It's because of how accessible Unity is and if you have the free version you have to have users see the logo when it should be the other way around. You get asset flips from UE4 but they can hide it(the engine) better lol
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Epic, Improbable create $25 million fund to transition devs away from Unity
- Thread starter Shard Shinjuku
- Start date
Give me $25M and I'll happily switch to Unreal. For that matter, I'll even make the game exclusive to the Epic store! Our last game was only 270p but think of all the p's we could have with $25M. All the p's.
Even if it's 2D, just somehow have it look like the default post processing applied like all those Nintendo fan projects
Unity is allowing the devs to keep on working on the games, they don't need to switch off. Improbable should have notified the devs a year ago when Unity originally told them they were in violation of ToS (though after this Unity REALLY needs to redo their ToS)
Improbable's statements on the matter seem well reflected by this excerpt from their blog post: "Live games are now in legal limbo." Which seems to indicate concern but in vague/uncertain terms in regards to the legal rights of current developers. After all, they are speaking about policy that's being decided by Unity, not them. While it's definitely worth considering both claims, the company who is deciding this policy is Unity, and their official public statement on the matter denies any affect on already-ongoing development, which is mainly what I wanted to bring up as the Unity blog post is embedded deeper in the linked article anyway and some folks may not have seen it. It's always possible their statement doesn't line up with how that policy will be enacted going forward, but right now hearing it directly from them is the closest we've got to an official stance on the matter, and at least my perspective I feel like it would be a strange turnaround to so directly claim something publically and then reverse the stance on it, but I completely get where you're coming from in terms of it being a bit of a "this one said, that one said" situation.
been reading a bit more, and you're right. it's a strange situation. either Unity isn't reflecting what actually is their ToS, or improbable is being really coy(i mean, it feels like they were talking to epic when they did that first statement), and this was a bit of fear mongering. Risky move for Epic, somewhat, if Unity is being honest.
As another thing to consider, Unity has an extremely large presence in the Serious Games and medical simulation community.
Unity is very easy to pickup and has no entry fee. As a result small teams hoping to make educational tools are very likely to pick it up.
I don't think this alone will stop Unity but if it ever happened to go away this would be extremely harmful to some very good causes. As far as I know there aren't any good game engines to fill the specific role Unity plays.
If I'm wrong in this, please let me know (this is not sarcastic, it'd be beneficial to me to learn of alternatives)
Unity is very easy to pickup and has no entry fee. As a result small teams hoping to make educational tools are very likely to pick it up.
I don't think this alone will stop Unity but if it ever happened to go away this would be extremely harmful to some very good causes. As far as I know there aren't any good game engines to fill the specific role Unity plays.
If I'm wrong in this, please let me know (this is not sarcastic, it'd be beneficial to me to learn of alternatives)
Yeah unity were not smart to give ammo to the competitor that literally has an unlimited cash supply. They need to be very careful in order to retain market share.
I believe that unity will still be around - there are some things it does which are a nightmare in UE4, but with all this PR UE4 is firmly locking itself in as the first & last one newcomers will bother to use.
I believe that unity will still be around - there are some things it does which are a nightmare in UE4, but with all this PR UE4 is firmly locking itself in as the first & last one newcomers will bother to use.
$25 million is what's in Epic's 40% owner Papa Tencent's petty cash drawer.
I may not agree with quite a few recent decisions by Epic, but good on them here. Unity fucked up HARD, it's good to see someone doing something.
You would be 110% correct. I worked in R&D for University based projects in the medical field and for enterprise level VR apps for about 3 years, we never used UE4 because it just wasn't as easy to pick up and didn't do what we needed it to for these projects. I now work as a Unity dev for P&G, again developing enterprise applications that UE4 just can't do and isn't a good use case for.
Now this extends far out of just those fields, Unity is very scalable which gives it A LOT of advantages, but from browsing GAF/Reset for years I've learned at the end of the day it doesn't matter, if a hand full of people made asset flips that means the engine is shitty, but also at the same time don't know Cuphead or Hearthstone run on it.
Though again, with this Unity really REALLY needs to update that ToS to be much less vague.
$3 billion last year - thats surplus cash after all expenses. They have no fucking clue what to spend it on. it's a dangerous amount of money to have because if you invest it in growth you can end up sinking. so they're smartly sitting on it, spending what is essentially a pittance, and waiting to see where the fortnite train takes them.
they can probably even write this off as a charitable donation and get a tax break from it - using that to offset bonuses paid out to employees.
This really needs to go into the OP - giving away 25 million of a 3 billion cash reserve is the equivalent of someone who ears $50,000 a year giving away $400. Except they can claim tax breaks on that too.
This is not some altruistic act of charity, it's using spare change to fuck with a competitor.
