MAKING THE BEST GAME EVER
Me one year ago: I think I'll learn programming with Godot! Unity is probably more practical, but Godot is fun and cute and new and it'll be nice to learn coding in a playful environment isolated from my job, without the pressure of making it work for a career.
My best friend Apollo, Roman god of prophecy, DMing me at 9AM this morning: lmaooo okay I didn't want to say anything at the time but
some people have been going around saying the unity news isn't so bad because "it doesn't affect very many people" and
there are plenty of reasons to be nervous about a move like this even if it doesn't (currently) affect you
the indie studios that aren't getting millions in budget from venture capital but are still doing gamedev full-time professionally are already squeezed enough without unity skimming even more off the top
some people are acting like grossing 200k in a year for an entire studio is like winning the jackpot, when in reality between platform holders, publishers, and governments taking their cut what's left could well be far below subsistence wages for team members already
so yeah, a large percentage of unity users won't be affected, but a large percentage of the indie "middle class", who make a large number of the indie games most people enjoy, will be highly affected. and i don't think that's okay. i think that's worthy of some panic
like, here's a breakdown of 200k for a team of 4
wow! what wealth! and that's without even getting into the fact that there are non-salary expenses to making games and that games take multiple years to make so amortize that 1st year revenue over the 3 years it took to create and even without non-salary expenses you're looking at $6,000/year for your efforts
Fundamentally, the thing game devs want more than anything is stability. Consistency. Sameness. Devs spend 1-7 YEARS working on the same project and if there's ever at any point a risk that the fundamental tools the project relies on stop working during that process it is a major disaster. For that reason, the most appealing thing you can possibly offer to a dev is the promise of consistency.
Of course, that's completely at odds with modern infinite-growth strategies that are all about hiring up and losing money to corner a market, then cranking up prices. In this sense, unity was doomed the instant it went public. Absolutely no one in games wants to be market disrupted. They want their 4 year old copy of a video game engine to keep working, and that's it. But, you know. That doesn't bring in turbo profits, so.
Anyway, I'm low key hoping this works out for godot and other open-source alternatives.
sorry we haven'T smoked weed and are a mess we are smoking it right now everything good thumbs up emoji
