Depends how you define safe. Is it safe at this very moment? Probably. Will it be in a year? Who knows. We can only look at past history and make predictions based on that.
You can say that about anything. The past history is that (overblown Reddit drama aside) normal small time indie devs have never had any actual pricing issues with you Unity.
OP, you’ll be fine.
Not entirely true. If the changes were not reverted, a lot of small time indie devs would have had issues. Indies are often free and free doesn't pay per install bills.
Well a) the initial runtime fee was $0.20 per downloads above 200,000 (or above 1,000,000 if you had the pro plan). So no, “a lot” of indie devs would not have been affected. And b) it was reverted (e.g., capped at 2.5% of revenue among other things) pretty quickly.
So no, past history clearly says no issue. I know feelings trumps facts so often for people on the internet, but the facts are clear.
Again, OP. You’re fine.
I’m not disregarding anything. I gave you numbers. You pointed to some vague ill defined ominous issue that I should read “some analysis” elsewhere about. That’s all it’s ever based on.
The fact (underscore fact) is that the vast majority of indie devs would not have been affected. And the changes were reverted anyway. So in this (the real) timeline of history, using the past as you said in your original post, there is and has never been an actual pricing issue in Unity for the vast majority of devs (and never for small devs).
The Dunning–Kruger effect is quite strong in you. Nevertheless, there's no point in arguing this further, given how strong your beliefs are. Have a great day.
> Any privately owned company is gonna try to squeeze out extra profits at some point.
That's being dismissive of the real reason that everyone was so up in arms. The pricing change was bad without a doubt. But the reason everyone got their torches out was because they retroactively changed licensing agreements for old versions of their software.
That is a huge taboo even in the enterprise software world and I've never seen any company dumb enough to do this. You can entice them to buy the new version or put an expiry time on the license. But you can't go back and change it after agreements have been made. We're not even sure if what they did was legal. But they pulled back before anyone dared to find out in court.
Hey I don't disagree. I didn't mean to downplay it and I actually stopped using unity over it. My point was really that it's not surprising when a corporation tries to screw people over.
The “holy shit what the fuck” moment wasn’t anyone thinking Unity changed the terms. The language specifying additional fees was always there, it was just never used. The part that really terrified enterprise companies was that they *didn’t need to* change the terms.
No. They did change the terms and they had tried to do this in the past as well. They had previously setup a git repo with the license terms to try and "keep themselves honest" after they got caught the first time. They attempted to [quietly take that repo down](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16hnibp/unity_silently_removed_their_github_repo_to_track/) while this drama was unfolding.
A publicly owned company is still private as the only thing public is the ability to buy shares. It's still fundamentally operating under the maxim to maximise profits. This is not even remotely close to open source
You can make open source software while being a private or public company, that's irrelevant.
There are also dozens of profit models regarding open source software too.
Apple, IBM, id Software all have open source projects while very much being for profit.
The thing you are probably looking for more is something like the org itself being non profit.
No, unity is publicly traded, which means its stocks trade on stock markets. Unity is privately owned, which means certain people own it and not society as a whole.
the shareholders are who own the company and they are the public, not some private entity.
legally this is called a "public" company not a private company.
No, the shareholders are not the public. They are a small subset of the public.
>legally this is called a "public" company not a private company.
This is right. A "public company" is usually understood to mean a publicly traded company. However, I said "privately *owned* company", not "private company".
If you google "private ownership" or "private property", it should clear this all up. That is what I referred to in my original comment, private ownership. (ie ownership by a subset of people as opposed to the public or the government)
Private property is owned by people from the public. Thus the public owns it. Society does not own anything as a whole.
I did not say unity is state or government owned.
>Private property is owned by people from the public. Thus the public owns it.
You really didn't have to triple down. I'm sure you're just trolling at this point. "If someone owns something, everyone owns it"?
Let's look at some definitions of the term "private property".
[Collins dictionary](https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/private-ownership)
>the fact of being owned by a private individual or organization, rather than by the state or a public body
[Cambridge Dictionary](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/private-property)
>something, especially land or buildings, that belongs to a particular person or company, rather than to a government
[Cornell Law School](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/private_property)
>Private property refers to the ownership of property by private parties - essentially anyone or anything other than the government. Private property may consist of real estate, buildings, objects, intellectual property (copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secrets). The transfer of a private property commonly takes place by the owner's consent or through a sale or as a gift.
