Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

mobilegamer.biz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 185 posts

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#171

Post by stuckinhell »

minimaxir wrote: post #147
johnnyanmac wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sonic Color's remaster. But it's not a good example when talking about stability. I feel half of it is on the engine and half on the fact that they were porting a Wii game to modern consoles (despite being gen 7, the Wii had ancient techniques for lighting and textures. Which is where many issues of the port came from).

The Sonic Colors Remaster had an infamous strobing issue on the Switch before it was fixed. Cassette Beasts, a great game on Godot ( https://godotengine.org/article/godot-showcase-cassette-beas... ), had weird performance issues for a relatively simple graphics game. Godot on consoles isn't as seamless as Unity, unfortunately.

Hearing cassette beasts has performance issues is crushing to me. I was really hoping to switch to godot.

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#172

Post by belval »

turquoisevar wrote: post #163
belval wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mobile game display ads seem like a very, very low value business to be in Might be much less prestigious than selling games that aren't predatory, but Unity does in fact make a lot more money from selling ads in mobile games than licensing and by a very wide margin. The sad truth is that for every "real gamer", there are 10+ regular mom and pop playing candy crush and buying boosts every other day. > Create Soluti…

While $340 million is nothing to sneeze at it would only make up 18% of Unity’s revenue if that’s what they’d make off of ads. Which makes me wonder where the rest of their revenue comes from, but I’m too lazy right now to go through their financial statements to find out.

The $340 million is from the last quarter, you were probably looking at yearly revenue.

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#173

Post by raytopia »

_the_inflator wrote: post #160
raytopia wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The engine is the medium gamedevs work in so it does highly effect the types of games they even think about designing. For instance the kinds of games made in RPG Maker vs Threejs vs Unity vs Pico-8. So by having more engines we'd get more types of games because the different constraints of those engines would impact the games developers will make. Hence like I said the engine is the medium.

I like you reasoning and I agree on this point. However, this also works the other way around: give people a new platform and tools, and let them focus on game design. Why reinvent the wheel? The examples you mentioned would mean, that everyone who is using Pico-8 is basically a rip-off and not creative enough to build their own completely innovative platform. RPG Maker is Unity in disguise with a different business…

I do agree that new platforms and tools are important and I wasn't clear enough that I don't think that everyone needs to make their own tools and platforms but more of them is good. So I agree not everyone should reinvent the wheel

I wouldn't say that everyone is a rip off using Pico-8 in fact I think Pico-8 is amazing and I'm very grateful that the platform was developed because it's changed my views on game development and its author would agree that the medium you work in is very important. he idea of a cozy design space is what lead to its development.

And RPG Maker certainly isn't Unity in disguise (well I guess the older versions) and because they way it's designed leads to very different games then Unity even though you can create the same kinds of games in Unity.

I have no problems with artists making a living from their work either and I also have no problems with people exploring new ways to make games.

so I guess what I'm saying is not everyone needs to go out and make a Unity/Unreal/Godot clone but I wish more people would explore the fact that their tools are a medium and can greatly impact the type of art they make.

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#174

Post by raytopia »

gabereiser wrote: post #116
raytopia wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the others is Panda3D. It's not on a lot of people's radars but you can use it with Python and C++. It's pretty code oriented which might not be everyone's cup of tea but I enjoy working with it.

Disney thanks you. No one else uses that engine really. It’s perfectly fine for 2008. It doesn’t have a modern rendering pipeline, doesn’t support DX12, Vulkan, or Metal. If that’s your requirements, use my engine Reactor3D.

Technically it's from around 1993 so it's even older! There's a decently size community around it gets about 20,000 downloads a month which isn't that bad.

Reactor3D looks pretty cool!

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#175

Post by hightrix »

thowfaraway wrote: post #150
squeaky-clean wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those thresholds are just the point when you'll be net negative. There's still a large range above that ARPU where you're making less money than before or with a different engine. Cult of The Lamb has already announced they will delist their game, and the Slay The Spire dev team have announced they're halting development on their new game to port it to a new engine.

Those are exactly the types of games that would be much worse off under an Unreal style royalty. Cult of the Lamb is $24.99 on Steam Unreal royalty is 5%, so $1.25 per sale Unity is $0.20 So royalty is ~6x more If there was a reasonable way to count installs (I don't think it is technically possible), install fee is much better than royalty for most devs who are not F2P apps.

