[HN Gopher] Unity merges with IronSource
___________________________________________________________________
Unity merges with IronSource
Author : Luc
Score : 325 points
Date : 2022-07-13 11:03 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.unity.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.unity.com)
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Welp, glad I'm working on learning other engines now.
|
| I'll take another look at Godot when it hits 4.0
| TOMDM wrote:
| The Godot 4 alpha builds are surprisingly stable for playing
| around in, and feature wise pretty good too.
|
| Still not there for working on anything other than small toys
| or concepts yet, but once it's done it'll be great.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I didn't have a great time with Godot 3. I got stuck trying
| to call a function on a different game object. Find node
| didn't work.
|
| I'm hoping for Godot 4 to be a massive leap in quality/ ease
| of use. I'm also playing with some lower level tools.
| numlock86 wrote:
| So this is the nail on the coffin?
| inglor wrote:
| Nit for @dang or OP - it's ironSource not IronSource
|
| (This comment is not an endorsement of the merger which I'm
| personally not a fan of - we get an ad/installer company merging
| with the biggest non-AAA game engine company which creates all
| sort of problematic incentives)
| wccrawford wrote:
| I heard recently that most of Unity's money already comes from
| Unity Ads, so this is just the natural extension of that. It's
| sad, but that's our reality I guess.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That is what happens when the price of a whatevercinno is too
| much to ask for a game.
| zamalek wrote:
| > an ad/installer company
|
| Seems like Unity isn't too proud of that either. I wasn't able
| to figure out what ironSource do from the first few paragraphs
| due to them dancing around the truth.
| Luc wrote:
| I used 'ironSource' when I posted. It must have been changed
| some time after by a moderator.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > we get an ad/installer company merging with the biggest non-
| AAA game engine company which creates all sort of problematic
| incentives)
|
| Whatever pushes people closer to Godot. Seriously though, the
| only thing I see that Unity has that Godot lacks is a rich
| asset / resource store, with lots and lots of options for
| whatever you want to build your game with. I would think the
| maintainers could produce such a store to facilitate funding
| the project and even provide their own offerings like code
| snippets for specific game types and then keep 100% of those
| proceeds (aside from payment vendor fees) towards the project.
|
| It's either that or someone, somewhere with free time and
| energy builds their own and donates to Godot for every asset
| bought.
|
| I really like Godot but I'm only a dev, I don't have time to
| design my own graphics, I just want to code different ideas to
| see how they go and go from there, I just want to download a
| few assets and get cracking, and right now that is far easier
| to do with Unity than it is with Godot it seems like. I think
| Godot adopting a Unity importer might help significantly.
| pixelbyindex wrote:
| As someone who uses (has used?) GoDot, would you say it may
| become to games what blender is to 3d modeling? It's such a
| huge slowdown to move from something you know (unity) into
| something new
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Godot doesn't have the same platform support. So if you want
| to publish to a console then Unity is still a better option.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| I can think of a few others, though I did move from Unity to
| Godot and never looked back so clearly they're not deal
| breakers (for me):
|
| - Doesn't handle 3D as well. Mostly optimisation stuff,
| though also things like procedural sky/sun is weaker I find
| with Godot than Unity. Though almost all of that are looking
| to change with Godot 4.
|
| - As you mention asset store, but also just the size of the
| community. Can't really blame Godot for this though, their
| documentation is certainly very good which is about as much
| as they can do.
|
| - GDScript is a great language, but I'm not a big fan of
| using engine-specific languages, rather than a generic one
| like C#. Of course it has its advantages, but it means you
| also miss out on whatever package manager comes with the
| language. Bindings remedy this, but they're not a simple out-
| the-box experience.
|
| - Similar to above, GDScript and a lot of areas of the engine
| feel more strongly orientated towards fast and easy dev time
| rather than game performance. Its a personal choice so I
| can't complain much, and again bindings can help, but out the
| box GDScript of course isnt as fast as C# with ECS.
|
| Thats about all I can think of, and as I say I use, and
| overall love, Godot so despite my complaints theres still
| more going for it than against it (for me)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > but it means you also miss out on whatever package
| manager comes with the language.
|
| I didn't even consider that! Good call out!
|
| > Similar to above, GDScript and a lot of areas of the
| engine feel more strongly orientated towards fast and easy
| dev time rather than game performance.
|
| Correct me if I'm wrong or way off, but isn't GDNative (or
| whatever it might be called now) basically for those
| moments where you need a little more beef, but don't want
| to rebuild the entire engine, so you bring in Rust or D or
| any other language you know and love and bridge it in
| through GDNative?
| bodge5000 wrote:
| Yeh so the bindings with GDNative do absolutely help
| performance, and I imagine Rust with Godot would be even
| faster than Unity with C# (You can also use GDNative to
| add ECS as well I believe), but out the box, and
| therefore likely the direction Godot is heading in, seems
| to favour workflow above performance.
|
| That being said, it could be a "grass is greener" issue.
| There are plenty of engines that offer better performance
| but a worse workflow, Unity for one, that I'm not using
| and instead using Godot, and I guess bindings are as
| close as reasonably feasible to getting the best of both
| worlds, so I cant complain much.
| tfigment wrote:
| Stride probably has a better chance at being Unity compatible
| being .NET and similar but it needs more polish to take on
| Unity. I only recently heard of it as it was used in Distant
| Worlds 2 but that game had an unfortunate launch and lots of
| bugs/compatibility issues.
| papruapap wrote:
| prob is a matter of time before their force ads in the unity
| free-tier, all roads lead to Rome, good news for Godot I guess.
| Animats wrote:
| _" This tighter integration between Unity's Create and Operate
| means a more powerful flywheel and data feedback loop that
| further supports creators' success and understanding of what's
| working between gameplay, design and their monetization
| efforts."_
|
| Aargh. Now what, built-in NFTs?
|
| Ads in games have mostly been failures. You can sell items to
| your users, but ads in games are a bad fit. Either they interrupt
| gameplay, or they're ignored in-game product placement. This is
| also true for "metaverse" systems. It's not clear there's any
| role for "brands" in the metaverse. The systems which are
| profitable don't have them.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > but ads in games are a bad fit
|
| Au contraire. Casual mobile games is the new television, and
| ads on television is a _huge_ market. Or was a huge market;
| that spend will now eventually flow towards personal devices,
| a.k.a. mobile games.
| w-j-w wrote:
| mrguyorama wrote:
| They're being more honest than you realize. In that quote they
| are basically saying they want this to make it easier for you
| to better target and milk the whales who play your stupid free-
| to-play mobile game. "Gameplay" here is being used the same as
| the gambling industry
| huhtenberg wrote:
| From Wikipedia: ironSource focuses on
| developing technologies for app monetization and
| distribution, with its core products focused on the app
| economy.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > With ironSource, Unity will take the linear process of making
| games and RT3D content and experiences and make it an
| interconnected and interactive one - creating the opportunity to
| innovate and improve at every step of the cycle.
|
| > What if that process was no longer "first create; then
| monetize?" What if creators had an engine for live games that by
| default enabled them to gain early indicators of success for
| their games through user acquisition of their prototype, and gave
| them a feedback loop to improve their games based on real player
| interactions as early in the process as possible?
|
| Sounds like utter nonsense to me. Does anyone have an optimistic
| take on what this is trying to say in a good direction? I'm
| reading it as shipping more unfinished games, possibly with more
| ads
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| Sounds like Steam early access with metics and feedback. Maybe
| it's referencing social media campaign to measure interest
| during the early prototype stage like star citizen has been
| doing.
| anttiharju wrote:
| (Disclaimer I'm an intern at Unity but I don't think I know
| anything more about the merger than what was in the article.)
|
| My thoughts go to musicians choosing what songs to finish and
| publish by picking the ones whose short clips get popular on
| TikTok.
|
| Not sure if these two are comparable though.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| They want to turn their proprietary metaverse into a licensing
| cash cow using creator labor, thats the play. Each engine is
| doing their own version of the metaverse.
| thsbrown wrote:
| Couldn't be any more vague if they tried.
| echelon wrote:
| Watch Twitch. See VRChat and VTubers. Minecraft and Roblox.
|
| Games are going to turn into sandboxes and movies and full
| creativity engines.
|
| Epic and Unity realize this and are ahead of the trend.
| Microsoft and Meta get it too, it's just not been realized yet.
| kaetemi wrote:
| Ah, like open source games where development drags on forever,
| and the player base is thinly spread out over time.
| bdefore wrote:
| Right? It disparages not putting profits first in the act of
| creation, but doesn't explain how its offering solves this
| problem. Instead it describes how to improve feedback loops. It
| leaves as an exercise to the reader how user acquisition leads
| to money. Filthy.
| sempron64 wrote:
| Some folks in this thread are characterizing this as a one-sided
| acquisition but what I did not realize was that ironSource is a
| public company
|
| ironSource ltd: mkt cap ~3bn Unity ltd: mkt cap 10bn
|
| This is an all-stock deal
| https://seekingalpha.com/news/3856307-ironsource-surges-afte...
|
| Ironsource also has 30-50% the number of employees as Unity:
|
| https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ironsource
| https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/unity-technologies
|
| So this definitely can be characterized as a merger.
| thsbrown wrote:
| Given that Unity and ironSource stock prices have both dropped
| fairly substantially I wonder how that factors in to the deal
| going through at this time.
|
| Does that make this a better deal for one vs the other?
|
| It says ironSource share will trade for ~10% of a Unity share.
| Given that Unity is at around ~$33 a share and ironSource is
| ~$3 a share was the attempt to just combine forces for the
| benefit of both parties?
|
| Sorry if this is coming off as a dumb question, trying to
| understand how this works to the benefit of disadvantage of
| them both.
| yywwbbn wrote:
| Well Unity is paying a 70% premium over what Iron Source was
| worth yesterday so it doesn't sound like such a great
| decision financially. Also the absolute share price is not
| really that relevant since companies hardly ever have the
| same amount of shares.
| telchior wrote:
| To me this looks like typical ad industry consolidation. It's
| part of the eternal circle of advertising: when a new ad
| format shows up (radio, TV, web, mobile, etc) a zillion
| little companies pop up. Twenty years later there are just a
| handful of big players.
|
| Unity made the choice to get into ads quite a few years ago
| when they acquired a company called Applifier. They ended up
| doing really well in mobile ads. IronSource, similarly, has
| done pretty well. But they're now competing with companies
| like Google, Facebook and Apple who have way more weight to
| throw around. At the least, if Unity had not done this
| acquisition, it leaves IronSource to be acquired or merged
| with someone else.
|
| You could say, why is Unity in the ad business at all? But
| they're in way too deep to back out now. Ads are a huge chunk
| of their revenue. Trying to gobble up smaller competitors
| just makes sense in terms of trying to be one of the eventual
| survivors.
| Devasta wrote:
| It'll be very interesting to see the impact on the games market 5
| years from now on this, no competant business is going to use
| Unity for new projects after this.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Not sure what to think about this.
|
| I was hoping unity would be _the way_ for the indie studio to
| build AAA experiences (and indeed it seems to have already
| achieved that in some areas), but this kind of _merger_ makes me
| skeptical about the long-term viability of that vision.
