I'm a solo game developer working in Unreal Engine. I typically buy environments and props from the Unreal Marketplace and modify them to meet my needs. Unreal's built-in modeling tools are usually enough for my purposes so I rarely open Blender, but when I do, I am so appreciative that this software exists and is free to use.
It's incredible how far Blender has come. I remember the days when time between significant releases was measured in years, not months. The progress they've made in recent years — particularly since Epic Games gave them a $1.2 million Epic MegaGrant — has been impressive, and encouraging to watch.
Thank you to all who fund Blender, and thank you especially to the people who make it. You're making a difference in the lives of many indie developers.
You can't really call them a broken clock for your own subjective view. Epic games makes good games and a phenomenal game engine that's allowed countless devs to make great games with great graphics.
A big plus for me is that they used their massive force to sue, and eventually budge Apple of their 30% revenue cut on their walled garden, but that's subjective.
They've also been subject to a class action lawsuit, the Epic Games Store they set up was so barebones and badly put together that there were major security breaches in the first few weeks. Refunds still don't work properly. They eventually resorted to bribing people with free games to join their platform, and pressuring devs into exclusive deals with lower platform cuts instead of fixing their damn product. Their handling of problems has usually been dismissive and out of touch and seems to lead to toxic communities around their games. They're as anti-consumer of a company as it gets, although nobody really beats EA there I guess.
I mean congrats, they sued Apple adding a precedent to let devs use external ways of paying for microtransactions, something 99% of actual devs don't have the infrastructure to do anyway. It only helps Epic stuff their face a bit more. Like winning a lawsuit that lets you run self-refined gas in your car or something.
> They eventually resorted to bribing people with free games to join their platform, and pressuring devs into exclusive deals with lower platform cuts instead of fixing their damn product.
You frame it as a bad thing but this is not a bad thing.
Epic seems like a pretty decent company overall. Not perfect by any measure of course.
Exclusive deals are bad for consumers - there's no way to frame it otherwise. And it's not like Epic paid full price for all of the games they gave away.
The only real downside for consumers is having to install Epics software. Exclusive deals tend to have a timelimit after which they can be distributed on other platforms as well. The upside is cheaper games and some badly needed competition for Steam.
They limit customer choice. Different platforms have different features and policies, which we should be able to pick between. If I want good Linux support, I go to Steam. If I wanted something else that someone else did better, I'd go there. With exclusives, that choice is gone.
Something a lot of people don't realize: they've taken like $3+ billion in private funding since 2018. I think a lot of those store exclusives and free games are investor money going up in flames lol
Just saying, but them giving out free games is actually much cheaper than advertising. If you checked the numbers from the Apple vs Epic lawsuit, you would see that they got new users extremely cheap.
You don't need everyone to spend. Even if only like 1% or 2% of the acquired users purchase 1 or 2 full priced games year or multiple smaller ones they're already recouping the costs.
It's incredible how far Blender has come. I remember the days when time between significant releases was measured in years, not months. The progress they've made in recent years — particularly since Epic Games gave them a $1.2 million Epic MegaGrant — has been impressive, and encouraging to watch.
Thank you to all who fund Blender, and thank you especially to the people who make it. You're making a difference in the lives of many indie developers.