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The Death of Unity

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Re: The Death of Unity

#171

Post by gmerc »

hadlock wrote: post #5
bluescrn wrote: post #2

The decline of Unity is sad. Unity got so many things very right in their pre-IPO years. They made rapid prototyping and development of 3D games much easier than anything that came before. Being able to develop in C# was a huge win, especially for small teams and solo indie, and it made developing for multiple platforms easy, and took away a lot of the pain of native mobile development for Android/iOS. But Unity has…

Bringing John Ricitiello on as CEO (former disgraced EA CEO) should have been a yellow (or red?) flag that things had reached their peak.

I wonder how many company funds went to reputation management to drive an obscure NY Pizza Palor on google above his name on a direct search after the molestation charges leveraged by one of their C-Levels

Re: The Death of Unity

#172

Post by gmerc »

boppo1 wrote: post #159
bluescrn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot more indies talking about Unreal, and also Godot. Too early to see how much of that talk will translate to shipping finished games, though. Artists are excited by the potential of UE5, as Unity's rendering tech has stagnated somewhat. But making a UE5 Nanite/Lumen game is likely to be limiting your audience rather a lot, with high hardware requirements.

Can UE5 be used to make lightweight games? Is it possible to target wrak hardware if you don't use Nanite or Lumen?

Absolutely

Re: The Death of Unity

#173

Post by vunderba »

msla wrote: post #88
qayxc wrote: post #18

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. Every minute spent on re-inventing the wheel for the umpteenth time is time lost on actually writing and polishing the actual game. Tools like Unity were a godsent for small teams and solo devs who just wanted to write and publish games. While libraries like SDL can lighten the burden somewhat, they are…

> 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?

This isn't really a very good example for two reasons

1. The concept of licensable game engines during the development of doom in the early 90s was hardly a common thing, and certainly nothing along the lines of a low barrier, low cost entry like unity used to be

2. Id software is very well known for basically being a tech company more than a game company, and later went on to make a great deal of money licensing out the doom and quake engines to other companies who could then focus on creating games without having to build a bespoke engine

Re: The Death of Unity

#174

Post by ffhhttt »

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…

You’d only pay $0.2 for a subset of your users above 200k (installs in outside of the top ~15 richest countries are $0.02)

Not that I’m a fan of those changes, but I’d bet the $0.2 fee is only there to encourage anyone affected to upgrade to Pro.

The fact that most people will only see a single number and ignore the rest of the quite complicated pricing model says a lot about their marketing department… I mean what did they expect?

Re: The Death of Unity

#175

Post by ffhhttt »

mulmen wrote: post #128
__loam wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Revenue isn’t profit. So if you build a toy game and it takes off without a solid business and pricing plan you could be stuck and have to shut it down. Seems like that makes Unity is a very bad place to start.

If it’s free you want have to pay anything?

If you managed to get over 200k installs and 200k revenue you can just upgrade to pro and increase these limits to 1 million.

I’m not a fan of these changes and the whole model seems too convoluted but the fees don’t seem to be that unreasonable.

It seems they are actually even lower now than they were for a subset of users.

Re: The Death of Unity

#176

Post by ffhhttt »

kevingadd wrote: post #61
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…

It's also catastrophic for services like Game Pass where the developer gets a flat fee regardless of how many people install the game. You can take a flat fee that seems reasonable based on an expectation of 100k installs, but then your game turns out to be a smash hit and it gets a million installs. Now you're on the hook for a massive amount of money to Unity but the money you got is barely enough to cover it, if i…

> it gets a million installs.

I highly doubt many/any(?) games os Gamepass or Apple Arcade were created using the personal edition (after all they already have a 100/200k per COMPANY revenue limit. would MS really pay less than that for any game and you have zero sales every else?)

On Pro you’d only have to worry if your downloads went significantly over a limit. Which is concern in this case, just relatively a much smaller one. In any cases it seems to create some false incentives for fixed fee developers (unless the publisher agrees to pay the fee which would be pretty reasonable)

IMHO so far the biggest issue with these pricing changes seems to be that they are way too complicated. It was unreasonable for them to expect that most people commenting online would bother looking at more than a single number (or would understand their current pricing model for that matter)

Re: The Death of Unity

#177

Post by Mikushi »

kilolima wrote: post #110

Happy to see the end of Unity as a Linux user. The Linux versions of games were very poorly optimized, and instead of native ports we got buggy, slow, unstable games, for years. Also Unity games were mod unfriendly, meaning that those games are mostly dead by now. And I don't know what it was exactly, but Unity games (specifically the RPGs) seemed to lack some sort of gritty realism with character interaction and mov…

> Also Unity games were mod unfriendly

That's got nothing to do with Unity. A game being mod friendly is 100% a dev decision.

For an example look at Cities: Skyline, lots of big mods and it's a Unity game.

Re: The Death of Unity

#178

Post by ffhhttt »

9dev wrote: post #82
kevingadd wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also catastrophic for services like Game Pass where the developer gets a flat fee regardless of how many people install the game. You can take a flat fee that seems reasonable based on an expectation of 100k installs, but then your game turns out to be a smash hit and it gets a million installs. Now you're on the hook for a massive amount of money to Unity but the money you got is barely enough to cover it, if i…

That situation sounds horrible, is that actually a thing? Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place?

> is that actually a thing?

Probably not, I’m not a fan of these changes but most people seem to really over exaggerating because they don’t understand how the new (very convoluted) pricing model works.

The $.2 install fee (only for users living in “rich” countries) seems to be there just to incentive developers to upgrade their subscriptions to Pro which offers much higher revenue/install limits and lower fees above them.

Re: The Death of Unity

#179

Post by ffhhttt »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #166
9dev wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That situation sounds horrible, is that actually a thing? Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place?

>Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place? they always have and always will. But revshare and ESPECIALLY residuals (tangential to this topic) are costs that the elite will fight to the grave to not give out. Indie devs are simply taking that gamble and unironically working for exposure. profits are razor thin in games and the market is fickle, so it's much preferable to have a guarante…

I’m sure Unity would prefer a revshare it’s just that it would be much harder and more expensive for them to enforce it (and even impossible at all outside of the developed countries and especially in China).

And yeah, of course there would be much bigger backlash for their largest clients who probably prefer this new model. Which IMHO doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable if you’re on Pro (which you current have to be anyway if your company has over 200k revenue)

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