- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://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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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.
Ticketmaster is a monopoly that should have never been allowed.
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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
Redhat was the golden child of the open source community, the paragon of open source success stories, until fairly recently.
Canonical was also very highly respected until they started putting Amazon ads into people’s menus.
It is not something that happens instantly for no reason, it’s because of the need for these companies to squeeze every last drop of revenue out of a product to appease shareholders. Open source companies can, and do, thrive without screwing their communities over. The problem is the mindset that creating value for shareholders is the only thing that matters.
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It’s because of the need for these companies to squeeze every last drop of revenue out of a product to appease shareholders.
Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. ( on Wikipedia ) established shareholder primacy meaning publicly-owned companies must favor the interests of shareholder dividends over interests of the workers, the customers or the economy.
It means a commercial interest that is publicly owned (on the stock market) cannot keep a fair agreement with other interests if it can enshittify to raise profits, nor can it work towards long-term development of the company.
This also kills the notion of supply-side (trickle-down) economic policy, since anything that trickles is profits failing to go to shareholder dividends.
Shareholder primacy means a company has to be as ruthless as possible in order to maximize profits, which makes benign capitalism impossible.
It also means developers would do well to create a robust open-source, freeware, public-domain or copyleft game engine. I don’t know how close Godot is to this.
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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What can happen, and actually happen in a lot of software fields, is multiple companies investing in the tool. That’s the case for the Linux kernel, for databases, for programming languages…
Many game companies even have their own in-house engine. Instead of investing in that (usually sub-par) engine, they could be investing in an open Source engine.
I don’t understand why this doesn’t happen in games. And don’t tell me that they want to keep their own engine as a competitive advantage, because most in-house engines are shit.
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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.
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
It’s quite the opposite.
Unity, like reddit, made a smart decision for sustainability that came with a bit of short-term outrage.
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.
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.
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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.
