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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Game Development
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founding your business on proprietary software is just a crazy gamble.
I turned down a job offer at a company that relied solely on twitter’s api in order to accomplish their goals. It was a sales lead generation tool that used a scripted approach to warming leads before handing them off to AE’s to bring home.
Within a year Twitter shut down their access and the company went under. That’s the day I learned not to trust another company to allow you to make money with their product permanently.
uncomfortable AWS noises
AWS is different as it’s a product marketed and sold as a product.
This company was using Twitters api in a novel way that want subject to an agreement, just Twitter’s whims to allow it to continue.
I worked for a company that used Google application engine for all of their cloud tools and services. Then one day Google flipped a new billing process and the entire thing became more expensive than self hosting. Sure gae would let us scale to support insane levels but the product was never going to need that scale.
Any aws pipeline I build I write as agnostically as possible, and usually write basic ideas and selections from another platform into my docs and proposals.
It's happened twice in my career that a shop had totally jumped provider, which isn't a lot but is enough to keep one eye open
Developing a good and feature rich game engine which also runs performant is a huge effort. That alone can cost a good team 2 years at least. Even more if we consider todays graphic standards. That's nothing which smaller studios can easily deliver. So yeah, it's an obvious decision to buy a license for a proprietary engine, where a lot of work has already went into. That's just business and nothing crazy about it. Companies using services or products of other companies is pretty ordinary.
FOSS alternatives to Unity exist though. And from my personal experience it looks like Godot seems like the better engine anyways. Not to mention the fact that there is no need for a game engine to create a game. Opengl + a windowing/utility library is ideal.
Until a few years ago there was barely any alternative afaik
Did they clear it with the owners first?
Because if you don't, and later they pursue the legal route, there's not much you can do, you agree to their terms or fight a lawsuit where they'll likely take everything
Need to pick a software.
"Fuck the open source options, they all suck and are not worthy of my time or contribution to make them better, imma use this nice and polished proprietary corporate one! Look at how shiny it is!"
Open source alternative stays unpolished and/or gets abandoned because no one supports its development and even openly mocks it for not being as good as the proprietary option.
Enshitification of the polished proprietary corporate software ensues.
"OH WOE IS ME! WHY DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN AND WHY ISN'T THERE AN ALTERNATIVE TO THESE ABUSIVE CORPORATIONS!! WHY CAN'T AN OPEN SOURCE ALTERNATIVE JUST POP OUT OF THE ETHER WITHOUT MY OR ANYONE ELSE'S SUPPORT OR CONTRIBUTION!!!"
(Which, calling it now, this cycle will happen to Sync for Lemmy eventually. Come back to this comment in a few years.)
Game devs and engine devs don't necessarily have the same skill sets though, right?
And who complained about Sync for Reddit? How would used foss alternatives to access Reddit have changed what happened to Reddit?