I hope this doesn’t turn into another one of those Apple must roll up its sleeves moments again, with Apple getting into gaming engines, Apple has enough on it’s plate working towards GPU parity with AMD, and Nvidia, oh and that little business with Qualcomm regarding modem replacement.
It wouldn't need to be Apple this time, it can be the big game studios that have their own engines - EA, Activision, Take Two, Nintendo, Ubisoft, Crytek, 4A Studios, Amazon, Guerilla Games, Bethesda, id, Square Enix, CD Projekt Red, Valve.
All these companies tried to reinvent the wheel making an engine of their own, solving the same problem over and over to end up with dozens of buggy proprietary engines that work for one product or franchise and with very little transferrable skills for the people who work with them.
A lot of them have reached a point where the saw how much effort and pain was involved maintaining an engine internally that many of them are now looking at Unreal engine but they don't control the engine.
If all of the studios pooled their resources together, they could make a strong, reliable core engine that everyone could use and know that it would be supported everywhere.
There is one that is really well made, open source, and free to use. Godot.
Godot only started getting reasonably good with version 4 and is still far from optimal. Their lighting/shading engine is poor vs Unity and Unreal:
They have backing from some big companies and Amazon employees are contributing to the engine. The problem with community projects like Godot is they often end up producing little more than low quality tech demos because they don't have the resources - 10 employees/contractors who have built most of the engine:
A good engine can have over 1 million lines of source code to maintain. Epic (Unreal Engine) has over 2000 employees. To properly maintain a good engine where each employee can handle 5000 lines of code per month (250 lines per day), it needs 50 full-time developers or more that can handle audio, particles, physics, lighting/shading, data formats, proper release management, stable API, device support, distribution and more.
Community projects are also never accountable for anything because they are free. If something is broken, they shrug and say someone will get round to it or why not fix it yourself and years later it's still broken.
Only a few engines have good lighting/rendering and performance because they take years to make and run optimally - Frostbite (EA), CryEngine (Crytek), Unreal (Epic), Unity, Decima (Guerilla), Infinity Ward Engine (Activision), Source 2 (Valve), Dunia and Snowdrop (Ubisoft), RE Engine (Capcom) and probably a couple of others.
So if someone offers a game for free, and it gets 1,000,000 downloads, and it made the developer $200K in a year....
That developer went from only giving Unity $20K total, to now $200K per month. In one year it will cost them 120x more. It will bankrupt them.
That's the fastest change in price structure I've ever seen. Your game went from making you $180K in a year, to costing you $200K each month.
.20 cents a download is not going to bankrupt anyone.
$0.20 per month for each download over the limit. It's unclear if Unity will keep track of a rolling 12 month period for revenue (I assume they would) and it's even more unclear what they mean by lifetime installs (does Unity track if a user uninstalls your game? If so, how?).
They have updated the graphic to be a bit clearer, it's one charge per download. The monthly part determines the payment level - new installs per month. It's still really badly thought out because that means a game that gets a lot of installs in a month can get 1/10th the rate of a game that takes a year to reach the same installs. Plus they are tracking installs via their own tracking system and billing based on it.
The also charge for installing on separate devices for the same user and they are applying it retroactively to games currently being sold and it will take effect January 2024.
It doesn't even matter if the fee turns out to be low, this is mad to do this, they are going to alienate everyone in their ecosystem by changing the terms of distribution.
I hope this doesn’t turn into another one of those Apple must roll up its sleeves moments again, with Apple getting into gaming engines, Apple has enough on it’s plate working towards GPU parity with AMD, and Nvidia, oh and that little business with Qualcomm regarding modem replacement.
1) The main appeal of engines like Unreal and Unity is that you can publish your game for all the platforms it supports — Mac, PC, consoles, iOS/iPadOS, tvOS, Android, web. That appeal is gone with an Apple-only game engine. This does not solve any problem.