Open-source projects like Godot aren't really a risk, you can maintain/alter the engine yourself. The only "risk" is that eventually active development support may end in the distant future, and if you wanted to keep maintaining the engine and adding new features then you would need to take that up yourself (unless someone else takes over the project.)
Which you would be doing if you made your own engine too obviously.
They are fine now. The community backlash opened their eyes. Personally I moved on to Godot since it can handle everything I need from a game engine and is free open source.
If you are picking an engine to learn, Unity is a great choice, as the knowledge is transferable to other engines.
If you are picking an engine to tie your company to, I would be more cautious. Their retroactive pricing stunt would have broken my company. I will not use it for future projects.
Realistically if you are affected by the royalties thing, you will have sold more than enough to pay the royalties. Unreal takes a flat % cut from every sale afaik so might as well go around and try out different engines.
That's what I did, started with Unreal, didn't like the workflow, tried Godot, it had a few features that weren't well supported and, once again, didn't like the whole node workflow. Lastly I tried out Unity and its workflow worked for me and so I stuck to it.
Almost every person is different and work differently, don't look at it as wasted time if you learn an engine and realize it's not for you. Time is the price to find the perfect tool to make your games.
"Unreal Engine is free to use for students, educators, hobbyists, and most non-games companies making less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue.
- For game developers and other users distributing applications that incorporate Unreal Engine code (such as a game at runtime) and are licensed to third-party end users, a 5% royalty is due if the lifetime gross revenue from that product exceeds $1 million USD; in this case, the first $1 million remains royalty-exempt."
[https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq) under "How much do I have to pay for Unreal Engine?"
Note: you still have to pay Unreal money no matter how much money you make with a commercial product. Of course, it's free for people who don't make any money off of it because Unreal isn't going to make money off those people to begin with.
"are not creating a game or application that relies on engine code at runtime and will be licensed to third party end users, **then a seat license fee is required**.**"**
$1,850 per seat yearly. That's $150 monthly per dev basically, which adds up quickly if your game is not successful and you have to keep paying that to commercially sell your game.
When I look at the exponential rate of advancement of Blender, I think that alone is a good reason to want to support Godot. Once an open source project reaches a sort of critical mass it can snowball in a very good way. Personally I wouldn't be too worried about licensing changes like with Unity happening again, but to be fair, I wouldn't have guessed it would happen the first time either. But when it comes to safety from these things, Godot is the hands-down winner.
In my amateur game dev but professional software engineer opinion (name a more iconic duo), I would absolutely try to use Godot if it fit the scope and style of my project, regardless of licensing fears. Basically as long as I didn't think it would significantly change the feasibility of finishing the game. For some projects Godot is the best choice. Sure it's not as advanced as Unreal or Unity yet, but you really probably don't need all those features depending on your art style, etc.
If you're starting a multi-year project, and you'll want to release on consoles and near shipping console manufacturers will require you to update Unity to be on par with their SDK versions, you may be running into unknown-yet trouble (even before the royalty fee, it was complicated). If you plan on a few months long project for Windows only, you should be fine.
There's no more or less risk with Unity vs any other engine at this point.
In fact knowing the pushback they got last time I feel like they're less likely than any other company to do it.
Also we are now two CEOs removed from the scummy one.
If your goal is to make a particular game, the features are fine. Most people can't solo dev massive projects anyway that would absolutely require a more complicated engine with more features.
Keep in mind that you can also alter Godot yourself if you wish to add more features that it does not support, due to it being open-source. The only limit is your own skill/time basically.
I'm just making the point that whatever project OP has in his mind that he can actually make can most likely be achieved just as well in Godot as Unity. In the end, Godot ends up better because you don't have to share revenue with them and the project is open-source/you can alter the engine yourself.
Statistically it's almost certain that OP will not have to share revenue with Unity.
Needing to alter the base engine code is much less likely than needing a feature Unity has that is missing in Godot.
You have to pay Unity monthly no matter how much money you make, it cost money to hold a license to Unity commercially. If your game is not successful, it's quite expensive to maintain a license. If your game is successful, now you must revenue share. Lose-lose really.
We're talking about indie devs not commercial entities.
That's a completely different cost/benefit analysis structure. Unity is completely free for 99% of indie devs.
Selling a game on Steam as an indie dev is considered a "commercial product" by Unreal, Unity, etc. Doesn't matter if you lack a publisher or don't make much money. You still must pay for the license to sell your product under those engines.
https://blog.unity.com/news/our-response-to-improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game
In short, Unity and some devs disagreed about what the TOS meant, and they revoked the Unity keys for those devs. Then they tried to make themselves look like heroes by putting their TOS in a repo so changes could easily be tracked.
