have to worry about the fee if you meet both $ and installation #, if the game is free there is no $
all apps will be tracked, your unity licence must check in every 3 days or be turned off.. and a TOS that is now both retroactive to cover every Unity Engine version made and they have already said it will change as they see fit..
now in most of schools they don't even bother to teach you how to develop your own engine you get just basics use for unity or unreal engine which is the wrong approach we become so dependent on them
Well, that depends on the degree. If you want to write your own game engines, you would need something like a CS degree with a game development concentration. I’m looking at this from the perspective of game design, which is its own thing.
Your statement is quite broad and lacks context on how video game companies actually operate. Not everyone whose goal is to work for a large video game company needs to have the knowledge of how to develop their own engine. Larger video game companies have positions that are dedicated to those who do know how to build their own engines. Like Michael pointed out in his comment, if you want to be a game engine developer, you would more likely pursue a CS degree with a concentration in game development. If your goal is to become a game designer, that is a job that does not require the knowledge of how to develop your own game engines. In larger companies, they will have other people that know how to do that and will do that for you. A role of a game designer is completely different from that of an engine developer etc. For game designers, the knowledge that we learn in school should be transferrable between any engine that is used for a game. While there will always be nuances and a learning curve when jumping to a new engine, the frustration from a game designer's point of view is not in the fact that we may have to learn a new engine. The frustration comes from the retroactive part of this fee and the fact that many indie projects cannot afford these sudden new fees. On the indie side of the industry, engines such as Unity and Unreal have allowed indie developers to bypass needing to know how to develop their own engines that is true. This however has allowed indie developers to focus their time on crafting unique and fun game mechanics etc. Rather than having to spend time learning how to develop their own basic engine. Time is money. On top of that, designers whose coding may not be their strongest skill may have their creativity potentially stunted just simply due to the fact that they may not have the knowledge to build an engine that is capable of creating the game mechanics they have envisioned for their game. The downfall is not on schools for not teaching every single student who wishes to enter the video game industry with a backbone knowledge of how to develop their own game engines. It should be on the greed and poor business decisions of companies like Unity. I have a few friends that work/worked for Unity so I've been in the loop of the business decisions that Unity has been making for the past year or so now and this news does not suprise me at all. The layoffs, the odd choices of aquisitions etc. They have been trying to look for ways on how to increase their revenue for a while now and unfortunately this is what Unity has decided will be their path forward.
I do not agree about that. I am not sure what purpose it serves by teaching specifically engine development unless it is a research project for master computer science students. I think it's more valuable to teach CS students or people of related programs software engineering/development with branching focus on graphics, ML etc in order to prepare them for career and more niche research projects.
You can make that argument either way tbh. Teaching game engine development has become somewhat moot because game engines today are incredibly complex and require large teams of specialized developers. But on the other hand there is also value in a game engine development course. We are a design college, so this is not what we do though. We teach storytelling with game engines if you want to put it that way.
As a fellow college professor, I gave a very similar rant to my students today. I appreciate your thoughts on the matter. I'm still baffled by this move.
Thanks! It is indeed flabbergasting, isn’t it?
It's a money grab, and not just in the obvious way. Upper Echelon just published on their channel a bit of a behind the scenes look at the executive shenanigans.
He made interesting points but UE tends to be a bit conspiratorial. Tanking Unity stock so that Apple needs to take over would get Unity management behind bars pretty quickly.
@@michaelgwagner What's annoying is that AppLovin made a generous unsolicited offer awhile back, which would have let these upper management types get their quick payout, and Unity get put in better hands... and here we are...
@@michaelgwagner I don't think the Unity execs are done milking it yet. But I do believe they're not interested in growing the core business of the company. IMO, they are taking big compensation, driving up debt, and aiming to sell. It's the classic corporate raider formula.
It reminds me of the Oracle JDK pricing changes for Java 8 that Oracle announced in 2019.
I was working at an investment bank at the time, and basically, overnight we were treating everything Oracle-related as cancerous tumors: Cut it out where you can. If it's too rooted, push that system waaay up the "to-be-replaced" queue...
And since the most valuable thing in any business is predictability, the kind of behavior Unity is displaying now makes them a liability, and no one will touch it with a 10-foot pole.
Absolutely correct.
Yeah. Even if they go back on everything, nobody will trust them again. Predictability is king. Who knows if they would try something else next, and potentially put everything based on it at risk.
Oh man, memories. AdoptOpenJDK/Corretto etc really filled that void!
The changes will scare away new devs who all dream to hit it big, because of fears unity will rob them when they do succeed,. Or even drive away existing developers when deciding what engine to use for next game. So... fewer new games, less chance of next big hit made with Unity, no subscription, no ad revenue and no runtime fees either. Unity will wither and die. And that affect education because it will decrease demand for unity courses.
