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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

#541

Post by johnnyanmac »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #354
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 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…

>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

TBH I think the growth argument is better. Ricetellio isn't some especially bad CEO, and I'm sure 50 other CEOs woulda done the exact same thing if it wasn't him. Which is exactly why every other tech company was also hit with massive layoffs this year.

It's not some standout, it's the 20th consequence of actions every other public company pursued. Look at all the industries Unity tried to branch out into in 4-5 years and you see why they became balooned to 7K employees: https://i.imgur.com/3Ume4Qm.png

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

#542

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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.

Where did you read that Unity is just a mobile game engine?

Unity supports basically all gaming platforms. Windows, Linux, Mac, PS5, Switch, XBox, etc.

There are AAA desktop games that use Unity.

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

#543

Post by eestrada »

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…

> Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we ended up here. I think that says a lot.

I've been thinking a lot about private versus public companies. Most of my favorite products come out of privately held companies. There is something about the incentives for publicly traded companies that encourages them to make poor choices. I think it is because there are effectively two forms of revenue: selling products/services and selling stock. And those two things often conflict with eachother to the detriment of the customer. However, with a privately held company, the loyalty is primarily to the customer. Thus the products are better because they need to be to keep the company afloat.

I don't think that means that public companies shouldn't exist, but I wonder how an individual can structure their publicly traded company to avoid having the company misalign its incentives with those of the actual paying customer.

My current theory is to focus more on revenue sharing instead of stock price. For example, dividend stocks. I don't think it completely solves the problem, but it at least moves things in the right direction.

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

#544

Post by KronisLV »

nugget wrote: post #528
philipov wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use their other (presumably inferior) products. As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course the new fees will remain. They must think the average game developer has…

> Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use their other (presumably inferior) products.

I looked into it a bit more and unless I did some bad maths or misread their terms, the whole Runtime Fee looks like a badly disguised sales funnel to me: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/unity-runtime-fee-a-look-at...

The Personal and Plus tiers in particular now need to basically find additional 50 or so cents per install (factoring in platform fees and publisher fees), whereas for Pro and Enterprise tiers that figure is closer to under 10 cents).

In other words, once you start having to pay the Platform Fee on the Personal or Plus tier, it very quickly becomes cheaper to just get a Pro subscription and have the Platform Fee go away for 800'000 more installs on Pro (on top of the 200'000 you get without the platform fee on Personal/Plus).

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

#545

Post by tomtheelder »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #481
tomtheelder wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really don’t at this point. Unreal has reached a point where it’s a better choice than Unity for nearly every single project. There’s still these pervasive beliefs that Unity is better for 2D or better for small teams, and it just isn’t true. The one exception is junk mobile games, and even then I think Unreal is a completely reasonable choice. Unity has been well and truly left behind with the gap widening ever…

I am saying that only from the point of view of someone who has made and published a lot of games, in roles including developer and director, on a lot of platforms and dealt with a lot of engines. But I really hate making this about me. The outrage-driven discourse that people hitch onto to promote their shit is the worst excess of cultural materialism. The most succinct explanation for the difference is that Unreal…

And what I am saying is that they absolutely are not designed to do different things any more. That used to be the case, but Unreal has fully eaten Unity’s lunch here in a technical sense. The engine’s roots are in AAA first person, but they have grown it far, far beyond that. It is now a fully capable general purpose engine for anything from 2D puzzlers to AAA FPSes.

There just are not games any more for which Unity offers any legitimate advantages over Unreal. Unity has been incredibly stagnant as an engine for pretty much a decade, while Unreal has expanded its capabilities and feature set to now virtually fully encompass those of Unity. The idea that they are designed for different things is just out of date.

In 2023 I think the only legitimate reason to pick Unity, and this is a very good reason for what it’s worth, is experience with the engine. I say this as someone who published games in Unity in the past and has transitioned to Unreal. They are both general purpose game engines serving the same teams and the same games, with the exception that Unity cannot support truly top end games.

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

#546

Post by johnnyanmac »

giobox wrote: post #501
lotsofpulp wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect any CEO to continuously sell shares as they are awarded. Diversifying investments is a very recommended and common investment choice.

The CEO's role though is to help make the stock attractive to other investors, not just optimize for their own personal finances. I personally would expect most CEOs to hold a significant portion of their stock awards as a show of confidence in the future value of the company - if the CEO won't hold the investment, why should anyone else?