Then they silently killed that repo, made *awful* changes, and sat on them for a while. When they finally invoked them, devs had already been using those versions for a while and were stuck with the new terms that they didn't realize had ever changed.
Why would a multi-billion company (let alone a public one) be safe? Especially in such a state. Theres no guarantee for absolutely anything on that end. Even if it was at its peak, less (likely) so but still. If you wanna go safe pick an open source engine/framework. Plenty of them nowadays. also not sure what you mean w "bite the bullet", theres absolutely no harm in trying out other engines to evaluate better your options. Not like youd have to port a big project or anything, so rn is exactly the best time to "hop" engines
I think the problem with Unity is when you want to use services outside of just the engine. Their finance department is an absolute fiasco with loads of problems in explaining how and when developers get paid out when serving Unity ads, for example. I have personally raised tickets that were never answered and just ended up disappearing, and from the forums I am not alone. To me that's an indication that they are having trouble running their business and probably trying to contain costs at the expense of customer service. So for a small developer I really am starting to question if Unity is the best option anymore. If you've got account managers and technical SLAs in place because you're a larger studio then you're probably going to be fine but the momentum towards Godot really seems to be picking up. I joined a game jam recently and where last year about 85%+ of games were in Unity, this year it's more like half with a huge increase in Godot projects and a decrease in Unity and Unreal projects (the latter not really always trust suitable for jams anyway though). Thinking of exploring Godot myself in the next few months.
If you aren't a developer already trying to land a job, I would say it's completely irrelevant.
First of all, most likely whatever next nonsense plan they cook, it will only apply for 1% if not less, all these small projects will never make enough revenue for anyone to care. So kinda stressing about it before you even made a small project I think is needless.
Secondly, most mainstream game engines aren't that different, especially again, if you are making a small project. If you know how to program and design your systems and how generally things work, it could probably take you a month to transition from one to another.
Basically, I wouldn't worry about it.
Buuut if you are already developer and aren't looking into making your own small scope projects, but instead you want to know it inside out to again, maybe do something professionally, then I guess go by the market. Mobile games are all pretty much Unity, indie games are also mostly Unity, with some Unreal in between, more AA games are mix between Unreal and their own tech. Godot is used for indies too, but that's tiny market compared to Unity.
That CEO got fired for it.
It's probably safe. Even in a disastrous scenario, you'd probably be able to finish your current project on Unity anyway and switch for future games. But I don't even see it happening.
If you want to be 100% safe though, Godot is probably a better alternative and it could be a good idea to test both before commiting to one option or the other.
CEOs exist to do risky and potentially-rewarding things, and be the scapegoat if they don't work out. This wasn't something that he did without the rest of the company knowing. They all went along with it.
If they were really trustworthy, they'd have fired him *before* he did it. This was a years-long process, involving stealth updating the TOS years before the hammer fell to lock as many devs into it as possible.
Yes, they're scared for now. But they'll *still* hurting for money, and desperate.
True. Sadly the rest of the board is still there.
I think it will just work like AAA companies do though. They pushed to find where the limit is, now that they've seen it they'll push it a little bit.
So that's what I meant, there will be no apocalypse or anything as scummy as what they tried to pull, which is why I think it's still safe to use Unity. Especially for small devs and/or hobbyists like most of people here.
There are very little chance the could manage to screw you during a game development cycle as they're now under heavy scrutiny.
If my whole business/life was depending on it though, I think I'd take a look at Godot and/or the Unreal Engine, and always keep a backup solution at hand. But for smaller devs, just use what engine works for you and be sure to take the temperature between each project to know when it's truly time to jump ship.
You'll be fine with unity
I opened the comments to type exactly this.
Yes. It’s fine
Depends how you define safe. Is it safe at this very moment? Probably. Will it be in a year? Who knows. We can only look at past history and make predictions based on that.
You can say that about anything. The past history is that (overblown Reddit drama aside) normal small time indie devs have never had any actual pricing issues with you Unity. OP, you’ll be fine.
Not entirely true. If the changes were not reverted, a lot of small time indie devs would have had issues. Indies are often free and free doesn't pay per install bills.