I think you need to have predictability. New developers need to be able to understand clearly what they are getting into. Their business model needs stability.
@@michaelgwagneryep, and that's exactly the problem with that for both developers AND Unity. Unity became THE engine for indie and new developers because it was so accessible AND their business model was reliable. It was perfect. Disrupting that just disrupts its position and use as the go-to game engine for indie devs, beginners, and the thousands of small games being developed with it.
Basically Unity is sawing off the branch it's sitting on.
Or cooking the goose that lays the golden eggs.
im glad teacher and educator talk about this. because this is really critical.
I usually stay in the background on these questions but this irked me.
Great video, so many people aren’t discussing the fact that, under the new terms, Unity Personal will require network connection. This change rolls out this coming NOVEMBER (not even before the end of this semester cycle). I can understand that Unity wanting a revenue cut, but do they really need to spy on solo/small/student dev teams? I feel like the discussion of the new fee structure is overshadowing Unity Personal network requirement changes.
Yes, just heard that today. Universities do have different licenses, but many of our students use personal off site. Need to look into this.
The current CEO at Unity was the CEO at EA Games when they developed Sim City 2013, which also had the always-online mandate.
By the way, Sim City 2013 was such a fiasco because of his shenanagans, they fired him right before it's release, and that was the last version of the Sim City franchise. The guy destroyed many games and game studios, so one wonders why Unity hired him?
Thanks for voicing your opinion from an educational perspective,
many people are minimizing or completely failing to understand the repercussions,
this is the same company that used to pride itself on "democratizing" game development.
Yeah, democratizing is something completely different. It used to be true. Not anymore inho.
I'm one of those that thinks that it should have been taught in a more agnostic way from the get go. Of course, hindsight and all that, but part of the reasons that companies are in a position to be able to this, because they have market share is precisely because that got potential customers when they were young. I remember when I had to switch not only programs, but OSs due to changes that came in roughly a decade ago. After that, I always make sure that if I have to switch again (and it will be have to, not because I want to), I'm better prepared for it.
It’s a bit of a struggle tbh. Because the other side of the coin us that employers expect that our students are getting classes that teach exactly the software they need.
@@michaelgwagner If students get a lower level approach, they should be able to apply that to the more high level approaches of game engines. It's about not being bound to any one way of doing something.
@WildWestDesigns Our students are required to go on interships. A total of 18 month during their undergrad program. If they don’t have experience with an industry standard game engine, they have very little chance getting a good internship.
Unity will also be an "always online" (actually it's you have to be internet connected every 3 days but still) service now, a fact many missed; just that fact alone has removed my interest.
Very interesting point! If thst is true, we might have a another problem as I don’t think we are allowed to use such software. They are rolling out new features for education. I hope they know what they are doing and are at least providing tools that are in compliance with higher ed requirements.
very good accuracy in your comments balancing informal and formal comments without a harsh language but without being afraid of speaking out.
Thanks! 😊
Exceptionally said. To me, unity's reassurances that this new fee will only affect successful devs, sounds more like "don't worry about the fee as the odds indicate you will not find sucess". I know they don't mean to sound crass, but as a long time user who hasn't released a "hit game", this does not inspire hope 😅
Good point!
Godot is about where Unity was a decade ago, but it is fully open source. IMO, this is the perfect solution for education. Also, Godot can be smoothly used with GIMP and Blender, and on Linux.
Yes, that’s an interesting one.
Stride is a far less steep learning curve and is also open source and written in c# natively... its cross platform like unity free and its api and workflow is very similar to unity... godot is not what I'd reccomend as a unity game dev with over 13 years experience its what I myself am migrating to
@michaelpalmer2143 My comparison was of course simplified. Some think Godot is better than Unity for 2D, for instance. I was thinking of general features. For instance, their 3D animation appears to be where Unity was when Mecanim launched.
Anyway, I tend to agree that Godot seems better composed / more polished, probably because of fewer hands involved in generating it.
I wouldn't say that. Godot had the luxury to learn from the past mistakes of unity and has some better features in the 2D space. Something unity never delivered on. Also Godot has assets in its asset store. Very useful stuff. I'm not sure about 3D. Unreal might be good for that.
@@orangelimesky Yeah, it seems that people are dividing in their thought, thinking Unreal for 3D and maybe Godot for 2D.
I think it would be great if added interest could boost Godot on 3D, but we'll just have to see.