|
| I do currently hold a long position in Unity, but this whole
| thing is starting to feel a bit yucky to me. Between Godot, UE,
| and the vast unknown of undeveloped engines, I think I need to
| re-evaluate my strategy.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| I can recommend godot. Got into it last weekend and compared to
| unity it runs like a dream. No freezing for seconds every time
| you make a change to a script
| grapeskin wrote:
| I really wish I weren't years into a major Unity project,
| because I'd love to make the leap. Every single time I see
| Unity in the news these days, I simply think "oh god, not
| again."
| mordae wrote:
| While a Godot fan, there are some serious rough edges all
| over the place.
|
| Godot 4 finally solves the insane widget sizing/positioning
| hell, but is still itself super unstable (scenes corrupted
| between alpha releases) and buggy (scenes broken on clean
| import).
|
| It's going to take at least another year for it to stabilize
| and be close to production.
|
| Meanwhile, the 3.x branch is simply lacking features.
|
| It's OK for 2D, though. If you can stomach the UI widget
| hell.
| thsbrown wrote:
| My feelings exactly. Lately I feel like Unity is getting
| wrecked by Unreal. I consistently look at Unreal acquisitions
| and developments and think, wow they are adding immense value
| to game developers / designers there.
|
| I have held off on migrating over, given that (from what I have
| read), I agree with Unity's long term vision (move to .net,
| package manager, rendering pipelines, UI toolkit, dots). The
| real question for me though is if they are going to pull it
| off, or get derailed along the way.
| radiKal07 wrote:
| Unreal is definetly better than Unity in the 3D space but for
| 2D it's still better to go with Unity
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| For 2D you still have some other options though. GameMaker,
| even with all its faults, still gives indie devs plenty of
| room to make good games. And there's also the route of
| using more barebone frameworks like MonoGame or actually
| make your own little game engine in C++ or C#. (You'll be
| surprised how many 2D indie games were created in this
| way!)
| bob1029 wrote:
| > I agree with Unity's long term vision (move to .net,
| package manager, rendering pipelines, UI toolkit, dots). The
| real question for me though is if they are going to pull it
| off, or get derailed along the way.
|
| I've had more time to think about this. Unity effectively has
| a golden goose of an ecosystem _right now_ and they 're about
| to murder it with boardroom bullshit. How much energy was
| spent on this merger that could have been redirected to
| doubling-down on the tech stack? Multiplayer could _really_
| use some more attention, IMO.
|
| It's definitely not too late for them to correct course, but
| I've seen this path so many times I do not reserve any hope.
| I took a loss on my entire Unity position this morning to get
| out from under any future bad decisions.
| thsbrown wrote:
| > I've had more time to think about this. Unity effectively
| has a golden goose of an ecosystem right now and they're
| about to murder it with boardroom bullshit. How much energy
| was spent on this merger that could have been redirected to
| doubling-down on the tech stack? Multiplayer could really
| use some more attention, IMO.
|
| I see your point, but in a way I think this merger makes
| sense to prioritize. I would argue the majority of their
| user base is using the engine in its current form for
| mobile development. Unfortunately Unity doesn't have a
| golden goose like fortnight to draw revenue while they are
| internally improving the engine. It stands to reason if
| they can draw in more revenue from ads from their pre-
| existing user base they have more money to keep them afloat
| when times are tough while they continue engine
| improvements.
|
| To be honest I don't like it. I would much rather they
| double down on fixing the engine and solidifying
| preexisting solutions. But I do think there might be a
| method to their madness.
|
| You might be right though, it might just be boardroom
| bullshit haha. I'm still holding out hope. And in the
| meantime I'm going to diversify my engine knowledge.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| The real issue IMO isn't that they aren't doubling down on
| the tech stack or paying attention to multiplayer. It's
| that are doing that but have gone full Google and kill
| these projects after they enter alpha or beta.
|
| For multiplayer there was the original UNet, then the FPS
| Multiplayer Demo stack, then HLAPI/MLAPI, now we're getting
| "Netcode for GameObjects".
|
| That also means their new tech stack rewrite for ECS won't
| get multiplayer support until they release "Netcode for
| ECS" at some later date.
|
| There's stuff like buying Bolt and then depreciating it
| months later for Unity Visual Scripting.
|
| It's like they have a ton of teams working on rewriting the
| engine but none of them communicate and often find out
| they've been rewriting the same feature as another team.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| > For multiplayer there was the original UNet, then the
| FPS Multiplayer Demo stack, then HLAPI/MLAPI, now we're
| getting "Netcode for GameObjects".
|
| This doesn't seem like the correct timeline of events.
| Anyway, if you want a clearer picture why they decided to
| throw the packages away, I recommend reading the source
| and/or trying to use them. For your reference:
| https://github.com/needle-mirror/com.unity.multiplayer-
| hlapi
|
| > That also means their new tech stack rewrite for ECS
| won't get multiplayer support until they release "Netcode
| for ECS" at some later date.
|
| Uhhhh? The package is literally right there. It's one of
| the very earliest ECS packages they published, I think.
| They also reaffirmed that the package is in active
| development internally. https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages
| /com.unity.netcode@0.51/man...
|
| > There's stuff like buying Bolt and then depreciating it
| months later for Unity Visual Scripting.
|
| Bolt _is_ Unity Visual Scripting. I really don 't know
| what you find so offending here (maybe except Unity's
| inability to develop their own tools in-house).
|
| > It's like they have a ton of teams working on rewriting
| the engine but none of them communicate and often find
| out they've been rewriting the same feature as another
| team.
|
| I can't come up with a single example of this. Unity
| occasionally has a tendency to develop a "vnext" tool
| while still supporting a "legacy" tool, which seems great
| for backwards compatibility (and for long-running
| projects), but it just keeps confusing people endlessly.
| I don't like Unity, but hell, I don't envy them for
| constantly having to deal with this shit either.
| Ksienrzycowy wrote:
| The only "AAA Experience" you can squeeze out of Unity is
| hardware requirements for your game. Use Unity and you have
| guaranteed worse performance than AAA titles for the next 10
| years at least.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> If you don't know ironSource, they bring a proven record of
| helping creators focus on what creators do best - bringing great
| apps and user experiences to life - while enabling business
| expansion in the app economy. ironSource's suite of tools and
| solutions provides the majority of the world's top games and many
| of the leading non-gaming apps with the monetization, marketing,
| analytics, and discovery capabilities they need to build and run
| scalable app-based businesses._
|
| I'm sorry. I must be dense. I still don't understand what
| IronSource does. I thought, from the name, that it was like
| Perforce, but that is obviously not correct.
| Jensson wrote:
| They run mobile game monetization, like micro transactions and
| ads. There is a reason they don't want to be open about that,
| everyone hates that and thinks it is toxic, but it generates a
| ton of money.
| cheschire wrote:
| Right, which makes the condescending tone of "if you don't know
| this company" even more egregious. They easily could've
| rephrased that to talk about ironsource's strengths without
| making a subconscious concession to the fact that 99% of their
| audience has never heard of this company they are MERGING with,
| not acquiring.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| I mean, the phrasing might be needlessly contrived, but I
| fully understood what the company does (despite never having
| heard the name): Ad service and monetization. Granted, if
| you're not the type of game/app developer that Unity targets,
| you might not realize that this type of company even exists
| or how important they have become in recent years. But the
| quote perfectly describes what they do without going into
| unnecessary details.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I suspect that may be because you are familiar with the
| context.
|
| I now know what they do, thanks to these comments, but that
| blurb I quoted is almost the Platonic Ideal for "Marketing
| Dross," and tells me exactly nothing, in many words.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| At this point one my argue who Unity writes their blog
| posts for. But then again if you simply filter out the
| marketing speech, you'll end up with a pretty good,
| simplified description:
|
| >If you don't know ironSource, they bring a proven record
| of helping creators [...] bringing apps and user
| experiences to life. ironSource's suite of tools and
| solutions provides [...] apps with the monetization,
| marketing, analytics, and discovery capabilities they
| need to build and run scalable app-based businesses.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Fair 'nuff, but I've spent most of my adult life, trying
| to explain fairly arcane technical stuff to non-technical
| people, so tend to use the vernacular.
|
| I'd probably say something like _" IronSource provides
| infrastructure to help game distributors make money off
| ads and measure the way their games are used."_
|
| Maybe also followed by _" And they will make us FREAKIN'
| RICH!"_
| dotancohen wrote:
| Has any merger actually worked out well for the consumer?
| Boeing / McDonnell Douglas, Chrysler / Daimler, HP / Compaq.
| Are there any counterexamples?
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| There are a lot of mergers with B2B sales, not consumer
| sales, that you don't hear about that have gone perfectly
| fine.
| mepian wrote:
| Apple and NeXT is the only counterexample I can immediately
| think of.
| stemlord wrote:
| >helping creators focus on what creators do best
|
| Every time
| system16 wrote:
| They're being deliberately vague. Adware and analytics.
| ravivyas wrote:
| Ironsource is an Ad mediation platform much like MoPub was and
| is popular with Mobile Games. Their largest competitor being
| Applovin.
|
| In addition they have their own ad network, and a game
| publishing studio https://supersonic.com/
|
| They recently also ventured into the App Analytics space.
| ev1 wrote:
| Is this the same supersonic as supersonicads? If it is, the
| only time I have _ever_ seen them is basically convincing
| children like me at the time to download malware in exchange
| for $0.01 in free to play mobile game credits...
|
| The ads they served were absolute bottom of the barrel awful,
| no legitimate brands, not even like clash of clans or
| anything - half their 'offers' were lockscreen ad APKs that
| installed themselves as unremovable device administrators
| that would kill play store and settings if you tried to open
| them.
|
| If you played F2P games, mobile games, korean free MMOs
| probably starting from a few years ago, maybe half a decade
| ago, you will likely eventually remember SupersonicAds,
| Peanutlabs, Tapjoy (also purchased by ironsource), Matomy.
|
| Tapjoy (now IS) would not pay out even after you installed
| the shitware: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
| releases/2021/01/...
|
| SupersonicAds would collect IMEI, ESN, etc as long as they
| could https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_event
| s/122... + wrote code bad enough and delivered their loaders
| over plaintext http to the point that google play was
| blocking apps including their sdk at one point
| ravivyas wrote:
| Nope.. different.
|
| That being said .. many Mobile game ads are ..
| questionable.. but work for the publishers because you can
| trust humans to do shitty things. Check out
| https://www.reddit.com/r/shittymobilegameads/
| shmatt wrote:
| Different, but they also bought Supersonic Ads. I knew a
| handful of their employees, it was a good company until
| IronSource took over in 2015. Every single one tried to
| pinch their nose and stay on at IronSource but left within
| months
| ev1 wrote:
| so IS owns both "supersonic studios" and "supersonic
| ads"? (though unsure if there is a difference anymore
| since the latter redirects to supersonic.com)
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| They sell a platform for ads and analytics in games.
| pixelbyindex wrote:
| Does anyone have experience shipping monetized games that do not
| rely on ads? Were any of these titles successful? What are your
| monetization models?
|
| I, for one, hate ads. I will do anything to avoid using ads, but
| I also need to put food on the table at some point.
| throwawayzz39 wrote:
| Multiplayer games can get way more revenue (like 10x) from in-
| app purchases than ads, and ads are actually surprisingly
| maintenance-heavy.
| thsbrown wrote:
| Definitely agree with the maintenance heavy. They are a
| nightmare to test and maintain.
|
| Really hope they do something about making them easier to
| integrate and debug overall.
| badRNG wrote:
| > Does anyone have experience shipping monetized games that do
| not rely on ads? Were any of these titles successful?