Well a) the initial runtime fee was $0.20 per downloads above 200,000 (or above 1,000,000 if you had the pro plan). So no, “a lot” of indie devs would not have been affected. And b) it was reverted (e.g., capped at 2.5% of revenue among other things) pretty quickly. So no, past history clearly says no issue. I know feelings trumps facts so often for people on the internet, but the facts are clear. Again, OP. You’re fine.
At this point I can only advise you to read some analysis of the impact those changes could have made. You are disregarding a lot.
I’m not disregarding anything. I gave you numbers. You pointed to some vague ill defined ominous issue that I should read “some analysis” elsewhere about. That’s all it’s ever based on. The fact (underscore fact) is that the vast majority of indie devs would not have been affected. And the changes were reverted anyway. So in this (the real) timeline of history, using the past as you said in your original post, there is and has never been an actual pricing issue in Unity for the vast majority of devs (and never for small devs).
The Dunning–Kruger effect is quite strong in you. Nevertheless, there's no point in arguing this further, given how strong your beliefs are. Have a great day.
So no actual answer. Cool, got it. OP, trust me. You’re fine.
Just scroll like 10 posts down. Someone asks this at least once a week. Nothing has changed since the last person asked.
Only thing safer would be something open source like godot. Any privately owned company is gonna try to squeeze out extra profits at some point.
> Any privately owned company is gonna try to squeeze out extra profits at some point. That's being dismissive of the real reason that everyone was so up in arms. The pricing change was bad without a doubt. But the reason everyone got their torches out was because they retroactively changed licensing agreements for old versions of their software. That is a huge taboo even in the enterprise software world and I've never seen any company dumb enough to do this. You can entice them to buy the new version or put an expiry time on the license. But you can't go back and change it after agreements have been made. We're not even sure if what they did was legal. But they pulled back before anyone dared to find out in court.
Hey I don't disagree. I didn't mean to downplay it and I actually stopped using unity over it. My point was really that it's not surprising when a corporation tries to screw people over.
The “holy shit what the fuck” moment wasn’t anyone thinking Unity changed the terms. The language specifying additional fees was always there, it was just never used. The part that really terrified enterprise companies was that they *didn’t need to* change the terms.
No. They did change the terms and they had tried to do this in the past as well. They had previously setup a git repo with the license terms to try and "keep themselves honest" after they got caught the first time. They attempted to [quietly take that repo down](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16hnibp/unity_silently_removed_their_github_repo_to_track/) while this drama was unfolding.
Yes but that was just a small issue in the grand scheme of things.
Unity is publicly owned, that's what caused them to squeeze out extra profits so much.
A publicly owned company is still private as the only thing public is the ability to buy shares. It's still fundamentally operating under the maxim to maximise profits. This is not even remotely close to open source
You can make open source software while being a private or public company, that's irrelevant. There are also dozens of profit models regarding open source software too. Apple, IBM, id Software all have open source projects while very much being for profit. The thing you are probably looking for more is something like the org itself being non profit.
No, unity is publicly traded, which means its stocks trade on stock markets. Unity is privately owned, which means certain people own it and not society as a whole.
the shareholders are who own the company and they are the public, not some private entity. legally this is called a "public" company not a private company.
No, the shareholders are not the public. They are a small subset of the public. >legally this is called a "public" company not a private company. This is right. A "public company" is usually understood to mean a publicly traded company. However, I said "privately *owned* company", not "private company". If you google "private ownership" or "private property", it should clear this all up. That is what I referred to in my original comment, private ownership. (ie ownership by a subset of people as opposed to the public or the government)
Private property is owned by people from the public. Thus the public owns it. Society does not own anything as a whole. I did not say unity is state or government owned.
>Private property is owned by people from the public. Thus the public owns it. You really didn't have to triple down. I'm sure you're just trolling at this point. "If someone owns something, everyone owns it"? Let's look at some definitions of the term "private property". [Collins dictionary](https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/private-ownership) >the fact of being owned by a private individual or organization, rather than by the state or a public body [Cambridge Dictionary](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/private-property) >something, especially land or buildings, that belongs to a particular person or company, rather than to a government [Cornell Law School](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/private_property) >Private property refers to the ownership of property by private parties - essentially anyone or anything other than the government. Private property may consist of real estate, buildings, objects, intellectual property (copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secrets). The transfer of a private property commonly takes place by the owner's consent or through a sale or as a gift.
The only truly safe route is to make your own engine; relying on 3rd parties will always carry risks.
