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Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

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Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#71

Post by alex_lav »

Pulcinella wrote: post #3

This really does seem like Unity is destroying their business for pennies. Mobile game display ads seem like a very, very low value business to be in and I would imagine rates are going down all the time. Unity may manage to wipe out AppLovin by burning down the rest of their business, but winning king-of-the-hill on top a pile of ashes does not seem to be a high value position. Edit: It's as if Unreal wants to be ki…

> Mobile game display ads seem like a very, very low value business to be in and I would imagine rates are going down all the time

You'd be incorrect. It's a huge business. Less ads in general more paid install services as a result of ads for games, but both are huge businesses tbh.

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#72

Post by deciplex »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #65
TillE wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's just no way this change is actually gonna happen. Many prominent indie developers have already announced they'll be switching away from Unity for future projects, and you have to think that larger studios are drawing the same conclusions. The ship is sinking. Unity will retract this. Switch to revenue share or whatever. They'll eat a huge loss of trust because of this idiocy, but they'll remain a relevant gam…

Revenue share is going to be worse for most indie developers - the .20 install fee is only bad for extremely high volume, low ARPU games. Basically mobile F2P. They deserve a different payment option, but switching everyone to revenue share is would be much worse for a typical Steam, $5+ indie game.

At least with revenue share the amount you owe is bounded by the revenue you've realized from sales.

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#74

Post by syntheweave »

TillE wrote: post #21
Pulcinella wrote: post #3

This really does seem like Unity is destroying their business for pennies. Mobile game display ads seem like a very, very low value business to be in and I would imagine rates are going down all the time. Unity may manage to wipe out AppLovin by burning down the rest of their business, but winning king-of-the-hill on top a pile of ashes does not seem to be a high value position. Edit: It's as if Unreal wants to be ki…

There's just no way this change is actually gonna happen. Many prominent indie developers have already announced they'll be switching away from Unity for future projects, and you have to think that larger studios are drawing the same conclusions. The ship is sinking. Unity will retract this. Switch to revenue share or whatever. They'll eat a huge loss of trust because of this idiocy, but they'll remain a relevant gam…

They've gotten commodified. It's going to be like being Oracle in a Postgre/MySQL world. You'll have some big legacy customers who just can't switch. But the market as a whole was primed to pack up and leave anyway. Gamedev has high turnover, and what the new kids are going to gravitate towards is what works immediately for them, which Godot superseded Unity on out-of-the-box experiences a long while back, and now has the tutorial content to accompany it.

What Unity has in its favor is mostly in the Asset Store, but that's shifted towards being a commodity as well.

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#75

Post by sph »

vore wrote: post #60
hcks wrote: post #57

[flagged]

A per-installation fee model is bonkers: of course Unity is allowed to charge for their product, but if your margins are already pretty thin, it's pretty hard to budget for a per-installation fee – not even per sale!

How do per-installation fees work in the case of piracy? Will game studios have to pay for pirated installs?

And if a user installs a game twice, do they have to pay the fee twice? Forget review bombing, now people can hate install a game.

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#77

Post by rodgerd »

TillE wrote: post #21
Pulcinella wrote: post #3

This really does seem like Unity is destroying their business for pennies. Mobile game display ads seem like a very, very low value business to be in and I would imagine rates are going down all the time. Unity may manage to wipe out AppLovin by burning down the rest of their business, but winning king-of-the-hill on top a pile of ashes does not seem to be a high value position. Edit: It's as if Unreal wants to be ki…

There's just no way this change is actually gonna happen. Many prominent indie developers have already announced they'll be switching away from Unity for future projects, and you have to think that larger studios are drawing the same conclusions. The ship is sinking. Unity will retract this. Switch to revenue share or whatever. They'll eat a huge loss of trust because of this idiocy, but they'll remain a relevant gam…

> There's just no way this change is actually gonna happen.

You under-estimate the degree to which companies can be driven by an exec determined to have their way.

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#79

Post by everyone »

I've been a pro Unity dev, as an employee and then a freelancer running a small team doing contracts for 10 years. I think this was in the back of my mind for a long time but yesterday a switch just flipped in my head and I decided Unity are just not to be trusted anymore, the company has lost all credibility and I never want to use Unity for another project. I'm learning Godot atm.

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#80

Post by everyone »

sitzkrieg wrote: post #67
Renaud wrote: post #36

Wondering if Microsoft shouldn't have bought Unity, It could have made sense, because of its focus on developer, because of its interests in gaming and because it's a huge showcase for C# and .Net as many of the features of unity could have been folded into regular .Net or there could have been an opportunity to have a '.GameNet' version, maybe.

on the flip side they kinda left XNA out to dry despite basically being the unity before unity in some ways for indie devs

Yeah I made games in XNA, then Unity (for 10 years), now Godot since yesterday.
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