|
| I don't think I've ever played a PC or console game that relied
| on ads for revenue (nor would I ever.)
| kroltan wrote:
| I don't know if they _rely_ on it, but recent NBA 2K games
| apparently have interstitial ads, even though it's a full-
| price 60USD game with yearly releases already.
|
| Absolutely disgusting, I already doubt the value of yearly
| releases, as you basically pay for an updated roster, but
| this is just overreach.
| thsbrown wrote:
| Not exactly answering your question here, but I shipped a
| mobile game worldwide about a year ago with both ads and
| ability to unlock whole game via purchase to unlock.
|
| My ads are as unintrusive as I could implement (watching an ad
| via button press to unlock a level). So far I have seen mostly
| iOS users are willing to purchase the game while Android users
| will heavily lean towards watching an ad to unlock a level.
| From what I have read (and seen so far) it looks as though the
| way I'm implementing ads is going to be highly unprofitable
|
| Additionally integrating ads in general was a huge pain in the
| ass. I initially looked to Unity, then Admob, and finally
| mediation of the two. Funnily enough at one point I looked at
| mediation via ironsource along the way as I had heard their
| Unity integration was pretty good.
|
| If your curious as to the exact monetization mechanisms you can
| check them via my game below.
|
| [1] https://commandcenterearth.com
| linuxftw wrote:
| On mobile, the best model seems to be FTP with ads, then a
| small amount ($5) to permanently remove ads.
|
| I don't develop games, but if I did, this would be a great
| addition, if I could 1-click this workflow to drive revenue.
|
| This could also have quite the network effect on the ad network
| itself. You're now able to say 'All Unity apps ship with this
| network' yada yada.
|
| The dark pattern will be "All games now ship with ads, and
| developers don't benefit from the ads" type stuff in order to
| drive premium subscriptions from developers. That or instead of
| the developer getting the 70% cut of the $5 'remove ads'
| purchase, they're instead going to get 40% and Unity gets the
| other 30%. I'm sure they'll figure out how to enforce
| monetization.
| munificent wrote:
| I think the key problem is that attention is the only currency
| that many children have access to.
|
| Many many many kids have mobile devices now, along with tons of
| free time and a strong desire to play games. What they _don 't_
| often have is access to a credit card to purchase games or do
| in-app purchases. I think that a big part of why so many games
| lean on ads is because it's essentially the main currency that
| kids have access to: their own time.
| laurencei wrote:
| They have a sub-title in their article "Redefining the game
| engine - this is more than ads"
|
| Then they go on to say "Advertising has long been and we believe
| will continue to be the economic engine for mobile games, driving
| players into their games and driving revenue at scale"
|
| Then finally "It also reinforces our strong conviction in the
| long-term strength and growth of the in-game advertising
| business"
|
| Seems like they are just doubling down on the ads in games
| mainstream...
| ravivyas wrote:
| They actually doubled down when they started building their own
| Ads mediation platform after having an AdNetwork, but they
| struggled to grow. Their targeting tool "Pinpointer" failed and
| showed up on an earnings call.
| birracerveza wrote:
| It makes sense considering 99% of Android "games", whose
| revenue models are entirely based on ads, are built on Unity.
| nemacol wrote:
| "driving players into their games"
|
| I don't know anyone that plays a game because of the ads that
| are in it. I must be misunderstanding what they are saying?
| RugnirViking wrote:
| presumably they mean adverts elsewhere for the game they are
| being driven to. Although of course if those other places are
| also mobile games, there is a certain bizarre oroboros to the
| whole idea... talk about zero-sum games, this is negative-sum
| GrinningFool wrote:
| It does seem to be a circle: games carry adverts. The
| overwhelming majority of adverts is for more games. If you
| get the advertised game, you're now seeing ads in that game
| for more games...
|
| Mobile games are a weird, impossibly self-sustaining beast.
| Developers (usually have to) dump money into advertising,
| even as their own games are advertising the competition.
| techdragon wrote:
| Which as many people I've talked with about the mobile
| game industry tell me... is a cold calculated game of
| roulette, you burn money in adds trying to get enough
| attention to yourself that some whales spend enough on in
| game purchases to let the whole thing make some money...
| it's a very "luck" driven market and they often are just
| experimenting with for side projects, which is one of the
| many less evil ways money flows into the mobile game
| advertising ecosystem.
| ratww wrote:
| The "luck driven" part is definitely true for Unity's
| whole niche. You can hear reports online of people
| "hustling", trying to hit jackpot, leaving jobs in order
| to spend a year doing random mobile in games to see what
| sticks.
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| There was a GDC talk telling a a story where two bored
| indie game devs made an AI that churns out throwaway low-
| quality slot machine games as a joke, but actually earned
| much more money they they've expected (thousands of dollars
| per day). They jokingly told that the reason for high CPU
| numbers was their "anti-retention" model, where people get
| so bored by their game that they would literally click ads
| to escape into another game!
|
| That talk was hilarious, here's the link:
| https://youtu.be/E8Lhqri8tZk
| wongarsu wrote:
| Free mobile games are full of ads for microtransaction-driven
| mobile games.
| bluescrn wrote:
| The ads in smaller games push players away from those games,
| while pushing ever more players into the F2P megahits that
| are perpetually at the top of the store charts and still rake
| in millions per day (and therefore have great big advertising
| budgets).
|
| There's little point trying to enter the mobile game market
| at this point.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Perhaps by making games ad supported where there otherwise
| would've been pay first or subscription based
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I think the idea was to try and say "by hooking this into an ad
| platform, you'll get useful analytics like adoption rates, even
| if you're not serving ads," but the writer couldn't quite sell
| themselves to it.
|
| I'm gonna guess there was a first draft of the doc that was
| basically "this is only about ads," but then someone who
| reviewed the doc said "this sounds terrible, explain how it's
| more than just ads," so they added a "this isn't just about
| ads" section and tried to come up with a list of bullet points,
| but they had very limited success because it wasn't true.
| yolo123 wrote:
| For those who are considering other engines, try Godot Engine.
| It's open source and free to use. https://godotengine.org/
| radiKal07 wrote:
| No consoles support
| klaussilveira wrote:
| It does support consoles: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/lat
| est/tutorials/platform/co...
|
| > In other words, there is no engine that is legally allowed
| to distribute console export templates without requiring the
| user to prove that they are a licensed console developer.
| Doing so would violate the console manufacturer's NDA.
|
| Just not out in the public.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| From the page you linked:
|
| _Console ports of Godot are offered by third-party
| companies (which have ported Godot on their own)._
|
| Maybe it is semantics but it Sounds more like no console
| support. You pay a third party to port your game to
| consoles. Perhaps those third parties have built support
| into Godot, but as you said, it is not public, and not
| accessible to you other than as a paid service.
| techdragon wrote:
| It's about commercial contracts and NDAs and that sort of
| thing. You can't share the console SDKs, so you can't
| ship the features with the rest of the code due to
| contract reasons, so after your done, you share for a
| nominal fee (because contract/business reasons) the
| bindings between Godot and the console SDk, and then the
| studio who wants their game on console still has to get
| all the console SDk contract stuff done before they can
| actually build and test a console version.
|
| I've looked into it with both Unreal, Unity, and a couple
| random engines that advertised their explicit support for
| various consoles... there is always some business
| contract stuff with the console owner company before
| you'll ever be able to compile for the console, and then
| depending on the engine there is sometimes a deal you'll
| have to cut with the company that built the console
| specific code/middleware/port/shim/adapter/etc ... no
| game engine ships out of the box with a "build for
| XBox/Switch/PlayStation button" even in Unreal you'll
| need the platform SDK installed and wired up which is
| documented from the Unreal side, but not provided, you
| have to get all the other half from the console vendor.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| ...no console support, then.
|
| > no game engine ships out of the box with a "build for
| XBox/Switch/PlayStation button"
|
| Nobody's putting the bar this high. I just want console
| support, I don't care much if I need to log in to
| Nintendo's website to download it. I'll need to go there
| to publish the game _either way_.
|
| > in Unreal you'll need the platform SDK installed and
| wired up which is documented from the Unreal side, but
| not provided, you have to get all the other half from the
| console vendor.
|
| Sounds absolutely fantastic, can I get that for Godot?
| ajdude wrote:
| > no game engine ships out of the box with a "build for
| XBox/Switch/PlayStation button"
|
| It looks like GameMaker Studio's Enterprise version does
| this, albeit for 2d games (and it's $800/year).
|
| https://gamemaker.io/en/blog/export-with-gamemaker
|
| https://gamemaker.io/en/blog/nintendo-switch-now-
| available
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Sure but the lack of transparent pricing is not
| appealing. As far as I can tell Unreal's Playstation/Xbox
| support is free on the engine side once you sign the
| console SDK stuff. Unity's comes with their Unity Pro
| subscription, which has a known price.
|
| How much does the console Godot engine cost me?
| datavirtue wrote:
| There are other issues. By all means, try it out!
| japhib wrote:
| This, right after laying off HUNDREDS of staff ...
|
| Source: https://kotaku.com/unity-ironsource-merger-ad-tech-
| layoffs-1...
| taken_username wrote:
| It seems acquisition and merger wave of failed SPACs is started.
| I think we will see many of these in the upcoming months.
| Schweigi wrote:
| IronSource went public last year via SPAC at over $10B of
| market cap. The merger or rather aquisition? happens now at
| $4B. Definitely a big loss for many of the investors and most
| likely a lot of the employees who couldn't get out fast enough.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Still, if you're going to catch a falling knife, best to do
| so before it hits the floor.
| drusepth wrote:
| A falling knife has no handle. It's always best to catch
| the knife after it's settled on the ground. ;)
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Why is it adverstised as a merge and not an acquisition?
|
| ironSource is a much smaller company than Unity, if I am not
| mistaken.
| bigtones wrote:
| They're just labelling it a merger for optics - it's absolutely
| an acquisition with one party buying the other.
| mmacvicarprett wrote:
| As of today, unity is worth 10-12bi, Ironsrc intended to go
| public at around 11bi last year, now they are being acquired
| at 4.4bi. Ironsrc main competitor, AppLovin is worth 12bi.
| Ironsrc 2021 revenue was 553m, Unity revenue was 1.1bi.
| However, Ironsrc had a net income of 21m and Unity had a net
| loss of 531m. Both hold around 0.7bi and 1bi in cash
| respectively.
|
| So is Ironsrc much smaller? I do not think so.
| thsbrown wrote:
| I agree, however I'm curious what the incentive for calling
| it a merge is? Is it part of the deal with ironSource?
|
| Do they, for some reason think that merge sounds better then
| acquired? Because I'm in the camp that acquired would be more
| appealing.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Merger sounds much better to the employees of Iron source.
| techdragon wrote:
| Does anyone there actually care about that... based on
| the history behind the company (well documented by other
| commentators on this story here) I can't imagine
| management give a flying fuck about anything or anyone,
| except the money.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| This whole press release was written for the executives
| of both companies, maybe the shareholders, but certainly
| not the employees, and definitely not the public.
| psyc wrote:
| The optics are atrocious for Unity.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| But a merger is a different thing. Can you just say you're a
| merger if you're not _merging_ two entities to form a new
| entity?
| xg15 wrote:
| Alright, "temporary challenges due to macroeconomic factors" will
| definitely go on this year's bullshit shortlist.
| drusepth wrote:
| Been using Unity for almost 2 years. Had no wavering when Unreal
| demoed lumen, metahumans, etc, nor when Unity doubled down on
| mobile games (even though it's not my market). I've always liked
| how Unity doesn't respond to what other engines are doing and
| instead has just forged forward with what they've always worked
| toward; it's always been ol' reliable in terms of functionality
| and future.
|
| However, I don't know how to interpret this in any other way than
| an exit plan for Unity. It's not an aquisition of ironSource, but
| a merger; this alone is a big change, but the release itself
| paints a clear picture of a complete reversal for unity: rather
| than being a capable dev tool for all platforms + non-games, it
| looks like they're now going to focus entirely on mobile and non-
| game applications? That's finally enough for me to consider a new
| engine (probably Unreal, maybe Godot).
|
| I'm not inherently against whatever this hand-wavy solution to
| "first create; then monetize" is they're proposing, even though
| it'll 100% result in more low-effort, highly-monetized games that
| already plague the industry. I still have a lot of faith in Unity
| as a company and a paradigm pivot like this _could_ result in
| something new if they play their cards right but... this being a
| merger puts a big question mark on what cards they 'll have left
| to play when merging their deck with ironSource.
|
| In short: there's a small chance this news will be very good
| long-term, but a high chance this news will turn out very bad for
| the future of Unity and unity devs that don't want to work with
| the kind of scammy monetization ironSource is known for.
