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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

#61

Post by everyone »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #41
everyone wrote: post #12

The installs thing doesnt make any sense. But, I've been a professional Unity dev for 10+ years and I have started learning Godot today; the reason is because I am very concerned about how would Unity possibly implement these policies? They would need to put secret analytics calling back to Unity servers in every build + secret killswitch they can trigger if you dont pay up. That is the reason. Tbh I've been waiting…

Why not Unreal? Godot seems like a much simpler engine compared to Unity and Unreal.

I go on about this in my other comment.. Unreal is great, but its not the same, it doesnt have that XNA / Unity / Godot "do what you want" feeling. It feels more like modding an existing game than writing your own game.

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

#62

Post by everyone »

MrLeap wrote: post #37
everyone wrote: post #12

The installs thing doesnt make any sense. But, I've been a professional Unity dev for 10+ years and I have started learning Godot today; the reason is because I am very concerned about how would Unity possibly implement these policies? They would need to put secret analytics calling back to Unity servers in every build + secret killswitch they can trigger if you dont pay up. That is the reason. Tbh I've been waiting…

You and I might as well be the same person.

:)

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

#63

Post by gamblor956 »

"As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft."

Expect Apple and Microsoft to drop all Unity games from their game subscriptions if this is still true in January.

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

#64

Post by anonymousab »

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.

Per install, not sale, which includes demos, pirated copies (yes, really) and, say, a web browser spinning up the browser version of a game. Or a cloud service running it in a VM (each executable startup in that case is an "install"). Or any download from a service like gamepass.

Above all, a single player/user redownloading the game on their device counts as a separate install. They've now said that they're using proprietary "fraud detection" and IP address uniqueness to prevent fraud, and seemingly requiring devs to reach out if they think they've been overcharged.

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

#65

Post by johnnyanmac »

OnionBlender wrote: post #19

It sounds like they initially wanted to charge developers per install (including a reinstall) but changed it after the backlash. The relevant section: > After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told…

well, kind of:

>But an extra fee will be charged if a user installs a game on a second device, say a Steam Deck after installing a game on a PC.

if you use multiple devices you can still incur larger costs on the developers, unfortunately. This just means that you can't be braindead and uninstall/re-install hundreds of times to incur costs.

But someone slightly tech saavy just spoofs hardware, or spins up emulator instances to get around this.

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

#66

Post by johnnyanmac »

everyone wrote: post #26
gabereiser wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 featur…

> There's nothing wrong with Unreal, its a great engine, but it does not feel the same

don't worry, I can do plenty of complaining about Unreal.

But in all seriousness, Unreal focuses on delivering content with graphical fidelity first, and iteration times are a distant 10th place in the priority list. Part of that is due to their choice to focus on C++ (and that's not a slight. UE is 25 years old, c++ itself was brand new back then. Let alone C# existing as an option). Part of it is a focus on highly spec'd computers with larger monitors. But the end result: developing a simple game with Unreal will feel slower because the compilation times and memory footprint are literally larger (even if you are really smart and take out a bunch of the unnecessary add-ons that are included by default).

>So if u have 1000's of workers it will stop individuals going off and doing crazy stuff, cus they cant.

oh you underestimate what crazy pitfalls designers can fall into :). But I can leave my rants about Blueprints and hard references for another post.

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

#67

Post by johnnyanmac »

Qwertious wrote: post #52
Ygg2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One niche Godot (or any OSS game engine) can't fulfill is seamless console ports.

Godot can't but Godot* can, where Godot* is a downstream fork of Godot maintained by $COMPANY that provides a seamless console port. There are a couple of companies trying to do this. In the long term, if Godot gets big enough then console makers have incentive to assist in this themselves, because if an engine with major marketshare can seamlessly port its games to Xbox but has difficulty porting to Playstation then…

$COMPANY in this case is called W4 games, by the way: https://w4games.com/

oh and speaking of Godot: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-developer-fund/

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

#68

Post by seba_dos1 »

sarchertech wrote: post #21
izzydata wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So people should run the games of developers they like in a network-less container, and for those they don't like they could keep launching the game in a fresh networked container instead of review bombing...

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

#69

Post by gizmo385 »

vinyl7 wrote: post #49

I hope this fiasco gets people to realize that it’s better to write your own code. But probably not. After decades of platform jumping after enshittification, people continue to to do it to platforms that they have no control over

Are you really suggesting that every hobbyist game developer should build their own game engine from scratch…?

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

#70

Post by donatj »

donatj wrote: post #51

Any way you slice it, it's a stupid regressive way to charge for an engine by a company that already makes an unimaginable amount of money. Their "fix" requires fingerprinting people's computers and phoning home, both of which should really be seen as privacy violations. And all that said, at it's heart there no justifiable reason the developer should be charged for every device I install something on. The developers…

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