In my completely pointless recent blog post on what I would do if I were rich (well, recently finally finished and posted; that post had been sitting unfinished on my computer for months), one of the things that I mentioned I'd like to have is my own video game company.
Now, that was not entirely an empty pipe dream that I've made no effort to realize. Mostly, yes. Maybe 94%. But not entirely. I have been taking some steps to try to learn how to make my own video games. It's something I'd been dabbling in for a long time—heck, even as a child I wrote a couple of simple adventure games in Applesoft BASIC. (Which I will say nothing further about.) But a few years ago, for a while I gave the matter more attention.
During the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Unity Technologies announced that all the course content on their website to learn their popular game engine, Unity, would be temporarily free. (This ended up not being temporary after all, but at least at the beginning that was the projection.) I decided I would take advantage of this deal and, well, try to learn to make games in Unity. This wasn't actually my very first time using Unity; I'd worked with it in the past, even started making a game with it. But I'd never really made a systematic effort to learn its features and functionality, and now, well, I did. There was a "Live Learn" class going on with live remote instructors, and I joined in on that... although I hadn't found out about the course until it was almost over, so I had a lot of hasty catching up to do with old sessions. I continued with other Unity Learn content after that, learned more about the engine, even participated in a few game jams.
I had a lot of ideas for video games I wanted to make. (Whether I had the skills, time, or talent to ever make those games was an open question, but that's beside the immediate point.) But before I started in earnest on any of those projects, there was one thing that gave me a bit of pause. (Besides possibly not having the skills, time, or talent.) Unity was, as I understood it, currently the most popular game engine for indie and professional game developers alike. But there was another engine that was a not-too-distant second. Like the Unity, the Unreal Engine was also free for personal use, and had considerable free learning content online—though it didn't seem to have anything like Unity's Live Learn classes. Still, might it be worth looking into? Granted, I'd already sunk a lot of time into learning Unity, but how did I know until I tried it that I might not like the Unreal Engine better?
There were some things happened with Unity that gave me some misgivings about it. The Live Learn content, frequent and plentiful when I first started with it, slowed to a trickle and now seems to have ceased entirely—the Live Learn page still exists, but has for some time shown no upcoming classes. And I wasn't sure what it portended when Unity laid off hundreds of employees last year. But that and a few other missteps weren't enough to completely tip the scales against it; as I said, I'd already sunk a lot of time into learning Unity, and I liked my experience with it so far. I did still intend at some point to look into Unreal Engine (I've bought a few Udemy courses on it, though given the amount of free learning content available on the Unreal site, maybe this was superfluous), but I wasn't sure how much I'd really be using it. Based on what I'd read about comparisons between Unity and the Unreal Engine, I thought maybe I'd end up using Unity for 2D games and the Unreal Engine for 3D, but that was a very tentative decisions. I'd maybe have to wait and see what I thought about the Unreal Engine once I'd looked into it more, and even then I wasn't sure it would be an easy decision.
Well, Unity Technologies just made the decision a whole lot easier.
Two days ago, Unity Technologies announced a new system for licensing fees. Previously, Unity was completely free to use for those making less than $100,000 in a year, but there were various commercial plans that offered additional features and services. For these plans, Unity charged an annual fee, but there were no additional charges; as the Unity FAQ used to say, "Unity is royalty-free. We don't charge on a per-title basis or require a revenue share model." According to the new plan, though, Unity is now "introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user." This fee would only kick in for games that had passed certain minimum thresholds in both yearly revenue and total installs, but for those that did, Unity would charge a fee for each time the game was installed, varying from half a cent to twenty cents depending on the number of monthly installs, the plan the developer was subscribed to, and where the developer was located.