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| I don't recognize this company anymore. What a gibberish
| announcement. Their game engine is hardly discussed. Apparently
| the future is ads on mobile apps.
| vvillena wrote:
| Not the future. It's the present, and the reason behind this
| acquisition.
|
| I agree, it's a bit sad to see.
| thsbrown wrote:
| As a game developer with a released mobile game made with
| Unity I'll admit I had very mixed feelings about the news.
|
| On one end it makes me wonder if Unity has it's priorities
| straight. On the other, I think there is definitely a lot of
| room for improvement with their own ad solution. Not too
| mention in order to fund any further improvements in the
| engine Unity needs to make money. Given that they produce no
| games of their own, it makes sense that they are expanding
| and improving their suite of services in order to bring in
| more revenue.
|
| At least that's my hope. Unity has been in a rocky place for
| a while now (straddling the line between what it is and what
| it wants to be) and I think news like this combined with the
| layoffs can lead many to wonder if Unity is still committed
| to making a world class game engine that can grow with them
| for years to come.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Unity has been in a rocky place for a while now
| (straddling the line between what it is and what it wants
| to be)
|
| Yeah, they tried to compete with Unreal for some reason,
| and of course they lost. And when doing so they made the
| engine worse for small creators. For example it got a lot
| slower after they changed the asset database in the 2019.3
| version, it feels horrible to use after that and just
| creating a new project now takes minutes.
| jayd16 wrote:
| As a game dev and not a small creator I'd say Unity feels
| far more consistent and bug free, both editor and
| runtime. I can't say it's much faster but I wouldn't say
| it's slower.
| Jensson wrote:
| I profiled this before and after the change using the
| same code files, the asset reload time is definitely much
| slower, and asset reloads also triggers a lot of times
| unnecessarily, often it reloads assets once when you
| select the editor window, and then it triggers another
| reload when you hit play, and then it triggers another
| reload when you end play, effectively reloading the code
| three times every time you change anything and test. This
| doesn't always happen, but it never happened before the
| change for the same code, maybe you can work around it
| but it isn't obvious what is causing it. The engine isn't
| slower, but the editor is much slower.
|
| It might be that this improved some things for larger
| teams, but for the projects I've worked on it was a huge
| downgrade. Unity marketing said this change would speed
| things up for large projects, but for small projects with
| small assets and mostly code things got much much slower
| than before, which was my point that when they try to
| compete with unreal they are making the editor worse for
| smaller creators.
|
| I'm not the only one experiencing problems, here is a
| thread:
|
| https://forum.unity.com/threads/assetdatabase-v2-refresh-
| sig...
|
| Wasn't fixed last time I checked. Might be fixed in some
| beta release.
| jayd16 wrote:
| What do you mean by a reload, exactly? If the asset isn't
| changed it won't be re-imported. If you're seeing
| erroneous reimports, then that is something you can track
| explicitly.
|
| If you're talking about code compiles or script reloads,
| that's not really what the asset database deals with.
| (Although you can script imports so its not entirely
| unrelated).
|
| That said, they did a lot of work to allow you to handle
| larger projects with (albeit manual) incremental
| compilations with asmdefs and the like.
|
| I'm also pretty sure they also didn't add more code
| reload points, they just added load bars for when they
| did the code reloads. If you don't want the code to
| refresh automatically, you can just turn it off.
| Jensson wrote:
| > If you're talking about code compiles or script
| reloads, that's not really what the asset database deals
| with.
|
| Editor profiler says the asset database v2's
| AssetDatabase.Refresh calls a function named roughly
| ~"reload all assemblies". That happens every time you add
| an empty line to a default code file and at many other
| times. This didn't happen before, and that is where it
| spends most of its time.
|
| > That said, they did a lot of work to allow you to
| handle larger projects with (albeit manual) incremental
| compilations with asmdefs and the like.
|
| I haven't been able to work around this with asmdefs, if
| you use an assembly then changing any file in it trigger
| the above mentioned code reload.
|
| > I'm also pretty sure they also didn't add more code
| reload points, they just added load bars for when they
| did the code reloads.
|
| Editor is unresponsive for longer. I know they added more
| bars, but it is hard to mistake an edit/play cycle taking
| a second in 2019.1 and then taking 10 seconds in 2020.3
| in the same project.
|
| > If you don't want the code to refresh automatically,
| you can just turn it off.
|
| I want things to reload automatically, disabling that is
| not a fix.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| It feels like they tried to compete with Unreal in the
| same way that Apple tries to enter gaming: very half-
| hearted attempts that they think are very serious. With
| Apple it's "hey look we are a serious gaming platform.
| Look we have 3 new APIs just to support gaming and we
| paid a AA/AAA developer to port their game eventually"
| and with Unity it's "Hey we can compete with Unreal. Look
| we even have new render pipelines with some of the
| features Unreal has and we bought Weta for some reason.
| Look we even put out a demo that barely works that we
| will never update showing just how graphically advanced
| Unity can be." They both think these meager attempts are
| actually some great effort when it actually requires
| large investments of time and money to get where they say
| they want to go. E.g. Microsoft buying their way into the
| console market with the original Xbox. Basically just
| hemorrhaging money for an entire console generation so
| they could finally compete the next generation with the
| 360.
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| microsoft could afford it though
| Narishma wrote:
| And Apple can't?
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| Apple's gaming "strategy" -- air quotes seem mandatory --
| continues to baffle me. It's as if every year or two they
| put more pieces into place for a future that never comes.
|
| (I'll believe they're serious about gaming when they
| release their own port of Vulkan.)
| datalopers wrote:
| IronSource is known for leveraging their ad network and
| installers to distribute spam, malware, and adware bundlers. What
| the fuck Unity.
|
| [1] https://www.benedelman.org/news-021815/
|
| [2] https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-
| iron...
| moralestapia wrote:
| >IronSource is known for leveraging their ad network and
| installers to distribute spam, malware, and adware bundlers.
| What the fuck Unity.
|
| Big company that makes money, wants to make even more money. Is
| this a new thing for you?
| returnInfinity wrote:
| So its flash player all over again?
| failrate wrote:
| Oh, yeah, Unity is in the "PE folks are wearing your
| organization as a skin suit" phase.
| munificent wrote:
| What an absolutely perfect turn of phrase.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| Thats funny
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| "PE folks"?
| umeshunni wrote:
| Private Equity
| potatochup wrote:
| Private Equity
| kinnth wrote:
| I'd say that's almost all mobile ad networks, as it's not the
| network themselves but the ads.
|
| This is good for both companies as Irnsrc gets deeper down the
| stack in terms of data and targeting and unity gets more spend
| flowing into their systems increasing their efficiency.
|
| Too bad the IDFA issue is slowly killing all forms of
| performance advertising. Unity should be looking to buy studios
| akin to Unreal IMO.
| bdefore wrote:
| In the second link above, a Bing ad is presented to download
| Chrome while describing a domain of "www.google.com" but when
| clicked takes the user to googleonline2018.com ... maybe my
| expectations are out of date, but how is that possible? The
| otherwise excellent article doesn't explain.
|
| edit: was the second, not first link. this one:
| https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-iron...
| franga2000 wrote:
| What do you mean by "describing"? If you mean the thingy in
| the bottom of your screen when you hover over a link, this is
| trivial to fake and Google itself is the largest user of this
| "feature". In a Google search, right click a link and copy
| it, then paste it somewhere. It will be a long ugly
| google.com tracking URL, even though what your browser showed
| you in the hover display was the link to the actual website.
| AinderS wrote:
| > the thingy in the bottom of your screen when you hover
| over a link, this is trivial to fake
|
| Sounds like a security flaw. Why don't browsers patch it?
| Liru wrote:
| Because the company that most benefits from it existing
| also makes the world's most used browser.
| AinderS wrote:
| What about other browsers?
| franga2000 wrote:
| Short of preventing JS from triggering redirects, I don't
| see a way they could, and that's a pretty important
| feature in modern web apps.
| antiframe wrote:
| I tested it in Firefox and Chrome. While they both
| display a spoofed URL in the status bar when hovered,
| they differ if you right-click the link. In Chrome,
| nothing changes. In Firefox the status bar string changes
| to the actual, not spoofed URL.
|
| At least in Firefox, one can check easily what the actual
| URL is before clicking without having to copy-paste
| elsewhere.
| antiframe wrote:
| Interesting. I had not known that. I tested it in Firefox
| and Chrome. While they both display a spoofed URL in the
| status bar when hovered, they differ if you right-click the
| link. In Chrome, nothing changes. In Firefox the status bar
| string changes to the actual, not spoofed URL.
|
| At least in Firefox, one can check easily what the actual
| URL is before clicking without having to copy-paste
| elsewhere.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| I'm seeing that Firefox behavior in Chrome.
|
| It seems to rewrite the link when it gets a mousedown
| event. Once I right-click, or if I left-click and then
| drag (to avoid an actual page navigation), the new
| hovered URL is the google.com/<tracking> version.
|
| Also this only seems to apply to search ads/promoted
| results. Organic search results don't get rewritten, and
| copying and pasting a link address gives me the expected
| destination URL.
| bdefore wrote:
| Sorry i misstated, it was the article at the second link
| from post i responded to. first image of that post, under
| where it says 'Get Chrome - Download Chrome Today' there is
| a green text that shows www.google.com. I thought that was
| enforced by the search engine and not able to be
| manipulated.
|
| At the risk of insinuating too much, there is a concerning
| incentive for Bing to provide corrupt links to Chrome.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| That definitely seems like a major flaw with Bing's
| search ads. They should be either deriving that green
| domain name, or verifying it matches the link, or at
| least verifying that you own that domain.
|
| I can't find a current Bing search ad whose green domain
| name doesn't match the domain of the destination of the
| link. Hopefully they've fixed this by now.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Oh well, there's always Godot.
| linspace wrote:
| What a pity Epic is not publicly traded, I just checked if it
| was possible to buy stock
| JyB wrote:
| > What the fuck Unity.
