21–30 of 186 posts
Everything I've seen so far points to no baser an explanation than Unity realizing it had an avenue of attack and deciding to employ it--and an attack is exactly what it is, a raid on other people's business model.
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.
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…
Is this a case where they overstepped or is it like reddit where the only leverage the user base has is illusory?
> 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?
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.
Examples of recent indie games like this: Among Us, Valheim, Phasmophobia, Rimworld, Hollow Knight,...
Here's a whole list: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/39750107-Games-Made-W...
Other than the 'extremely' popular games, you'd be surprised who surpasses those numbers. A small game studio by me was showing their financials at a talk (unheard of!), and the 'long tail' of their games definitely went past those numbers - and more costs coming in after a certain point just make the game less likely to be supported and discounted/sold.
This really does seem like suicide. I'm not a game dev though. Is there any reason everyone won't/can't just switch to Unreal Engine? Is this a case where they overstepped or is it like reddit where the only leverage the user base has is illusory?
Switching engines mean to rewrite most of your codebase. Actually if you're 1) not using an additional scripting layer or 2) not willing to lose performance, it means to rewrite about... 100% of your codebase.
> 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 ?
[0]: https://deadline.com/2023/09/fox-krapopolis-animation-strike...