Earlier quoted context omitted.
people trusted in unity for years, enough to build their products and careers on it and around it, and something like this still happened. was it foreseeable? even if it was, well what then, 'great, i have no options besides sucking it up or switching, since i built upon this'. what guarantees do epic/unreal customers have? oh wait, this isn't about 'what worth does 'trust in company' even have', but more like 'publi…
> was it foreseeable? Has Unity ever said anything about turning their software into a platform, for instance asking for monthly/yearly subscriptions instead of a one time fee ? If they did, that's when the devs (and especially teachers of future devs !) should have dropped it as soon as feasible.
Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
641–650 of 733 posts
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#642Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The leadership will be ousted by their shareholders quickly enough, I expect. Wouldn't be that certain... there is a lot of stuff built on Unity. The most common theme I heard was that they're trying to capitalize off of Genshin Impact [1], but there's also a ton of other highly successful games like Among Us or Untitled Goose Game that won't/can't (easily) be ported to another engine. In other words, they want to…
Among Us can't easily be ported to another engine? LOL I've been making a Unity VR game, and I can assure you, with a bit blood, sweat, tears, and some ChatGPT assistance, it can be done, especially for the vanilla 2d games which represent the majority of Unity games in the wild.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#643Earlier quoted context omitted.
Among Us can't easily be ported to another engine? LOL I've been making a Unity VR game, and I can assure you, with a bit blood, sweat, tears, and some ChatGPT assistance, it can be done, especially for the vanilla 2d games which represent the majority of Unity games in the wild.
What engine did you port too?
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#644Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#645Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. This can't be directly enforced. You can't make laws for what people to "focus" on. Though there is a way to indirectly push this notion: Restrict all stock ownership to be a minimum of 10 years. This indirectl…
I apologize for not being clear in my comment. None of my musing was meant to allude to public policy or law. It was about what an individual (or group of individuals) could choose to do with a corporation to avoid perverse incentives in the future. I'm not really interested in directly enforcing anything. To make a play on an old programming joke: Once there was an individual who noticed there was a problem with soc…
The first part of my comment doesn't require a state change. I'm sure you can issue securities with a 10 year clause.
The second part of my statement is that while I largely agree with you we Still have state controlling things in the world and it's largely a good thing. You don't want a world without the State controlling an aspect of the free market.
It's not that you don't like the State, it's just that adding additional controls can lead to large unanticipated side effects. Especially sweeping changes like some of the ones I proposed. Totally get this.
That doesn't mean it won't work. Like UBI, these ideas need to experimented on and data needs to be gathered to verify whether it will work. You can't dismiss the fact that that changing public policy Won't work because it currently DOES work.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#646Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would an SDK be secret?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983#Loss_... TLDR A game market flooded with shovelware crap is a disaster for everyone. Modern day consoles intentionally add hurdles/friction/cost to publishing in order to weed out the less serious studios.
And in the meantime, there's already tons of crap shovelware on the Switch storefront. Nintendo doesn't filter for quality.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#647Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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/uni…
How are you calculating .50 cents personal vs .10 cents pro?
Let's see how I got there, let's take their Runtime Fee rates: https://unity.com/runtime-fee
For Personal tier you start paying after 200'000 installs (threshold), whereas with the Pro tier you start paying after 1'000'000 installs (threshold).
That gives us 1'400'000 installs that we need to pay for with the Personal tier and 600'000 installs that we need to pay for with the Pro tier, for which the runtime fee will be calculated and which are above the corresponding thresholds.
For the Personal tier, which has a fixed rate, the platform costs are then:
1'400'000 * 0.20 = 280'000 USD
For the Pro tier, with the volume discounts, the platform costs are then: 100'000 * 0.15 = 15'000 USD
400'000 * 0.075 = 30'000 USD
100'000 * 0.03 = 3'000 USD
TOTAL: 15'000 + 30'000 + 3'000 = 48'000 USD
(they're lower for emerging markets, but using the main prices here)With 1'600'000 units sold, the overhead per a single unit then becomes:
Personal: 280'000 / 1'600'000 = 0.175 USD
Pro: 48'000 / 1'600'000 = 0.03 USD
If we assume that a publisher might take around 50% (just an example value in the spreadsheet I used; though in practice can be as low as 20%), then that figure becomes: Personal: 1/(1-0.5) * 0.175 = 0.35 USD
Pro: 1/(1-0.5) * 0.03 = 0.06 USD
On top of that, there are also the platform fees (like Steam might take 30% of your revenue straight off the bat, other platforms might take less), so the figure then becomes: Personal: 1/(1-0.3) * 0.35 = 0.5 USD
Pro: 1/(1-0.3) * 0.06 = 0.085 USD
Sanity check (doing the same in reverse): Personal full cost (overhead): 0.5 USD
Personal after 30% platform cut: 0.5 - (0.3 * 0.5) = 0.5 - 0.15 = 0.35 USD
Personal after 50% publisher cut: 0.35 - (0.5 * 0.35) = 0.35 - 0.175 = 0.175 USD
Pro full cost (overhead): 0.085 USD
Pro after 30% platform cut: 0.085 - (0.3 * 0.085) = 0.085 - 0.0255 = 0.0595 USD
Pro after 50% publisher cut: 0.0595 - (0.5 * 0.0595) = 0.0595 - 0.02975 = 0.02975 USD (close enough to 0.03 USD)
While the exact percentages might change, Unity asking for say 0.20 USD per copy (or effectively 0.175 USD in the example, because the first 200'000 don't have the runtime fee) means that you'll need to make more gross revenue per copy than that, because your publisher and the platform will both take some of that for themselves.Here's the graphs that I came up with, first how the total runtime fee changes based on the tier: https://blog.kronis.dev/images/1/4/-/u/n/14-unity-pricing-gr...
Also, approximately how the runtime fee overhead changes with publisher/platform fees included (with the example percentages above): https://blog.kronis.dev/images/1/6/-/f/e/16-fee-per-install-...
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#648The 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 it’s anyone’s guess what will happen when that stops being true, but anyone under the age of 40 or so should recognize they will almost certainly outlive those individuals. Closed source means you are beholden to what their successor’s decide even if you (like me) are confident their current leadership will make good decisions.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#649This 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…
> MongoDB, Elasticsearch > Redis You suggest that mongo and elastic search are not open source and redis is ? While all three have a company backing them and sell or have some restrictions (usually targeted towards cloud providers not self hosting ) i would have said all of them are open enough in their current versions not to have a vendor lock in risk
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#650Earlier quoted context omitted.
That reminds me. How is blender able to stay free. How is their approach different?
Blender is GPL2+. It's impossible to have that license and not be free. It's also basically impossible to change license.