|
| Quite right
| bdefore wrote:
| Unity has learned all the wrong lessons. Their success was
| largely from the verdant asset store and the asset developers
| who augmented a creaky platform with wonderful and useful tools
| to shorten development time. They never figured out how to
| maintain sane compatibility for these tools version to version,
| nor a way to sustain and compensate these authors. Which brings
| us to today: a shady acquisition to sneak malware tech into
| games while they continue to neglect the community that made
| them who they are.
| mordae wrote:
| Good times for Godot, nice!
| extrememacaroni wrote:
| People keep bringing up Godot but there's no way around the
| fact that it feels like some guy's homebrew engine through
| and through, especially once you try to use the native C++
| side. But you don't really need to get that far to realize
| how janky it is. You can't even delete assets that may or
| may not be used in scenes without running into errors and
| warnings that may be benign but eat away at your trust that
| things will still work fine later down the line.
|
| The GUI tools are atrocious compared to Unity's and they
| fail at the most important thing: make sure that when you
| play the game the GUI looks exactly the same as in the
| designer. There's also some weird jank with the GUI, where
| you have to reload the scene to see some changes being
| applied (like, imagine setting some property in, say, a
| winform, and having to close and reopen the winform's
| editor to see it actually having an effect, wtf) but I
| don't think it's limited to the GUI, I forgot what those
| were exactly. But there's no indication that you need to
| reload the scene, you google the problem and the answer is
| "reload the scene".
|
| There's a loooooooong way to go for Godot to reach Unity's
| level. They'd have to essentially become the next Blender,
| which I use as the benchmark for open source community
| driven projects.
|
| Godot == Unity at home.
|
| The best thing about it is that you have access to the
| source for free, so you can fix bugs yourself. "We may run
| into issues three years down the line with the project but
| at least we can fix them ourselves". How attractive this
| sounds to you depends, I assume serious developers who want
| to build large games for profit, will choose either Unity
| or Unreal because they're expected to work better overall.
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| This * 1000.
|
| I'd love to meet a single person on this site who has
| used Godot to ship a commercial game of any note. Ship a
| Godot game on macOS 11+/iOS 13+/tvOS
| 13+/PC/Linux/Switch/PS4/PS5/Xbox and then come tell me
| how it went. Godot is basically completely unproven for a
| game requiring this level of release support.
|
| I feel like a Unity apologist sometimes, but what options
| are there? If your studio doesn't have high level
| competency with Unreal, committing to a project using it
| adds an immense amount of risk.
|
| This merger is a real kick in the gut for me, but I'm all
| in with Unity and I can't afford to bet my studio on an
| Unreal switch without _major_ partner financial support.
| nrjames wrote:
| Not a game, but my understanding is that the 3D elements
| and renderings of traffic in the Tesla (and Tesla app) is
| made with Godot.
| [deleted]
| omoikane wrote:
| Maybe not the best example, but Sonic Colors had Godot in
| it:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/pi1ioo/son
| ic_...
|
| https://twitter.com/falessandrelli/status/143385695747621
| 684...
| SXX wrote:
| For the time being Godot going to be PC-first game engine
| and our 10-people studio dont have any issues building
| for Windows/macOS/Linux. Test imports for web work
| amazingly well, but we dont need it.
|
| Lack of console support is just limitation of what can be
| done with open source code since even SDKs for consoles
| are under NDA. I guess if you building project for
| consoles then you have to look elsewhere.
|
| You are not wrong in any way. At the same time there are
| plenty of small teams that can work with Godot and build
| some fun games using it.
| extrememacaroni wrote:
| The lack of console support comes especially from the
| fact that there's no company behind godot itself that can
| become a licensed Nintendo developer for example.
|
| There are other companies that can port your godot games
| to consoles and publish them, but in the stores the games
| will be listed as theirs not yours. If you're an indie
| without a publisher, that's probably not a big deal.
| Although it would be if it were me, I'd want the game to
| be listed under my own name, not someone else's,
| especially if a player might start to avoid games
| published by X because they played games they did not
| like in the past. But if you're already backed by a
| publisher, that will probably not fly.
| SXX wrote:
| I will just add a note about publishers: if your project
| is not using Unreal / Unity most huge publishers just
| wont be interested. It has nothing to do with Godot
| console support or anything else about Godot itself.
|
| Basically all big publishers have their own pipeline and
| in-house teams for porting / QA / certification and it's
| all built around Unity or Unreal. So it's all about
| market share.
|
| So yeah choosing Godot will certainly limit your options
| in terms of what publishers might fund your project.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I think all the reservations about Godot are valid, but
| let me offer my perspective. In 1996-1997 I remember
| meeting with Epic to evaluate their engine in develop for
| a game a AAA game at Activision. I remember in the late
| aughts (like 09?) being asked to evaluate Unity for a VC
| that was considering investments and wondering how much
| commercial developers would actually use it.
|
| These engines are all risky until they aren't. And Godot
| certainly seems at the tipping point of adoption. Also,
| all game engines have strengths and weaknesses so that
| you would want to use Unity or Unreal in many particular
| cases for a long time. But Godot also has some strengths,
| not the least of which is that it is open source.
|
| The key thing I would watch is the transition to 4.0 and
| Vulkan. That seems like a point at which they can either
| pick up momentum or lose it. The SDK problem for consoles
| can easily be solved by contractors / middleware if there
| is enough good games to make it worth the time to bother.
| boredtofears wrote:
| What is it about the 4.0/vulkan transition that you view
| as being important?
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I like the engine but I don't think it is super
| competitive in 3d. For example, to use it on Quest you
| have to use GLES2, which is missing a number of features.
| Quest 2 is a mobile GPU, so you aren't going to be state
| of the art but I have seen more games that seem to
| squeeze more performance out using Unreal on that
| platform. Hopefully the switch to Vulkan will help them
| get better 3d performance on mobile gpus.
|
| There are a ton of changes in the works from Godot 3. to
| 4. One of the biggest problems with Unity, in my
| experience is compatibility as the engine moves forward
| in versions. You always see projects that are stuck on
| older versions of Unity because the team doesn't have the
| time to make the changes so it works with the new
| version. In general I haven't seen that as a big issue
| for Godot. Code for old versions seems to run on new
| versions. But I have never seen a jump as big as the one
| to 4.0. The question I am wondering is will they be able
| to make that many changes to the engine and have it be
| reasonable to transition projects.
| boredtofears wrote:
| They can't be universally true can it? I know Hades is
| built on a basically in-house engine, and I think it
| released on all platforms simultaneously... then again
| that studio might not even qualify as "indie" especially
| now... are custom engines like that really that rare
| nowadays?
| Jensson wrote:
| Supergiant games doesn't have a publisher, they publish
| it themselves so they can do whatever they want. I don't
| really consider them indie, to me "indie" is when the
| people developing it are also the people funding
| development, meaning people make choices without worrying
| about what others opinions.
|
| As for self made engines, if you make it yourself then
| that is a risk. If you make it in unity or unreal then
| the publisher knows they can easily find people to help
| you ship it if there are problems, but for a self made
| engine it could be unsalvageable.
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| And don't get me wrong, I am 100% cheering Godot on long-
| term. Same with the Bevy ECS.
|
| Options are great, it's just that the first adopters have
| to pay the hardest price when they want to ship a game
| using it. If I were doing the indie thing still, I'd
| consider Godot.
| CJefferson wrote:
| Have you actually released a game using Godot? If so, can
| you share a link?
| SXX wrote:
| Link is in my profile. Our game gonna be released this
| year after ~3 years in development. It's fully funded by
| a publisher and close to gold master.
|
| Feel free to ask whatever about development process :-)
| dagmx wrote:
| For what it's worth, Godot is actually used quite a bit
| for gambling machine games. I've got a few friends who
| work for companies in that space doing the art.
| gg2222 wrote:
| I second this opinion. As a (non-hobbyist) game
| developer, I started my current game with Godot, but
| after running into many issues including performance
| which was the final dealbreaker, I decided to port the
| whole game to Unity.
|
| Finally I could focus on developing the game rather than
| running into engine related issues and limitations and
| having access to all the time saving assets in the Asset
| Store was (literally) game changing. Having the Asset
| Store is a whole new world. And as a dev with funds,
| paying for assets to save weeks of time was a no brainer.
|
| Back to Godot, yes deleting stuff in Godot is pretty
| scary cause there is (or at least was) no way to know
| what effects/errors it could cause.
|
| GUI system (at least last time I used it) was very
| unfortunately not well designed making it extremely hard
| to get consistent positionings. I feel it's so bad that
| just using HTML+CSS would be better cause then it would
| be possible to confidently put things and keep them where
| you want to.
|
| And yes, overall as someone who has also used the C++
| side, it does feel like some guy's homebrew engine. I
| felt things weren't as solidly designed as they could be.
| And this is talking about foundational stuff.
|
| The C++ source code is really not modern C++ (or you
| could call it anti-modern C++).
|
| I would not advise anyone to develop a game on it if your
| livelihood depended on your game's success.
|
| Of course people can and will prove me wrong by still
| powering through and creating a successful game with it,
| but your time is better spent using a more mature engine
| like Unity or Unreal.
|
| Even if you want to get your hands dirty and help fix
| bugs or add features to the engine, there is no guarantee
| that your PR will be merged.
|
| Game development is probably the most riskiest type of
| software development already business-wise. No need to up
| your risk.
|
| Of course if you are a hobby indie dev and do it just for
| the enjoyment of building things, then no problem.
|
| As for Godot's future ... well it's been many, many
| years, but if I understand correctly they're mainly still
| working on 3D rendering features. There are tons of other
| areas that are still the same with the same limitations
| as they were years (5 years+) ago. I think with not so
| solid foundation and the pace of development, it will
| take many many years if ever to catch up to Unity.
|
| I do like the way Godot engine does some things and I do
| hope for it's success as competition is always good. I
| just don't have much faith in it from what I've seen. I
| do hope I will be proven wrong though.
| [deleted]
| brundolf wrote:
| > You can't even [common action] without running into
| errors and warnings that may be benign but eat away at
| your trust that things will still work fine later down
| the line.
|
| To be fair, in my experience this is par for the course
| in Unity too
| noobermin wrote:
| Caveat, this is a meta post. I'm not a gamedev (not
| professionally at least), and don't have experience in
| either.
|
| This reminds me of something I rant about often, linux
| naysayers on HN. Because of them, I tried buying a
| macbook in 2015 and had some of my most frustrating
| experiences in my life, culminating in a talk for a
| national conference I had to redo on a friends windows
| laptop in half an hour because it failed to display on
| the projector. Turns out the HN crowd who kept saying
| "mac is unix like linux but better since it's not a
| bazaar open source mess" aren't always right after all.
|
| People have some bad experiences with X product where X
| product is often open source and being open source
| explains the bad experiences. However, when Y product
| also offers similar bad experiences (and even worse ones)
| but they paper over it in their minds because "it just
| happens" although it's probably just because they're used
| to it. Repeat for photoshop and gimp (my SO is an
| animator and adobe products crashing is a common
| experience, as is redoing work in case a save was
| forgotten), linux and mac, etc.
|
| Anyway, I'm not a gamedev, I just see a similar pattern
| and it's hard not to notice.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| As a Linux user on my daily drivers and a Mac user on my
| work-issued machine, I agree with this sentiment
| completely. Linux has weird issues a good amount of the
| time if you're trying to do unusual stuff, but so do
| Windows and Mac, and on those platforms you're less
| equipped to pop the hood and fix the underlying issue.
