Unity's Plan Won't Work, but Someone Else's Will | TechnoFeudalism in Games and Beyond

Submitted ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Frostwolf@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://youtu.be/xDPPig9JR5Y?si=bDzy0cFHzPDTRPCT

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/5196308

It’s scary that the Unity debacle is not just happening in games but a very real threat not just in digital and app space but in real life.

It can happen in medicine, housing, even the food we eat if the trend of subscriptions and lock ins continue.

Despite this, a global concerted effort towards Open Source tech is still not happening.

In Unity for example, there is a push to transition to Unreal but less so for Godot. We see this happening with reddit too. And soon maybe we’ll see it in real life. What’s stopping our hotels and landlords from charging us everytime we open doors.

We see this in the rampant mandatory tips. Where everyone is automatically charged per order.

It’s scary and frustrating at the same time that there may not be a clear remedy for this. As the world shifts to subscriptions and services, do we truly own anything anymore?

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Comments

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BombOmOm@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Unreal is creaming their pants this week. They can’t have imagined a better sales pitch.

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- 50gp@kbin.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  they just have to unveil some new shiny tools to convert from unity to unreal
  
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  - Dangdoggo@kbin.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    There will never be a tool to convert Unity projects to Unreal. However there are already several to convert Unity to Godot, because both use C#
    
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  - messem10@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Sadly it can’t work that way. From a programming perspective alone they are very different engines.
    
    Unity uses C# while Unreal is C++.
    
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- FLX@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  We chose unity because we thought unreal model was shitty too.
  
  Next time it’s open source, godot or stride or i don’t know, but not unreal.
  
  They would have done the same shit if it worked
  
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  - hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’ve honestly been surprised that Godot’s getting a lot of hype out of this. I honestly expected MonoGame/XNA to be the big beneficiary – particularly for Unity’s 2D users, but also 3D (though I expected Unreal to benefit the most there just because of developer familiarity).
    
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- excel@lemmy.megumin.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Except Unreal already had the same kind of pricing structure that Unity is trying to move towards, that’s why Unity thought they could get away with it.
  
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Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Ticketmaster is another real world example we’ve got right now. Or any service that adds on arbitrary fees that aren’t a part of the advertised price.

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- SinningStromgald@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Ticketmaster is a monopoly that should have never been allowed.
  
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Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I am a strong supporter of open source tech. Specifically the proper FOSS flavor.

It is NEVER going to be a valid alternative when there is a massive multi-million (if not billion) dollar alternative with an affordable license. Because it takes time to develop these feature sets and time is money. Even someone working in their spare time can’t put in a full day of work… and are likely burned out FROM a full day of work.

And that ignores the tendency for GPL-like licenses that are straight up cancer as far as companies and products are concerned. I respect the ideology but… that is WHY companies are less likely to pull a Valve and dump massive amounts of money into supporting open source projects.

The best we can hope for is the model used by Ubuntu and the like. An open source project backed by a corporation that sells support. And… the open source community almost instantly turns on that and decides they are evil and starts going out of their way to shit on it at every step of the way.

As for the overall idea of “do we even own anything in this world of subscriptions?”. That, much like with the “I bought the disc so I own this game” mindset is very much a fallacy. Because you can get a life time license to version 1.2315151651616 of FooSoft. hell, you can even get 1.x of FooSoft. That… doesn’t matter because the moment a CVE is found in FooSoft or its dependencies you need a new version. Which is WHY we tend toward these subscription models because we know we need the updated version.

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- tabular@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A universal basic income would allow more developers to choose to work on software they actually like, rather than the demands of business and their proprietary models.
  
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  - Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Most UBI solutions (which I very much support and voted for Yang in the primaries for…) tend to be built around the idea of providing cost of living for “free” but encouraging people to still suck capitalism good if they want more money on top of that. Which is “good” because it is how you get those rock star developers focused on major products.
    
    But that more or less makes the same problem. Sure, there are going to be people who genuinely want for nothing more than three meals a day and spend the rest of their time doing hardcore development. But, even then, they likely are never going to be “challenged”. I’ve worked with some AMAZING developers over the years and have learned a lot from them. And I would hope they learned from me. Because, during a code review, you see how Nancy solved a problem and might try to incorporate that pattern into your own workflow and so forth.
    
