It's unlikely for a small indie to roll a mobile game engine But if you are talking about companies with millions of dollars of income from gacha games like Hearthstone, most of them have already attempted to roll their own or even used in production already. (NeoX from NetEase, Cyllista from Cygames and Supercell’s unnamed engine…) For mobile game engines, they are not striving for crazy visual fidelity since mobile hardware is really limiting. Those who stick with Unity now because it’s cheaper, but if Unity tries to charge way more, they will definitely spend that markup to push their own tech onto production instead of surrendering money to Unity.
Unreal has technology moats like Lumen and Nanite to justify the royalty while Unity doesn't.
People Make Games made a video about this Infiniminer/Minecraft story and they interviewed Zach Barth. When Microsoft was reviewing the 2.5B Minecraft deal, Zach was working for Microsoft and was on those meetings.
Sometimes they just force you to implement feature for them, like “Sign in with Apple”
> We’ve updated the App Store Review Guidelines to provide criteria for when apps are required to use Sign in with Apple. Starting today, new apps submitted to the App Store must follow these guidelines. Existing apps and app updates must follow them by April 2020. We’ve also provided new guidelines for using Sign in with Apple on the web and other platforms.
> 4.8 Sign in with Apple
Apps that use a third-party or social login service (such as Facebook Login, Google Sign-In, Sign in with Twitter, Sign In with LinkedIn, Login with Amazon, or WeChat Login) to set up or authenticate the user’s primary account with the app must also offer Sign in with Apple as an equivalent option.
And implementing Sign in with Apple in Unity is one of the worst experience in my career that I dedicated a blog post talking about:
- Native Sign in with Apple button not working in Unity
- Official Sign in with Apple plugin provided by Unity also not working
- Hooked up API with help from GitHub and created Sign in with Apple button by myself ended up getting `4.0 Design` rejection without explanation
- Trying crazily to contact Apple reviewer for weeks only to find out you have to use system font on that button
- Unity cannot support new Thai system font after iOS 13 and they mark it won’t fix
- Ended up building a native sample app and screenshot Sign in with Apple button from it in 12 different languages into PNGs and ask the my designer co-worker to remove background for me to import them into Unity
- After all these the update is finally accepted by App Store
- Casually downloaded games by other companies a week later, saw a totally malformed Sign in with Apple button not being nitpicked by reviewer and just went live like that
Working on games with Unity for nearly a decade, the standard approach is to defer upgrading Unity as long as possible. Generally we stay on the old LTS (Long-term support) version until it’s no longer supported. Latest version and new LTS are very unstable with game crashing bugs on certain platforms that I had to spend weeks to track down and spend weeks to convince Unity QA there is actually a problem then wait for months to get it fixed. It’s better to just stay away from the latest and greatest, having other people do the demining.
There's another episode from Gaming Historian specifically for Tengen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLA_d9q6ySs
It talks about how Atari abuses the copyright system to gain access to Nintendo’s protection system source code.
Nope, while Nintendo definitely abused copyright law doesn't mean Atari/Tengen is in the clear. They specifically requested the lockout code fron the US Copyright Office under the pretense that they'll be suing Nintendo.
You are forced to use IL2CPP on mobile since the Google/Apple mandated ARM64 build is not available through Mono. (Mono itself does support ARM64, just Unity doesn't bother to port it) I recently had a bug which erroneously stripped functions in generated IL2CPP code, and I had to trace generated IL2CPP line by line, it’s so much fun.
I don't see why we would -- I don't think Unity has any individual credits listed for their engine developers. That's standard for software development, AFAIK Adobe is really the only mainstream software company that still has credits listed in their product releases.
The paid support is not cheap and mostly useless, at least in Asia region. We still need to go through normal bug report system, create reproduction steps for them, and get denied for back-porting bug fixes every single time. The only thing changed is that there's a "bug fix progress update" to make you feel a little bit better. We terminated the support right after the term expired.
Part of it is also due to Unity3D sticked with the ancient stop-the-world mono GC for a very long time and discuraging developers from doing allocation in official talks.
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=46289.0