This was such a strange move by Unity. In the last few years I was getting the feeling that Unity was starting to lose their monopolistic hold on indies, with Godot shooting up in popularity, several new game engines starting to take the limelight and Unreal engine making their tools easier for indies. (I suspect that's the reason why you were thinking of creating those engine agnostic courses.) Unity though, instead of going back to the basics of providing (and receiving) value from the indies that had given them their giant market share, they've gone and done something completely different and alienated their customers in a seemingly desperate attempt to make Unity profitable. Such a strange move by Unity
A desperate attempt to make Unity profitable. I think that’s the main point.
Unity also alienated its key engineers. Who weren't lured away by some other company, they just quit and retired very recently. Their star hire Acton (DOTS), Aras P and Rej, some of their founding architects.
At my college we are about to use a new Unity project for all of our Immersive room learning via VR headsets but also runs on desktop PCs for remote learning and to join other campus Immersive Rooms. Just in our group alone that would be several-hundred education licences and pretty sure it extends to many campuses across the UK as I assume it's government-led funding to build all these VR rooms across the country. Could be interesting as that project is very early in its development with Unity.
Interesting. We did a similar thing with Unreal. But it is true that Unity is particularly dominant in the VR space. And these developers are apparently hardest hit by the new business model.
@@michaelgwagner We're using ArborXR to manage headsets and then deploy to each headset/pc something called Class VR to each headset which is the Unity bit.
Well said Michael! We have been making a similar series of curricular changes to a software agnostic/open source approach for our game dev program. As you said, most software developers do not see the impact of students not learning their software until 5 years after their poor decisions are made. By that time there has been a complete change of leadership at the corporation and they don't understand why no one is using their software.
Yeah, you’re right. It’s almost like a pork cycle.
Some of the best points I've heard that aren't being echo'd elsewhere as much as other arguments.
Thank you for highlighting the privacy concern.
I'm glad that I dropped Unity years ago. The pricing structure even at that time was too much for my peanut brain to handle! You shouldn't need flowcharts and diagrams to figure out how much something costs!
We actually used to pay a licence fee for Unity. Was relatively expensive but ok, imho.
Thanks for a fresh point of view. Its sad times for Unity developers, but at least I got to discover your channel, just because of this drama. Subscribed :)
Thanks!
@@michaelgwagner Agree, good channel. Always have been a fan of the German accent as well.
Sir you are a legend for the closing of the video.
😊
I feel for the many students that have invested years of study time into Unity; many majoring in expensive Unity-centric game dev courses. This will set countless young developers back financially, emotionally and event psychologically. I've spoken to such students over the past few days, with many confiding that they are close to graduating and were planning to find game dev specific jobs, and now fear demand for this skill will evaporate. And that fear will be realised. Dark times for many developers.
May a new culture emerge from this, where as a community we create the open source tools we need to free ourselves of corporate exploitation.
Yes, that is absolutely correct. This is what annoys me personally. We have a responsibility to make sure that our students are getting the most applicable skill set. The last thing I need is a company who upends their market for no apparent reason and without doing any due diligence on unintended consequences!
Good perspective, and excellent use of the wisdom of the philosopher.
Thanks!
Very interesting perspective. Asmon's quote at the end gave me a good laugh... i needed that :)
Thanks! And yes, that quite is a good one.
Great video touching some very relevant new points and that Asmongold clip at the end was the cherry on top.
I did take a Game Design class in college where I got to learn Unity more in depth. The teachers, however, gave us complete freedom to choose the framework. Some of us turned to Unity, others to Godot and some even used vanilla Javascript. In my opinion the class went smoothly and the framework freedom allowed teachers to focus on the design process, rather than the ins and outs of a particular tool, which would sometimes happen in other subjects.
Correct. In an entire program consisting of dozens of different classes that need to work with one another, things get a lot more complicated. But it can be done.
What an interesting view point to unity as far as education. Very cool topic.
Thanks!
Great video, thank you for sharing your thoughts!
When I found your channel, it was to look at your videos pertaining to Wwise, which have been great to watch, but I had a question:
Around the time this Unity drama started, I received an email from Audio Kinetic that they would be changing the pricing of their certifications, leading me to believe the certification courses may be getting revamped?
Do you think if changes are made, they will change the game engine they demonstrate Wwise capabilities with?
Thanks! I doubt it. The Wwise learning material is really good and for the most part the fact that you use Unity isn’t all that important. Rewriting everything for Unreal seems impractical imho.
I don't think the Engine runtime will "call home". I read somewhere that they said that they "aggregated data from various sources", probably meaning App Store downloads.
I agree, but they will need to make public what data they collect.
Greatest philosopher of our times indeed 🤣
But yeah, Asmogold was spot on there.
This same concern about privacy is also one unintended consequence for people who play Unity games. I think students and devolopers need to be aware that as soon as players see the Unity logo, they may not want to install or play the game because of privacy fears.
Very true!
has not stopped people from using Microsoft Windows ...
