Making games related i think i was heavily influenced by Shockwave and due to it’s crosslrelease capabilities, it always was obvious giving this advantage also to the user and offering a game or an app for all the platforms you could compile for, for free, at least to those who made sense, sometimes leaving out Linux (for instance with BlitzMax or Flash).
The last years showed that more and more smaller devs also seemed to understand that buying somthing for your computer sucks and instead it should be more a software licenced to you as a person and therefore crossreleases should be free of charge.
Now i’m really pleased that TTG also, after getting their tech ready, offers the OSX ports of their adventure games for free, starting with TOMI.
Easier to handle, less greedy, just feels a lot better. I really hope that Unity at some point will change it’s licence and also go for a more person related friendly licence.
Actually, I’m quite happy with the 2 installs. I’ll probably need 3 soon (I’m considering moving Unity development over to a BootCamp installation because of better Visual Studio support on the Windows side - so that will be Mac desktop, Mac laptop, and Bootcamp on desktop) but I’m hoping that can be handled somehow. What pisses me off a little ATM is that Apple has single install licenses (and I missed getting the family packs because I thought getting a family pack for a single person was a bit too much ).
I think with two installs, most people should be just fine and with three installs, almost everybody should be happy (including people doing cross-platform development). On the other hand one could argue that DRM-systems always suck … but so far, I haven’t had any conflicts with the one that Unity uses, so I’m quite content. Besides, I’m pretty sure that when you have specific personal needs you can talk to them about that.
I think user centric licences are the way to go because they are sexy in quite some aspects.
I, for more than once ran into the situation that i needed a Unity licence for a temporary usage or that it would be better having it installed on four machines here. Although it’s still only me using these machines i sometimes prefer using machine A over machine B for various reasons.
With small ideas i sometimes end up firing up BlitzMax just because i can use it everywhere i want without the need to contact, explain, aks for, thank someone, … to get it running.
No matter how sweet this process is and whilst Otee most of the time was quite fast, it sucks.
User centric licenses have their drawbacks too. I use modo and that’s user based. I can install to any number of machines but I can only run one instance of the app at a time. So moving assets to the mac and then tweaking for the iphone requires me to stop all PC operations (including rendering large scenes).
In Unity, as much as I hate the 2 machine limit, I can at least have several instances of the app open at once which I really like. I can even have the iphone and PC version open on the same machine at the same time. Not allowing multiple PC instances is a little bogus (why in the hell would you ever architect software this way…it’s not the early 90’s anymore), but having several projects open for reference is handy.
That’s a vaild point but with my workflow i more run into the problems i’ve described above and if done properly there is more to win than to loose.
Just out of curiosity, aren’t two instances of Modo allowed to be running at the same time in the same network? I could be wrong because i only use one instance.
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