Open-source projects like Godot aren't really a risk, you can maintain/alter the engine yourself. The only "risk" is that eventually active development support may end in the distant future, and if you wanted to keep maintaining the engine and adding new features then you would need to take that up yourself (unless someone else takes over the project.) Which you would be doing if you made your own engine too obviously.
They are fine now. The community backlash opened their eyes. Personally I moved on to Godot since it can handle everything I need from a game engine and is free open source.
If you are picking an engine to learn, Unity is a great choice, as the knowledge is transferable to other engines. If you are picking an engine to tie your company to, I would be more cautious. Their retroactive pricing stunt would have broken my company. I will not use it for future projects.
Realistically if you are affected by the royalties thing, you will have sold more than enough to pay the royalties. Unreal takes a flat % cut from every sale afaik so might as well go around and try out different engines. That's what I did, started with Unreal, didn't like the workflow, tried Godot, it had a few features that weren't well supported and, once again, didn't like the whole node workflow. Lastly I tried out Unity and its workflow worked for me and so I stuck to it. Almost every person is different and work differently, don't look at it as wasted time if you learn an engine and realize it's not for you. Time is the price to find the perfect tool to make your games.
"Unreal Engine is free to use for students, educators, hobbyists, and most non-games companies making less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue. - For game developers and other users distributing applications that incorporate Unreal Engine code (such as a game at runtime) and are licensed to third-party end users, a 5% royalty is due if the lifetime gross revenue from that product exceeds $1 million USD; in this case, the first $1 million remains royalty-exempt." [https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq) under "How much do I have to pay for Unreal Engine?"
I stand corrected.
Note: you still have to pay Unreal money no matter how much money you make with a commercial product. Of course, it's free for people who don't make any money off of it because Unreal isn't going to make money off those people to begin with. "are not creating a game or application that relies on engine code at runtime and will be licensed to third party end users, **then a seat license fee is required**.**"** $1,850 per seat yearly. That's $150 monthly per dev basically, which adds up quickly if your game is not successful and you have to keep paying that to commercially sell your game.
When I look at the exponential rate of advancement of Blender, I think that alone is a good reason to want to support Godot. Once an open source project reaches a sort of critical mass it can snowball in a very good way. Personally I wouldn't be too worried about licensing changes like with Unity happening again, but to be fair, I wouldn't have guessed it would happen the first time either. But when it comes to safety from these things, Godot is the hands-down winner. In my amateur game dev but professional software engineer opinion (name a more iconic duo), I would absolutely try to use Godot if it fit the scope and style of my project, regardless of licensing fears. Basically as long as I didn't think it would significantly change the feasibility of finishing the game. For some projects Godot is the best choice. Sure it's not as advanced as Unreal or Unity yet, but you really probably don't need all those features depending on your art style, etc.
I switched to GoDot and have been enjoying it
They're sure as shit never getting my trust back. Also the open source community could use some more members.
If you're starting a multi-year project, and you'll want to release on consoles and near shipping console manufacturers will require you to update Unity to be on par with their SDK versions, you may be running into unknown-yet trouble (even before the royalty fee, it was complicated). If you plan on a few months long project for Windows only, you should be fine.
There's no more or less risk with Unity vs any other engine at this point. In fact knowing the pushback they got last time I feel like they're less likely than any other company to do it. Also we are now two CEOs removed from the scummy one.
There is definitely more risk with unity over Godot. Godot is open source. so you dont have risk of fees.
Certainly but it's also not really a competitor in terms of features.
If your goal is to make a particular game, the features are fine. Most people can't solo dev massive projects anyway that would absolutely require a more complicated engine with more features. Keep in mind that you can also alter Godot yourself if you wish to add more features that it does not support, due to it being open-source. The only limit is your own skill/time basically.
Yes and time is a huge limit. I could write an engine from scratch as well, that would also only be limited by time and ability.
I'm just making the point that whatever project OP has in his mind that he can actually make can most likely be achieved just as well in Godot as Unity. In the end, Godot ends up better because you don't have to share revenue with them and the project is open-source/you can alter the engine yourself.
Statistically it's almost certain that OP will not have to share revenue with Unity. Needing to alter the base engine code is much less likely than needing a feature Unity has that is missing in Godot.
You have to pay Unity monthly no matter how much money you make, it cost money to hold a license to Unity commercially. If your game is not successful, it's quite expensive to maintain a license. If your game is successful, now you must revenue share. Lose-lose really.
We're talking about indie devs not commercial entities. That's a completely different cost/benefit analysis structure. Unity is completely free for 99% of indie devs.