2) none of those imaginary people would be working on those other projects
I hope this doesn’t turn into another one of those Apple must roll up its sleeves moments again, with Apple getting into gaming engines, Apple has enough on it’s plate working towards GPU parity with AMD, and Nvidia, oh and that little business with Qualcomm regarding modem replacement.
1) The main appeal of engines like Unreal and Unity is that you can publish your game for all the platforms it supports — Mac, PC, consoles, iOS/iPadOS, tvOS, Android, web. That appeal is gone with an Apple-only game engine. This does not solve any problem.
2) none of those imaginary people would be working on those other projects
This is looking like another Code Warrior moment, where would the Apple be today?, If they hadn’t rolled up their sleeves and designed X-code, it appears that we are reaching the end of third party game engines on the Mac?, how long do you think Apple is gonna go through this? Or should Apple close up shop to any games and go without any 3-D raytracing hardware (just added to A17 coincidentally and probably the M3) and say oh well we’re not gonna do anything in the future because some third-party software company isn’t available or are pulling a fast one? Remember Code Warrior an outside third-party developer.
Unity must have a death wish? They better look at what happened to Cold Warrior, Apple has had similar problems with Motorola, IBM and Intel, some technologies become too important to your future to let third-party outfits hold you hostage. Unity is over playing their hand in the same manner that Epic has, even if Apple puts a Band-Aid over it they probably are now thinking more seriously about whether or not they should make a game engine themselves which I’m sure a company as big as Apple has already considered. I think they will because of their past experience with Code Warrior, and the three companies that used to make CPUs for them.
In the end, if you want it done right you have to do it yourself? Maybe Unity is looking for a buyout?
Outside studios can switch engine, albeit at great cost/time (probably a year or two for big studios), the employees will lose their income and potentially this will ruin the entire company they worked for years to build.
"As a unity employee until this morning, I assure you we fought like hell against this, brought up all the points everyone has, were told answers were coming, and then the announcement went out without warning. Those of us who care are out -- more resignations coming end of week."
The police report makes it sound different than the media reports. This comes across like an employee made an angry post on social media and the employer decided to press charges as a means of retaliation:
I hope this doesn’t turn into another one of those Apple must roll up its sleeves moments again, with Apple getting into gaming engines, Apple has enough on it’s plate working towards GPU parity with AMD, and Nvidia, oh and that little business with Qualcomm regarding modem replacement.
1) The main appeal of engines like Unreal and Unity is that you can publish your game for all the platforms it supports — Mac, PC, consoles, iOS/iPadOS, tvOS, Android, web. That appeal is gone with an Apple-only game engine. This does not solve any problem.
2) none of those imaginary people would be working on those other projects
This is looking like another Code Warrior moment, where would the Apple be today?, If they hadn’t rolled up their sleeves and designed X-code, it appears that we are reaching the end of third party game engines on the Mac?, how long do you think Apple is gonna go through this? Or should Apple close up shop to any games and go without any 3-D raytracing hardware (just added to A17 coincidentally and probably the M3) and say oh well we’re not gonna do anything in the future because some third-party software company isn’t available or are pulling a fast one? Remember Code Warrior an outside third-party developer.
Unity must have a death wish? They better look at what happened to Cold Warrior, Apple has had similar problems with Motorola, IBM and Intel, some technologies become too important to your future to let third-party outfits hold you hostage. Unity is over playing their hand in the same manner that Epic has, even if Apple puts a Band-Aid over it they probably are now thinking more seriously about whether or not they should make a game engine themselves which I’m sure a company as big as Apple has already considered. I think they will because of their past experience with Code Warrior, and the three companies that used to make CPUs for them.
In the end, if you want it done right you have to do it yourself? Maybe Unity is looking for a buyout?
I cannot for the life of me unravel your spaghetti post. It does not appear we are reaching the end of third party game engines on the Mac, quite the opposite. And, again, Apple providing a game engine won't magically make developers want to use it. The multi-platform aspect of the game engines being discussed is the entire point of their ubiquity.
Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBRSn63huJ8 (Godot 4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqbczsV7elM (Unity)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFhMfTzh1E8 (Unreal 5)
Godot also uses its own gdscript, Unity uses C#, Unreal uses C++. Proprietary languages are usually slow and not easy to port.
The Open 3D Engine looks pretty good, this was previously Amazon Lumberyard, which was forked from CryEngine:
https://o3de.org
Although that engine is new, CryEngine has been used in a few AAA games and can produce high quality output with fast rendering:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Sx8qaAKgLs&t=16997s
They have backing from some big companies and Amazon employees are contributing to the engine. The problem with community projects like Godot is they often end up producing little more than low quality tech demos because they don't have the resources - 10 employees/contractors who have built most of the engine:
https://godotengine.org/article/funding-breakdown-and-hiring-process/
A good engine can have over 1 million lines of source code to maintain. Epic (Unreal Engine) has over 2000 employees. To properly maintain a good engine where each employee can handle 5000 lines of code per month (250 lines per day), it needs 50 full-time developers or more that can handle audio, particles, physics, lighting/shading, data formats, proper release management, stable API, device support, distribution and more.
Community projects are also never accountable for anything because they are free. If something is broken, they shrug and say someone will get round to it or why not fix it yourself and years later it's still broken.
Only a few engines have good lighting/rendering and performance because they take years to make and run optimally - Frostbite (EA), CryEngine (Crytek), Unreal (Epic), Unity, Decima (Guerilla), Infinity Ward Engine (Activision), Source 2 (Valve), Dunia and Snowdrop (Ubisoft), RE Engine (Capcom) and probably a couple of others.
They have updated the graphic to be a bit clearer, it's one charge per download. The monthly part determines the payment level - new installs per month. It's still really badly thought out because that means a game that gets a lot of installs in a month can get 1/10th the rate of a game that takes a year to reach the same installs. Plus they are tracking installs via their own tracking system and billing based on it.
The also charge for installing on separate devices for the same user and they are applying it retroactively to games currently being sold and it will take effect January 2024.
It doesn't even matter if the fee turns out to be low, this is mad to do this, they are going to alienate everyone in their ecosystem by changing the terms of distribution.
https://unity.com/pricing-updates
2) none of those imaginary people would be working on those other projects
This is looking like another Code Warrior moment, where would the Apple be today?, If they hadn’t rolled up their sleeves and designed X-code, it appears that we are reaching the end of third party game engines on the Mac?, how long do you think Apple is gonna go through this? Or should Apple close up shop to any games and go without any 3-D raytracing hardware (just added to A17 coincidentally and probably the M3) and say oh well we’re not gonna do anything in the future because some third-party software company isn’t available or are pulling a fast one? Remember Code Warrior an outside third-party developer.
Unity must have a death wish? They better look at what happened to Cold Warrior, Apple has had similar problems with Motorola, IBM and Intel, some technologies become too important to your future to let third-party outfits hold you hostage. Unity is over playing their hand in the same manner that Epic has, even if Apple puts a Band-Aid over it they probably are now thinking more seriously about whether or not they should make a game engine themselves which I’m sure a company as big as Apple has already considered. I think they will because of their past experience with Code Warrior, and the three companies that used to make CPUs for them.
In the end, if you want it done right you have to do it yourself? Maybe Unity is looking for a buyout?
https://www.osnews.com/story/11402/codewarrior-to-cease-development-on-os-x/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcode
https://metro.co.uk/2023/09/15/unity-gets-death-threats-from-its-own-employee-19505140
Outside studios can switch engine, albeit at great cost/time (probably a year or two for big studios), the employees will lose their income and potentially this will ruin the entire company they worked for years to build.
"As a unity employee until this morning, I assure you we fought like hell against this, brought up all the points everyone has, were told answers were coming, and then the announcement went out without warning. Those of us who care are out -- more resignations coming end of week."
The police report makes it sound different than the media reports. This comes across like an employee made an angry post on social media and the employer decided to press charges as a means of retaliation: