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?
I've honestly been surprised that Godot's getting a lot of hype out of this. I had 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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.