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Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume

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Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume

#21

Post by sarchertech »

izzydata wrote: post #13
Filligree wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are apparently attempting to prevent that... but installs on 'separate devices' still count. So I'm sure someone will find a way to do precisely that.

But if they are attempting to prevent that then why not charge per game sold? If they think a single person installing it more than once shouldn't count then what do they believe the difference is? It seems like the only purpose of this pricing scheme is because they want to be able to charge for a single person installing it multiple times.

I think they plan on including spyware that calls home to Unity when a game is installed. Despite being terrible, this is much easier for them than relying on or forcing developers to accurately report sales.

Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume

#22

Post by boppo1 »

eminence32 wrote: post #17

From [1], it seems they intend on counting "loading a unity game in a browser" as an install: > Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? > A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming inc…

This has 'MBA who doesn't understand contemporary gaming paradigms whatsoever' written all over it.

Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume

#23

Post by gmueckl »

izzydata wrote: post #13
Filligree wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are apparently attempting to prevent that... but installs on 'separate devices' still count. So I'm sure someone will find a way to do precisely that.

But if they are attempting to prevent that then why not charge per game sold? If they think a single person installing it more than once shouldn't count then what do they believe the difference is? It seems like the only purpose of this pricing scheme is because they want to be able to charge for a single person installing it multiple times.

My first guess would be that this is by design to syphon off money from F2P game devs. They need to have large install bases because >90% of players never pay for anything.

Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume

#25

Post by teraflop »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #15
izzydata wrote: post #2

How does this pricing scheme even make sense? Why do they think "installs" is a relevant metric? I could uninstall and reinstall a game 100,000 times. Would I single handedly cost the developers a ton of money?

They claim to have developed proprietary code to handle this situation. They don't offer up a lot of details. https://x.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607

Based on this, it seems like Unity's real goal is to achieve perfect price discrimination.

For each game that gets sufficiently popular, they can fiddle with their unreviewable "proprietary" metric until it matches whatever they think the developer is willing to pay, and then send them a bill for that amount.

It's a clever plan if you assume your customers are too dumb to notice what you're doing.

Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume

#26

Post by everyone »

gabereiser wrote: post #5
Arrath wrote: post #3

Do any companies pre-game this out with PR response plans for scenarios of "public acceptance", "public indifference", "public outrage" and so on? Or are the executive suites usually so high on their own supply that they expect everyone to accept whatever is doled out?

They are resting on the fact they have a near monopoly for indie and their only competitor is Unreal at this point.

I used XNA, then MS killed it for no reason, then I switched to Unity, been using it since 2012, today I'm learning Godot.

Imo Godot is the new indie engine. it has the same feel as XNA and Unity. There's nothing wrong with Unreal, its a great engine, but it does not feel the same. XNA / Unity / Godot / indie engines, u just sit down and start writing C# code and can write your whole game and ignore the engine features.. Unreal feels more like modding an existing game where you must use the existing systems. As a lone indie dev I find it very tedious and slow to use, but I can see how its good for big teams, there is a big rigid system already in place they everyone must follow in order to do anything.. So if u have 1000's of workers it will stop individuals going off and doing crazy stuff, cus they cant.

Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume

#27

Post by peteforde »

I find it fascinating to consider that they will require free-tier developers to maintain an active internet connection to use the editor. This is such a self-evidently cursed idea that it veers into satire.

No matter how quickly they try to walk back these intentions, this is Unity's elephant hunting moment.

Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume

#29

Post by ilaksh »

It sounds like the WebGL initialization thing is ridiculous. They better fix that.

But aside from that, collecting a minimal fee seems fair enough to me. If paying 20 cents per sale of your successful game is ruining your life, maybe consider investing in some of the open source game engines.

Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume

#30

Post by [deleted] »

ilaksh wrote: post #29

It sounds like the WebGL initialization thing is ridiculous. They better fix that. But aside from that, collecting a minimal fee seems fair enough to me. If paying 20 cents per sale of your successful game is ruining your life, maybe consider investing in some of the open source game engines.

[deleted]
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