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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

#71

Post by vinyl7 »

gizmo385 wrote: post #69
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…?

Yes and no. Firstly, hobbyists should make games...not engines [1]. You don't need an engine to make a game. Secondly, people don't need every imaginable feature like what Unreal or Unity provide. It just needs to do what they need it to do to make the game, thus it can be greatly simplified compared to the big guys.

[1] https://geometrian.com/programming/tutorials/write-games-not...

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

#72

Post by polski-g »

Filligree wrote: post #7
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 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.

Malicious persons will spin up Windows in a VM with slightly different hardware, install the game, repeat.

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

#73

Post by stuckinhell »

boppo1 wrote: post #22
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.

I think he does, unity bought WETA. They want to go toe to toe with Unreal in AAA games and Hollywood, but Unity has a terrible stigma due to all the shovelware and indie games made with it.

They need to jettison the "dead weight" to make the premium money. The core engine isn't as bad as people think it is especially if you hand code your game and avoid the editor. I've seen people pull nearly miraculous demos this way.

I'm going to pivot to godot maybe.

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

#74

Post by qwytw »

stuckinhell wrote: post #73
boppo1 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think he does, unity bought WETA. They want to go toe to toe with Unreal in AAA games and Hollywood, but Unity has a terrible stigma due to all the shovelware and indie games made with it. They need to jettison the "dead weight" to make the premium money. The core engine isn't as bad as people think it is especially if you hand code your game and avoid the editor. I've seen people pull nearly miraculous demos this…

> the premium money

It's not really obvious to me that's true. Ad infested shovelware is where Unity makes most of its money from and that market is probably much easier for them to monetize than AAA (I don't think Unreal is really making that much from their engine business to be fair, it's just that they have Fortnite and way less bloat(employees) than Unity so they don't have to push that aggressively with their pricing.

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

#75

Post by gabereiser »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #66
everyone wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bra…

People who never developed a game on a large team like that don't know that there's nothing, nothing at all, stopping you from going crazy and doing crazy stuff. Often, it's a hack disguised as novel. Blueprints aside, even just doing hacky systems is allowed. Since it's C++, there's no stopping you.

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

#76

Post by gabereiser »

everyone wrote: post #60
gabereiser wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have history with XNA. What’s your take on MonoGame?

I haven't used it but a friend of mine has. His opinion is yeah good. Basically they more or less made XNA work again using Mono, so if u liked XNA its very similar.

There’s been quite a few games released with MonoGame. It’s a direct port of XNA API to open source. Like I said, I have history with XNA. No one heard of our games but they heard about XNA/Silverlight. The precursor to MonoGame. Shout out to Bill Reiss wherever you are.

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

#77

Post by XCSme »

eminence32 wrote: post #42
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…

I sometimes use NVidia's GeForce Now streaming platform. I like it because it hooks into my Steam library. Sometimes when I launch a game, it goes through an installation process on Steam. It's almost instant (there's no actual download, so there's something special happening here), but it's definitely hooked into Steam's "install a game" mechanism. If I was a game developer, I'd be very worried about these game stre…

You mean, sometimes it runs the installer again, even if you played the game before on that streaming service?

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

#78

Post by XCSme »

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.

Because they can't really track games sold. But if they add a call-home script into their engine, they can track how many times it is installed/opened.
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