> if the CEO won't hold the investment, why should anyone else?

I don't think you understand how many shares a CEO has. There are directors at Unity throwing around hundreds of thousands of shares and I'm sure the C execs have an order of magnitude more than that. You never want all your eggs in one basket, if only because you don't want everything to be beholden to the power of your country's economy (something even a CEO can't control).

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

#547

Post by pastor_bob »

fragsworth wrote: post #390
JackMorgan wrote: post #376

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 ar…

> DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, Azure, AWS, Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc. At least with these individual tools, it's usually not your entire codebase written around that thing. For instance, you can generally switch from one database to another if they decide to overcharge you. You can even switch from one cloud service to another. In other words, they (usually) don't have you nearly as locked…

I've heard (sarcastically) that MongoDB's business model is relying on companies who have it entrenched via tech debt and can't get out.

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

#548

Post by tombert »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #485
JackMorgan wrote: post #376

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 ar…

It is a wake up call, I don't think open source is the only solution though. You just need good business practices. Work with vendors that you trust, vet your dependencies, decide how much risk you want to tolerate, pay attention to the licenses that you are using. Especially for something as critical as a game engine is to game development companies.

I agree that it's not the only solution, but it's the only way to (somewhat) guarantee a lack of bullshit.

There are companies like The Omni Group that I think are, generally speaking, bullshit-free. They make (in my opinion) pretty good products, I can buy them once, I get the normally-expected number of updates, and it's about as ideal a transaction you'd want. I don't mind them charging money for a good product, and I'm grateful that products like OmniFocus exist.

That said, one thing that continues to bother me is that Omni could change things whenever they want. They could decide to start charging 10x the price if I use OmniFocus for anything involving business, or they could make it so that my flat-fee purchase of OmniFocus no longer works.

Do I think Omni is going to do that? No, I think they're generally pretty decent people, but open source guarantees that I can always take a snapshot of the "current state" of the project, and also guarantee that there's not retroactive strings being attached to things I'm making with that software.

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

#549

Post by darklycan51 »

gochi wrote: post #495
darklycan51 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split" Yeah, I wonder why, almost like they're trying to slowly gain market share lead to then have a monopoly. Arguing that just because right now there's alternatives that don't seem like they'll do that, right now. Is not a good argument against open source. if any of those engines can retroactively destroy your liveli…

Epic will never have a monopoly as long as Steam exists. They aren't complete fools here, they realize this but are aware that even having a slice of that massive pie is enough to fuel numerous positions in the future.

When I was talking about monopoly, I was talking about 3rd party engines, not storefronts.

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

#550

Post by johnnyanmac »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #453
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 get that you're writing stylized speculations but in my experience in the games industry, every single point is wrong. It is the most upvoted comment because it touches on a bunch of first-principles-know-nothing boogeymen, but so it goes with Hacker News nowadays. You can keep reading to find out why, or whatever, my dog in this race is (1) I use Unity (2) I don't think they're going to change anything about these…

>If people want to spend their breath agitating for something, it's to get Unity to share the source code for a lower price.

while I hate it being gated, it's not that expensive for a medium sized company to get source code access. $3000 + probably some per seat licenses that are orders cheaper than what you pay employees (even significantly underpaid game devs). if you get more than 250k installs you're already paying more than that to begin with with the new plan.

>Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine.

maybe for you, but to pretend there are zero alternative tools because you don't like shows more arrogance than the post you are criticizing.

>I'm actually not saying that one person should use one or the other - they are simply made to do and make fundamentally different things.

it's a tool at the end of the day. you can make Unreal engine 5 run Undertale and you can make Gamemaker run Crysis if you are determined enough. Most people here will be talking about the technical aspects of the engine, not the political/historical roles each engine has made.

I can kind of see where you are coming from but I disagree with the angle that Unity/Unreal are fundamentally different skillsets. they are ubiquitous enough and feature filled enough that the limitations come a lot from the team rather than the engine, with a few special edge cases.

To name one: Unity and Unreal are awful for games with mass destructible environments for example. People CAN still make those, but that's the one case where it may be worth rolling your own tech. Essentially, you make your game separate from the actual unity layer and use Unity purely as a renderer, not for its game framework. I know Unity games that do this, and I think UE can do the same but I lack the knowledge there.

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