| sfteus wrote:
| I have to agree with this. I moved off Windows into Linux
| as a daily driver mainly due to issues with docker
| support (pre WSL2, but even that had filesystem issues
| the last time I tried to used it). I recently accepted a
| new position that provided a Mac M1 and it's just a
| generally frustrating experience comparatively.
| Specifically, anything that involving keyboard directed
| window management is either non-existent or flaky at
| best, and a ton of functionality that it just
| inconsistent with the rest of the OS / applications (why
| is a separate fullscreen the default functionality, and
| why can you no longer Alt-Tab + Cmd + Tilde to a window
| that's been made fullscreen if you have a second non-
| fullscreen window open?).
|
| Maybe my flow just isn't compatible with the OS (it feels
| very visual + mouse oriented), but between a previous ~2
| year stint with another Mac-only job and these ~3 months,
| about the only thing I have to say that's positive about
| the OS is the spaces feature.
|
| And like you mentioned, even when I had an ambiguous
| error on Linux, there was usually enough information to
| find a similar enough problem online to at least narrow
| down what I should investigate.
| lostdog wrote:
| Yeah, Mac's UI of spaces/desktops is so busted that it
| usually takes me a couple tries to get the window I want.
| I've also watched another user lose track of every window
| that goes fullscreen.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| I'm surprised you would say that Godot has more bugs than
| Unity. Unity is an endless fountain of bugs that keeps on
| giving when you least expect it.
|
| Godot does lack some features. But that depends entirely
| on the kind of game you're aiming for. The 2D market like
| RimWorld could easily move to Godot.
|
| On that note. UI skinning isn't a feature that's lacking
| in Godot. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorial
| s/ui/gui_skin... If you easily implement that screenshot
| what prevents anyone from matching any designer's dreams?
| SXX wrote:
| > The 2D market like RimWorld could easily move to Godot.
|
| I really all for Godot and our team have positive
| experience with it, but I think that it's will be hard to
| mantain game that is heavy on simulation with a lot of
| moving parts. Might be Godot 4.x will get improved
| profiler, but for now it's really lacking.
|
| So unless you move everything into C++ I dont think
| you'll manage good performance in Dwarf-Fortress-like
| simulation game. Though might be I overeastimate how much
| simulation / physics game like RimWorld require.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Personally, as a professional programmer who's interested
| in developing a Dwarf-Fortress-like sim game as a side
| project, I've been keeping an eye on Bevy as an open-
| source game engine that would likely have good
| performance for a sim game with lots of moving parts.
| Being a Rust-based ECS game engine lends itself to a lot
| of potential for heavy parallelization, which you'd need
| to maximize that sort of number crunching performance on
| a modern CPU
| Jensson wrote:
| You can implement the heavy stuff in C++/Rust, compile it
| to a dll and import it into whatever engine you want. The
| hardest part about making a game like dwarf fortress is
| to implement a good UI, making it run fast is much easier
| and shouldn't be a priority when selecting engine. Game
| engine performance is mostly about rendering and not your
| custom simulation code.
| Macha wrote:
| I mean, there's rimworld for an example of "dwarf
| fortress with better UI but slower simulation".
| Commercially it's worked out for them, but I do find
| myself wishing for the scale of DF when playing rimworld.
| The new game UI does warn you away from even the larger
| map sizes they do have implemented though.
| Jensson wrote:
| Rimworld implemented their simulation using unity
| objects, if they wanted to increase scale they could
| rewrite it to run the simulations in custom code and thus
| run just as fast as dwarf fortress. Or faster if you
| parallelize it well. Then they could just look at the
| world state and render that every frame, which is super
| cheap since its just a bunch of 2d objects and a bit of
| text.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| > I think that it's will be hard to mantain game that is
| heavy on simulation with a lot of moving parts... C++
|
| I don't see why that would be. Godot has bindings for all
| sorts of languages including C#. Why would it be any
| harder to write C# code with Godot bindings than C# code
| with Unity bindings?
| SXX wrote:
| Problem is not to write GDScript or C# code in Godot, but
| profiling and performance optimizations: toolset of the
| engine is really lacking in this area so it's really hard
| to find out what are major bottlenecks are and what is
| eating most of frame time.
|
| Godot profiler for their "scripting" be it GDScript or C#
| is a dumpster fire. If you have a lot of objects and non-
| obvious performance drops it's really hard to find them.
|
| In case you use C++ you will be able to use mature
| profilers for C++ projects like built-in one in Visual
| Studio or Xcode, Valgrind on Linux or some 3rd-party
| solution like Intel XE Studio. All of them are just
| 10000% better than what Godot have at this moment.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| > Godot profiler for their "scripting" be it GDScript or
| C# is a dumpster fire. ... In case you use C++ you will
| be able to use mature profilers
|
| Why couldn't you use your regular mature C# profiler like
| you do anywhere else? It's officially supported. Both the
| mono profiler and JetBrains work.
|
| > In case you use C++ you will be able to use mature
| profilers for C++ projects like built-in one in Visual
| Studio or Xcode, Valgrind on Linux or some 3rd-party
| solution like Intel XE Studio. All of them are just
| 10000% better than what Godot have at this moment.
|
| You can do exactly that right now. Use the C++ profiler
| to find hotspots in Godot and the C# profiler to find
| hotspots in your code.
| SXX wrote:
| I can easily answer both of your questions. Because I
| obviously want to know how much time exactly game code
| takes together: both engine and "scripting". Using weird
| combinations of two different profilers is not a good day
| to work on code. Both Unreal and Unity have proper usable
| profilers and Godot doesnt.
|
| Also unfortunately our project is usingGDScript and there
| is no profiler for it.
| SXX wrote:
| Okay I will share some of my own experience over almost 2
| years working with Godot / GDScript. We're building 2D
| pixel art game for Steam. We're fully funded by publisher
| and have a team of 10 people with 3 programmers. We have
| around 100KLOC codebase with a lot of game mechanics.
|
| Primary downside of using Godot for commercial
| development is lack of official console support.
| Everything else will vary from project to project since
| every game is different. Godot have bunch of weird
| limitations, lack of proper virtual filesystem (e.g
| boost::filesystem anyone?), really shitty profiler, some
| weak UI / UX in editor some of which can be easily
| compansated by using VSCode.
|
| At the same time I can certainly say that you can make
| proper commercial game using Godot. Engine is stable,
| performance is not the best, but okay. Will it work for
| everyone? Probably not, but again it works for us.
|
| PS: I also glad to advertise few Godot projects that are
| not mine, but I find them really enjoyable (check profile
| if you curios about project I work on):
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1953670/Quetzal/
| uwuemu wrote:
| > some weak UI / UX in editor some of which can be easily
| compansated by using VSCode
|
| ??
|
| What exactly can be compensated for with a code editor?
| 75% of the value of a "modern engine" is in its tools...
| with something like Unreal it may be close to 90%. Level
| editors, object browsers, geometry editing, animation
| editors, rigging, particle editors, material and UV
| editors, physics/navigation/ai system and their
| editors... the list goes on and on. Gameplay code is
| something you'll either do in visual scripting (UE
| blueprint) or in an external IDE. Any engine-level coding
| will be done in an external C++ IDE (Visual Studio).
| So... I can't imagine what exactly VSCode compensates
| for?
| cain wrote:
| The limitations of Godot's in-engine text editor can be
| compensated by a more powerful external editor: VScode,
| emacs, vim, etc. An example would be the lack of
| remappable keybindings: this can be overcome by using an
| external editor.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| But the strength of Godit's native scripting is its
| integration with the rest of the editor. Can the vscode
| plugin match that?
|
| I find the Godot native editor annoying (and it lacks vi
| keys!) amd clunky and long for multiple tabs but it
| increases productivity enough that I wouldn't give it up.
| cain wrote:
| I can't speak to the strengths of the VScode plugin, but
| if it's anything like the emacs gdscript plugin (which I
| use with Spacemacs + vi keybindings), then the
| integration is very tight. I get just as much completion
| as I do in the in-engine editor, I can
| run/debug/breakpoint etc. I've been using it for ~2
| years.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > I assume serious developers who want to build large
| games for profit, will choose either Unity or Unreal
| because they're expected to work better overall.
|
| they'd ultimately choose them because of support more
| than jank, to be honest. They care less about the ability
| to fix a bug 3 years down the line than the ability to
| phone up engine experts they don't have to directly hire
| to fix it for them.
|
| I'm assuming Godot doesn't have such support past
| enthusiast forums.
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| Yep, I bought enterprise support for my studio for
| exactly this reason.
|
| Great example: Apple updates Xcode to 14, which includes
| some undocumented change to Clang that ends up completely
| breaking Burst static initialization. Unity's fault?
| Nope. But they fixed it quickly. When Godot breaks, glfh,
| that's on you.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Is this something that happened or an example of
| something the could happen? I mainly target Apple's
| platforms and while moves like this don't leave me
| feeling confident about Unity, the acrimony and legal
| battles between Apple and Epic (and Epic's level of
| support for development on Max, especially ARM Mac)leaves
| me feeling even less confident about switching to Unreal.
| darkteflon wrote:
| I think Epic's doing a pretty reasonable job of
| distinguishing between Apple, and people that develop on
| its engine on Apple machines. The 5.0.2 release, for
| example, had loads of MacOS-specific fixes. There are
| compromises versus developing on Windows, of course - you
| lose hardware Lumen, for example. No native AS support
| either yet, but it runs okay through Rosetta depending on
| what you're doing.
| [deleted]
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| Yep, real: https://forum.unity.com/threads/burst-
| xcode-13-3-builds-for-...
| adamrezich wrote:
| but also, maybe it's a good time to try dropping the scene
| graph/ECS way of doing things--there _are_ other ways to
| make video games!
| JoeyJoJoJr wrote:
| I'm a big fan of immediate mode rendering. Unfortunately
| not a lot of engines/tools/libraries support this way of
| working.
| nomel wrote:
| > there are other ways to make video games!
|
| Any interesting, practical, examples?
| adamrezich wrote:
| I'm having trouble understanding the question--there's
| plenty of open-source games that do not use ECS or a
| Unity-style scene graph. this mode of thinking being the
| default is relatively recent in the history of video game
| development. if you've never tried something like that
| before, PICO-8 might be a good starting point. this blog
| post might also prove useful:
| https://www.gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2265481-oop-is-dead-
| long...