@lubossoltes321 true, but really there's not much choice there
Thank you for posting this
You're welcome!
i remember 5 years back when i saw unity offering a free version but they force the logo in your games ,
sort of saying "give me your money or else" since then i know its a sneaky hunting behavior and it wont stop there,
i switched to unreal engine and i'm in peace since then .
RE: Student Project turned into Indie Projects into Indie hit (7:50)
Example: Dorfromantik. A game build in Unity.
Your game?
In an engine-agnostic program, do profs need to have expertise in all game engines? Otherwise how will they provide sufficient technical direction?
Not in all classes. We can run certain classes in multiple sections for different engines. But in general, yes.
It's not just clarity, it's about trust. And Unity have taken a massive dump on trust
And trust is extremely difficult to regain.
Danke für dein Input, super Video ! Grüße aus Wien
Danke sehr!
RE: Unity blackbox algorithm, estimating installs based on unknown data points.
ICYMI: Facebook settled with advertisers a lawsuit over inflated video view numbers - $40 Million.
A larger publisher might take on Unity to dispute installation numbers. But indies? Thus, long term, as you've said, the industry will shift to an alternative product that is less feudalistic in its business model.
Very insightful and nice to give students choice. I hate that when I went to school they would shove Windows down your throat for some schools. My last school didn’t thankfully.
A lot of Unity's appeal was the sheer number of tutorials and other such information online. Given current events, I can see a lot of that drying up. Eventually, the old tutorials will apply less and less to newer versions of the engine, and less people will be making new ones. This will essentially remove one of Unity's main advantages over other engines.
Good point!
Well who knows the engine development might stall entirely and then old tutorials still happen to apply!
Guess we're going to see a lot more Godot and Unreal projects. When you literally can't afford to publish a demo, your hands are seriously tied as a new studio.
Agree. Unity could still turn this around to some extent, but not completely I think.
07:58 This is incorrect. Unity can sell or rent their engine. But they don't sell the game or success, which is the blood and sweat of the developer. They can ask a price for their own engine, not for other's success.
If we are hurt by make a interaction with something, normaly we do not make this interaction again. Logic of natural survival. Same for all the other interactions of our life. If is a hurt possibility, we don't make again. RIP Unity. Your zomby corpse will survive, but you will be this for the rest of your existence.
And I realy apreciate your vídeo. Thanks.
Thanks!
One thing I don't hear anyone talking about is that maybe it is counting as a mater of checking for updates to the Unity Engine, which most software does already through App stores, Platform software updates, etc. I am not saying this is the case, but could it be as simple as this?
Whatever it is, my feeling is that they only get a very rough estimate which is why they don’t want to disclose it.
@@michaelgwagner Agreed. I think my only point was that it might not be as privacy intrusive as many are making out. But that aside, the whole way this was rolled out and lack of any clarity screams poor upper-level understanding, direction and overall management.
@Jason-mk3nn It’s primarily the issue that we _have_ to know. It puzzles me that Unity think they can use the “proprietary data model” defense.
some unity employee posted that they are still researching how to implement that install tracking and the development will probably last in to 2024. so after the changes takes effekt. not sure how trustworthy that source is though. @@michaelgwagner
I wish there was more support for open-source in education. Much of the world's academia missed out on Blender. I have the feeling it's going to be the same situation with game-engines, whether it's Godot that rises above the commercial engines or something else.
I have a short scheduled about that tomorrow.
I like your voice :)! Good video, definitely subscribed
Thanks!
i LOVE how you did make that video so professional and then show a asmongold clip XD
Don’t underestimate him. This guy is the proverbial hermit philosopher. 😀
Great video ❤
Thanks! Much appreciated.
Switch to open source, we are. Godot for the game engine, MySQL for the DB, Mirror for the network code. All open source. Gimp instead of Photoshop. Blender instead of Maya/3DSMax. Entire stack open source
is mysql open source? isn't it owned by oracle?
MySQL is owned by Oracle and have many problems, including licensing. That is also the reason why MariaDB, fork of MySQL, exists
PostgreSQL, on the other hand, is truly open-source, much more powerful & feature-rich, and allows you practically everything with it's license
In my experience, all medium/large-sized companies switched from Oracle to PostgreSQL (including the bank where I'm working), last time I heard about MySQL was in context of some student's PHP project
@@ea_naseer "Owned" but only about as much as you can own a GPL software. You can just switch to a fork MariaDB or some other if the governance of the project isn't to your liking. Being open source avoids a degree of vendor lock-in.
Apropos Photoshop, Krita may be worth a look, that's the pixel image editor of the KDE project that has evolved more heavily towards painting and vector.
