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Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

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Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#11

Post by raincole »

ako wrote: post #8
ZeWaka wrote: post #6

Not the best article. It basically entirely ignores how this is going to hurt the small/indie developers the most, who are the main reason Unity exists as it does today. Indie games will have lower price points than AAA games, and thus Unity's cut is a larger piece of the ever-shrinking pie. My personal opinion about this whole fiasco is that they'll go back on their original statement to something still quite greedy…

Is Godot mature enough to offer Indy games developers an alternative to unity? If not, what is missing?

Mobile support for C# is the top of my list.

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#12

Post by high_5 »

> Meanwhile, time-spent-centric business models mean that games are not competing with just games (like they once used to), but with other entertainment propositions for the limited 24 hours of the day.

Interesting. Theoretical "(number of people) x 24h/day" is the max limit for attention economy. Has it already hit the ceiling?

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#13

Post by stuckinhell »

madrox wrote: post #9
ZeWaka wrote: post #6

Not the best article. It basically entirely ignores how this is going to hurt the small/indie developers the most, who are the main reason Unity exists as it does today. Indie games will have lower price points than AAA games, and thus Unity's cut is a larger piece of the ever-shrinking pie. My personal opinion about this whole fiasco is that they'll go back on their original statement to something still quite greedy…

Are indies still Unity's raison d'etre? They may have started there, and they're hardly a AAA engine, but I'm pretty sure they've moved upstream.

Unity was used for an official pokemon remake. Unity was used for an official digimon game. Unity was in genshin impact (3 bil revenue - https://sensortower.com/blog/genshin-impact-three-billion-re...)

A bunch of asian companies were all jumping onboard the unity train.

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#14

Post by mcpackieh »

> but of course, the games industry declined in 2022

I suppose the article author would have me believe that is indicative of a broader trend, but does anybody think a drop in games profits in 2022 isn't simply a consequence of covid policies ending?

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#16

Post by devmor »

gambiting wrote: post #7
ZeWaka wrote: post #6

Not the best article. It basically entirely ignores how this is going to hurt the small/indie developers the most, who are the main reason Unity exists as it does today. Indie games will have lower price points than AAA games, and thus Unity's cut is a larger piece of the ever-shrinking pie. My personal opinion about this whole fiasco is that they'll go back on their original statement to something still quite greedy…

>> It basically entirely ignores how this is going to hurt the small/indie developers the most, who are the main reason Unity exists as it does today. You only start paying if you have 200k installs AND $200k in revenue. Most indie devs never reach anything like those numbers.

When people say "indie" devs, they mean devs that aren't with a big publisher. Not necessarily solo devs.

Any relatively successful game is going to hit those numbers. $200k in revenue is barely enough to cover 3-4 months of development for a small studio.

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#17

Post by dleslie »

stuckinhell wrote: post #3

The part I found interesting: With the rise of free-to-play, cloud gaming and live ops, the power (and revenue) will increasingly become concentrated among a smaller number of games companies as games production and publishing become a lower margin business (just like any business that experiences content commoditisation via streaming). The number of installs / downloads / plays will not go down (neither will the num…

Roblox is an example of this, and Fortnite is following its lead: the game is the social network, the distribution platform, the development target, and the runtime for other games. There's an entire generation of kids for whom "Video Gaming" is synonymous with Roblox or Fortnite, rather than Steam, Xbox or Playstation.

Interestingly, it seems like Nintendo is still its stalwart and indefatigable self; unrelentingly unstoppable and irreplaceable.

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#18

Post by raincole »

madrox wrote: post #9
ZeWaka wrote: post #6

Not the best article. It basically entirely ignores how this is going to hurt the small/indie developers the most, who are the main reason Unity exists as it does today. Indie games will have lower price points than AAA games, and thus Unity's cut is a larger piece of the ever-shrinking pie. My personal opinion about this whole fiasco is that they'll go back on their original statement to something still quite greedy…

Are indies still Unity's raison d'etre? They may have started there, and they're hardly a AAA engine, but I'm pretty sure they've moved upstream.

Unity has a very long history of obsoleting features before the replacement is ready.

Now they're doing the trick to themselves: they obsoleted themselves as an engine for mobile casual games and indies, but not ready as an AAA engine. That's what I call consistency.

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#19

Post by stuckinhell »

high_5 wrote: post #12

> Meanwhile, time-spent-centric business models mean that games are not competing with just games (like they once used to), but with other entertainment propositions for the limited 24 hours of the day. Interesting. Theoretical "(number of people) x 24h/day" is the max limit for attention economy. Has it already hit the ceiling?

It's got me thinking we might have hit "peak content" too. Is there is just enough high quality historical media and endless free cheap modern media to consume ?

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#20

Post by SeanAnderson »

Meh. Half true.

Capitalism requires up-and-to-the-right progress on stock performance. The main ways to achieve this are through legitimate innovation and/or squeezing existing innovations.

Unity finds itself becoming an ad-tech company. There aren't a lot of technical innovations in that space, so they're left with squeezing their users. If their business model had stayed more focused on monetizing the sale of their tooling, rather than ads within, then they'd be rewarded more heavily for innovation.

I get the impression that this is exacerbated by us all having existed in a low interest rate world for a while. There wasn't a ton of pressure. You could take on debt for projects that made money, but not a ton of money, and that was still sufficient to appease investors.

Now that money is worth something again, thanks to high interest rates, and with some pressure from inflation - it's not such an easy world. Previous choices now have ramifications that become apparent. One of those is users getting squeezed by companies that don't have reasonable ways to sustainably innovate their way to higher returns. Companies which overplayed their hands will go under as users reject them outright. This makes space for newcomers.

The circle of life :)

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