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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

#31

Post by dehrmann »

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…

> Perhaps they planned that all along?

This will turn off new development, though.

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

#32

Post by mcpackieh »

LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #10
gambiting wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Right, but once a dev does hit that threshold, they could very easily be upside down on their income if the app goes viral and gets installed at a much higher rate than the revenue it generates and that's what people are mad about. You could instantly go from 200k revenue to being in the red on developer fees alone.

Indie devs actually selling their game should be fine right? If it's just the devs of F2P / adware crap that will be sunk, then maybe Unity's new pricing policies will be the unexpected savior of gaming. Imagine a world in which we're not racing to the bottom with ad-ridden shovel-ware but instead people try to make the best possible product and sell it for what it's worth... radical. Or maybe I've misunderstood something and this will hurt developers who sell their games too.

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

#33

Post by Macha »

dleslie wrote: post #17
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…

And Minecraft before those and call of duty before that, and wow/RuneScape before that. Call of Duty at least relied on Xbox Live, I guess but the others were their own ecosystems

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

#34

Post by lnxg33k1 »

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…

I mean every time something like a dev tool starts charging, or there is some tax or regulation, someone arrives and says it's gonna hurt the small indie devs, but who cares? If they can't contribute to anything and require the whole society worse off, then its likely that they'd better do something else

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

#35

Post by jeremyjh »

raincole wrote: post #11
ako wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are really good reasons to choose Unity over Godot, but C# isn't one of them. You have to learn a whole new API, framework, workflow, etc. Learning GDScript is the least of the issues.

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

#36

Post by starburst »

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…

I don't think it could have been planned all along, the damage done seems irreversible. No one is going to propose Unity ever again for upcoming projects even if the fees are actually a much better deal than the competitions (like Unreal 5%).

The audacity of asking everyone who have built a game using their engine (completely disregarding the TOS at the time) to be potentially on the hook to receive monthly bills from their own black box that estimate the number of installs ensure that their reputation is effectively ruined, the future is that no one is going to trust them to use their engine because at any point they can come up with new ridiculous fees...

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

#37

Post by Ekaros »

devmor wrote: post #16
gambiting wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Or couple of years of solo developer time.

Not to forgot it is from revenue not profit. So give Steam/Google/Apple their cut and remove any external asset or work bought and 200k isn't that much for any non-low income country.

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

#38

Post by Airsinner »

starburst wrote: post #36
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…

I don't think it could have been planned all along, the damage done seems irreversible. No one is going to propose Unity ever again for upcoming projects even if the fees are actually a much better deal than the competitions (like Unreal 5%). The audacity of asking everyone who have built a game using their engine (completely disregarding the TOS at the time) to be potentially on the hook to receive monthly bills fro…

If Unity is the best by a mile it works.

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

#39

Post by ZeWaka »

robswc wrote: post #24

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?

Porting is a relatively big issue. Core game systems often intertwine closely with how the engine operates, especially graphics systems like the renderer or particles/effects. It's totally possible though. One of the game projects I help with switched from SFML to Godot to an in-house engine.

There's also the 'skilling up' of a dev team. If a studio has developed on Unity for 10 years, switching to Unreal or Godot or similar will be... Challenging.

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

#40

Post by foota »

lnxg33k1 wrote: post #34
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…

I mean every time something like a dev tool starts charging, or there is some tax or regulation, someone arrives and says it's gonna hurt the small indie devs, but who cares? If they can't contribute to anything and require the whole society worse off, then its likely that they'd better do something else

Pragmatically, many people enjoy indie games as much (or more) than AAA games. AAA games are more oriented towards making money and mass market appeal, and if we don't provide a market for indie games then we lose out on the specialty and variety of them.
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