Thread by @reduzio

Want to understand in depth why the Unity debacle and why it is critical that FOSS becomes the de facto business model for the game industry?

Please make sure to read on!🧵..

To begin, you have to understand what is the "whole product" concept is:

There are many variations of it, but the main idea is as follows..en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_pro…

Companies have a "core product" they sell that most of the time it costs a lot to develop, in R&D, physical materials, whatever.
Ultimately, to be competitive, they tend to sell that product at minimum/no profit margin, then obtain most of the revenue from "augmented products"..

A very simple example is, you buy a water heater that costs $10 (core product), then they sell you an extended warranty for $2 (augmented product). The company makes its actual income from the later..

With software it's the same, in the case of something like Unity or Unreal, the engine is the actual core product. It costs a fortune to develop, so the companies rely on augmented product to turn profit (ads, online services, etc)..

Now what happens if the market changes and the augmented product revenue diminishes? (As example, general income from advertising is down due to restrictions by Apple, more competition in the online service space, etc)..

This means that, as augmented products turn no profit, the company is forced to turn back to the core product for profit, either reducing R&D cost (firing people), or changing the business model (charging royalties). This means, even a profitable company can fuck up majorly..

But with FOSS, the equation changes. There is the notion of open ecosystems. The core product is developed by a community of individuals and/or companies. They all benefit the same from it..
Here's my GDC talk about it:

Because the core product cost is near none, companies in this ecosystem can benefit from simply investing in augmented product and having much higher profits. This is why so many FOSS companies have been so successful recently on the enterprise side...

My wish is that this model finally comes to the game industry, so we can all benefit from this open ecosystem. Godot is meant the stepping stone into this and Its important that industry realizes how dangerous is to rely on proprietary solutions that develop technology at loss.