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OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

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Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#111

Post by chaostheory »

SXX wrote: post #108
Aurornis wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but somehow I suspect that private equity Unity is publicly traded: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U Can’t blame private equity for this one. > crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry. More realistically, they crunched the numbers and saw that they aren’t making enough money to keep the company going forever. It’s not a secret, because it’s a public company: They need to make more money to…

They tried to take sustainable B2B middleware business and make new Google out of it. And they keep failing, but still paying exorbitant amounts to their execs. According to their SEC fillings their staff almost tripled in just 4 years > Dec 31, 2022 7,703 > Dec 31, 2021 5,245 > Dec 31, 2020 4,001 > Dec 31, 2019 2,715 Development of game engine is costly and take a lot of resources, but they already had a successful…

This is what happens when you are publicly traded. You become a slave of 3rd party Wall St analyst revenue expectations. Only a few CEOs like Jobs can effectively deal with that. Having a CEO like Riccetiello exacerbates the problem.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#112

Post by mightyham »

I'm still not fully convinced that Unity's new pricing is unfair. The retroactive aspect of it is certainly troubling and I've seen some fair points about how policy implementation will likely be messy. Moving onto the pricing itself, I've only seen it brought up on a couple occasions that the actual stores these games are being sold on are taking a way larger cut in most cases then what Unity is asking for (For reference, Steam, Apple, and Playstation: 30%, Google: 15%, Epic and XBox: 12% -- please correct me if I'm wrong about any of these).

The flat pricing model will disproportionately effect cheap mobile games, which I suspect was on purpose. Even then, I hardly see this as a problem. Just scrolling through the top games on any mobile store, most of it looks like low quality crap produced by large companies that figured out a successful formula for virile games. The only empathetic party I can figure in this mess is indie mobile game developers, which seems like a pretty small category of Unity users, certainly not commensurate to all the huff people are making.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#113

Post by teamonkey »

gmerc wrote: post #97
teamonkey wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity are currently asking for 4% of revenue over $1M for developing the engine and toolchain that game developers will use all day every day. Valve skim 30% of the retail price of the game for the priveledge of hosting a game on their storefront. This is why Valve makes money.

Valve delivers massive value equivalent to entire departments in a publisher through their steamworks system. Distribution, Analytics, Multiplayer, Anticheat, Publishing Services, Anti Piracy, Storefront, Sales, Mods, Custom Content Integrations, Localisation, and most importantly discovery (things you pay for dearly outside on mobile). They never had need to convince developers that the fee is worth it and they neve…

I just find it really strange to think of Valve's 30% cut to be value, when its main advantage is being an oligopoly, but Unity's 4% cut to be rent-seeking, when it's the foundation and toolset for the software being made.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#114

Post by chess_horse_L »

Macha wrote: post #104
chess_horse_L wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A sample of apps larger than 70mb on my android device: - The built in Contacts app - Degiro (investment management) - Doubletwist (music player) - Sony Headphones Some apps above 150mb: - Element (chat) - Kindle reader - Pocket Casts (podcast player) I don't have too many games installed but layton and the curious village, a point and click DS port, is 700mb (10x larger than on its original platform of the DS). I gu…

I know. I was pointing out the app size since he said that it's 70mb, and that's absolutely not good compared to Unity (10-20mb).

To be fair I don't care about the app size either (Though once you reach a threshold, you'll have to care, since extra config is involved in the stores), I just wanted to point across how much work you have to do in Unreal to reach what Unity does by default, and app size is just an easy unit to explain.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#115

Post by lesuorac »

mightyham wrote: post #112

I'm still not fully convinced that Unity's new pricing is unfair. The retroactive aspect of it is certainly troubling and I've seen some fair points about how policy implementation will likely be messy. Moving onto the pricing itself, I've only seen it brought up on a couple occasions that the actual stores these games are being sold on are taking a way larger cut in most cases then what Unity is asking for (For refe…

So?

This isn't the first time unity made drastic changes without warning. Sure, people are upset above the new pricing but they're really also very upset about the rug pull.

Sure many people love free stuff. However, 1) Unity isn't free 2) People understand that businesses need to make money. If Unity instead explained that they're losing money hand over first and need to change things up and here's a bunch of ideas I bet Unity could've landed a run-time fee without all this complaining.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#116

Post by sfjailbird »

dzonga wrote: post #12

quick qn for game dev's ? why was C# adopted for game dev ? compared to java given that they're both similar langauges which use a vm. I do understand that C# has a better native interop story. than java. and probably the only notable jvm based game was minecraft

For anyone interested, LibGDX[1] is a very nice open-source game engine for Java. It is cross-platform (mobile, PC/mac, web). Very popular and well maintained, too.

[1] https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#117

Post by raincole »

teamonkey wrote: post #113
gmerc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve delivers massive value equivalent to entire departments in a publisher through their steamworks system. Distribution, Analytics, Multiplayer, Anticheat, Publishing Services, Anti Piracy, Storefront, Sales, Mods, Custom Content Integrations, Localisation, and most importantly discovery (things you pay for dearly outside on mobile). They never had need to convince developers that the fee is worth it and they neve…

I just find it really strange to think of Valve's 30% cut to be value, when its main advantage is being an oligopoly, but Unity's 4% cut to be rent-seeking, when it's the foundation and toolset for the software being made.

It's both rent-seeking.

But I can't help but feel you're willing to twist the facts to defend Unity. I'll list some facts for the readers:

1. The 4% cut is a rumor at this point. It's not confirmed.

2. Unity didn't just announce a 4% cut at the first place. They announced a fee per install. It's an unprecedented business model. No other semi-popular game engine does that, ever.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#119

Post by stuckinhell »

mightyham wrote: post #112

I'm still not fully convinced that Unity's new pricing is unfair. The retroactive aspect of it is certainly troubling and I've seen some fair points about how policy implementation will likely be messy. Moving onto the pricing itself, I've only seen it brought up on a couple occasions that the actual stores these games are being sold on are taking a way larger cut in most cases then what Unity is asking for (For refe…

Its the install tracking and fees related to non revenue metrics that really has people super mad.

The install tracking will be borderline malware based on Ironsource's reputation. All they needed to do was take a cut of revenue.

Without that, people wouldn't be as mad.

Re: OSS Game Engines are increasing their stars on GitHub due to Unity's missteps

#120

Post by pjmlp »

Macha wrote: post #104
chess_horse_L wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A sample of apps larger than 70mb on my android device: - The built in Contacts app - Degiro (investment management) - Doubletwist (music player) - Sony Headphones Some apps above 150mb: - Element (chat) - Kindle reader - Pocket Casts (podcast player) I don't have too many games installed but layton and the curious village, a point and click DS port, is 700mb (10x larger than on its original platform of the DS). I gu…

Yet, it is a common subject on Apple and Google conferences regarding mobile best practices.

Not everyone is living in the first world with flagship devices, unless you mean only those are entitled to play games.

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