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

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

#121

Post by belltaco » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

whaleofatw2022 wrote: post #103

gruez wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Idk if steam is a true monopoly though. Almost every big US publisher has their own platform (i.e. Origin, EGL, whatever the hell Ubi is doing nowadays) for distribution. There is also GoG, but I feel like that is not a good option for Indies. Still, they get a huge shout out because of their retro collection and friendliness to that subgenre. For indie developers, there's always Itch.io with the option to try Steam…

And many of those publishers are now also publishing on Steam because it's close to a monopoly. Like Blizzard recently with Overwatch and soon their other games. And Microsoft published games.

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

#122

Post by starburst » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

jwells89 wrote: post #118

starburst wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the thing, it isn't, it's simply good enough, get the job done and is so popular that employing people that knows it is easy. I agree it is a good value proposition which is why it is the industry standard for mobile games. However, it isn't some marvelous piece of technology that's irreplaceable and when you factor the fact that they can come up with any kind of ridiculous fees and breaking their TOS at w…

Even before the recent upsets, for technical reasons the vibe I had been getting is that for a long time now Unity has been tolerated , not celebrated, and this latest move has tipped the scales and made tolerance no longer possible for many.

Every new version is bloatier, slower and buggier. When you have a Unity version that works for your project, you stick to it and hope you won't be forced to update because Apple / Google changed something that now requires a new Unity version to be compatible.

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

#123

Post by 0x457 » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #72

devmor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not what I mean when I say "indie" and I work in video games. I'm aware of some companies that employ 10+ people who still call themselves "indie" - I find that dishonest. >>Any relatively successful game is going to hit those numbers. Sure - and any relatively successful game should have no trouble paying those fees. The only real edge case that's going to be affected negatively by this change are f2p games t…

It's the same meaning of the world as in the movie and music industry - no publisher/label == indie.

Indie doesn't mean "small team" or "ugly game with interesting gameplay" or "game that makes less than 200k". All that means is that there aren't any external contractual obligations.

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

#124

Post by lesuorac » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

mcpackieh wrote: post #82

mortenjorck wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Great point, Unity should add a free demo exception then.

Unity should've talked to people before announcing the changes.

This is an unforced error on Unity's part and while historical performance does not promise future performance; you really can expect Unity to make large blast-radius changes in the future without consulting you.

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

#125

Post by m00x » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

smitty1110 wrote: post #89

Airsinner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Unity is the best by a mile it works.

Unity skated by on their freemium pricing and easy programming languages. Unreal has been technologically superior for _years_, only held back by the high revenue split, the footguns the Blueprints came with, and how daunting the C++ interface could be. The real nail in the coffin is less the pricing changes in and of themself, but that they can make it retroactively applicable. This means that this pricing is also s…

Unreal isn't great for 2D games, and other small games that don't need all of its power. It's amazing and has unprecedented quality/perf, but being so powerful makes it hard for newbies to pick up.

Godot on the other end will be a perfect fit for what Unity is leaving behind. It's not only free, but OSS, and maintained by amazing people.

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

#126

Post by SL61 » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

dwallin wrote: post #66

It’s not the fact that Unity wants to make more money from its engine that has gotten people so up in arms about it, it’s the way it was structured. If they simply took a percent of revenue, everyone would have shrugged, you might have had some indies complaining, and the world would have kept on turning. Instead, they made a couple of compounding missteps. An install based fee creates a massive amount of uncertainty…

And, if I'm reading the details correctly, it seems like it's going to push developers toward charging recurring subscription fees for their games. If I install a game 20 times in the span of a decade, the devs are being charged over the long term while I only paid once.

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

#127

Post by snordgren » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

jwells89 wrote: post #118

starburst wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the thing, it isn't, it's simply good enough, get the job done and is so popular that employing people that knows it is easy. I agree it is a good value proposition which is why it is the industry standard for mobile games. However, it isn't some marvelous piece of technology that's irreplaceable and when you factor the fact that they can come up with any kind of ridiculous fees and breaking their TOS at w…

Even before the recent upsets, for technical reasons the vibe I had been getting is that for a long time now Unity has been tolerated , not celebrated, and this latest move has tipped the scales and made tolerance no longer possible for many.

Unity suffers from an outdated and inefficient architecture, both in game logic and the rendering engine.

There have been multiple ambitious projects aimed at finding a more efficient way to process game entities, and more efficient ways of rendering them, but that has only resulted in a fragmentation of the ecosystem.

Despite spending countless millions on trying to stay technically relevant, Unity has been living on past merits.

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

#128

Post by nugget » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:13 PM UTC

dwallin wrote: post #66

It’s not the fact that Unity wants to make more money from its engine that has gotten people so up in arms about it, it’s the way it was structured. If they simply took a percent of revenue, everyone would have shrugged, you might have had some indies complaining, and the world would have kept on turning. Instead, they made a couple of compounding missteps. An install based fee creates a massive amount of uncertainty…

The Unity CEO and management team seem actively hostile to game developers. They view them more as adversaries than allies. Their first principle may be something like "How can we extract more revenue from our developers?" rather than "How can we make developers more successful on our platform [such that we all enjoy more success]?". I think that cultural value is the root of a lot of these tactical problems and missteps.

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

#129

Post by belltaco » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:13 PM UTC

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

Epic is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year on it and will eventually shut it down. The only reason it ran for so long was because it's not a publicly held company and Tim Sweeney never liked stores taking a lot of developers' revenue.

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

#130

Post by anonymousab » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:14 PM UTC

epolanski wrote: post #104

Timon3 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

That only applies to F2P games essentially thought, right?

Initially, this applied to every single update, every single reinstall, and anything that changed your IP. Every load of a unity web game.

All of those counted as a new install, and this was stated to be intentional by unity to all the journalists who reached out and by their internal developers on the support forum.

So the long tail of things like your customers buying a new phone == old apps get transferred == that counts as a new install and you get charged. Reinstall a game from steam or change the install drive or directory? Same thing.

Beyond devs and game types that are affected by legitimate usage, there is the clear problem of malicious installs (what a phrase) and abuse. Unity's answer to that was that proprietary secret internal models would solve abuse, but also that developers would have to reach out with proof of being falsely billed after it happened. And just kinda hope that unity would have the support and billing staff to ever actually deal with that problem.