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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

#281

Post by saltymug76 »

_chu1 wrote: post #222
codeulike wrote: post #137

Seems to me, the bit where all these game frameworks get a bit tricky is when you want to target iOS. Apple keeps moving the goalposts (you must use some version of Xcode, or you must target some version of iOS) and so the open-source frameworks have to constantly faff about to support the latest apple things. A few years ago I was building using LibGDX which used RoboVM to target iOS but then Xamarin bought RoboVM a…

I would have never thought in a million years iOS was considered a large gaming platform.

Millions of kids and their sticky iPads would like a word.

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

#282

Post by maccard »

swalsh wrote: post #229

I wish game development wasn't so monolithic. You're either all in on Unity, or all in on Unreal, or all in on GoDot. They are designer forward, code later. Each has a marketplace of sorts, but in my experience it's substandard. Compare that to web development (different beast I know, but there's no reason gaming can't be more componentized). Web development is so simple these days because I spend most of my time glu…

I fundamentally disagree about unreal being design first. What do you think the teams of programmers implement features in unreal games are doing?

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

#283

Post by fenomas »

rhtgrg wrote: post #154
TMM2K wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shar…

> What about 2 cents, which would be the cost on a pro license,

2 cents with the pro-license only applies after the first 1M installs, tallied per month. If a game is under 100K installs per month, a pro license only lowers the install fee from 20 cents to 15.

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

#284

Post by danaris »

raincole wrote: post #13
echelon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There's zero risk of this happening. Godot is going to become Blender for gaming and eventually eat into Tim's margins. (Unreal isn't even his cash cow.) Unreal might be significantly ahead now, but when Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. contribute to Godot, it's game over.

My estimation is about 10 ~ 15 years for open source engine to catch up Unreal. (both feature and popularity) Amazon did make a game engine. It shows "Amazon money" doesn't magically solve every problem in the world. > Godot is going to become Blender for gaming Exactly. Blender still isn't the first choice for most animation and VFX jobs.

Please abandon this idea (that so many have) that the only thing worth aspiring to is "being the first choice"/dominating an entire industry.

We need standards, sure, but we desperately need better competition between high-quality products.

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

#285

Post by grumple »

hcks wrote: post #169
Havoc wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t matter what your pricing is if you no longer have clients

Absolutely. Remember last summer when everyone fled Reddit because of the API price hike and they shutdown?

That was this summer, not last summer. It's seems that there's a lot of discussion even today about usage going down: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/16icvv2/1_month... . I have noticed a continuing decrease in quality on reddit for many years (as it attracts more people), like all sites that grow and depend on ad revenue, and activity seems to have gone down substantially lately in the few subreddits I still watch.

Developers / professionals are more judicious in where they spend their time / money / effort than most people. When I select a technology for professional use, I look at the long term prospects for the company. Open source is always a positive, as I don't have to worry about a company raising rates and trying to extract more money from us. Feature completeness can be a concern, as is ease of use, but we really only need our needs met and a path to meet our future needs.

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

#286

Post by mijoharas »

nerdjon wrote: post #187

For the record, I am not a game developer but I don't think that changes my opinion on open source technology. Open Source software is great, but that also comes at the cost of support when you are running into a problem. Particularly if you are on a critical timeline, especially if trying to fix a bug after something is released. You are at the mercy of the community being able to help (and most likely only being ab…

> vs the possibility of the company you are licensing from sending you engineers to actually help you fix the problem.

How often do you think that happens for unity? _Maybe_ for some massive developers, but I don't think this would be very common for most customers.

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

#287

Post by baobabKoodaa »

mrtksn wrote: post #81
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 profitab…

(deleted)

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

#288

Post by nick__m »

raincole wrote: post #15
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. Unity acquired Weta at 1.6B. The solution is not to do this.

Not Weta FX but Digital’s Tools, Pipeline, and Engineering.

"Weta Digital’s Academy Award-Winning VFX teams will continue as a standalone entity known as WetaFX under majority ownership by Sir Peter Jackson and helmed by CEO Prem Akkaraju."¹

1- https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2021/Unity-Com...

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

#289

Post by devwastaken »

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…

Why would you need godot to be "developed further"? If your game is shipped, it's developed. You can continue doing this. When the source is private and behind a license you are forced to agree to the new terms when the old ones expire, or if you can't agree to them then you can no longer ship the game. These are not equivalent circumstances.

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

#290

Post by olig15 »

grotorea wrote: post #202
intelVISA wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I’d probably bet that the majority of games on steam have less than 1000 sales, so being a popular game on Steam probably doesn’t mean much compared to being a popular game by daily active users viewing unity ads.
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