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The Death of Unity

gamedeveloper.com

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Re: The Death of Unity

#51

Post by hitpointdrew »

>Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar.

Not only that, but with this predatory practice of taking any percent (steam, apple) or fix dollar value, makes just having a game up a potential liability. If you need to refund anyone you are refunding the full $0.99 from your account, despite you only made $0.46 (steam and unity are going to keep theirs, its on you as the publisher to make up the difference). If you had a disastrous launch and had a majority of people seeking a refund, well not only did you hard work and effort not pay off, you owe $$$$ on top of that. In theory this liability is like shorting a stock and the loss potential is virtually limitless, you could end up owing millions.

Re: The Death of Unity

#52

Post by TheRealPomax »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #30

The thing is it's still far cheaper than Unreal, so unless Unreal is dying too calling it death doesn't make sense.

When your game engine's license can bankrupt you just because some game platform owner like Epic decides to put your game on as the freebie-of-the-week, so that you now owe several million installs times 20 cents, you take Unreal over Unity even if it costs more (or you start looking into Godot or the like).

This is how you kill a product.

Re: The Death of Unity

#53

Post by ianlevesque »

kllrnohj wrote: post #48
ianlevesque wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t take it to that extreme, there’s great Unity content (walkabout VR mini golf comes to mind), but recently when I really played an Unreal Engine game again for hours (Satisfactory), I was floored by just how much better optimized it was. A similar, arguably simpler, game in the genre (Oxygen Not Included) is Unity and famously terrible on performance. I had just sort of accepted that was how it had to be. It’s…

Oxygen Not Included is a _significantly_ more complex simulation than Satisfactory is as ONI is doing gas movement & thermal transfer mechanics across a large 2D grid. Now compare Satisfactory to its actual genre-appropriate competitor, Factorio, and suddenly Unreal looks like a pathic joke. Factorio scales _so_ much better it's absurd, but that's really down to the quality & focus of the simulations being added by t…

Haven’t played that one much. Thanks for the added color.

Re: The Death of Unity

#54

Post by yvdriess »

causality0 wrote: post #35

Before the popularity of commercial game engines, each game was built bespoke, which had some advantages, but took a lot of time, and made each port a chore. One of the greatest things Unity provided was a relatively easy pipeline to console releases, making ports more about platform quirks than full recoding. This heavily implies Unity was responsible for the advent of commercial game engines and game engines being…

Source, GameBryo, LithTech, ...

Re: The Death of Unity

#55

Post by kevingadd »

rexpop wrote: post #15
ghostzilla wrote: post #7

About time. What makes a game unique in spirit is its engine.

What an absurdly facile perspective. While it's true that developers like Valve develop games only to take advantage of or exhibit new engine developments and Minecraft's revolutionary voxel engine likewise enabled a game that could not be built otherwise, you seem to be suggesting that eg all UE games throughout the last thirty years are undifferentiated "in spirit" because they share an engine. What an insult to wr…

Minecraft's engine wasn't remotely revolutionary, it was basically a 1:1 riff on an XNA game called Infiniminer that predated it. And its engine wasn't especially good. Minecraft's success is almost entirely due to its accessibility and the fundamental strength of its design - both things that are possible in any game engine. These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the original Java version, because it's really not about the engine.

Re: The Death of Unity

#57

Post by r_hoods_ghost »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #30

The thing is it's still far cheaper than Unreal, so unless Unreal is dying too calling it death doesn't make sense.

Unity is cheaper only in certain circumstances. UE5 is free and then you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenues over $1m. This avoids a lot of the issues faced by indie developers with the new pricing model (having to pay for copies you give away, having to pay a flat fee that eats the profit margin of 99p games, needing to pay for a subscription up front etc.)

Re: The Death of Unity

#58

Post by jrflowers »

>I know one such developer who is stuck, who's estimating this new scheme will cost them $100,000/month on a free to play game, where their revenue isn't guaranteed.

We can assume that this would mean running the game at a loss, because the author didn’t say that.

Re: The Death of Unity

#59

Post by byyoung3 »

hitpointdrew wrote: post #51

>Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar. Not only that, but with this predatory practice of taking any percent (steam, apple) or fix dollar value, makes just having a game up a potential liability. If you need to refund anyone you are re…

[flagged]

Re: The Death of Unity

#60

Post by TheRealPomax »

bpye wrote: post #42
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #30

The thing is it's still far cheaper than Unreal, so unless Unreal is dying too calling it death doesn't make sense.

Maybe? It seems like Unity is charging the fee per install [0], not per unique user. So when I install my Steam games on my desktop, my laptop and my Steam Deck that's 3 installs. If I reinstall the OS, that'll be another install - or if I clean up my Steam library and reinstall later, etc. Maybe this is acceptable if your title has microtransactions because you may get some ongoing revenue stream for that user - but…

And then Epic goes "this week's free game" and now it's several million installs and the game studio's bankrupt. Because weaponizing this will happen if given the chance.
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