There really needs to be some way to prevent people from forking free projects. Its really not fair for someone like me who works on a project for 5 years just for some random 9 year old child to click a button and take all of my work and apparently be able to publish it to other sites while claiming it is theres and face zero consequences for this blatant fraud.
Currently the only way to do this is by paying at minimum $15 every single month. That is $180 dollars every year. Not only that, but $15 per person. I have two accounts, and use them both for basically the same purpose, but is it really fair that I would have to spend $30 dollars every single month just to prevent people from stealing all of my hard work?
I have personally seen people take entire projects and claim they created it while giving exactly zero credit to the people who actually worked on the thing. That has personally happened to me, the people who have been around for a while know what I am talking about.
I honestly cannot think of any other game engine that does anything similar to this. Unreal does not do this. Godot does not do this. I believe that unity tried to do something like that and everyone freaked out about it and threatened to leave. I am not saying no engine does something similar to this, but I havent heard of any that do, and there is probably a reason why.
Some time ago I was in a game development discord server with thousands of members and when I tried showing them my projects not a single one of them even knew what Playcanvas was. Why is that? This perfectly capable web based engine has basically zero percent market share, which it definitely should not.
It really does suck hardcore, because I have some great ideas for games I would love to create, but I am scared to work on them because at any second all of it can immediately be stolen and often I would not even know because I do not have access to a list of projects that are forks of mine. Even if I did there isnt any reasonable method for me to know if someone has been in my editor and copied who knows what.
As I said before Playcanvas is a perfectly capable engine, and honestly I would call it the perfect engine for making web games. If Playcanvas had a proper solution to securing projects I genuinely believe it could become similar to how flash was. Playcanvas could become the next adobe flash, but its not, and the reason as to why that is the case is the insecure projects. Well, thats the primary reason.
I say that because I believe the reason nobody knows about Playcanvas is because there are barely any games made with it. Why are there barely any games made with Playcanvas? Because at any moment someones hard work can be taken, so nobody actually wants to do anything here. I believe the thought process for most competent people who actually try Playcanvas is something like āI just made my first project. But what does this fork button do?
So I can just copy someones entire project? Wait, can other people fork my project also? Yeah I am definitely not using this, time to install unityā.
People have told me that Playcanvas is like this because it has similar rules to Github, but why? I have really thought about this and there really isnt any reason as to why Playcanvas has to be this way. The only thing I can think of is the Playcanvas devs wanting to squeeze a couple bucks out of their community, but is it worth it? I would obviously say no.
At this point Playcanvas honestly feels less like a proper game development program and more like the pirates cove, or that one episode from adventure time. Everyone can take anything from anyone else, and because everyone knows that nobody dares actually put in effort to create something worthwhile. Communism does not work in game development. The fact that I even have to say that is not a good sign.
If the reason is purely monetary than I absolutely assure you it would be far more profitable to allow free accounts to lock some small amount of projects to attract more competent developers to create actual good games to bring more people to Playcanvas.
I would literally rather have ads in the editor than zero private slots. This is of course assuming the reason is monetary. I am not sure if that is the case, and honestly I am not confident on what the reason for this decision could possibly be other than that. It is very hard to give suggestions and feedback when I dont know what the reason is for the choices being made.
Personally my solution is the ability for someone to lock their entire account. What I mean by this is the ability for someone to set their entire account so that nobody can fork their projects or open their editor, but they cannot fork anyone elses project or open anyone elses editor. And there must be some clause about multiple accounts needing to be set the same so that a person doesnt just make another account to yoink peoples work.
I understand doing all that would be quite taxing on the Playcanvas devs, and I dont know how many there are, but there has to be something to prevent this. At bare minimum give us one single private project slot. Honestly what exactly would the downside be of giving free accounts one private slot? If people want their project openly available then they can still do that, just give us something to prevent piracy.
Didnt something similar to this already happen, where free accounts could not publish games here but now they can? Or was it self hosting? I dont remember. It can even be considered a new feature brought by the 2.0.0 update. Now free accounts get a single private slot. That should be extremely easy to implement. It would literally be revolutionary.
I dont hate Playcanvas, its by far my favorite game engine. I make this post because I want it to be better.