I find this a very insightful video. Long term strategies have become unpopular in the Anglo-Saxon way of doing business and the educational system is suffering for it. Games can also be made engine agnostic by moving the business logic of the game into a separate C# project using only Plain Old Class Object (POCO's).The resulting DLL can be used in Unity, Godot and even Unreal with the UnrealCLR. It's technically more difficult then building for one engine specific, but there might be some technically gifted students in gamedev classes that could handle it. The rules of a game, like for instance chess, should not have to be rewritten just because the game uses a different engine.
Thank you!
Part of the problem is we have normalized the software as a service mindset, rather than software as a product. What Unity is doing now is Software as a Service + revenue share based on install count. We need to go back to software being a product, you buy and if the developer wants you to pay more, they need to offer up something of value.
I would argue that this is nit a clean SAAS model. The runtime is provided to the customer of a developer and bit the developer. It is not a service the developer receives.
Great video, but I disagree that Unity can do whatever they want with the pricing model and with the focus almost entirely on privacy. Apart from the reasons that you mentioned, the pricing model itself is horrible. Also, I apologize for my English in advance, it's not my native language.
Firstly, initially they directly said that every installation will count. And with WebGL games, every initialization (basically every pressing of F5 without cache) is counted as installation. Now they backpedaled it, but only after immense backlash. And installations on different devices from one user are still charged multiple times.
But even with an updated model, there are a lot of issues apart from various loopholes for exploitation and the lack of transparency.
This is basically a death sentence for f2p/freemium games. For any game where install count is substantially higher than revenue. And the fee is based on REVENUE, not PROFIT.
So the platform (App Store/Google Play/Steam etc.) is taking 30% cut, then publisher is taking 50-70% cut… and from 200k$ revenue you have 70k-42k$ remaining. Even before any taxes/salary etc. And then Unity will charge you for your installations.
A lot of devs pointed out that this fee will charge them more than they earned in their entire life, let alone from one game. So, this change will actively punish successful indie devs, who is successful enough to pass the threshold, but don't have as much money as big over monetized companies to pay this fee.
Also, for mobile games. People are regularly buying new phones (new iPhone every year etc.) and transferring data and app (and games) from the old ones. And the new phone is a new device. So, a new charge for devs. So, every Apple/Samsung/Xiaomi release will be another death sentence for f2p Unity games
Imagine the company that manufactured a hammer charging you every time somebody sits on a chair that you built with that hammer (which you bought). You will go bankrupt if you won't introduce mandatory charges for sitting on that chair. And this is exactly what Unity wants, but worse, since you are also paying their subscription. Remember, the current CEO of Unity was CEO of EA and was fired for being too greedy (even for EA). The man who wanted to charge players a dollar per reload in Battlefield, the same man who introduced loot boxes into FIFA. The same man who called “the f***ing idiots” devs who don't want to focus entirely on monetization.
Also, a note about trust. Unity deleted the GitHub repo that tracked license changes, and added it back, only without the bit that allowed devs to use the license shipped with their version of Unity. Now everyone is subject to a new license, even if the game came out years ago and devs not agreed to this.
And there is a lot more, such as Unity plans to also charge Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Apple and Google at the same time (good luck with that), always-online editor, offers to devs to reduce fee if they stop using Unity's competitors' services, tens of millions of dollars of insider trading of Unity executives right before this changes, and more
Good points. There is so much out there and I did not want to regurgitate things that have already been said many times. The privacy issue is an overlooked one and also a potential no-go for educational use. That’s why I focused on that.
For me as a developer, it feels like Unity is weaponizing the sunk cost fallacy. They knew how unpopular this change would be, but they trust that developers are too wedded to the engine after having spent so much time and money learning it, buying assets and so on and won't take their business elsewhere. Well, I have no tolerance for that kind of manipulative behaviour and will switch to Unreal, even though it's going to cost me a lot in the short run.
Yes, that could very well be.
What's frustrating is that this drama detracts from the normal unity engineer's work. It massively slows down the development of new features/fixes etc.
Good point! 👍
My inference is that a lot of engineers don't even want to work there any longer. A few key personalities in the engineering quit this year or rather recently - weren't hired off to a mightier company, no, just straight up retired from all commercial software development. Jono Forbes has quit early over the announcement (was quitting anyway) and he reports that there are numerous resignation letters piling up at the management's desks.
Fellow educator here; I teach a GPU Programming for Video Games class at Georgia Tech. I used Microsoft's XNA from 2007 to 2012, and then from 2014 to this past summer I used Unity. I need to find something else, since even though Unity still fulfills my educational goals, I could never recommend anyone use it in a commercial context and hence would not feel comfortable using it in a classroom setting. I ranted about this here: th-cam.com/video/AFtllMcz3uI/w-d-xo.html
If XNA was good, then what about Monogame/FNA?