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Another option that is still young (young as an Open Source
| project, but has a lot of historic development behind it)
| is O3DE (https://www.o3de.org/) I think this has a lot of
| potential if it gets enough attention and development.
| fyrn- wrote:
| sauntheninja wrote:
| The compatibility between versions has always bit me when
| trying to learn unity. I find a tutorial on a short game and
| when I try to open that in Unity its incompatible with a
| newer version and you have to then go browse unity forums for
| an answer
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I'd argue the asset store was the beginning of the (very
| slow) end.
|
| Before the asset store Unity's community was a hotbed of
| openly shared innovation.
|
| The moment Unity gave people an easy way to slap together
| what would have been a quick post to the forums with a
| webplayer link, some code samples and a few paragraphs
| explaining it... into a paid package that sells for $5...
| that ended quickly.
|
| And the worst part is, the skillset to manage a paid library
| is not the same one needed to develop some cool tech! There
| are so _so_ many packages on the asset store that are
| practically abandoned, or poorly suited for integration into
| someone else 's codebase (some people have no issue with
| warnings everywhere in their code for example...), or are
| poorly documented, or will break on any platform that wasn't
| the original dev's personal machine. The list goes on.
|
| -
|
| I don't have anything against indie game devs making money, I
| know the struggle of slaving away at something and ending up
| broke for your trouble... but I really wish the asset store
| had been restricted to game assets like 3D models, sounds,
| etc.
|
| It's not like people wouldn't be able to sell their code then
| either. It's just before the asset store if you wanted to
| create a paid distributed library, the inertia you'd have to
| overcome was a pretty good filter against low-effort
| attempts. There were still successful libraries that were
| worked on full time and sold as products
| SXX wrote:
| You could guess how Unity will end up after John Riccitiello
| became it's CEO. After all Electronic Arts was one of most
| hated anti-consumer companies ever.
| m463 wrote:
| Unity is pretty screwed up too.
|
| GOG.com sells games that do not have DRM and are generally not
| evil.
|
| But the unity games on the platform - they all phone home and
| send back detailed telemetry on what you do in-game. (I also
| know paradox games are a mess too)
|
| Thankfully the GOG terms allow you to install and run the games
| offline without requiring these shenanigans to play your game.
|
| I'm not versed on all the multiplayer subtleties.
| shmatt wrote:
| I've interviewed IronSource employees who showed me their work.
| I was pretty shocked at how purely evil the products intent was
| (malware wrapped installers for popular Windows applications).
| And this is in Israel, so you regularly interview people from
| NSO and similar companies, but at least they can claim to be
| part of "The War On Terror".
|
| IronSource doesn't even have that as an excuse
| weatherlite wrote:
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Any relation to IronDome?
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Depending on who you ask, it's actually "war for terror"
| jacooper wrote:
| > And this is in Israel, so you regularly interview people
| from NSO and similar companies, but at least they can claim
| to be part of "The War On Terror".
|
| Help empowering the Apartheid occupation would be a more
| accurate reason.
| andrepd wrote:
| > but at least they can claim to be part of "The War On
| Terror".
|
| Can't decide if that makes it better or worse x)
| golemiprague wrote:
| Terror might not be the main issue in Israel these days as
| it was for example around 2000 but it still happens and the
| reason it doesn't happen as much is partly due to those
| efforts. The main issue is that there are still entities in
| the region openly claiming that they want to destroy the
| country and turn it into another Arab country, most of the
| military efforts are against this threat. There is no need
| to judge it cynically as if we are talking now about the US
| or some European country going half way across the world to
| destroy some countries as part of the "war on terror".
| stelonix wrote:
| There are still entities in the region oppressed by the
| Israel regime too, human beings whose land has been
| taken, journalists, children, civilians in general
| murdered by their army, a belligerent stance on their
| neighbors, known nuclear weapons... The list could go on
| and on, but there's no way to put Israel on some noble
| pedestal, it's a powerful first world nuclear power
| oppressing people on their doorsteps.
| alternatetwo wrote:
| Let's also not forget that the Mossad murdered an
| innocent civilian by shooting him 13 times in front of
| his pregnant wife in Norway:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Who are the angels in the region? Which other countries
| in the region tolerate women, LGBT, and Jews?
| mort96 wrote:
| Well, at least it opens the possibility that the employee
| _thinks_ they're fighting the good fight, even if they're
| misguided. You can imagine the kind of person who thinks
| they're making the world a better place by working on
| technology to "fight terrorism". I don't think there exists
| a single person who genuinely thinks they're making the
| world a better place by installing malware onto innocent
| users' computers to earn money; you know for a fact that
| the employees who work on that stuff are morally bankrupt.
| atwood22 wrote:
| "Not only is this work evil, it also involves wasting 8
| trillion dollars and killing civilians"
| progbits wrote:
| Slightly off topic: in [2] the first screenshot showing
| "download chrome" query in Bing - do I understand right that
| the green "google.com" text is not the actual domain of the ad
| link?
|
| I couldn't reproduce this, Bing no longer shows me ads
| annotated that way. But that seems like a strange feature to
| let the ad owner present custom domain name...
| ev1 wrote:
| You can usually pick what domain you want to show up there
| when you buy an ad. It's common so you can use obnoxious
| chains of tracking links redirecting into each other and not
| show up as emjcd.com
| progbits wrote:
| Sure (I mean that is shady but whatever) but at least it
| would seem logical to verify the redirect chain ends up on
| that domain or better yet (since the redirects could change
| later) only allow the domain if ownership has been verified
| though DNS or similar.
|
| I simply don't see why I should be able to buy ad that
| shows "google.com".
| ouid wrote:
| >That is shady but whatever
|
| This century's motto
| ziml77 wrote:
| That's fucking insane that it's allowed.
|
| But if the ability to override the domain is truly that
| important, then there needs to be manual vetting of the
| ad buyer and the target domain. I'm sure you could
| automate it with signed TXT records, but I think there
| should still be a human in the chain to at least double-
| check everything.
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| thank the gods for godot and other projects
| acomjean wrote:
| I wouldn't bring gods into it and consider thanking all the
| Godot contributors.
|
| Actually a lot of open source project and contributors need
| our support.
| yomkippur wrote:
| Unreal Engine having a field day with this one. Honestly I'm
| super disappointed in Unity and I regret having purchased so many
| plugins on their store that I never even used.
|
| Soon we will only have Unreal Engine dominating the scene as
| Unity essentially just signed their own demise.
| zomglings wrote:
| Guys relax, check the date, it's April... oh :(
| neals wrote:
| IronSource is pure evil. Godot is starting to look more and more
| interesting ...
| surmoi wrote:
| I worked for too long on mobile games, ads mediation company
| are indeed the worst, IronSource included. It's a nightmare to
| work with their black box SDKs, and god knows what they do in
| that, in addition to tracking and showing ads (do you know some
| ads can take up more than 200MB ? That's sometimes more than
| the game I worked on...)
|
| I hope this will incite more developers to look into open
| source game engine such as Godot and find better way to
| monetize games than ads.
| bdefore wrote:
| I feel like there's room to innovate on monetizing gaming
| hobby projects without ads. And that Kickstarter and Early
| Access have polluted the well by asking for a one-time
| payment for an unknown final quality.
|
| I'd be more inclined for something more of Patreon
| subscription model, with a game loop that had a very overt
| 'Hey if you enjoyed this latest update, consider becoming a
| supporter. If I get xxx supporters this month I'll keep
| making more cool stuff' with a clear connection to what would
| come. Regular monthly updates so long as monthly supporters
| exceeded a certain number.
| surmoi wrote:
| I like this approach, I often thought of having it
| integrated into a game directly. Players could browse and
| select to sponsor from a few features I'd plan to integrate
| and thus allow them to have some say on what they'd like to
| see first as a community.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| This is an ad platform, like unity ads.
|
| https://developers.is.com/ironsource-mobile/unity/unity-plug...
| Kye wrote:
| This is going to be like what happened to SourceForge.
| mathverse wrote:
| There's so many israeli software companies I have never heard of.
| It is truly a startup nation.
| capableweb wrote:
| Do you know particularly few Israeli companies compared to lets
| say South African or Polish companies? Wouldn't that just mean
| it's not a "startup nation" as if it was, you would have heard
| about those companies? Your reasoning here seems backwards.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Do you know particularly few Israeli companies compared to
| lets say South African or Polish companies?_
|
| "Startup nation" has been a well-known nickname for Israel
| for some time. On a per-capita basis, Israel excels at both
| the number of startups created and the amount of capital that
| they attract.
|
| "A striking conclusion is that on a per capita basis, capital
| flows into Israel were a whopping 28 times more than those in
| the U.S." -- https://www.inc.com/peter-cohan/why-israel-
| drew-28-times-mor...
| mathverse wrote:
| Bad wording on my part but there's a lot of israeli companies
| i have never heard of on top of THAT MANY i have.
|
| There's prominent israeli startups and unicorns you usually
| know about like Wix or some old ones like (ICQ/Mirabilis) and
| then there's a myriad of small ones you stumble upon because
| they are in your domain area like logz.io.
|
| But then you hear about a company with like 1k employees and
| you are like...wth.
| keewee7 wrote:
| They also have many hardware companies. It's almost an annual
| thing that some megacorp buys an Israeli hardware or
| semiconductor company.
|
| We used to have a good hardware startup ecosystem in Denmark
| because former Giga employees had more money than they knew
| what to do with after Intel bought Giga in 2000. However it
| slowly burned out for some reason. Maybe the 2008 crisis had
| something to do with it.
| jakearmitage wrote:
| If anyone is looking for a Unity alternative, the guys at rbfx
| are doing a great job revamping the old Urho3D codebase:
| https://github.com/rbfx/rbfx
|
| It has good C# scripting support, a nice editor and modern
| rendering pipeline.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Unity is the most popular game engine on Steam and has majority
| share of the mobile game market.
|
| The fact that _they_ can 't survive two years of a pandemic
| without losing hundreds of employees and accepting a merger is
| indicative of the relative illness of the entire game tool
| service industry. This is a decades-old company that didn't have
| enough war-chest to float a few bad years.
|
| Given these market realities, one should not expect quality of
| life in the games industry to improve without unionization or
| government intervention.
| thsbrown wrote:
| This is just a guess but I think the main issue with unity is
| that the majority of the games released with it float under
| their 100,000 revenue target in order for them to get a piece
| of the pie.
|
| I believe this is why they are rapidly expanding their backend
| services and ads network in order to try to eke out profit in
| other ways.
|
| [1] https://unity3d.com/unity/activation/personal
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I think the main issue with unity is that the majority of
| the games released with it float under their 100,000 revenue
| target
|
| Those games don't _cost_ them anything, though. You 'd have
| to explain trouble in terms of games doing worse during the
| last few years than they were historically, which is the
| opposite of the truth.
| thsbrown wrote:
| I see your point and I think it's a good one, but could
| them being a public company and their stock price
| plummeting not also affect their bottom line?
|
| I genuinely am curious here, as I'm not well versed in how
| a companies stock price can affect their internal
| financials and ability to run the company without laying
| people off .
