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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

#371

Post by and0 »

miragecraft wrote: post #340

The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn't track for me. The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes…

Bingo re: Unity going public. Once you have a stock price (and assuming your early investors aren't the most aggressive type in the first place) the goal then shifts to infinite growth, and lately tech companies (even Google Netflix etc) have had to make user-unfriendly decisions to justify ever growing valuations in the face of rate hikes. Unity isn't the first, but it has maybe done it the worst.

One of the "analysis" threads by a VC on Twitter mentioned the engine not making as much money as the ad business as "unsustainable". But it's the same nonsense Musk spouted with Twitter not being sustainable or "making a profit" -- it made a profit but not given the market realities deliberately hoisted upon it.

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

#372

Post by babypuncher »

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 brought this on themselves. They never needed 7700 employees just to maintain an indie-scale game engine.

Epic maintains their far more advanced engine with 2200 people, and they also run a AAA live service game.

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

#373

Post by and0 »

philipov wrote: post #365
miragecraft wrote: post #340

The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn't track for me. The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes…

> I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no revenue ... Not quite. Unity merged with a company that sells mobile ads: ironSource. They are direct competitors of AppLovin, the dominant player in that market. The terms and backroom deals that Unity is offering devs will waive these fees if they use Unity's ad products instead of AppLovin. Thi…

That's fascinating, thanks. None of the various analysis I've read so far have hit on this point but it makes sense.

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

#374

Post by rhtgrg »

fenomas wrote: post #283
rhtgrg wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see. And this error explains why I’m being downvoted and don’t deserve any other answers?

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

#375

Post by cableshaft »

mijoharas wrote: post #286
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.

Not sending engineers, but when I worked for a smaller dev studio we did need to contact Unity and get support a couple times when we got stuck on something. I think we ended up paying for access to the source code and the development manager ended up making a couple of changes in the source code to get something working better as well (I don't remember the specifics, I was working in Unity but on a different game at the time).

This was like 10 years ago though. That guy worked on multiple arcade games in Assembly back in the day too (you've likely played games he worked on if you've played more than a handful of popular arcade games), he was no slouch.

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

#376

Post by JackMorgan »

This should also be a wakeup call to anyone using closed source tools at all: DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, Azure, AWS, Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc.

While some of these tools are best in class, it's borrowed time until the owner decides to change the terms, stop offering it, or raise prices enough to damage your business.

Closed source software tools are a liability, and the benefits often are only minor compared to the risks.

I've been on several teams where entire projects with dozens of person years of effort had to be thrown out because tools stopped being supported or were made prohibitively expensive. This isn't about open source posturing. Relying on closed source software you can't easily switch off of just isn't worth the risk.

(As an aside, I'm not a purist, I'll use tools like JetBrains, because I could easily switch off to open source tools if I had to without any disruption to my business)

Edit, I do not suggest writing your own tools, I suggest using great open source tools: postgres, apache, Linux, mariadb, open source languages, Redis, couchdb, etc.

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

#377

Post by harles »

miragecraft wrote: post #340

The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn't track for me. The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes…

I think this comes down to ambitions. Unity wanted to be an advertising company and when that goal started slipping away, they did something drastic. Epic wants to be a store and a virtual production platform. Who knows what they’ll do if those goals seem impossible.

It’s also worth remembering that Epic isn’t the good guy here. When incentives align, most corporations are capable of some pretty awful stuff. With Epic specifically they made accidental purchases in Fortnite very easy and then intentionally buried the refund button outside the store under an obscure settings page [0].

[0]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...

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

#378

Post by bitcharmer »

miragecraft wrote: post #340

The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn't track for me. The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes…

> In my opinion, the only reason this whole fiasco happened is because Unity the company has too many headcounts and has too much expense, and the reason for that is they grew too big, and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth, even if the company is much healthier if it had stayed smaller

This can be simplified to:

"The only reason are MBAs"

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

#379

Post by tmpX7dMeXU »

miragecraft wrote: post #361
sigmoid10 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a problem of company structure. It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened. But if you hire the former CEO of EA - a guy with no low level industry experience and who left his last job because of poor financial performance - then this whole fiasco se…

On the surface that is the case, but once you're a publicly traded company you're beholden to your shareholders, not your customers, so your goals and incentives changes drastically and "bad management decisions" gets made. You think the management made a mistake, I think the management (as a result of going public) is the mistake.

That’s a simplistic view. “Beholden to shareholders” does not mean prioritising short-term gain at all costs. That’s not just my ideology, it is how publicly traded companies work a lot of the time, including the one that I work for.

To imply that there’s such a stark binary difference between a privately held and publicly held company misses a lot of nuance. Investors can want a quick out or be in for the long game in either case. The controlling parties pre-IPO have plenty of knobs they can turn to limit drive-by influence if they choose. If a company gets fucked by going public, it was already fucked before it went public, because the people behind the float either didn’t care about protecting the company, or didn’t know how.

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

#380

Post by charcircuit »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #242
charcircuit wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forking is not limited to open source software

Are there any examples of proprietary forks?

Nvidia maintains a fork of unreal engine which integrates with RTX for ray tracing support with their cards.
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