This is not an accurate calculation as it assumes a single install per purchase.

Let's say I really like this game and install it on my laptop, desktop, and steamdeck (3 installs). Now, let's say I upgrade from win10 to win11 (4 cummulative installs). Alright, now I'm bored of the game an uninstall it. A year later the game recieved a new free DLC including new content. So, I install on my laptop, desktop, and steamdeck again, after I have updated both PCs from win10 to win11 or made some other hardware change (7 cummulative installs). And repeat this process every 2 years.

Unity's price is now much more than Unreals as I'm now costing the dev $1.40 after just the first update. Every subsequent update means I'm costing the dev another $0.60.

This may seem ridiculous, but anecdotally, it seems relatively common.

Again, the issue is not with Unity wanting to make more money, but with how they are trying to achieve this. Install based cost means you cannot estimate tooling cost as it is impossible to estimate situations like above.

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#176

Post by hightrix »

password54321 wrote: post #78
hcks wrote: post #57

[flagged]

As usual, a lot of it isn't even genuine outrage but people who just want to see a giant fall. I will even admit, as someone who didn't like Unity anyway I find this quite amusing.

Unity is my favorite developer tool. I think it is fantastic for both prototyping and production. I am (used to be) a VERY strong advocate for the platform. My current product won't be affected by these changes.

I'm still absolutely and 100% against these changes and am lobbying internally for us to explore different 3d engines not because of the price changes but because Unity has announced, loudly, they do not respect their own user agreement and may change it retroactively(!!!!!) at anytime.

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#177

Post by tough »

salynchnew wrote: post #83

When the anonymous source in the article said "they've been killing it," then I knew that the quote came from a source internal to AppLovin. Their exec team loves to say stuff like that.

They need some google lawyer talk over there

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#178

Post by PawgerZ »

SXX wrote: post #119
extesy wrote: post #101

This situation with Unity looks very similar to the recent blunder by Wizards of the Coast attempting to change their license and triggering the exodus of their customers: https://www.ign.com/articles/wizards-of-the-coasts-new-dunge...

It is not the same. D&D fans can of course shit on WotC and Hasbro, but they would still be D&D fans in the end of day even if changes were not reverted. Fans can't just go and become fans of "free and open source D&D". Individual people are weak and not rational. Majority will always continue to pay for entertainment companies products and bring money no matter how bad they treated by said companies. Think of Disney…

You're talking about the consumers, and you're 100% right in regards to them. But you seem to be equating D&D fans to the game studios, and I see that as a false equivalency.

Consumers of Unity games == consumers of D&D

Companies based on the OGL == Companies based on Unity license

WotC/Hasbro == Unity

D&D consumers =/= companies based on Unity license

In both cases, a large corporation (WotC/Hasboro, Unity) captured the space with promises that their platform would be free to use in perpetuity. In both cases, smaller companies were built around this garuntee; they naively thought that in perpetuity meant in perpetuity. In both cases, these smaller companies that popped up grew the large corporations to what they are today.

In both cases, the corporation tried to sneakily revoke the older agreements to trick these smaller companies into a terrible deal. In both scenarios, the corporation displayed rent-seeking behavior and proposed changes that would destroy the companies that helped them become what they are today.

> Fans can't just go and become fans of "free and open source D&D"

Not sure what you mean by this, but my friends and I are and always have been fans of "free and open source D&D" because that's literally what D&D has always been. That's why so many were angry with the OGL changes; thats why the OGL changes got dropped. And, once Hasboro tipped their hand, many did transition to free and open source tabletop games that respect their third party creators and consumers alike https://www.polygon.com/23587624/non-dnd-dungeons-dragons-og...

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#179

Post by PawgerZ »

extesy wrote: post #101

This situation with Unity looks very similar to the recent blunder by Wizards of the Coast attempting to change their license and triggering the exodus of their customers: https://www.ign.com/articles/wizards-of-the-coasts-new-dunge...

I 100% agree with you, and I was waiting for someone to bring it up.

Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

#180

Post by LightHugger »

ceeam wrote: post #105
lux wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Godot Engine is coming along nicely https://godotengine.org/

Sadly I haven't seen a (semi)professional, serious, 3D game made in Godot yet.

it's rendered in 3d though plays in 2d, deltaV: rings of saturn is great.
Post reply on HN