Godot supports a GLSL variant for custom shaders, if that helps. And perhaps for shader experiments and the like, the low complexity and high interactivity of the engine might be just the thing.
Thank you for this video, and never tought i would see Asmongold in your video. 😊
Many of his comments are spot on. What I particularly like about his videos is that he often communicates philosophically sound comments in a language that is spoken today. And that even though he does not seem to have any formal training in philosophy.
Man you got the same accent as Arnold the action hero actor.
I grew up about an hour from where he was born. I get that a lot. 😂
For educators, preference should be given to free open source projects. Linking to commercial products and private companies is inherently risky and expensive.
Also consider that educational communities and institutions can even create the software that they need themselves.
One famous example is the game Oregon Trail which was created by a contract for a local school system in the US State of Minnesota.
Replacing Unity with Godot by default and the option to use most others is reasonable. But I would suggest banning Unity entirely because it could potentially open up the institution itself to financial and legal problems. If students want to use a major commercial product then there are other options available such as Unreal.
Class lectures and examples should probably use mostly Godot.
There is some argument to be made in that direction. We need to balance needs though because on the other hand we need to make sure that our students get the skills industry expects and that usually points to either Unreal or Unity.
no point in teaching tools that nobody uses and no employer wants. but mentioning that there are alternatives is never a bad thing. @@michaelgwagner
The recent developments in import tools such as those explained by gamefromscratch in his Unity to Godot in Seconds video should make migrating projects less painful.
A combination of Godot and Unreal instruction seems like a pretty solid foundation for future employment. I suspect that “must have Unity experience” is going to quickly disappear from new job listings within a few months.
Time to switch gears and go full Unreal. I doing it and its "fun".
Yup
@michaelpalmer2143 Track record of Unreal say otherwise.
Educators should use open source tools, especially if some of them are shitty at the moment EOT. E.g. Blender couldnt become one of the best 3D software without the growth of their userbase and support from community.
It's not an easy path, but there are no other known mechanism that can protect us from greedy corporations becoming techno feudalistic overlords. Educators who doesn't use free software are literally manufacturing techno peasants!
I feel like Unity is trying to act like it's some kind of baked-in, Enterprise software companies usually get stuck with. EG: A company may become a Windows shop stuck with SQL Server, or an Oracle shop with Oracle DB, or they bought into SAP as their ERP system and are stuck with it. In these situations, you have a whole business infrastucture built up, and can't easily pivot away from it.
But, in the game development industry... games are stand-alone. You make it using a certain dev tool, and then maybe, b/c you like that dev tool or got good with it, you stick with it. But, if you don't like it, or it doesn't offer features you need in the future, or (in the case of Unity) it drastically changes the B2B relationship you have with it... you can just pivot to something else.
Maybe in the future, a game studio will want to remaster a game. Ok, then maybe they'll need to crack it open in Unity again to fluff it up. But, that's outlier scenarios.
Changing a game dev environment is a bit more complicated than changing your preferred word processor program... but it's possible and doable. You're using MS Word one day. Next day you're using Google Docs. It's not exactly embedded into your company the same way all your databases are using SQL Server or Oracle, or your ERP system is via SAP.
I'm currently thinking of doing a VR game. And, Unity has been the main one Meta and a lot of VR devs have been pushing as the easiest/best one to use. But, it's just boggling. I'm not planning on becoming a millionaire with my game if I make it. But, I don't want some dark cloud lurking over my head if I do make a game and it does hit it off and blow out the $ caps Unity put in place. I don't want to have to worry about upgrading to a professional license w/ yearly fee. I don't want to have to worry about folks installing the thing a lot and some weird thing bites me in the butt with Unity sending me a bill. The game I want to make is a stand-alone, non-network game. So, I don't want a "phone home" internet-required junk always running.
So, now I'm looking at Godot. I just want to make a simple VR game. Unreal engine is way too over the top for what I want to do. And, I don't want to deal with pay-for licensing and other weird stuff.
There's a LOT of folks that want to explore game development, but don't want all the corporate BS bogging them down on the off chance they really get into it and do something good.
interesting. will you say this is reasonable?:
another consideration for which tool to teach depends also on how used it is on the market?
E.g. will you teach unity if you knew its gonna give the students less chance of getting hired assuming companies would move to other engines?
i mean i know carnegie univ teaches panda3D (which i love) but it does so for other reasons (same reson minix was created and used, to learn).
but if the goal of the education is to have 'practical skill knowledge' will this be a factor? (btw i love ypur university focuses on practical experience)
in other words, i dont think people will still think is that much valuable to teach flash.
We are more career oriented than CMU, so we do need to expose students to what industry uses. But even with that, there are many options. Unreal, Unity, …
Switched from game programming to artificial intelligence this semester but would like to hear what my college professor's opinion on this. Also I have a unity game programmer certification exam that i haven't taken yet and not sure if that will be worth anything after this whole mess is resolved.
