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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

#91

Post by ZeWaka »

gambiting wrote: post #51
Hemospectrum wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> unique hardware ID

This is vastly more difficult than you think. For example, if you try to use the standard method, which is hard drive serial numbers, it's incredibly easy to spoof AND all prebuilt computers from Walmart share the same serials. Non-starter.

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

#92

Post by gruez »

mannerheim wrote: post #69
belltaco wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

>Steam ... is a monopoly >Its competitor Epic

To be fair "monopoly" is so abused now it basically means "entity that controls the market". eg. "amazon is a monopoly" despite the fact that there are obviously other e-commerce sites, "uber is a monopoly" despite the fact that there's other ride-hailing apps, "google is a monopoly" despite the fact that there are other search engines.

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

#93

Post by whaleofatw2022 »

m_0x wrote: post #76
belltaco wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

Your comment makes it sound like Epic Store was demonized because they charge 12%. I bet that's the only thing they did not get demonized about. Their shady practices such as forcing exclusivity to Epic Store and suing Apple is what brought them shit all over them. Developers are free to submit their game to Steam and release their game in any other platform. Epic handcuffs the devs to the Epic Store for a while. > w…

Steam and Gog Galaxy are the only PC launchers I've used that don't make me cringe.

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

#94

Post by Timon3 »

epolanski wrote: post #48
ZeWaka wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but it does hurt the indie darlings that 'get noticed,' who showcase the Unity engine as a platform for small developers to make their game. 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 numb…

How much does it hurts them? What's the cut? I see this being repeated over and over, but I'm not really understanding, say an indie Dev makes 500k in revenue in one year, how much is it going to unity? If it is anything below 50k it seems to me like a sweet deal for all the things Unity offers to devs. There's no shortage of free and good game engines out there, but I guess Unity does offer a lot that those free opt…

That's the thing: it's not possible to answer this question, since the cut Unity gets is not tied to the revenue of the developer anymore. You pay per user install. In the absolute worst case of people trying to abuse this structure, it would be possible for the developer to owe more than their revenue!

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

#95

Post by jzb »

Like other folks, I'm disappointed in the author for deliberately misunderstanding the actual scenario here.

As I understand it Unity has said it would not do exactly what it has done. This isn't even a "rug-pull" in the sense that people assumed wrongly that Unity wouldn't do these things without explicit assurances. This is a company expressly going back on its word after people have gone all-in on its platform.

And the fact that Unity is trying to switch terms out from under people who've already agreed to and planned on different terms.

Hashicorp is rightfully getting slammed for abruptly changing licenses, but its community has the final releases under the old licenses to fall back on. With Unity it's a major bait-and-switch.

I don't buy the argument that developers shouldn't be angry at Unity. If Unity's model is not profitable or profitable enough there are plenty of ways that it could've approached this that might have been a bit painful but not nearly as harmful.

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

#96

Post by ZeWaka »

robswc wrote: post #49
ZeWaka wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Makes sense. Is there anything about Unity that would make the community grit it's teeth and take the terms? Or is it all just economics at this point?

The main benefit of Unity over all other engines (from my perspective, anyways) is the large amount of skilled developers trained in it. If studios and devs start abandoning it, there goes your value proposal.

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

#97

Post by strangetortoise »

robswc wrote: post #49
ZeWaka wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Makes sense. Is there anything about Unity that would make the community grit it's teeth and take the terms? Or is it all just economics at this point?

Theres a lot of value in the ecosystem through the asset store, that allows yoi to get up and running much more quickly than if you had to built subsystems from scratch (i.e. You can buy a good water package for Additionally, from theres lots of educational resources, that might be harder to find for smaller engines

On the other hand, unity has a habit of shooting itself in the foot with incredibly messy and poor documentation, fragmented and duplicated functionality across multiple implementations (theres a common refrain in the unity community that every system in unity is either in beta or deprecated), so an engine that can provide an easier onboarding / dev experience could definitely compete there.

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

#98

Post by terribleperson »

epolanski wrote: post #64
terribleperson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe (with no evidence) that infinite-scrolling social media sites have already consumed most available attention. To get a share of attention you now have to compete with them, instead of simply being an alternative to boredom.

To be honest if games can't compete with doom scrolling they are either crap games or the social media doom algos are too effective. No part of me thinks "I'd rather scroll my social feed" rather than doing pretty much anything more fun.

Personally I feel it's the second one. When you're competing with boredom, a piece of entertainment can be pretty 'swingy' in how rewarding it feels, which I think is a desirable thing - dynamic range for feelings. When you're competing with social media scrolling, you have to beat that baseline of constant rewards.

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

#99

Post by Timon3 »

ralferoo wrote: post #63
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.

From what I can tell, it only applies on copies sold after 200k copies or 200k in sales. So, if you've paid $X profit after 200k copies, after 201k copies you've made $X plus a bit more, unless you're actually selling your game at less than $0.20 per copy and whatever your payment fees are on the platform you're using. If you consider the IOS app store, where the minimum price is $0.99 and they take a maximum of 30%…

> If you consider the IOS app store, where the minimum price is $0.99 and they take a maximum of 30% (including all payment fees etc), that still leaves you with at least $0.49 per extra copy sold.

This is assuming that all users only install the app on one device. Say a user has both a tablet and a phone, they install the app on both, and after a couple of years they upgrade both and reinstall the app - suddenly you owe Unity more money than you took in from the sale!

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

#100

Post by SeanAnderson »

Stealthisbook wrote: post #87
SeanAnderson wrote: post #20

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…

While there might not be much innovation available in the ad tech space, there's plenty to address in gaming (and ad tech may have lots of arbitrage given different legal regimes) If Unity made their engine just more usable, much less more capable, than UnReal and others they would gain market share. That's ignoring the other lucrative arenas games engines have entered like movie vfx and vr. The CEO going full tilt i…

Do they have the capital to do that, though? My impression is that the Unity software is a quagmire of tech debt. and that napkin math on trying to fix those issues, then wait for sentiment to change, then grow, then capture value from the growth - doesn't pan out.

Their stock is trading down 50% from IPO. I can't imagine investors are very supportive of burning a ton on technically complex, long-term initiatives?

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