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

#151

Post by anonymousab » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:49 PM UTC

delecti wrote: post #120

m_0x wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Epic pays for temporary exclusivity. Lots of devs turn down that deal and release on both Epic and Steam. The reason so many devs take the offer is because it massively helps reduce risk. Gamers got angry at Epic because they didn't want to have to install a new launcher for a game they wanted. That's really it. And to be clear, I feel the same way. I have a ton of free games on EGS that I've never installed because…

> Epic pays for temporary exclusivity

In several cases, they sought out games that were already coming out on Steam and even had preorders (or kickstarter backers) there, and then paid those developers to rip it out.

There is a seemingly minor but important distinction with what Epic does: they do not pay for exclusivity nor do most of their actions involve paying for a game to be made that otherwise would not have been. Either of those things are fine, even if begrudgingly.

What Epic actually does is pay to harm Steam specifically; the stipulation is always "don't put it on Steam", not "only put it on our platform". It is purposely targeted and antagonistic towards steam and steam users; "we have deprived you of a thing, now you have to come here if you want to get it" is how that comes across, when they should have aimed for "we are getting this new thing made for our platform, come over here to check it out!"

While they were doing this, their store was in a miserable state compared to its competitors, in terms of features and reliability (especially for the desktop app). So they were seen as prioritizing depriving another platform instead of prioritizing having a good platform and customer experience.

When all of the above is put together, it comes across as petty and malicious, rather than them trying to throw their fortnite dollars at bootstrapping their platform, and at making and having a quality platform for consumers.

If they had simply paid for a bunch of new exclusive games and IP to be made for their platform rather than seeking out existing, already advertised and in-development suitor games, it would have come across way differently. Or if so much more of the effort and money would have gone to making the store better and beyond feature parity with its main competitors (not that it necessarily reached even that), it would have been received quite differently.

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

#152

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:51 PM UTC

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.

And being the best C# engine.

There are others, but without the console support, VR/AR headset and platform SDKs like Unity.

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

#153

Post by LocalH » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:51 PM UTC

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.

They have literally said they're not going to do this because their install tracking does not give them any personally identifiable information.

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

#154

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:52 PM UTC

belltaco wrote: post #57

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 go…

The difference is changing the rules in the middle of the game.

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

#155

Post by LocalH » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #134

Timon3 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your small paid game goes viral = you pay a small fee per install, but since you are making money on these sales this is functionality identical to perfentage of revenue(please convince me otherwise) and I don't see the problem. No, that's the issue! It's possible for you to owe more to Unity than you took in from the sale. It's not tied to your revenue. If a user re-installs your game too many times you will li…

>>It's possible for you to owe more to Unity than you took in from the sale. It's not tied to your revenue I think you don't understand what revenue is. It's entirely possible for a revenue based percentage system where you lose money on every sale. In that sense this system is the same - under some circumstances you can lose money on a sale. >> If a user re-installs your game too many times you will literally owe Un…

Yet, that is what they are planning on doing.

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

#156

Post by anonymousab » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 7:03 PM UTC

nugget wrote: post #128

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 miss…

A couple of years ago the CEO called game developers "big fucking idiots" effectively for not extracting the most possible revenue out of the industry. There was the classic "well I actually meant [more innocuous but still dirtbag thing]" walkbacks, but we all knew what he meant.

It now makes a lot more sense when you view it from the perspective of Unity wanting to rip much more revenue out of devs and games using their engine.

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

#157

Post by kemayo » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 7:05 PM UTC

0x457 wrote: post #123

gambiting wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To mostly agree with you, note that the etymology is that "indie" is a shortening of "independent".

It does tend to carry connotations of small teams in video games, but that might just be because the margins in the industry make it super-hard for large studios to remain independent.

Note that I think Valve would count as an indie under a pure independence metric, thus making things like Half Life an indie game. Which feels a bit off.

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

#158

Post by danjoredd » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 7:12 PM UTC

ralferoo wrote: post #84

ysavir wrote: post #21

Has there been any explanation, from Unity themselves or anyone else, as to why Unity thinks it deserves a cut based on install count? Do installs have to connect to Unity servers to download something? Anything like that? 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'…

> Has there been any explanation, from Unity themselves or anyone else, as to why Unity thinks it deserves a cut based on install count? The simplest is that by using Unity, the developer reduces their development costs compared to creating a game without using an engine and the tooling that comes with it. If they don't think the advantages that using Unity gives them is worth $0.20 per copy, they should probably wor…

Let me rephrase this with a different tool to point out how poor the argument is:

>If they don't think the advantages that using YouTube gives them is worth $0.20 per 1000 views, they should probably work out how much it'd cost to switch to a different platform altogether

>If they don't think the advantages that using Adobe Photoshop gives them is worth $0.20 per image, they should probably work out how much it'd cost to edit their photos without photoshop.

>If they don't think the advantages that using Google gives them is worth $0.20 per 1000 clicks, they should probably work out how much it'd cost to hire more developers to do the extra work they'd have to do to promote their website without Google.

The point is it's a stupid payment model that is predatory. People were already paying for Unity subscriptions over $200k...why should they pay for Unity AND pay an extra 20 cent tax per install on top of that? The issue isn't that people aren't paying for Unity. It's that subscriptions seemingly aren't enough to satisfy them, so they decided to price gouge.

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

#159

Post by ZeWaka » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 7:22 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #108

ZeWaka wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have no idea why you think it's difficult at all. On windows Microsoft provides you directly with functionality to query the device ID, that's good enough but in reality if you pair it with some kind of online login system it's pretty much all you need. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47603786/where-do-window...

> I have no idea why you think it's difficult at all.

Because I help develop a game engine / platform that deals with this problem and therefore done extensive research?

All of those Microsoft device ID variants are trivial to spoof or collide. If you're talking about GetSystemIdForPublisher() and friends like 'Product ID', you get the Walmart collision problems.

https://github.com/topics/hwid-changer

Furthermore, if you rely on an easy-to-spoof hardware ID system, if someone gets ahold of someone else's HWID (see: database breach, phishing), you can trivially mess with the data.

Valve/Microsoft/Epic get around this by spending tons of developer time on this problem and using techniques like fingerprinting and behavior analysis.

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

#160

Post by devmor » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 7:33 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 may not be what you mean, but you are responding to other people's takes on the situation with their usage of the word. What you mean does not matter.