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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

#151

Post by PeterisP »

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…

Is Unity-2023 version a billion dollars better than Unity-2022, or even close to that?

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

#152

Post by mcv »

isaiahg wrote: post #123
nhinck wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't though, if any developer had the means to take it to court it is incredibly likely that Unity would lose. While TOS are rarely worth the toilet paper they could be printed on, I'm curious about whether arguments could be made about whether existing subscribers from 2019 could now sue for breach of contract and costs associated with (re)development.

Do you have the money to fight it because I sure don’t

That's the big issue. This is going to hurt smaller developers more because they can't afford to fight it.

The big question is: to what extent to Unity games need to be able to talk to Unity's servers? If they're looking at number of installs (and apparently that includes pirated copies even?), serve ads, and probably provide other services, that sounds like the games need a connection to the server. In which case they may be able to disable your game if you don't pay. And then even if you could sue them, the real damage is already done.

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

#153

Post by Woodi »

simion314 wrote: post #8
makomk wrote: post #2

Much as I love open source and the Godot engine, this seems more like a wake-up call on the importance of corporations not being able to unilaterally, retroactively change contracts in ways that impose new charges and violate existing contractual commitments that others have relied on. If they can do that then open source doesn't offer much real protection.

The problem is today everything has ToS, you get a ToS update in the email and if you do not like it you have to stop using the product, and lot of software this days require an account , and has online features or requirements. I got burned by Steam, I have a super old laptop with some old games on it, Half Life, so one day I got the laptop out, Steam updates and f** itself, the old system is no longer supported but…

> I agree, open source is not required, but we need to own our software not rent it.

That's just a start but also require freezing your OS and have lots of spare hardware or have rights to emulate it :)

And same with data - buyed songs for example :) Big industry already is killing media you can own - cd, dvd, blueray depends on outdated cpu, pendrives decay before becoming usefull backup media...

In the age of asholess open sources and resources are best. Let's bring more viral licenses then GPL !

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

#154

Post by rhtgrg »

TMM2K wrote: post #88
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…

Looks like you know a lot about F2P games, can you help me understand this fee in the context of other variables such as cost of customer acquisition? Is that usually a much lower amount than 20 cents? What about 2 cents, which would be the cost on a pro license, which most successful F2P devs would assuredly be able to afford?

I’m hoping you can answer these with concrete data. If that’s not possible, could you share your references?

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

#157

Post by chefandy »

JCharante wrote: post #105
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…

Losing a billion means they spent more than that, but on what? I haven’t used unity since 2016 and never in a professional capacity but I can’t imagine anything significant was improved or added in the last year.

I'm not going to say that they spend their money wisely, but game engine development, in general, moves at breakneck speed, and unity is no exception.

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

#159

Post by erremerre »

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…

If I got 3 ads impression the moment I install and open and app. I can promise you that I will never know if the app has 3, 4, 10 or 100 ads impressions.

No matter what is the app.

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