To say that this announcement was poorly received might be a bit of an understatement. It seemed that just about every major video game news site (and some non-gaming news sites) ran stories about developers' dismay at the new pricing plan. Unity execs quickly tried to run damage control, addressing how their new policy would apply to things like demos and giveaways and bundles, and assuring users that the thresholds meant that it would only apply to higher-end developers. This all meant very little; first, there were still a lot of troublesome questions the execs didn't address, and, perhaps more importantly, it did nothing to assuage concerns of the precedent that had been set. Even if the new fee structure did only apply to high-end developers now, if Unity Technologies is willing to unexpectedly, unilaterally, and apparently semiretroactively impose such a drastic change in their fee structure now, there's little reason to be confident they won't make more changes in the future that might affect smaller developers. "If you're starting a new game project, do not use Unity," says the subheading of one article, and under the circumstances I think that's very good advice. I guess it's not entirely impossible in the face of all this backlash that Unity Technologies will walk back the changes, as Wizards of the Coast eventually did in its disastrous attempt to revoke the Open Game License earlier this year, but even if they do, short of a thorough executive housecleaning and restructuring, it's hard to see how they could possibly restore any developer trust or confidence after this.
So yeah. I guess I'm done with Unity. But what does this have to do with the Wongery? (Because this being the Wongery blog, you'd expect all the posts here should relate to the Wongery in some way, however tangential.) Well, like the aforementioned OGL business, this doesn't have any major impact on my plans the Wongery, but is likely to have an effect on what gets included in one of the subspaces. Not the Gamespace this time, but the Assetspace, which is what I've somewhat tentatively decided to call the subspace that will be devoted to assets for video games, which although these are also games do not go in the Gamespace, because I am bad at naming things. I had planned on including assets specifically for Unity, including characters, environments, and templates—this probably isn't something that would be there at the time of the hard launch, because I've got a lot of other things I have to get ready, but it was something I'd planned on including eventually. I even mentioned Unity in a past blog post as an example of a projected "subsubspace". But in the light of this announcement, it's now looking like there won't be Unity content on the Wongery after all.
I started this blog post with a reference to another blog post on what I would do if I were rich. Well, I think I have another item now to add to the list in that post. I'd also want to spearhead the creation of a fully open-source game engine. There are good, full-featured open-source 3D modeling programs (Blender); open-source web browsers (Firefox); even open-source operating systems (Ubuntu). I know of a lot of free game creation systems tailored toward specific type of games, but I don't know of any broad-purpose open-source game engines comparable to Unity or the Unreal Engine... but I don't see why such a thing couldn't exist. Granted, it would be a big undertaking, and it may take a lot of resources to get it done, but that's why it would be an item on my if-I-were-rich wishlist (as in, if I were rich I'd pay programmers to make the engine that I'd then release under an open source license) rather than something I actually expect to achieve. I guess it's different from the other items on that list in that the other items do have at least the theoretical possibility of making a profit, even if for some of them that possibility is slim (like I said in that article, for instance, I'm not sure comic books actually make any money). Still, I guess—in once again the completely fanciful counterfactual situation in which I actually had the money to do the things in that list—it's not entirely possible it might redound to my wholly hypothetical commercial enterprises' benefit in fostering goodwill, or in bringing attention to my other IPs through assets packaged with the engine. But even if it didn't, this is still something I'd want to exist.
Wait, hold on a moment... speaking of Blender, wasn't there a Blender Game Engine? I don't think it ever got nearly the attention or userbase of Unity or the Unreal Engine, but that's a thing I'm pretty sure exists. Okay, so I just looked into it, and it turns out there was an open source Blender Game Engine, but as of the release of Blender 2.8 in 2019, it's no longer included with the Blender installation. But it does still exist as a forked separate project called UPBGE. Moreover, it's not the only open source game engine. There's Godot, which I'd heard of before but hadn't realized was open source. There's Cocos Creator and Defold and Torque and okay at this point I'm pretty sure there are a lot more I could find with a little more searching. So, yeah, actually, there are already broad-purpose open-source game engines. Rather a lot of them, as it turns out. Which, actually, I should have guessed, and it was kind of stupid of me to assume there weren't. Which still wouldn't necessarily preclude me wanting to make my own if I had the time and resources, because it's always nice to have more options and because I just like making things. But in the meantime, hm, I think maybe I'll look into Godot.
(Although don't expect me to release any finished games made with Godot any time soon, because I have roughly five billion other projects I'm also trying to get done. (Note: Previous sentence may include slight hyperbole.) Also, even if against all odds I do finish any games, that would be something I would do completely separately from the Wongery and under a different pseudonym.)
But yeah, anyway. So much for Unity.