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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

#201

Post by isilofi »

RugnirViking wrote: post #139
j-bos wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>clicking "agreed" in the installer is very often a contract that you should run by your legal advisors. The law often makes use of the reasonableness standard. I'm hard pressed to believe that carefully reading the hundreds of TOS and EULA's hoisted upon us is reasonable. If you're reading my comment you must have read the TOS/EULA for ycombinator, firefox (or chrome), your wireless or ISP, the keyboard app on your…

to be more charitable to the above, we're not talking about consumer software. if you're starting a company selling something there is a fair bit more reasonableness in asking you to read a contract

Exactly. This isn't about Joe Blow not reading the ToS for his eleventieth browser toolbar. This is about a business not reading the ToS for an essential, integral component that will cost you dearly to replace and might bankrupt the business.

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

#202

Post by grotorea »

intelVISA wrote: post #42
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…

The Unreal thing is that Unity has/had ~8,000 employees last year. Sounds like an awful lot for a mobile game engine.

Not not it's an everything engine it's the most popular engine on steam by far from a quick search, although it does leans towards indie. https://infogram.com/1d560b7e-21a1-437a-91f4-198309bf3e25 https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/game-engines-on-steam...

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

#203

Post by distantsounds »

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…

>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 this.

Maybe _you_ didn't research how Unity had this same exact clause and decided to just... remove it. The author is implying Unreal could do the same at any point in time.

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

#204

Post by 1323portloo »

intelVISA wrote: post #42
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…

The Unreal thing is that Unity has/had ~8,000 employees last year. Sounds like an awful lot for a mobile game engine.

That's not their focus at all. They're trying to be an all-things-entertainment company, currently, they are focusing on movie animation and digital character creation.

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

#205

Post by j_maffe »

40yearoldman wrote: post #191
pdpi wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Epic is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart Tim Sweeney founded Epic and wrote the Unreal engine himself. John Riccitiello’s whole career is in management. Even if they’re both entirely motivated by profit, they have different perspectives on how to get there. Also, Unity is a public company, while Epic is private. Even though Tencent owns a considerable share of the company, Sweeney still holds over…

Eh. Part of apples brand is “doing the right thing” and “being the good guy”. I would wager Apple’s brand would be hurt more by not being a green company. ROI is more complicated than simple fist level cost. Going green and doubling down on recycling has generated a much larger ROI than doing nothing. Further more, Tim is bound by law to do what is best for the shareholders. Simply put, if Tim favored environmental c…

This is a complete falsehood. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

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

#206

Post by qwytw »

progx wrote: post #54
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…

Look at the millions of free to play games in the App-Stores. Normally you have 98% of free playing users paying nothing, 2% pay. Imagine now you have 1 million installs. 2% (20.000) pay you 200.000 / year. 980.000 players pay nothing. Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000, you made ZERO with your game... crazy. That is an uncalculatable risk for a small company.

You'd only pay above a million user and need to have above in 1 million revenue.

Previously you weren't even allowed to use Pro/Personal if you made over $200k (not just per game).

> Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000,

Not saying the whole price model is not stupid but only those developers who are very bad at basic math would pay this. Everyone else would upgrade to pro.

> Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000

Again, not really. Even in this case only a subset of user would pay 20 cent.

Another example demonstrating the incompetence of Unity's marketing department, they should've understood that most people can't really memorize more than a single number or be expected to spend over 30 seconds reading something (now I'm not saying that this change overall was not a terrible decision but even a significant proportion of people commenting here don't seem to understand how their per install pricing is going to work).

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

#207

Post by isilofi »

j-bos wrote: post #73
isilofi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a wakeup-call also to do due dilligence and risk management when entering contracts. And yes, clicking "agreed" in the installer is very often a contract that you should run by your legal advisors. Or at least think very hard about. _Some_ kinds of Open Source might help there, since _some_ open source licenses are very easy to comply with and very business-friendly. On the other hand, all the game studios now…

>clicking "agreed" in the installer is very often a contract that you should run by your legal advisors. The law often makes use of the reasonableness standard. I'm hard pressed to believe that carefully reading the hundreds of TOS and EULA's hoisted upon us is reasonable. If you're reading my comment you must have read the TOS/EULA for ycombinator, firefox (or chrome), your wireless or ISP, the keyboard app on your…

> The law often makes use of the reasonableness standard. I'm hard pressed to believe that carefully reading the hundreds of TOS and EULA's hoisted upon us is reasonable.

Yes, but there are two sides to "resonableness": The "what" side and the "who" side. "What" is the thing that should be resonable. But the overall resonableness just as much depends on the question: "for whom is this reasonable?". While a consumer cannot possibly be expected to really read all the ToS everywhere, a business maybe can be expected to do so. Especially for things that are very critical and integral to the business, like the license of that one framework you are building all your software upon. So I do think requiring a business to read and understand the Unity ToS is totally resonable.

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

#208

Post by re-thc »

Pannoniae wrote: post #196
40yearoldman wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. Part of apples brand is “doing the right thing” and “being the good guy”. I would wager Apple’s brand would be hurt more by not being a green company. ROI is more complicated than simple fist level cost. Going green and doubling down on recycling has generated a much larger ROI than doing nothing. Further more, Tim is bound by law to do what is best for the shareholders. Simply put, if Tim favored environmental c…

"Further more, Tim is bound by law to do what is best for the shareholders." This stupid meme needs to die already. There is no such obligation, he only has a fiduciary duty to not trash the company and spend the earnings on cocaine. "companies are legally forced to maximise profit" has never been true and this piece of misinformation has been going around for ages now.

> "companies are legally forced to maximise profit" has never been true

It's more like too hard to be proven in any way. Unless you live in an simulator it's really hard to say which set of decisions is better than another. People often say it is obvious or in hindsight but fact is there are no such hard proofs.

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

#209

Post by techdragon »

40yearoldman wrote: post #191
pdpi wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Epic is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart Tim Sweeney founded Epic and wrote the Unreal engine himself. John Riccitiello’s whole career is in management. Even if they’re both entirely motivated by profit, they have different perspectives on how to get there. Also, Unity is a public company, while Epic is private. Even though Tencent owns a considerable share of the company, Sweeney still holds over…

Eh. Part of apples brand is “doing the right thing” and “being the good guy”. I would wager Apple’s brand would be hurt more by not being a green company. ROI is more complicated than simple fist level cost. Going green and doubling down on recycling has generated a much larger ROI than doing nothing. Further more, Tim is bound by law to do what is best for the shareholders. Simply put, if Tim favored environmental c…

It’s a private company… to whatever theoretical extent he’s beholden to the majority of the shareholders with potential board of directors and shareholder meeting shenanigans … that majority of shareholders is himself… and I’m pretty sure he’s ok with his own decisions…

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

#210

Post by translucyd »

unsigner wrote: post #45

Unity was a dream, or a lie, the lie that you can make games without a somewhat competent software team. Now TFA gives hope to another dream, or a lie, the dream that magical open source fairies can let you keep getting away without a competent software team. It won't. Find those programmers, build a team, build a company where this team has a place, adjust your business model (i.e. raise your prices) to where you ca…

Excellent take.

People think that making good games is cheap and anyone can do.

Making games, maybe. Good ones? I don’t think so.

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