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“This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

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Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#121

Post by Aerroon »

joobus wrote: post #79
leke wrote: post #53

2nd time I'm saying this...2023 is the year of the greedy CEO.

Unity has lost $455 million dollars in the first 6 months of the fiscal year 2023. They lost $919 million in 2022. I don't think they have ever made a profit. Companies are not charities; they exist to make money, and Unity doesn't by a mile. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000181080623...

How do you lose that much money? How does Unity Technologies employ 7700 people?!

For comparison: Epic Games employs about 3700 people. That includes the people working on Fortnite and the Epic Games store.

Edit: the stats might be a bit questionable though.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#122

Post by mejutoco »

hayst4ck wrote: post #101
leke wrote: post #53

2nd time I'm saying this...2023 is the year of the greedy CEO.

It's not CEO's doing something wrong. It's workers. Try "year of the submissive worker" maybe "year of the dominated worker" and see how that tastes in your mouth. It's workers lack of unionization and enforced professional ethics that means there are no consequences for being "greedy" and that being "greedy" is in fact a winning strategy in the game of prisoners dilemma. It's convenient when someone else is doing so…

> Wage is capped by value provided, but scales with power.

Did you mean: "Wage scales with value provided, but is capped by power". It seems to make more sense to me.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#123

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

dgb23 wrote: post #108
pech0rin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure you read the article. Unity explicitly states they are NOT applying this retroactively.

Retroactively in terms of previous installs or in terms of already published games?

It applies to new installs (from 01/24) of all games, regardless of when they were published.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#125

Post by firen777 »

jdougan wrote: post #80
loupol wrote: post #48

Choosing installs to collect revenue on is stupid because it isn't tightly correlated to revenue for a game: Demos, bundles, free week-end tryouts on Steam, free-to-play games and other specific cases all lead to high install counts without necessarily generating the matching sales. It's especially stupid because Unity has good market share on mobile, which is a juicy market but with a fixed price per install, free-t…

Best part is you can bet people who don't like the developer of a game (for whatever reason) will "install bomb" the game.

Unity took a look at that greentext:

>pirate game

>delete it and download it again 9 more times

>company loses $600

and thought this is a valid business strategy.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#126

Post by dgb23 »

amirs wrote: post #19
TekMol wrote: post #5

Does this mean the engine will phone home every time a software which contains it is installed? How is that compatible with the GDPR which has been interpreted by courts in a way that it forbids sending any network packets to the USA, no matter if the user consented to it or not? For reference, see the rulings which deemed Google analytics illegal independent of consent.

Doesn't GDPR basically count as the perfect excuse as why they would count the same user installing as multiple installs? Something along the lines of "we can't identify the device so we have to count it as a unique install"

You can agree to telemetry under GDPR as a consumer.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#127

Post by bitcharmer »

zigzag312 wrote: post #92

So, Unity is now more expensive than for example AutoCAD and has a royalty fees. I see a bright future for Unity Technologies...

I can bet my money on this being yet another case of things going well until MBA imbeciles took over.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#128

Post by richbell »

Aerroon wrote: post #121
joobus wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity has lost $455 million dollars in the first 6 months of the fiscal year 2023. They lost $919 million in 2022. I don't think they have ever made a profit. Companies are not charities; they exist to make money, and Unity doesn't by a mile. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000181080623...

How do you lose that much money? How does Unity Technologies employ 7700 people?! For comparison: Epic Games employs about 3700 people. That includes the people working on Fortnite and the Epic Games store. Edit: the stats might be a bit questionable though.

It sounds like Unity needs to learn some personal responsibility. Why should they get a hand out at our expense? /s

Seriously though, that is an insane number of employees. It sounds like another case of poor leadership that thought there'd be free money forever.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#129

Post by viccuad »

Kiro wrote: post #37
datavirtue wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let us know how you deal with the threading model in Godot.

Your comment worries me. I'm making games that usually rely heavily on multithreading and I'm looking at using Godot for my next game. Are you saying that would be a bad idea?

A good architecture for fully parallel, deterministic, thread-safe, serializable and extensible games is the Entity-Component-System pattern. I'm sure that Godot has one or a way to integrate a library that implements it. I think Unity doesn't come with ECS anyways.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#130

Post by alpaca128 »

6581 wrote: post #117
alpaca128 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you download and install a game without internet? Even the last few games sold outside Steam still need some launcher whether it's from Epic, Ubisoft or whatever. Sure, you can install a game from 2004 completely offline but that's not a Unity game.

> Even the last few games sold outside Steam still need some launcher The vast majority of indie games do not require a launcher.

We are talking about paid games using Unity engine. If you can name a market for those that even remotely comes close to the sales on Steam, PlayStation, XBox, Epic, etc I'd be curious to hear about it.

Either way it doesn't matter because Unity will just require an internet connection during installation and 99% of players won't notice or complain.

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