Well, AI is a good choice right now. And that knowledge would also help you in game development if you want to go that route. If you already spent energy into the Unity cert, I would complete that. Unity is not going to disappear and you never know how things turn out long term.
I am more concern on why academia needs to force brand X into education in the first place.
As long as the needed functionality exist it shouldn't matter what brand you use. You are basically giving this companies a user base in detriment to other companies with similar, and in some cases superior, software.
Education should be based on STANDARDS. Not BRANDS.
It’s not that clear cut. I have a short scheduled for Sunday that talks about that.
This is technofeudalism, look it up. This came from two directors of unity that worked this with twitter APIs, then it moved to reddit APIs and now its in unity.
I was actually toying with the idea of making such a comment but then decided to leave it out because it is a very loaded term.
We won't see the effects of these bad decision until a couple years from now unless Unity scraps them. There's already a lot of studios abandoning Unity for future projects.
I think if they want to salvage the situation they need to act fast.
Shoot, things are getting really serious.
When arnold start making games
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Well, time to introduce a game engine development curriculum :-)
Our colleagues in CS have one. We are on the design side and our students rarely take that.
Its a fee at a non transaction. You buy, you get the rights to install. An exchange. Runtime installs on the user end is bonkers. Esg, required interent for editor, retroactive, extra enforcement and departments. People know this is bad business and follows the other bad decisions of Unity.
Well royalty based licensing models for intellectual property are actually historically quite common! They aren't per se a problem, like, if you don't agree with the terms, you just pick something else. In some situations they are strongly preferred as they can distribute the risk. The problem is retroactive nature, and even if they announced it a year in advance and only applying to future versions, It would still feel like a bait and switch, since investment in engine and assets is generally much longer term.
"I am altering the deal; pray i don't alter it any further". Scifi villain grade business antics.
Lol adding Asmon was the cherry on top
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....Everybody get down.... Come with me if you want to live.... I'll be back.
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Sad thing for us devving on Unity for pc or consoles, we are now just unwanted trash that doesn't matter, we can all just disappear and their board of directors won't even notice.
I wonder if even the mobile devs they are targeting now want to stay with Unity, they need game building tools too, and there are better options available.
I had worked for years on my game project, and demo release was supposed to happen in 2024, but they are not seeing a cent from me now.
I rather just start over on Unreal, even if I don't like Epic, but compared to how disgusting Unity has become they're good guys
I would be careful not to overreact. Switching engines after years of development is not something I would recommend. I would finish the game and then re-evaluate what engine to use for the next one.
WTF You said Adobe more then Unity in a video about Unity
Unity is over. Even if they 100% U-turn on their stupid decision, no sane developer would dare to touch Unity again. No sane developer would risk years of development just for Unity to pull some bullshits again on its payment model in the future. Please support Godot's free open-source model. Blender is the proof that free open-source model DOES work, as Blender (with the help of the community) nowadays rival fully funded proprietary modelling software like 3DS Max.
Please contribute your skills and knowledge to improve Godot to attract as many ex-Unity developers as possible to make Unity obsolete and to make it disappeared on the face of the Internet altogether.
I would not say it is over, but it will be difficult to recover. They could retreat into a niche though, like, for example become the required engine for Apple Vision. 😉
Godot will replace Unity in the educational place, because Godot is 100% free and open source and you wont risk anything using it in schools
Most of us in education need to follow the games industry because they are the ones defining the rules of engagement. ;)
@@michaelgwagner I think the education may need to change its approach. Like you're there to convey the insight and the inherent skill; not necessarily a tool dependent skill, because tools of the trade will necessarily drift and change every few years. Once Renderware was THE toolkit of choice, where is it now?
The first subject i studied was computer science, and they started with OCaml. Because it was a different approach to everything else and it was virtually guaranteed nobody had touched it before. It has been challenging and it has generated the right type of universal insight.
Of course choosing obscure tooling and subjects can backfire as well. We were taught machine language on the VAX, and the VAX machine, well it hadn't really been operational. There was no logic or reason for this, they just did it because it was enshrined as the pride of an institution, because it wasn't some off the shelf VAX, it was a student and professor developed VAX clone existing in Qty 1! Which also meant nobody was left who could repair it and keep it running and nobody got the hands-on experience that we'd ideally like to have. Heck 68000 would have been more fruitful.
I appreciate seeing your thoughtful insights on how this change may affect the use of Unity in an educational setting. I expect this is something that has been considered, though in the current climate of misinformation and ephemeral "outrage" I don't think there are any clear answers yet. I don't think this is being helped at all by the many content creators who stand to earn money by stoking the confusion and generating views. Additionally, there seems to be a bit of selective criticism where it concerns the "trust us bro" commentary, when most of our society operates at the whim of corporate black boxes that have far worse consequences than video games.
