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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

#161

Post by devmor »

kemayo wrote: post #157
0x457 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Whic…

Valve would not count as an indie because they are themselves a large publisher.

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

#162

Post by belltaco »

sickofparadox wrote: post #147
belltaco wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Once WoW is on Steam, then this argument might hold water. Overwatch being put on steam was a desperate attempt at boosting the player count of a game suffering severe player drop-off. Steam was simply an untapped well of users to draw from for Blizzard.

They did put CoD back on Steam, and Destiny went back too.

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

#163

Post by BoorishBears »

anonymousab wrote: post #156
nugget wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

He was saying not thinking about monetization during the creative process is idiotic in context of developers wanting to to do monetization.

As in don't tack on monetization at the end of spending years building out your big creative dream. Which is bluntly true, you're going to be in a world for pain.

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

#164

Post by gustavus »

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…

Its funny you mention that. The enormous variety of games is what kept me on WC3 Battle.net for hours and hours at a time.

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

#165

Post by lowbloodsugar »

imbusy111 wrote: post #73
sickofparadox wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a side note, I always find it quite amusing when for-profit companies accuse another for-profit company of being unfair by wanting to make more money. Maybe because most people think you shouldn't announce that you are going to fundamentally alter the way your payment model works for the reason of "We didn't make ENOUGH profits last quarter". Article was written by a soulless mba-style cretin. Into the garbage it…

Why is a perspective from a "soulless mba-style cretin" discarded, if it is presented in a logical way? Unity is a for-profit business after all, and a public one.

What part of “throwing their toys out of the pram” gave you the impression that it was logically argued?

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

#166

Post by zzleeper »

Revenue US$1.39 billion (2022)

Operating income US$–882 million (2022)

Net income US$–921 million (2022)

Total assets US$7.83 billion (2022)

Total equity US$3.53 billion (2022)

Number of employees 7,703 (2022)

(From Wikipedia)

Holy F these numbers are tough, sp in a high rate environment. Why would unity need almost 8k employees??

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

#167

Post by kemayo »

devmor wrote: post #161
kemayo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Whic…

Valve would not count as an indie because they are themselves a large publisher.

Yeah, but that's still not them being affiliated with someone else. We'd probably call someone who self-publishes an indie, for instance, and that's what they're effectively doing...

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

#168

Post by ralferoo »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #132
ralferoo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But this is a silly way of viewing tooling. If I sell a million books laid out using Adobe tools, adobe shouldbt get a cut!

Do you include the adobe tool in each book? No.

Do you include a massive chunk of Unity code in every game made with Unity? Yes.

If you make a song that includes samples from other songs, you have to pay the original creators royalties too. You might negotiate a deal for a one-off payment, or per-copy sold, or percentage. AFAIK Unity offers all of those options.

I guess you're probably unaware that if you release a game on any of the consoles, you also have to pay a license fee per copy. Not sure of the current prices, but it used to be around $7-$15 depending on expected sales volume. If you release a game on mobile, you have to pay 15-30% cut to be on the app stores. If you release on steam, you have to pay them, etc.

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

#169

Post by foota »

Timon3 wrote: post #145
gambiting wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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…

> 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. I perfectly understand what revenue is, thank you. I am not talking about a revenue based percentage system where you lose money on every sale. Please explain to me how a developer…

I don't want to get in to deep. But they said "lose money on each sale" not that the fee would be greater than your revenue. If you make $1 in revenue, pay 90 cents in various fees, and then 20% (20 cents) to unity, you've lost money on the sale, despite them taking only a percentage of the sales revenue.

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

#170

Post by [deleted] »

pjmlp wrote: post #150
jeremyjh wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And C++ outperforms C#, so native modules are always an option where you really need performance. Yes, you have to build for every platform but most projects really won't need it - but its there so you know you have options when you do. GDNative is also an option to avoid building the core engine, and its still at least as fast as C#.

Except most Unity users don't want to write C++, if they wanted to, they would have chosen another engine in first place.

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