Technology

Found the article where the screenshot came from, and wow it's even more infuriating! The VideoLAN folks tried to work with them for months, and Unity seems to have cranial rectal inversion.

For anyone wondering:

1. There was a plugin on Unity Store that acted a bridge between Unity and libVLC, which allowed developers to make video players inside the game engine. As the post says, it got removed.
2. This plugin isn't made by VideoLAN, it's made by a company named Videolabs that includes several people who supposedly have contributed a lot on VLC and FFMPEG.
3. The Videolan team made a blog post about this, if you want to know more: https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html

Wait, people are still using Unity after they clearly demonstrated they'll fuck you on a whim? Honestly, seems like everyone's been given a fair warning about dealing with these scumbags. I get migrating a codebase is a motherfucker, and sometimes it is even easier to redevelop much or all of the project. But again, if you're renting retail space from someone who is a psychopath, bipolar, and an arsonist (Unity in this case), and they might burn your shop down at any moment, sometimes you gotta move!

Front VLC blog, link in post above

"After months of slow back-and-forth over email trying to find a compromise, including offering to exclude LGPL code from the assets, Unity basically told us we were not welcome back to their Store, ever. Even if we were to remove all LGPL code from the Unity package.

Where it gets fun is that there are currently hundreds if not thousands of Unity assets that include LGPL dependencies (such as FFmpeg) in the Store right now. Enforcement is seemingly totally random, unless you get reported by someone, apparently."

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.

Lmao they really don't want anyone to keep using their engine anymore

Go help out Godot or perhaps Bevy, financially, by contributing code &/or bug reports or by any other means you may be capable of.
When Unity dies you'll be thankful you did.

LGPL requires distributing the license with any code. I imagine unity does that with the core code, but it would be difficult to enforce that for assets distributed in their store, which they would be liable for legally. I imagine this will be resolved, but I no longer use Unity so idfc

Okay but what's the real reason?

Just report every other package that includes ffmpeg.

Everyone can agree on VLC being the best video player, right?

cough mpv cough

Why does VLC need to be in the Unity store when you can download it directly from videolan.org?

Ohhh no, VLC has some problems with... who's this Unity fellow again?

Some of these comments are wack. "Just stop using Unity" bro some people don't get that choice.

Unity has an app store?