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The fact that they can't survive two years of a pandemic
| without losing hundreds of employees and accepting a merger is
| indicative of the relative illness of the entire game tool
| service industry. This is a decades-old company that didn't
| have enough war-chest to float a few bad years.
|
| Bad years? I thought the pandemic was unusually _good_ for at-
| home entertainment.
| adoga wrote:
| Worked for a mobile game company in 2020 and 2021. Can
| confirm that 2020 was a very good year revenue wise, if not
| dying off a little bit towards the end of 2021
| abbabon wrote:
| I, for one, am happy for this merger / acquisition.
|
| As a mobile games developer, I feel that Unity as a _game engine_
| has lost its way in the last few years, and the recent
| acquisitions reflect that. Instead of capitalizing on its merits
| and strengths - an easy-to-bootstrap multi-platform engine which
| is _perfect_ for mobile development - Unity has opted to try and
| compete in the AAA /AAA-like market against Unreal. The recent
| announcments and the features actually being delivered from Unity
| support that strategic transition, and this leaves the engine in
| a state of constant conflict with itself.
|
| Ask anyone who tried to integrate a 3rd party advertisment engine
| into their game and you'll understand why including a 'default'
| or an easy-to-bootstrap advertising and user-acquisition tool is
| a good move. This will hopefully streamline what is nowadays a
| less than ideal process. That is, if the merger will be
| capitalized upon instead of just serving the stock owners.
| bitwize wrote:
| Maybe it's different now, but in the past I associated Unity
| mobile games with my phone running very hot.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Unity games run horribly on desktop.... how they think its
| legit a good mobile engine is beyond me
|
| Like, Valheim runs like ass, all things considered.
| Battletech takes up like 50gb for a game without more than a
| couple of cutscenes and a camera that sits in the sky, and
| takes forever to load. Graveyard Keeper -- a PIXEL ART 2d
| game -- is for some reason made in Unity, and it takes way
| too long to load a couple of megabytes worth of textures
| Ace777 wrote:
| By that same metric, you've got hollow knight, ori,
| hearthstone and many more that are very good though.
| porcc wrote:
| Funny to think that the developers who haven't paid for the
| ability to remove the splash screen are also the ones likely
| to have optimized their games poorly
| surmoi wrote:
| That's because very often mobile games are not developed with
| performances in mind or when they are, they'll use everything
| the device can give, often pushing it into throttling mode,
| because mobiles are not made to be run at sustain load for a
| long time.
|
| Mobile is the most constrained platform to develop on if you
| want to actually have an optimized game, especially when
| supporting most Android devices.
| bdefore wrote:
| It's confounding to me. AAA/AA has always been an unhelpful
| designation. Much of PC gaming's recent hallmarks have used
| Unity to great success, for example Hollow Knight. Developers
| used to proclaim their games were based on Unity almost akin to
| a badge of honor. That honor is diluted by Unity's pursuit of
| the indie mobile gaming space which is tarnished with
| microtransactions and ads.
|
| Blockbuster titles may pull in more revenue. But they also can
| fail spectacularly. Is there a financial window for a tightly
| focused indie-game engine like Unity? I don't know. But it's
| hard not to see Unity's arc rhyming with the story of other VC-
| soaked growth-chasing operations.
| techdragon wrote:
| Unity was never that great of an engine and tooling. I've
| only come across one extremely specific circumstance where it
| was technically the superior choice. Where it gained
| mindshare was its licensing deals before Unreal changed
| theirs. It grew with the mobile gaming boom and in order to
| keep growing they tried to grow to compete with the AAA/AA
| engines (most of which are either Unreal, in house and studio
| exclusive, or completely custom) and barely made it... I say
| barely because based on my experience and the conversations
| I've had, anyone who built a technically impressive game with
| Unity has probably built 80% of it themselves because the
| stuff that shipped with unity wasn't up to the job. Unity
| survived because after a boom in developer mindshare courtesy
| of mobile games, lots of familiar developers were available
| to recruit for larger Unity projects where they got to spend
| their time reimplementing more and more of the entire game
| engine themselves on top of Unity because it didn't really
| give anyone enough to build more than the simplest of games.
|
| I'm not saying it's broken or shit, it did deliver a working
| engine. Just that the entire marketing hype and ecosystem
| built on top of it was a technical house of cards held
| together by the suffering of the developers using it.
|
| It's the MongoDB of game engines, "worse is better" ...
| because we spent most of the money on marketing, because
| marketing gets sales via our content marketplace before
| people can really discover how bad it is, and by then they're
| fighting the sunk cost fallacy of the money they spent in the
| content store... just good old classic MBA "apathetic evil"
| ... nothing special.
| kensai wrote:
| The future is also AR/VR applications, not only mobile games.
| But I wonder how they will monetise those.
| psyc wrote:
| If it had been an acquisition, I wouldn't have given it much
| thought. Maybe a pause, if I read some of the comments here
| about IronSource's reputation.
|
| A MERGER sends an entirely different message. Two messages.
| One, that unity is in dire straights, and two, that they've
| lost their sense of direction completely, given who they merged
| with.
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| Absolutely. A merger is terrifying. Who makes the calls now
| on what teams get resources, what features get prioritized,
| etc?
| psyc wrote:
| And TIL 'dire straits' is the correct usage, not a
| stylization by the band like I always thought. Like
| waterways.
| yomkippur wrote:
| A big reason why I stopped buying/playing mobile games was due
| to the ads. I would be happy to just pay for a game and that'd
| be the end of it but its driven a lot of people away from
| mobile and towards PC gaming.
|
| You may be celebrating this but you are just going to end up
| with less people watching your ads or downloading your game.
| Ace777 wrote:
| Unity dev here. I loathe mobile ad-driven games as well, but
| unfortunately Mobile dev is a numbers game. There is a
| gargantuan pool of regular joe-type people to whom ad-driven
| games are normality. Power users like you or I rarely play
| these things.
|
| It's all about optimizing the (user) funnel rather than the
| fun. If you don't you're at odds with google/apple, the
| platform operator, who usually promotes based on market
| performance.
|
| So even if I were to make a fun mobile game where you have no
| advertisement or a t least a way to nuke the adverts, there's
| no customer base specifically looking for that, and if there
| was my game would be buried under a mountain of shit and i'd
| have to manually buy users ... so that 95% of them never buy
| the ad-free option...
|
| Really the only option that prioritizes fun for mobile is
| bringing in an external audience.
| nurblieh wrote:
| Press release tried so hard to not say "ads" that it's
| conspicuous.
| honkycat wrote:
| So glad I ditched unity for unreal a year ago.
|
| Instead of chasing the ecs waterfalls they should have been
| iterating on their product... Or actually shipped one of their
| next gen features within a reasonable timeline.
| lencastre wrote:
| So no more updating of Unity's base platform right?
| PedroBatista wrote:
| It's the end of the road for Unity. ( at least what most of us
| think Unity still is, but it's not )
|
| The technology was always more or less "fine". Unreal Engine
| didn't "kill" Unity and it will not in the future.
|
| For the better part of a decade, Unity tried to become not-sure-
| what but way more than "just a game engine", and that's the
| problem, I don't know exactly what and neither do they.
|
| To be clear, Unity is not "dead" and will not be dead for a
| while, but the writing is on the wall with this "merger".
|
| I'm not sure how is Boeing and who is McDonnell Douglas but I
| already wrote the off my mind.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| I don't think Unity will die until another Game engine adopts
| something similar to C#.
|
| A lot of indie teams don't want to write c++.
| brundolf wrote:
| Godot uses C#, and supports some other languages too I think
| SXX wrote:
| Godot uses both C# and Python-like GDScript. And majority
| of addons likely gonna be in GDScript.
| jayd16 wrote:
| C# is really nice but I think Unity's mobile story is
| probably what keeps devs there over something like Unreal.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Unity's been killing itself with it's own fragmentation.
| Instead of upgrading existing systems, they've been
| replacing entire systems but never reaching a point of
| being able to deprecate/remove an old system.
|
| So now there's 3 render pipelines, 3 UI systems, 3 physics
| systems, 2 input systems, and so on.
|
| This makes it harder for new developers to get started, and
| it breaks a lot of the content on the Asset Store.
|
| Just the HDRP/URP split alone is such a mess, with URP
| feeling like the second-class system and missing important
| features (while being the one designed to work on a wider
| range of hardware). But HDRP is the render pipeline used
| for shiny tech demos...
| ratww wrote:
| Yep, that's it. The engine used to be developer friendly,
| now it's downright hostile due to fragmentation. Half of
| it is deprecated, the other half is experimental and
| feels second class. They keep piling stuff up, and
| information is scattered. A modern project will have
| three of four different ways of adding libraries or
| third-party stuff. And the worst part: I might be totally
| wrong, because they might have completely changed
| everything since the last time I touched it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which is a bummer, given that since the XNA story, Microsoft
| has decided to outsource to Unity the whole "how to do 3D in
| .NET" story.
|
| Given that the DirectX team is quite anti anything but C++,
| as shown by all attempts that eventually were killed (Managed
| Direct X, XNA), Unity's death would mean most shops would
| just move into C++.
|
| While C++20 is quite nice, it would be a pity if such
| scenario would take place.
| billconan wrote:
| I'm kinda the opposite. I don't like to write C#.
|
| Unreal Engine's build system is also based on C# as I
| remember.
| tomwojcik wrote:
| > Unity tried to become not-sure-what but way more than "just a
| game engine", and that's the problem
|
| IIRC most of their revenue comes from Unity Ads, so they'd be
| dead if it wasn't for this weird pivot. From the business POV,
| not being "just a game engine" probably saved them.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Unity is arguably the most popular game engine and has a
| large market place for plugins/extensions. It is almost
| unbelievable that there isn't a viable strategy to expand and
| refine the core product. My intuition here is that the
| product was taken over by people who wanted fast, huge
| financial growth, so they invested in what they saw as an
| opportunity to do just that, while weakening the core product
| and their image.
| munificent wrote:
| I think the key problem is that most game developers are
| broke and most games are unsuccessful if they even ship.
|
| The "picks and shovels" business model where you build
| tools for customers who use them in their own enterprises
| can be very successful. But it does require those customers
| to be successful in their enterprises. (Or you can rely on
| customers to be willing to pay out of pocket at a loss
| because it's a hobby, as with music instruments.)
|
| Without some kind of other monetization, Unity is
| essentially selling picks and shovels to miners on a
| mountain with almost no gold in it.
|
| To be clear, I don't think this justifies what Unity is
| doing. But they are clearly trying to be a $$$$ business in
| a $ market, and are willing to sell their souls to get the
| extra $$$.
| darzu wrote:
| What? The video games is nearly a $200 billion dollar
| industry[0] and Unity is one if the most popular engines,
| if not the most. How is that a "mountain with no gold"?
|
| [0]
| https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-05-05-video-
| game...
| chowells wrote:
| There's lots of money, but it doesn't go to developers.
| The big profits go to publishers. If you're selling tools
| to developers, you'd better hope they're able to pass the
| cost along to the publisher. If they can't, they're not
| going to be able to pay anything significant for your
| tools.
| foobiekr wrote:
| That may be true, but you just need to look at Unity's
| financials to see what fraction of the games market flows
| to them. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U/key-
| statistics?p=U
|
| It's not _terrible_ but it's not great.
| munificent wrote:
| There's a lot of money in games, yes, but much of that
| flows into large game studios using their own engines and
| the production costs are also high.
|
| Unity is primarily used by smaller game developers and
| there is much less money available there.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Just like in any kind of arts, it might be worth
| millions, but only for a selected few.
|
| There are plenty of street performers that can hardly
| play the rent.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| yywwbbn wrote:
| However most users of Unity don't make very much money if
| any at all. So unless they switch to a revenue share
| based model (instead of fixed license pricing) $200
| billion is not that meaningful.
| darzu wrote:
| They could have hired less people and tried fewer risky non-
| core investments. Plenty of tools-only companies survive well
| indefinitely.
|
| They got greedy. The grow into a unicorn or die trying
| mentally is cancer to good technology.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| >> IIRC most of their revenue comes from Unity Ads
|
| This was and is a really interesting business for them and I
| still think it is a great way for them to grow.
|
| Unity is so entrenched in the game business that if they were
| seriously worried about profitability they could just raise
| their prices and curtail investment and they would have a
| solid business. Like many unicorns they have been favoring
| growth. But at their core they have a solid product that
| people who make a lot of money depend on. Yes, 99% of game
| developer make zero or less, but its a huge industry and some
| very profitable developers / publishers use Unity
| extensively.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| > From the business POV, not being "just a game engine"
| probably saved them.
|
| I agree, but if they were a "game engine and everything
| around games" instead of spreading focus and recourses all
| over what they have been trying to do, my guess is they would
| be in a very good position now.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-13 23:00 UTC)