Rust dev is bored of paying Unity '$500k a year' to fix its engine and promises that his Garry's Mod successor won't hoodwink devs with fees
If you can cast your mind back to around this time last year, you might remember Garry Newman—him off of Garry's Mod, and founder of Facepunch Studios—announcing that "Unity can get fucked" in the wake of sudden, badly thought out changes to the engine's pricing scheme that would have seen devs fork over fees on a per-install basis once certain «fee thresholds» were met.
Unity eventually walked back the most egregious aspects of those changes, but it's probably not surprising that Newman is more committed than ever to his kinda-sorta Garry's Mod sequel/brand new engine s&box, which has been in the works for years now. In fact, Newman spoke a bit about his vision for the engine in a recent dev blog.
«I don't want to pay Unity $500k every year so I can then pay my own staff to optimize and fix their engine,» writes Newman, quite reasonably. Facepunch's other game, super-popular survival game Rust, has been based on Unity its whole life, but Newman has already said Rust 2 would be based on a different engine.
«Unity has been good to us,» he says, so it looks like bygones are bygones when it comes to those fee changes, «but I regret that we didn't always have our own engine being developed in the background… The long term goal is to be making all of our games on s&box, and to have expanded so the engine works on mobile/console/etc.»
So Newman would quite like to stop paying Unity for the privilege of fixing its engine, which makes sense, but he also regrets that «the Garry's Mod community mostly have to leave Garry's Mod if they want to make money from the things they create in it.»
Later on, Newman writes that «In Garry's Mod, if you made a popular game, the next step was to abandon the community and make a new version in Unity or Unreal. That fucking sucks.»
That means a key element of s&box will be «A Garry's Mod type platform, where there's a list of games and you can jump between them. But this time providing a way for the game developers to monetise.»
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