Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

gamesindustry.biz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 186 posts

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

#171

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.

[deleted]

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

#172

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

>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.

I think that's the issue. I did some math and it turns out that this is actually really cheap for f2p games, at least the heavily monetized ones that have a high attach rate. At Enterprise level, the install rate is only $0.01, which means as long as more than 1 out of every 500 people buy some monthly pack, the fee is paid for. And those monthly packs are the cheapest of very expensive packs modern mobile games charge. a whale dropping $100 on some big pack covers for 10k downloads. the install rate is nothing for the successful games.

In comparison, consider how Unreal after their threshold will take $5 out of that whale pack. Is it fair? debatable, but it's a more scalable option. However, for those large games with crazy expensive packs, UE is a much worse deal.

The big problem is that Unity is clearly targeting F2P games, but these deals are awful for console. Gamers with multiple devices (or upgrading devices. or simply changing whatever arbituuary metric they track) will cost you more money with zero return, which may be nothing for a f2p title but it adds up quickly for single purchase content. Then they just think they can walk over and ask Microsoft for their Gamepass money, which is laughable. MS could simply drop every Unity game from Gamepass (which wouldn't hurt as bad as you'd expect) and then take Unity to court over retroactive fees.

This could have easily been solved with two different payment plans based on platform and monetization, but this plan clearly wasn't properly thought through.

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

#173

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

> I'm aware of some companies that employ 10+ people who still call themselves "indie" - I find that dishonest.

how? my first failed app had about 7 staff at one point: 2 programmers, 2 artists, a writer, sound designer, and the founder himself. the founder was paying all of us out of pocket. What makes that "not indie" compared to right now where if it was just the owner using his own time?

>and any relatively successful game should have no trouble paying those fees.

accounts I've read from devs suggest not. For some devs it ends up paying more revenue than they take in, despite qualifying.

>The only real edge case that's going to be affected negatively by this change are f2p games that rely on having millions of installed copies to make miniscule amount of money from few paying people.

nah, it works best for them because whales can purchase continuously and with huge amounts.

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

#174

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

>Think about it, when did you ever see anything critical of Steam on HN or Reddit?

I probably helped in that regard. I hate it but it's a harder battle to face since those rates have been standard for decades. I especially hate that Valve made deals for AAA's to get lower cuts after selling a bazillion copies. Shows where their loyaly lies.

If Unreal Engine is taking 5% after a large revenue floor in order to help make the game, a platform holder really can't ask for more than 2-3x that cost to host it.

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

#175

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

>You know what Valve did? They fucking fixed their platform.

not really. The core complaints from 2003 are still there. Valve instead just conditioned users to not care about physical disks, not care about needing a store open to play a game, and undercut the competition. No different than Amazon in that regard.

Only difference is that it they got good PR out of it (unlike most tech companies doing the same), because gamers are young and they praise cheap stuff above all else. Valve was also smart because they can just take a cut out of already premium games, compared to how most other websites had to sell a free website and monetize it in less savory ways.

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

#176

Post by johnnyanmac »

traverseda wrote: post #74
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…

Yeah, but valve is investing a lot of that into linux and FOSS while unity is investing a lot into ad-tech and user tracking. Steam is taking a big cut, but they've never tried to fuck me over as a consumer.

>Steam is taking a big cut, but they've never tried to fuck me over as a consumer.

most consumers. If you were ever a part of the certain niche games that were bizarrely removed/rejected for no reason, you can be frustrated at valve's vauge lines of what's allowed.

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

#177

Post by ecsenjoyer »

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.

[dead]

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

#178

Post by Xorakios »

Macha wrote: post #136
ysavir wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity definitely deserves to get paid for the value they provide. But why should that value scale with install count? Doesn't it already charge for licenses to develop the game? There is a big disconnect between "We make tools for game developers" and "we should get revenue share of the game developer's income"

I'm sure one of these days the office furniture companies will be coming for recurring revenue shares, since after all, you can't retain the devs you need to make the game if they're sitting on the floor. Think of all the value those chairs provided. Shouldn't the furniture company get a cut of that? It's hard to predict revenue when you don't how long people will hold onto their chairs on a fixed purchase model too.…

Alas, sarcasm might be more like reality.

Retail store rentals have long required a cut of monthly sales.

Actors/writers in the US are currently striking over their residual cut of entertainment sales, essentially forever.

Architects have negotiated for lifetime payments over the rental payments of buildings, so why shouldn't iconic furniture producers get a cut of sales using their most excellent chairs forever?

:)

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

#179

Post by Jensson »

kemayo wrote: post #167
devmor wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

To me indie means that there is no outside stakeholder that wants ROI, its all funded by the development team or customers.

This would then also include every public stock company and every company where the owner no longer works on the games in addition to having outside publishers. This would disqualify almost every bigger teams. There are still some big indie teams, but very few.

All the bad things that comes with a publisher also comes with having outside investors/owners in general, it means that now the game starts to be judges on ROI rather than the developers pride.

Post reply on HN