Only in rare circumstances does a price increase kill something. More often will a company die because they don't increase prices when needed.
The Death of Unity
211–220 of 242 posts
Re: The Death of Unity
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
A thought occurred to me a few weeks ago... it was another Hacker News thread, forget which, but someone had mentioned the specific case law which cemented this fact. Maybe it was Ford himself? The details escape me, but afterwards, companies were forced to prioritize shareholders above all else. But legislators aren't exactly forbidden from creating new types of companies. As ignorant as I am of most things business…
Existing corporations can already do what you describe. The fiction that a corporation's fiduciary duty to its shareholders means "profits above all else" didn't become a thing until the 1980s, when Reagan's "greed is good" became the driving mantra of capitalism. A "B" corporation, for example, is just a C corporation that has voluntarily agreed to a set of governance rules.
'Profits above all else' came primarily from three sources:
1) The 'Chicago School' emerging from the University of Chicago economics department, most active from the 1950's to the 1970's, and of which Milton Friedman was the exemplar;
2) The 'Powell Memo' that corporate lobbyist and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell wrote to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971; and
3) The efforts of Robert Bork, who was a militant critic of antitrust regulation and believed that mergers and acquisitions were good because they always lowered prices for consumers, and led to the creation of greater shareholder wealth.
Re: The Death of Unity
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
People believing that in the mobile space Godot can be a replacement to Unity are delusional, in 10 years maybe? Godot is a "mature" toy engine. There is not a single quality / money maker game that shipped on Godot.
Dave the diver is a successful game made in Godot : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1868140/DAVE_THE_DIVER/ Granted it's not a mobile game but still.
Thank you, I wanted to see quality examples like this. I'd love to find a list of high-quality polished games made in Godot, like this one.
Re: The Death of Unity
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like a negatively charged take. Vampire Survivors could have been made in a ton of different engines that are far far less capable that Godot, for example. The engine is not the thing that holds back a product from succeeding. This is the same as saying "no FAANG company uses X language/platform so X is a toy", it's far too reductive and not actual reality.
As someone who’s played a lot of games… I disagree. These days I specifically avoid Unity games because they always feel janky, and yes it absolutely is the engine.
For comparison, Unreal games that don't get extra optimization and love during development have engine-standard issues. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is notoriously affected by Unreal load/unload lag spikes, even on console. Every Unreal game will do this to some extent unless that behavior is dealt with since it's just how Unreal handles large texture swaps.
So yes, an engine can have known issues, but isn't it up to the devs to make a product that runs well? Unfortunately for Jedi: Fallen Order they just weren't given time to make it work well, just "good enough" for console, and it's even worse on PC. The sequel has the same issues.
Re: The Death of Unity
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who’s played a lot of games… I disagree. These days I specifically avoid Unity games because they always feel janky, and yes it absolutely is the engine.
Do you think Rust and Escape From Tarkov are janky? (just off the top of my head) https://rust.facepunch.com https://www.escapefromtarkov.com
Tarkov is a bad example. The devs are absolutely FLOGGING the entity count and their maps are huge with lots of little details. People give them crap for doing a bad job but the vision they have for the game would be difficult to pull off no matter the engine. They have been on an old version of Unity for a while and are currently moving to a newer version.
One big argument people have is whether the lighting in game is good or not. They do dynamic lighting, which can definitely cause some voidlike shadows, but people were arguing over whether Unity had tools to help with that or not.
Also, multiplayer is hard, but they have made some (very questionable) decisions like sending all clients the entire map entity list. Hackers abuse this to know where rare items are located and even the stuff other players have found or brought into raid. If I find a GPU or LEDX and put it in my bag, they instantly know and can come kill you to take it. This combined with issues with desync, audio not working correctly, invisible players...I don't think this is a Unity problem as much as it's just a complex game, a pretty small dev team, and they don't want to hire outside of Russia.
Re: The Death of Unity
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK, UE is completely free until you make your first $1,000,000 revenue? (then a 5% royalty rate beyond that). These new Unity per-install fees could hit developers who aren't making money - for example F2P games, free demos, very cheap games (e.g. charity bundles), potentially even pirated copies (if Unity intend to track installs via analytics sent from the runtime?) In reality, most indies fail and won't hit the…
Unity's install fees don't start until you hit 200k installs AND $200k revenue. If you buy the $1800/yr PRO then it doesn't start until $1 million just like UE. There isn't any concern for the hobbyists.
The bump is huge though! If your per-install fee costs $0.20 but you have 199,999 installs, you owe Unity $0. But the second a new user downloads your game, you suddenly owe Unity $40,000.
If they made the price increase continuous and charged for max(0, #installs - 200,000), then that would be something else, but the way they wrote it implies a bomb waiting to explode if your game gets too successful
Re: The Death of Unity
#217The new prices don't seem that huge.
Re: The Death of Unity
#218The new prices don't seem that huge.
Yes, that's why it's clever.
The cumulative effect stacks up as they charge for every install & re-install of the app. That's the subtle shift of per install v. per user.
If the user has to reinstall the game due to the bug, the developer will have to cough up the fee.
If they have to reinstall because of hard-drive space hijinks, then the dev coughs up the fee.
If they get a new computer or a new device and install the game again...
Re: The Death of Unity
#219The new prices don't seem that huge.
It's higher than zero/game_sold, so it's significant.
Re: The Death of Unity
#220Why is every article and discussion about this filled with misinformation? There are thresholds for the per install fee that I'm sure the majority of small indie developers will never hit. The idea that most Unity developers will switch to Unreal is laughable.