Everyone can agree on VLC being the best video player, right? Game developers can agree on it too, since it is a great utility for playing multimedia in games, and/or have a video player included. However, disaster struck; Unity has now banned VLC from the Unity Store, seemingly due to it being under the LGPL license which is a “Violation of section 5.10.4 of the Provider agreement.” This is a contridiction however. According to Martin Finkel in the linked article, “Unity itself, both the Editor and the runtime (which means your shipped game) is already using LGPL dependencies! Unity is built on libraries such as Lame, libiconv, libwebsockets and websockify.js (at least).” Unity is swiftly coming to it’s demise.
What pisses me off about the whole Unity thing is that if Unity makes itself eat shit then it just further consolidates engines into fewer hands. Godot is great and all but it doesn’t have everything Unreal has (I’m not throwing shade it’ll get there dw) and I really really don’t want Epic to have a bigger stranglehold on the games industry than it already does.
Unity had its niche and if the executives could stop fucking around it would be lovely to have as a competitor in the landscape.
Also to everyone saying “just don’t use Unity”: there are a lot of people who have put a lot of time and money and effort into learning Unity and it’s not exactly as easy as you think to just switch to an entirely new workflow. You also have to consider how impractical it is to switch engines mid-development. There’s a reason why Unreal 5 has been out for multiple years and we’re only just seeing games developed with it now. Developers (especially ones with big budgets and all the caveats they come with) don’t want to ship a game with the latest and greatest engine if there’s kinks to be worked out. This is why you still see Unreal 4 in games released today.