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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

#51

Post by gambiting »

Hemospectrum wrote: post #44
mcpackieh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

Install bombing is still a problem. Unity, for all its "clarifications," keeps promising it won't be a problem and then refusing to be transparent about any of the ways it could possibly be less of a problem. Either they backtrack on this whole lifetime install count scheme or this blows up even more spectacularly when January rolls around.

I don't understand why this is a worry - they will do it the same way Valve/Microsoft/Epic/Blizzard identify how many machines you have their product installed on - with a unique hardware ID that will make sure you aren't charged twice for installing the game on the same machine. It's not rocket science, it's been used in the industry for ages.

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

#52

Post by duxup »

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…

The social aspects are huge on Roblox, but so is the ease of just ... trying lots of stuff quickly.

When I watch my son play with his friends they hop from game to game a lot, often trying out new games, similar, or completely off the wall.

It's a wild ecosystem that offers a crazy amount of variety. That ease of access to the variety I think is a big reason for the success.

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

#53

Post by epolanski »

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.

Pretty sure that unity is behind multi 100M+ $ projects like Genshin Impact.

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

#54

Post by bitvoid »

Airsinner wrote: post #38
starburst wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately for them, it isn't.

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

#55

Post by Stealthisbook »

With the phrase 'throwing their toys out of the pram' I immediately knew there was a problem with this article. There might be overblown anxiety over uncertain outcomes related to fees or from developers that would never realistically be affected, but it's totally reasonable to be pissed that terms of service can change retroactively to include both products in development and existing games. Having a Unity based game available for download suddenly becomes an undefined liability that might bite out of nowhere based on it going viral, or even malicious intent.

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

#56

Post by mortenjorck »

mcpackieh wrote: post #32
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

A semi-forgotten but viable and healthy business model (with roots in the Shareware tradition) for mobile games is the free-with-unlock. Not F2P where the IAPs are different quantities of “gems” or “coins,” but a single “unlock” IAP that gets you the rest of the game if you enjoyed the free content.

The per-install fee instantly makes this model unviable.

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

#57

Post by belltaco »

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…

Meanwhile Steam takes 30% of indie devs' hard earned revenue and is a monopoly, but Valve seems immune from any criticism or even mention of it, with the pc gamer community reacting with downvotes(like with this comment) and angry replies if it's ever brought up. Think about it, when did you ever see anything critical of Steam on HN or Reddit?

Its competitor Epic store which charged only 12% IIRC was demonized and got much more that it's share of criticism and every shortcoming was highlighted relentlessly. I guess Unity does not have much fan armor.

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

#58

Post by robswc »

Macha wrote: post #41
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?

The economics for in progress games means probably only a few particularly early in development or strong feeling dev teams are going to switch engines mid stream so I think in the worst case unity thinks they have buffer to climb down if needed. I can't see future projects building on unity with this "we have changed the deal and can do it again" attitude on the other hand. So I'd put the level of customer power her…

>I can't see future projects building on unity with this "we have changed the deal and can do it again" attitude on the other hand.

Yea, that almost seems the worst part. Seems like a huge risk for any future projects.

>So I'd put the level of customer power here as more than Reddit users but less than Dungeons & Dragons users.

That's good at least.

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

#59

Post by BudaDude »

jeremyjh wrote: post #35
raincole wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn't always true. C# outperform GDScript. Even GDScript 2. GDScript is great for quickly programming certains events. But if you want to create complicated systems that using require thousands or millions of data points, you will notice the speed difference.

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

#60

Post by starshadowx2 »

robswc wrote: post #45
raincole wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there any reason everyone won't/can't just switch to Unreal Engine? 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.

That sucks. I mean, going forward would anyone still start projects with Unity? Or is that ship sailing?

There are a lot of studios and devs now saying they won't use Unity for new projects. Some will be able to switch to new engines, others are just completely cancelling in-progress projects.
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