So How Long Until My Business Just Dies? (Also, the Unity Debacle) - eviltoast

The great Jeff Vogel discusses the Unity event.

  • AdmiralShat@programming.dev
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    10 months ago

    I was a Unity user for a long time, I watched them fumble after fumble, then merge with Iron Source, deprecated features with promises of the future, canceled plans, mire promises, pulling the rug out from under people, etc

    I will never use a non FOSS game development ecosystem anymore. We should all force the industry to adopt this.

  • RedditWanderer@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    The point in the article isn’t bad, but what he is forgetting is whatever version of Unity his engine depends on, will always be available. It’s not actively being worked on really, unless you intended to update to a later release but most don’t need to. Doesn’t matter if Unity goes down, they will always have a product, they’ll just get smaller and privatize which isn’t a bad thing.

    Unity made a gazillion dollars and wasted it all on acquisitions it had no business managing. They poofed a billion easy on those and people got extremely profitable payoffs and retirement plans. All this while they play is for fools.

    As a Unity employee who was recently let go I know it’s still a total shitshow, and we’re all better off cutting our losses and not planning improvements on the Unity version of our games. At least Unreal isn’t bleeding money and backtracking on a bad business model.

    • William@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      True, except that you need to be able to compile for the latest SDK, etc. Google and Apple now require that your app is compiled against the current or immediately previous SDK, and will actually hide your app on the store if it isn’t now. Perfectly good games just disappear from the listings for some BS reason.

      And the old version of your game engine often won’t compile against newer SDKs, especially if it’s more than a couple years old.

      I experienced something similar with my game that I made using Unity and the Chromecast plugin for it. Google stopped updating the plugin, and the new Unity didn’t work with the old plugin, and for some reason I needed to use a newer Unity version. (It’s been a while and my memory is hazy on it now.) I could not compile my game for modern devices anymore. Luckily, it wasn’t even a game I had published, so I didn’t screw over any users with that, except my own family.