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The Death of Unity

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Re: The Death of Unity

#141

Post by ummonk »

MenhirMike wrote: post #38

I believe it when I see it. I would like to see it, but I doubt that a significant enough portion of developers are going to jump ship. For smaller indie studios, there are definitely better alternatives, but when it comes to the big packages, there's really just Unity and Unreal.

The big studios are mostly developing on Unreal, or their own in-house engines. The exception is companies targeting F2P / mobile games, but they're the ones who're going to be impacted by the pricing changes the most.

Re: The Death of Unity

#142

Post by KTallguy »

It’s a shame. Hobbyist developers and smaller studios have very little time to sift through all of these complicated pricing situations. The pay-per-installs prevents giving away a semi-successful game for free in donation packages, and adds new admin overhead. I don’t understand the goal… what new revenue stream will magically spring forth from these changes?

Unity is not my favorite engine to work with, and there was a long period of buggy, non performant console ports, but less choice is always worse.

Re: The Death of Unity

#143

Post by Tommstein »

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…

> >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.

Out of curiosity, how does 0.99 * 0.7 - 0.2 = 0.493 come out to 46 cents?

Re: The Death of Unity

#144

Post by al2o3cr »

jrflowers wrote: post #58

>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.

    We can assume that this would mean running the game at a loss,
    because the author didn’t say that.
A better assumption would be that they're likely to clear the $100k/mo, but as they said "not guaranteed" to do so.

I suspect that if the author would have intensified the statement to "they would go out of business with the new scheme" if they were certain to lose money.

Re: The Death of Unity

#145

Post by msla »

bluescrn wrote: post #108
msla wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine. Which is why that silly "Quake" thing never went anywhere. What was John Carmack thinking? How did he ever imagine "Doom' and "Quake" could ever get released?

That was a very different time. That era of pushing hardware to it's limits is mostly history when it comes to games. These days, hardware is almost limitless* , the real scarce resource is person-hours of development time. (*Ok, not limitless, there's still some people doing serious optimisation work on games. But for an average indie/mobile developer, it's more about avoiding fairly well known performance pitfalls…

Maybe a single person can't make a Triple-A game engine. That's not a problem, because a single person can't make anything else needed for a Triple-A game, either.

Photorealistic art assets? Voice acting from name actors? Really crappy hackneyed plots which fall to pieces under the slightest scrutiny? I think Bethesda actually has a patent on that. Lootbox mechanics which are a couple iffy election cycles away from a Senate subcommittee hearing? None of that is coming out of a bedroom developer. Writing a simple engine for a simple indie game with the kinds of art and mechanics a single person or small unfunded team can accomplish, however, is a lot more feasible.

Re: The Death of Unity

#147

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #60
bpye wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does the studio not have to agree to Epic making their game free?

Re: The Death of Unity

#148

Post by Tommstein »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #65
mdtrooper wrote: post #4

Well, I write one thing: https://godotengine.org/

The thing that I like the most about Godot is that the binary weighs less than 200 MiB, compared to the several GiBs of Unity, and that you don't need to deal with any account, registration or license BS like you do in Unity. However, one thing I don't like about Godot is their choice of a dynamically-typed, scripting language as their main programming language, instead of a statically-typed, compiled language which,…

> However, one thing I don't like about Godot is their choice of a dynamically-typed, scripting language as their main programming language, instead of a statically-typed, compiled language which, in my humble opinion, would have been better.

I have never used Godot, but from https://godotengine.org/features/#script :

> New in 4.0: GDScript offers optional static typing support, boosting your coding efficiency and runtime performance.

and

> Godot is built to be extended, and that means you can choose a programming language not provided by the Godot team itself. Thanks to our community there are many language bindings for popular tools like Rust, Nim, Python, and JavaScript.

>

> New in 4.0: C++ supports comes officially in the form of GDExtension API, which gives you a way to script and program your game components for maximum performance without having to recompile the engine.

Re: The Death of Unity

#149

Post by gmueckl »

pjmlp wrote: post #3

The biggest issue, unfortunely is that all the other engines that offer C# support as the main language, lack the AOT compilation toolchain (including game consoles), the graphical tooling including debugging and profilers, asset store with people living from it, and above all, being fully endorsed by all major game platform owners and VR/AR hardware. So anyone that wants to replace Unity, despite their missteps, has…

Good point. The Unity AOT toolchain is really unique and optimized for games in ways that other .NET AOT approaches aren't. The keywords here are IL2CPP and Burst Compiler. Both represent a years of investment into big efforts and aren't replicated easily.

Re: The Death of Unity

#150

Post by gingerrr »

__loam wrote: post #85
garblegarble wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have evidence for that claim? My understanding is that Apple takes their cut after any refunds have been settled[1], and the same appears to be true for Steam[2]. 1: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/does-apple-keep-its-c... 2: https://www.techradar.com/news/how-steam-refunds-are-a-bless...

Also worth noting that the unity fee only takes effect once you're making a pretty large amount of revenue, so most devs will be unaffected. Still shitty and I'm glad I made the switch to Godot a few months ago, but not as bad as people are making it out to be.

The fee isn't revenue-based, it's install-based - and not based on hard numbers.

Also, demo installs apparently count against that threshold https://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/1701717971016790508 (their original reply https://twitter.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607)

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