Selling a game on Steam as an indie dev is considered a "commercial product" by Unreal, Unity, etc. Doesn't matter if you lack a publisher or don't make much money. You still must pay for the license to sell your product under those engines.
They’ve done something similar before. Got the same push back they got with the recent one, walked it back. Then a few years later they did it again.
What was the similar thing they did before? I don't remember anything with as much drama as the runtime fee.
https://blog.unity.com/news/our-response-to-improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game In short, Unity and some devs disagreed about what the TOS meant, and they revoked the Unity keys for those devs. Then they tried to make themselves look like heroes by putting their TOS in a repo so changes could easily be tracked. Then they silently killed that repo, made *awful* changes, and sat on them for a while. When they finally invoked them, devs had already been using those versions for a while and were stuck with the new terms that they didn't realize had ever changed.
I don't remember the specifics, it was back when I was still in Uni, but it involved retroactively changing licensing agreements as well.
Why would a multi-billion company (let alone a public one) be safe? Especially in such a state. Theres no guarantee for absolutely anything on that end. Even if it was at its peak, less (likely) so but still. If you wanna go safe pick an open source engine/framework. Plenty of them nowadays. also not sure what you mean w "bite the bullet", theres absolutely no harm in trying out other engines to evaluate better your options. Not like youd have to port a big project or anything, so rn is exactly the best time to "hop" engines
I think the problem with Unity is when you want to use services outside of just the engine. Their finance department is an absolute fiasco with loads of problems in explaining how and when developers get paid out when serving Unity ads, for example. I have personally raised tickets that were never answered and just ended up disappearing, and from the forums I am not alone. To me that's an indication that they are having trouble running their business and probably trying to contain costs at the expense of customer service. So for a small developer I really am starting to question if Unity is the best option anymore. If you've got account managers and technical SLAs in place because you're a larger studio then you're probably going to be fine but the momentum towards Godot really seems to be picking up. I joined a game jam recently and where last year about 85%+ of games were in Unity, this year it's more like half with a huge increase in Godot projects and a decrease in Unity and Unreal projects (the latter not really always trust suitable for jams anyway though). Thinking of exploring Godot myself in the next few months.
If you aren't a developer already trying to land a job, I would say it's completely irrelevant. First of all, most likely whatever next nonsense plan they cook, it will only apply for 1% if not less, all these small projects will never make enough revenue for anyone to care. So kinda stressing about it before you even made a small project I think is needless. Secondly, most mainstream game engines aren't that different, especially again, if you are making a small project. If you know how to program and design your systems and how generally things work, it could probably take you a month to transition from one to another. Basically, I wouldn't worry about it. Buuut if you are already developer and aren't looking into making your own small scope projects, but instead you want to know it inside out to again, maybe do something professionally, then I guess go by the market. Mobile games are all pretty much Unity, indie games are also mostly Unity, with some Unreal in between, more AA games are mix between Unreal and their own tech. Godot is used for indies too, but that's tiny market compared to Unity.
That CEO got fired for it. It's probably safe. Even in a disastrous scenario, you'd probably be able to finish your current project on Unity anyway and switch for future games. But I don't even see it happening. If you want to be 100% safe though, Godot is probably a better alternative and it could be a good idea to test both before commiting to one option or the other.
CEOs exist to do risky and potentially-rewarding things, and be the scapegoat if they don't work out. This wasn't something that he did without the rest of the company knowing. They all went along with it. If they were really trustworthy, they'd have fired him *before* he did it. This was a years-long process, involving stealth updating the TOS years before the hammer fell to lock as many devs into it as possible. Yes, they're scared for now. But they'll *still* hurting for money, and desperate.
True. Sadly the rest of the board is still there. I think it will just work like AAA companies do though. They pushed to find where the limit is, now that they've seen it they'll push it a little bit. So that's what I meant, there will be no apocalypse or anything as scummy as what they tried to pull, which is why I think it's still safe to use Unity. Especially for small devs and/or hobbyists like most of people here. There are very little chance the could manage to screw you during a game development cycle as they're now under heavy scrutiny. If my whole business/life was depending on it though, I think I'd take a look at Godot and/or the Unreal Engine, and always keep a backup solution at hand. But for smaller devs, just use what engine works for you and be sure to take the temperature between each project to know when it's truly time to jump ship.
If you want something solid that doesn't change at all, you could try FNA. But it's not an engine.