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Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

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Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#81

Post by mrtksn »

kypro wrote: post #12

I kinda feel bad for Unity. The company is in a bad place finacially. They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no good solutions to this. Either they try to increase pricing and piss off their customers, or they cut costs (which they've been doing with mass layoffs) and risk losing ground to other game engineers like Unreal. For years the only thing really holding the company a float was their valuation…

> They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no good solutions to this

Maybe they should have something to show for this $1B/year and take a cut of this $250B+ industry to cover the costs? They appear to have about %30 market share, so they need to capture less than %2 of the value created with their tool to break even and if they can't do that or they are providing tech for the less than average profitable part of the industry they should shift focus or reduce costs.

AFAIK it's only natural for businesses to go out of business if they can't capture more value than they consume.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#82

Post by popmatrix »

The author seems to misunderstand the new pricing model (as did many others; this is Unity's fault) [1]

The $0.20 is not retroactive, nor do you need to hope your users see 10 and impressions to cover a cost to the game developer -- you need to earn $200,000 _and_ have 200,000 installs. A free game would not be charged, and if you don't believe you can muster 10 ad impressions per user (to cover the unity install cost of $0.20), the base cost of the game can be increased by [1] https://twitter.com/unity/status/1702077049425596900

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#83

Post by whatyesaid »

thenerdhead wrote: post #67
ThinkBeat wrote: post #47

This is written based on my quite poor understanding of the game business. I am sincerely wanting to learn more about how it works and how the new license structure impact developers. My questions below might be idiotic. (but not intentionally so) I have no idea how many apps reach above 200.000 installs total or $200.000 income per year. How common is it for apps to meet the minimum requirements when the fees kick i…

Take Marvel Snap for example: https://unity.com/case-study/marvel-snap > Generated $100M+ revenue and 21M+ downloads on Android and iOS since October 2022 At $0.20 per install after meeting both conditions that would be a lot of money. Note: I don't know the full terms but just took what most articles are reporting on. i.e. $4,160,000 USD (# of total downloads - 200k * $0.20)

They would probably qualify under enterprise pricing of $0.01 or $0.02 on Pro. To release a game without Unity branding you also need at least 1 year of Pro subscription. They also would count more than 21M maybe e.g. multiple devices.

They also charge more at less scale and can't detect things like pirated installs, bypass Steam DRM, and you're still gonna hit the Unity servers. It's just checking device HWIDs.

But Marvel Snap is a card game and like many others has terrible monetisation, you can't keep up with card releases at all without paying. It's more like the pay to win games.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#84

Post by [deleted] »

ekianjo wrote: post #71
chii wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except that with Godot at least you could work on it yourself if you wanted to. let me play the devil's advocate - unreal's source is available (despite it not being actual opensource licensed). This means if Epic ever abandons unreal, you could theoretically also just make the changes you need to support whatever your project required - as long as you didn't distribute those changes (except perhaps the run-time? N…

Source available means you cant do shit at the end of the day before going in legal trouble

[deleted]

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#85

Post by bionhoward »

I was crowing to my game dev buddy about how he (a Unity C-sharp developer) ought to check out Bevy and Rust because the Rust type system is friggin’ awesome!

Code examples: https://bevyengine.org/learn/book/getting-started/ecs/

License is Apache 2.0 OR MIT:

Apache 2.0: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/LICENSE-APACHE

MIT: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/LICENSE-MIT

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#86

Post by prmoustache »

NotGMan wrote: post #4

>> While Unreal engine currently does not have terms like Unity’s, there’s nothing stopping them from doing something similar. In fact if Unity manages to get away with this it seems likely they will follow suit. Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for NEWER version Epic can change…

> So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a project with zero support. Good luck developing it further instead of focusing on your game. > > The same goes for his very own product.

The same goes for Unity and Unreal.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#87

Post by Daedren »

popmatrix wrote: post #82

The author seems to misunderstand the new pricing model (as did many others; this is Unity's fault) [1] The $0.20 is not retroactive, nor do you need to hope your users see 10 and impressions to cover a cost to the game developer -- you need to earn $200,000 _and_ have 200,000 installs. A free game would not be charged, and if you don't believe you can muster 10 ad impressions per user (to cover the unity install cos…

I think when most people are, in this context, talking about the "retroactive" part, it's about if it will affect existing games. The pricing structure will be applicable to everyone starting next year.

The other issue is how they measure "installs", as it has been a constant problem in the mobile community for years on end (a problem especially affecting the ad industry as you may imagine). I personally don't see how they will accurately measure the cases mentioned in the tweet without forcing everyone to have some authentication.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#88

Post by TMM2K »

popmatrix wrote: post #82

The author seems to misunderstand the new pricing model (as did many others; this is Unity's fault) [1] The $0.20 is not retroactive, nor do you need to hope your users see 10 and impressions to cover a cost to the game developer -- you need to earn $200,000 _and_ have 200,000 installs. A free game would not be charged, and if you don't believe you can muster 10 ad impressions per user (to cover the unity install cos…

It is retroactive, games that are already made today and already exist today on the various app-stores will be impacted.

10 ad impressions per user might not sound like much, but you're going to get a lot of people installing your app, not liking it, and uninstalling it. The way the mobile game business works the "install count" means almost nothing, you need many, many, many installs to start making any money at all because so few people 'stick around' to actually make you any money.

Regardless of how they spin it, this model is very bad for the FtP games, which is the vast majority of games now.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#89

Post by rossng »

thenerdhead wrote: post #75
TMM2K wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not possible with something that is open source. If it has a "dual license" that means you can pick which license to apply. You just pick the one that doesn't make you pay.

There are a number of projects doing this today with dual-license models(Permissive/Commercial). I'm not a lawyer and have no idea if they hold up in court/can be enforced but it absolutely is a thing today. https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5599/any-succ...

This is specific to GPL-style licences. You would have to meet the terms of the GPL anyway (i.e. provide your modified source code under the same licence).

The commercial licence is just an additional option for companies willing to pay to not adhere to the GPL terms.

There are certainly cases where maintainers have started licensing _new_ versions of a project under different, non-open source terms (Terraform, ElasticSearch etc.). But you're free to continue using any code that was released under the old licence.

There are some badly written licences which make it ambiguous whether the licence can be revoked in future (e.g. Wizards of the Coast with the OGL), but I have rarely seen this raised as a concern in a software context.

(IANAL, this is not legal advice, etc.)

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#90

Post by orly01 »

chii wrote: post #41
TMM2K wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're contradicting your own points. If it is not a problem that Unreal can change their license for next versions because you can use the old one (which is now unsupported and not worked on) that is fine. For Godot, if we were to stop developing it (and I'd like to note that Godot is one of the most active projects on Github right now) you would still have the version you have now. What is the difference between Ep…

> Except that with Godot at least you could work on it yourself if you wanted to. let me play the devil's advocate - unreal's source is available (despite it not being actual opensource licensed). This means if Epic ever abandons unreal, you could theoretically also just make the changes you need to support whatever your project required - as long as you didn't distribute those changes (except perhaps the run-time? N…

If unreal decides to abandon all older versions support and development, to just focus on something new that requires payment, I don't think you can keep fixing or updating the old unsupported code, even if you have the source
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