In the light of the recent news in the game industry and to reassure the community about our commitment, the MonoGame Team would like to share its future plans. The team wishes the MonoGame Framework to become future-proof, both from a technical and governance perspective.
This new era of the open-source project will see the creation of a non-profit foundation to which all rights and properties will be transferred to, with the aim of ensuring MonoGame remains open-source, and free for all and any scenario, including on consoles.
This foundation will allow the adoption of a more sustainable model and will open MonoGame to be supported by more patrons. A new board will be created within this organization with the task to define which projects to undertake, and how they may be funded, transparently.
We will discuss the roadmap at a later time, but we can already state that MonoGame’s goals will be set with regard to the quality of developer onboarding for the framework, its stability and console support of the current version, and the start of a new iteration to further expand MonoGame’s reach and capabilities.
We will communicate the progress of this transition based on developments in future announcements.
We look forward to everyone joining us on this new and exciting chapter.
What news in the game indsutry? I’m an isolated loft-programmer, I don’t know any of that stuff about the tech ecosystem. What’s happening? Is it about the AI?
Just google anything about the current situation with Unity. It’s literally such a big deal that my non-gamer, let alone non-developer, friends have heard about it.
Basically, Unity decided to charge developers for every time someone installs their game.
You heard that right - not purchases, but installs.
This is mainly bad because:
It’s completely unreliable - the amount installs is only known by Unity (as opposed to something like revenue share), and unity has officially stated that the amount of installs will predicted by them
It’s retroactive - if you made a game 10 years ago, and someone installs it now, you will have to pay
It has a lot of edge cases: what about piracy? And reinstalling? And installing on different device? Unity’s response is usually “we’ll figure something out” (btw, Rust cheating community already managed to create a script which can trigger the installation sequence any amount of times, basically making the developer bankrupt)
It’s dumb and messy - Unity changes their opinion and decisions every few days, and it has been officially confirmed that unity doesn’t really know how to even count these installs in the first place yet. It really feels like someone at Unity with zero IT experience just opened Google Play, saw the “installs” count and said “We’ll use this for pricing”.
It completely broke the trust - by making such a dumb, unreal and messy change to their pricing, making it apply retroactively, no serious developer will trust an Engine that can (and will) change it’s business model anytime the Unity team feel like it.
It caused/came with even more bad/dumb changes, like unity changing their Terms Of Service to even make these fees legal, then quickly deleting their TOS Github repo (so hopefully no one will notice) and then arguing that the new TOS is what applies to developers (although their old TOS - which is the one everyone signed, not their new one - said that this is the case only if developers upgrade to newer version of unity editor), and also Unity closing offices and their CEO basically lying it’s because of death threats (trying to play “the poor guys”)
It’s not the only drama caused by Unity in the recent years - previously Unity has done things like buying ironSource - a company that made installers used to install malware and one of the biggest mobile ad providers, and their CEO - John Riccitiello (yes, that’s the guy that added packs to Fifa and wanted to charge Battlefield players for ammo - back when he was EA CEO) called develpoers using Unity who don’t think about monetization of their games since first day “f***ing idiots”
So yes, Unity managed to break the trust of their community and change their pricing to “trust me bro” with a single post
The idea of MonoGame from the beginning was to give developers freedom, without having to be a slave to any engine. I see a bright future for the project.Congrats
