I wonder why Godot and Unreal are getting so much interest today

Someone claims here that if you use Unity's internal Ad API then you will make that money back, giving people who put ads in their games a free pass.

If true, Unity is trying to force indie devs to enshittify their products.

How can be retroactive?

I mean legally. The devs agreed to a contract, it can't be changed with different economic terms later

If someone published an Unity game 4 years ago, has now abandoned the project, doesn't release any update, why needs to pay a per install fee "for supporting the runtime"? The version is now ancient. I could understand if it was "from version xx.yy"

They actually explicitly stated as such:

Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?

A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.

Not to mention that it's such a sudden announcement. I mean, sure, they gave people 3 months notice in advance, but when you consider the scale of many games probably take longer than 3 months to make the decision AND actually make the switch (or make up for the switch), it's cause for quite a bit of harm.

Granted, the majority of people may not be affected by it due to needing to meet a requirement of like earning $200,000 and 200,000 installs at a minimum, but I feel like the once you reach that, it's just downhill from there.

In addition to your example of costing the devs for reinstalling the game, you now have to consider the possibility of a user (or group of users) maliciously reinstalling their games to financially damage the developer. Sure, Unity says they'll have fraud detection for stuff like that, but then it's literally up to the people you owe money to decide whether you should pay more or less money to them.

This feels so wrong to me that I feel like they must be going against some law, or they need to be sued to set precedent. I'm not a lawyer, I just think this smells completely like a giant corporation scamming people.

It was decided that game engine development was over complicating the goal of Blender. It detracted from actual 3D software development resources and trying to make all blender features seamless with it was nearly doubling potential work.

Default Cube is a playable character in Super Tux Kart, although unofficially through a user created addon which can be downloaded through the game’s addon feature.

Not Suzanne the monkey?

Also, it's not 3D, but you may like 140, where you play as a square that turns into a circle when jumping. It's actually a great game, like a decomposition of what it means to be a platformer.

Not the dreaded cone?

It would be great if a portion of them decided to dip their toes into game development too since it's free.

You just described what I did just before reading this comment.

Oh, Unity will lose too.

Somehow, I keep remembering Reddit.

Wich is a violation of EUs GDPR...

Unreal is not open source, it's source-available. Open source generally gives freedoms like redistribution, yet that is explicitly not allowed by Unreal. To get access to the source, you need to agree to a licensing agreement with them.

That said, source-available is a lot better than most proprietary software licenses.

I was really confused because from some reason I was thinking that Unreal and Unity were the same.

I trust they did their best.
I also trust that any sufficiently tech savvy individual will be able to bypass that system. It only takes one person to pull it off and then it's public knowledge. Sure, they'll fix it, and then someone will do it again.
Small companies can't afford to take that risk and larger companies won't want the hassle.

It's a shame too. I liked Unity more than Unreal. Oh well.

That's a leadership issue though. The CEO's job is to communicate expectations to the board and balance long term and short term returns.