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Unity’s Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC
(mfkl.github.io)
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this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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They're mostly banking on the cost of change being higher than the inconvenience of staying.
They probably are, but it's not really about cost, it's about fear. I fear that while it costs $x to switch to Unreal Enigne now, it'll cost $x+10 after a few weeks when they do their next decision, and $x+20 a month or so after that.
Like buying a reverse lottery ticket. If you're unlucky, you suddenly have to pay a big amount somewhere in the future.
That description really fits all kinds of technical debt.
Agreed.
Except, you don't win a negative lottery prize so much as you take on someone's loanshark debt and now have to service it at insane interest rates.
Also I think there’s a vast majority of crap in app purchase games that will happily pay money to unity as they run their gacha systems. Real, honest developers care about stuff like this, but international game farms (the kind that always seem to be sponsoring YouTubers and streamers) are just running calculations on what it will cost them to keep using Unity.
And now that unity has backed down on pricing those devs are still raking in money, so they, as potentially unity’s biggest customers, and unity themselves, don’t care what more indie devs think as they push forward higher growth targets.
ah the mainframe strategy
The microsoft strategy.
Which signals to investors that there is little to no expected growth. If you aren't attracting new customers to grow your user base, then you only have the option to milk your existing customers to increase revenue.
That may work short term, but long term it signals a death knell for the company, since as the old customers retire or the studios close down, the new crop of game developers would have been trained on or adopted a different engine so aren't going to switch to Unity. Eventually they just run out of customers.
Especially in a competitive market where compelling alternatives exist.
Especially in tech.
And especially in software.
Yep, but the best part is because their core demographic is moronic, know-nothing-about-how-any-technology actually works, start-up indie game devs with basically only a dream and prayers combined with 'i have played some video games, it cant be /that hard/ to make one!' kinds of people...
...you can expect discussion around everything going on with Unity to be filled with irrelevant and infuriating opinions/beliefs/concerns that will eat up most discussions in most communities while also mocking and downplaying actually correct and actually relevant things.
It never fails to amaze and infuriate me how confidently completely wrong nearly all video game players are about literally everything about /creating/ video games.
Quick! Let's talk about supply-chain risks in modern tooling with app coding on enterprise platforms and the jeering techbros who downplay the risks as some personal attack to their tribe.
And any talk about moron-pushed software coding that seems to have survived in spite of itself, its techbro wunderkinder coders, best practice, and aggressively-spun critical concern from experienced experts, needs to include a concern about the "we tell ourselves to ignore its construction and lie about its ease of use and speed" vomit called systemd.
I worry that game coding is by no means the outlier here. And that we are at the edge of a Clue Precipice, about to take a momentous step.
Whew, wont lie, I am getting tired and I had to reread that a few times till it clicked.
SystemD... and Linux gaming.
I am far from an expert on systemd and its alternatives, but so far all what I at least think I know is:
SystemD is not as efficient as other paradigms could be,
It could potentially be a massive security vulnerability, or maybe not, or maybe so, or no one seems to agree on this and then everyone starts yelling,
I am reasonably confident that at least currently there are not any existing alternatives to SystemD that allow one to play much less develop basically somewhere between any to most games that involve 3d graphics.
Again, I could be completely wrong about all of this, absolutely beyond my experience and skill set to comment much more than:
A systemd alternative that would allow for modern kinds of multiplayer 3d online games would be really neat, but it seems like it would take a massive amount of effort that is at least nearly certainly beyond my ability to contribute to in any meaningful way.
That's all that matters. The next quarter's growth is more important than the year-end P/L sheets.
I moonlight as a small app developer. This is absolutely correct. I have a handful of legacy apps which uses Unity, and makes so little that moving them would cost more.
That said, if/when I do another project, it won't be in Unity.