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Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

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Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#61

Post by BlueTemplar »

hypercube33 wrote: post #34
dash2 wrote: post #4

What's interesting here is the economics of F2P mobile - which, as the article describes it, incentivize the creation of maximally addictive games that drain the user's wallet.

I used to be a heavy palm pilot gamer so I was excited for the future when Android hit the scene. instead, I get a lot of "free" games that are fun for an hour -- just long enough to get you invested and having fun -- to have the game time wall you and ask to pay to get passed it. I'd happily pay $1-15 for a fun mobile game but I haven't found one yet, honestly.

Yeah, it was a huge disappointment, but then I realized that in the context where I only had my smartphone, I would rather listen to podcasts anyway.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#62

Post by [deleted] »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #23
hesdeadjim wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Just the QA testing budget alone that is required to support all consoles, PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot. What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just…

I’m not a game developer nor do I plan to become one but the thing that seems strange to me is all of this talk of revenue sharing with the development tools. If I create a successful app or website using Visual Studio, Microsoft isn’t going to take a percentage of my revenue. Even Apple won’t take a percentage to use Xcode and only charges to publish on their platform. Why is game development different?

[deleted]

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#63

Post by mr_tombuben »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #24
floydnoel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think VC-backed engines can avoid enshittification. Unity is really demonstrating that now. OSS is the only way.

Depends on who the backers are I guess. Perhaps not the classic kind — like say, convince MS, Apple, and Sony to pony up $10mm each. It’s a good play for them to not be caught in this Unity fiasco and $10mm is a rounding error.

Traditional VC companies wouldn't work because they'll always enshittify. Even on consumer space, you can see enshittification from MS, Sony and Apple. I really don't see a reason why the companies you listed would need that 2% royalty at all honestly. They already get the 30% from the sales themselves, and could very well financially support the existence of an OSS game engine with no extra royalties. Sony and MS already develop the Unity and Unreal integration for their platforms without charging extra royalties.

The devs using the OSS engine also wouldn't be stopped from spending resources on making the engine better for their uses (and in turn, making it also better for everyone), similarly how it works with Linux.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#64

Post by delusional »

lordfrito wrote: post #39
floydnoel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think VC-backed engines can avoid enshittification. Unity is really demonstrating that now. OSS is the only way.

Yeah it seems like enshitification during the long tail is the point of the VC model across all industries. Give product away for free, figure out how to screw the install base later on. Can't blame the VCs for trying this model, but they've played society for suckers. We let them get away with this for too long, becoming dependent on their "free" offerings. At this point I'd be willing to get rid of my free stuff al…

Try kagi.com. I'm a very happy customer myself.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#65

Post by hesdeadjim »

wokwokwok wrote: post #28
hesdeadjim wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Just the QA testing budget alone that is required to support all consoles, PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot. What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just…

Anyone down voting this needs to pause and take a good long look at their cloud provider bill. Why are you not self hosting? Probably, its because the its very convenient having some else doing the release cycle QA, deployments, infra work for you. The same goes for game engines. Are you going to start self hosting tomorrow if AWS announces it’s charging you $0.2 per db query on top of the existing pricing? No, you’l…

Exactly! I, up until recently, have been happy to pay Unity six figures for enterprise support for exactly this reason.

I even have engine source, and guess what, it’s wildly complicated. My team doesn’t remotely have the bandwidth to do anything meaningful with it even if we had the right to make modifications.

The argument for open source always neglects this reality. Just because I could change something doesn’t mean I have the economic reality to actually change it.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#66

Post by seba_dos1 »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #32
loveparade wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what QA budget has to do with game engine budget and why the latter needs to be larger. What's the budget of Linux again compared to stuff that runs on top of it?

First off, you can’t OSS consoles. The manufacturers require an NDA and arpproval to gain access to the hardware and SDKs. This costs real money. Second, every console and to a lesser degree mobile are constantly changing their SDKs and that requires a lot of testing to ensure that your engine works across a huge permutation of platforms. Throw in the need to support an LTS version of your engine and it balloons in c…

> First off, you can’t OSS consoles.

All those SDL games already released on consoles and Godot soon gaining support via W4 beg to differ.

Yes, it's pointlessly hard and annoying because of platform stewards and all the hoops they make you jump through, but it's certainly not impossible nor infeasible.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#67

Post by hesdeadjim »

metabagel wrote: post #29
hesdeadjim wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux kernel doesn’t require signed NDA contracts with console manufacturers.

In exchange for what? What does that give Unity access to which Godot doesn’t have access to?

In exchange to access the sdk and hardware. OSS Godot doesn’t have access. Only their newer for-profit arm does, so now… not OSS?

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#68

Post by hesdeadjim »

qwytw wrote: post #46
hesdeadjim wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on who the backers are I guess. Perhaps not the classic kind — like say, convince MS, Apple, and Sony to pony up $10mm each. It’s a good play for them to not be caught in this Unity fiasco and $10mm is a rounding error.

> $10mm is a rounding error And you wont manage to achieve anything with that. Maybe Unity could spinoff its ad business (together with some major liabilities like Ricitelo and other execs) and then MS could buy the engine part.

$10mm each. $30mm backing and you could get a pretty solid tech base to build a game on. Especially since there are some great new libs out there for things like physics. The Horizon Zero Dawn lead programmer has an OSS MIT engine that is very advanced and less bloated than PhysX.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#69

Post by phmqk76 »

delusional wrote: post #64
lordfrito wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it seems like enshitification during the long tail is the point of the VC model across all industries. Give product away for free, figure out how to screw the install base later on. Can't blame the VCs for trying this model, but they've played society for suckers. We let them get away with this for too long, becoming dependent on their "free" offerings. At this point I'd be willing to get rid of my free stuff al…

Try kagi.com. I'm a very happy customer myself.

Maybe I’m an outlier, but I blow right past their limits on any reasonably-priced tier. I use my search bar for all sorts of inquiries, serious and frivolous, including basic addition and subtraction. I tried it for a month and found that my usage far exceeded what I was willing to pay, which was about $10 a month. If they can get the costs down, I’d happily subscribe, I think the results were very good. Google’s results have become terrible over the years, it’s hard to fathom how it’s still their cash cow when the product is practically unusable.

Re: Unity's Just Not into You, Indie Developer

#70

Post by hesdeadjim »

fidotron wrote: post #53
hesdeadjim wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS isn’t tenable as a competitor to any real engine you want to ship big games on. Just the QA testing budget alone that is required to support all consoles, PC/Mac, iOS and Android outstrips the budget of even Godot. What we need is a VC backed, for profit engine, that is up front about taking 2% of revenue after $1mm for perpetuity. And only being an engine company. Period. And like Unreal, source available, just…

I spent some time in the trenches on this, and concluded what is needed is some sort of agreed module/integration mechanism and an ecosystem of open and proprietary modules. (Quite similar to how many large game devs operate already). No “open engine” will ever be enough, by definition, as the games people will pay for will be those which were hard to make, and tech advantage is one well proven way to do that. The te…

This is compelling to me in general. Getting a core engine stood up that is capable of this flexibility would be a hell of a challenge, but a fun one!
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