You are correct, of course. My point was that in a world full of options most people will move on quickly. Quite often they have to. I do not have tge luxury yo wait for Unity to make up their mind. And regarding black data boxes, you are somewhat correct on a personal level. However, on a corporate level this looks different. I need to adhere to strict data security standards. I cannot even make that choice.
I think you underestimate how much businesses try to avoid risk. You can see it in the game dev responses... its not so much the new model Unity have introduced, it's that they've shown themselves to be unreliable/untrustworthy. That is like kryptonite in the game dev communitry. That lack of clarity you mention just makes it worse. Most developers will just move on to a different platform they see as stable.
that why open source is the way
Since you are not bothering to make a video of the new proposal here it is. new cap 1000 000 in past 12 months and the 20c may not exceed 4% revenue cap! Negotiations work child like tantrums do not!
Privacy concerns remain.
Get to da chopper!
Sorry couldn’t resist.
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@@michaelgwagner 😹all in good fun. But seriously couldn’t resist
Amongold truly is the Diogenes of our generation
Correct!
next video, you NEED to yell, "Get to the chopper!"
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i sweare id subscribe, just hearing that.@@michaelgwagner
First time watching, five seconds in: Ahh, a Wiener :D
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Very well explained, thank you. As so far as Unity? In the long term they're finished. Unless they completely backtrack on this and fire the entire board. The CEO is ex EA. Responsible for adding "microtransactions". imho. They're done.
I wonder if Mr.Wagner read the material he's talking about? You only have to worry about the fee if you meet both $ and installation #, if the game is free there is no $
But they still need to collect that data and that’s the issue.
all apps will be tracked, your unity licence must check in every 3 days or be turned off.. and a TOS that is now both retroactive to cover every Unity Engine version made and they have already said it will change as they see fit..
@joshb8215 There are many apps that we can’t use in the classroom because of that.
teach bevy
now in most of schools they don't even bother to teach you how to develop your own engine you get just basics use for unity or unreal engine which is the wrong approach we become so dependent on them
Well, that depends on the degree. If you want to write your own game engines, you would need something like a CS degree with a game development concentration. I’m looking at this from the perspective of game design, which is its own thing.
Your statement is quite broad and lacks context on how video game companies actually operate. Not everyone whose goal is to work for a large video game company needs to have the knowledge of how to develop their own engine. Larger video game companies have positions that are dedicated to those who do know how to build their own engines. Like Michael pointed out in his comment, if you want to be a game engine developer, you would more likely pursue a CS degree with a concentration in game development. If your goal is to become a game designer, that is a job that does not require the knowledge of how to develop your own game engines. In larger companies, they will have other people that know how to do that and will do that for you. A role of a game designer is completely different from that of an engine developer etc. For game designers, the knowledge that we learn in school should be transferrable between any engine that is used for a game. While there will always be nuances and a learning curve when jumping to a new engine, the frustration from a game designer's point of view is not in the fact that we may have to learn a new engine. The frustration comes from the retroactive part of this fee and the fact that many indie projects cannot afford these sudden new fees.
On the indie side of the industry, engines such as Unity and Unreal have allowed indie developers to bypass needing to know how to develop their own engines that is true. This however has allowed indie developers to focus their time on crafting unique and fun game mechanics etc. Rather than having to spend time learning how to develop their own basic engine. Time is money. On top of that, designers whose coding may not be their strongest skill may have their creativity potentially stunted just simply due to the fact that they may not have the knowledge to build an engine that is capable of creating the game mechanics they have envisioned for their game.
The downfall is not on schools for not teaching every single student who wishes to enter the video game industry with a backbone knowledge of how to develop their own game engines. It should be on the greed and poor business decisions of companies like Unity. I have a few friends that work/worked for Unity so I've been in the loop of the business decisions that Unity has been making for the past year or so now and this news does not suprise me at all. The layoffs, the odd choices of aquisitions etc. They have been trying to look for ways on how to increase their revenue for a while now and unfortunately this is what Unity has decided will be their path forward.
I do not agree about that. I am not sure what purpose it serves by teaching specifically engine development unless it is a research project for master computer science students.
I think it's more valuable to teach CS students or people of related programs software engineering/development with branching focus on graphics, ML etc in order to prepare them for career and more niche research projects.
You can make that argument either way tbh. Teaching game engine development has become somewhat moot because game engines today are incredibly complex and require large teams of specialized developers. But on the other hand there is also value in a game engine development course. We are a design college, so this is not what we do though. We teach storytelling with game engines if you want to put it that way.