Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle::Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.
Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle::Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.
We’re here on lemmy and mastodon, but Reddit and twitter still have waaaay more users. Unities move has boosted the popularity of other (open source) alternatives, sure, and if I was a game dev I would transition, but most of the devs and studios are going to need a lot more incentive to abandon the tool they spend decades getting to know
I could still use Reddit for free. At any point, I can easily decide to install the app and use it in parallel. I can go back-and-forth with 0 consequences. My income is not dependent on my ability to access Reddit.
Developers have made the business decision to use Unity or not, and this debacle pretty seriously impacts that decision.
They’ll see longtime customers start to divest, I’m sure. I’d imagine most of the damage done was to their future new customer numbers. Anyone starting a project today would be pretty foolish to even consider Unity, and they’ll feel that more and more going forward. The death rattle’s begun.
I’d personally seek out any good open source alternatives before trying anything else nowadays. I’m pretty happy with blender and krita now I’m starting to get back into animation and drawing. But I’m old, I don’t know if joung people would not simply choose the one that is free-ish and more popular and better supported
Unfortunately, this is likely true. If people can keep using Twitter after all that has happened, people will certainly continue to use Unity and for more legitimate reasons.
I don’t think so. Twitter doesn’t fundamentally change the finances of your business. People are unlikely to feel safe building their entire passion project around an untrustworthy corporation.
Unity also doesn’t have the network effects that Twitter has. People use Twitter because the people they follow use Twitter, and those people use Twitter because enough other people use Twitter that it’s the easiest place to build an audience. Network effects do exist for game engines (it’s a lot easier to use a tool when enough other people use it that the solution to any given problem is likely just a web-search away) but the critical mass that needs to be overcome to become competitive is a lot lower.