    But when you are more or less the sole “ninja” developer on a project and are mostly working with college kids who can remember what the various design patterns are called? You are likely not being challenged in the slightest and you “stagnate”.
    
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- Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There are free OS nowadays that are Better than the paid ones (especially the most used one for desktops).
  
  What do you need your PC to do? If it’s word-processing and spreadsheets you are already ready to go free. Other software or “solutions” will come later.
  
  It just takes time because the money is pushing hard the payment models.
  
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tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Do we know yet if unity’s plan won’t work?

Games take 3-5 years to make… you can’t change engine mid-development so it’ll literally be years before they see any negative impact - during which time they’ll be making bank.

From their point of view that’s a success… shareholders care little about long term sustainability.

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- Kes@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Developers are on the hook for potentially infinite losses without gaining revenue in a per install fee system. Expenses are entirely unpredictable for developers and bad actors can run basic install scripts to cost the company a lot, so if Unity stays their current course for a few more weeks, many of the larger developers using Unity will begin switching engines even if it means delays. It’s absolutely worth it for a developer to port their game over no matter the cost, because they are easily looking at no limits to their costs if they don’t
  
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- KingCapitalist@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s quite the opposite.
  
  Unity, like reddit, made a smart decision for sustainability that came with a bit of short-term outrage.
  
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  - Boldizzle@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The people in charge at Unity can’t just take over their customers project and boot the Devs out if they protest like Reddit did with Subreddits they protested for too long where they just banned the mods and took over the subs that had gone dark.
    
    There’s way more control in the Devs hands in this instance but Unity seem to be trying to rely on the fact that it’s a massive pain in the ass to switch to a different engine mid development but that’s definitely not stopping some people from making the migration still.
    
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ekZepp@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
More links on the subject: Article - Are We Living Under ‘Technofeudalism’?

Video: Technofeudalism: The End of Capitalism

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uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The right-to-repair movement is showing us cyber-feudalism will fail in time, as is the failing BMW subscription seats thing. We may be moving into a golden age of service and media piracy in which households throughout the developed world simply resort on cracked services. We may be using cracked ink cartridges and illegally-jailbroken refrigerators until they realize the compound public resentment and ingoing war against pirates is cutting more into profits than is gained from rent seeking DRM

We’ve already seen how the efforts by the record lables to litigate against children and elderly can go poorly and just increase piracy (or worse, decrease engagement).

But it means we’ll have to suffer more as the paradigm shifts. Capitalists are not allowed to relent when it comes to profit seeking, making them the enemy of the people. And a government that favors commercial corporations over the public (as is the case in the US) is also, by definition, the enemy of the people. It means any transaction is predatory unless there is a force acting in the interest of the worker and the consumer that effectively dissuades contracts without parity.

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Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I would use open source but there are no open source game engines that support VR with controller and hand interactions, let alone online avatars. Open Source is just behind in a major way in the VR/AR space and I hope it makes closing that gap a priority.

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- Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There are strong indications that Valve’s Deckard is imminent. Whether that is a standalone VR device or a “console” like steam machine with a heavy emphasis on VR is up for debate.
  
  But it should result in a much stronger focus on non-proprietary VR libraries that are OS agnostic. I doubt it will make for a massive market share increase, but it will hopefully make working with ti more palatable for the various free engines. Because NOBODY wants to spend their free time interfacing with facebook. But OpenXR (or something actually good?)? We’ll see.
  
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  - Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I remember when FB bought Oculus and everyone was outraged swearing to boycott and maybe they did, but the Quest went on to be the best selling VR headset by a lot.
    
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ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Techno -fuedalism Image

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- ekZepp@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Strangely enough, don’t feel like laughing.
  
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- kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  what’s funny tho? dude has a point
  
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  - ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The absolute absurdity of framing and drawing comparisons between the technology sector and feudalism.
    
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- tabular@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Requesting source of the emoji.
  
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  - ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Google GBoard built in!
    
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- kurwa@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Just sounds like an interesting name for SAAS.
  
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  - ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    SaaS, literally slavery.
    
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