This is not some altruistic act of charity, it's using spare change to fuck with a competitor.
TIL enforcing your TOS is "not smart"
And by that logic, Epic must be the biggest dummies on the block given how they utterly destroyed Silicon Knights for their TOS violations.
Yup, I have been using it since the 3.x.x days and it has changed in incredible ways since then, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. Unity will be a fantastic tool in two or three years time when their new stuff has really matured and is truly production ready, but the way there seems really bumpy from my point of view as someone who has developed with the engine for a very long time now.
The big problem with Unity from my point of view is the legacy parts of it (or rather what is the production ready configuration of it right now) and how underdeveloped a lot of features are compared to the competition. The SRP initiative is great, but it breaks compatibility with all high quality third party post processing/rendering assets. The job system and burst is incredibly performant, but structurally the engine rarely allow for anything to be read or set outside the main thread. ECS seems like a great next step to optimize the memory impact and access to various components, but it's still in very early days.
Tools like the post processing stack, timeline and cinemachine are really neat on paper, but everything about them is super simple when compared to the really incredible built in tools Unreal offers, the cinematic editor in Unreal legitimately feels like it was created by industry professionals at Adobe and not tech focused developers, the difference in tool quality is often shockingly big.
And that kinda ends my rant, I love working with Unity and I can create really cool optimized things with it, but I cannot help complaining about how slow the core toolset is evolving and how Unity Technologies as a company constantly tries to create services we can buy into when that development time should be spent elsewhere.
Yeah no I will agree with you there fully. I use Unity for work and rapid prototyping (I can whip up a pretty good prototype in about a week) but if UE4 got C# support I would go Unity > UE4 > Release then for any future video game project I work on independently.
Don't trust closed source software for your own projects. Use as little as possible and always make sure you retain the rights to your code and where to run it
That's completely true, by "official stance" I simply mean that in addition to TOS terms themselves the actual way Unity plans to enforce those terms or act within their rights is also relevant here. My original comment was purely in response to the notion that Unity will be taking action against all current SpatialOS Unity developers, which Unity is currently stating will not the case, regardless of their legal ability to do so.
Unity is more approachable than Unreal for sure by virtue of being a blank canvas, but inherently better is certainly not a word I would use. For some projects the tools in Unreal absolutely shine and deliver a content pipeline that is much more efficient and easier to use than what you see in Unity, it all depends on the team at hand.
Yeah, good C# support in unreal would be incredible, I love everything about Unreal except when it comes to programming C++ lol.
There was mono-ue which was promising, maybe Epic throws another $25mil their way and make it official? hahaha
I believe Fortnite alone brings in hundreds of millions a month. Nevermind the engine royalties, storefront or Tencent to fall back on.
This is on the same level as that Sony's "here is how you can trade/borrow games on PS4" video after Xbox One reveal. Except they turned around even quicker. I am not a fan of Epic or their store, but damn, they are on point.
Mobile brought in $460 something million. I am sure consoles and PC brought in more. So they made most likely over $1billion just last year.
Not risky at all for Epic. $25 million is chump change to them and they've given some devs an incentive to jump ship from their competitor at a time when their faith in them was shaken. Whether this TOS change ends up actually changing anything or not, it's probably scared some people in to second guessing using Unity for their next project and Epic is pouncing on that. At worst, they stick with Unity.
It's rumored they made 3 billion in profit last year, but it's from an anonymous source, so take with a load of salt. I wouldn't be surprised if they were at least close to that though.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/fortnite/fortnite-revenue-2018
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They should use that money to make a better engine, not pay off devs to not use the competition, that is embarrassing.
Takeaway for me- Improbable is sketchy as hell. $25 million is nice but seeing as all Unity has done is nothing more than remove a license due to TOS violations without impacting anyone but the TOS violator, I'd say Improbable is coming out looking pretty bad. Improbable is the one throwing around accusations but Unity has been pretty mellow on the whole thing-
1) Revoke Improbable's Unity license
2) Publish blog post saying only Improbable is effected and not anyone using their service.
Whole lot of smoke coming from Improbable while Unity's developers remain completely unaffected.
1) Revoke Improbable's Unity license
2) Publish blog post saying only Improbable is effected and not anyone using their service.
Whole lot of smoke coming from Improbable while Unity's developers remain completely unaffected.
Hell, seeing how they are just throwing money everywhere atm it must be true.
They've made millions in profit since you asked this question. Epic's fuck you money pile is taller than the world's largest skyscraper. No signs it will stop growing.
Lost in all this talk about "devs are not affected" is that the engine/middleware developer can no longer develop the software. So no bug fixes, no improvements, nothing. So the devs that are running ongoing/unreleased/live games are definitely affected. They're just not getting hit with legal action.