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Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

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Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#141

Post by ARandumGuy »

georgeecollins wrote: post #46
ZeWaka wrote: post #6

Not the best article. It basically entirely ignores how this is going to hurt the small/indie developers the most, who are the main reason Unity exists as it does today. Indie games will have lower price points than AAA games, and thus Unity's cut is a larger piece of the ever-shrinking pie. My personal opinion about this whole fiasco is that they'll go back on their original statement to something still quite greedy…

I think you missed the point of the article, which is that the professional game business has grown faster than the market and is likely to consolidate. The article is in gamesindutry.biz, not "indie developer" after all. Indie devs have lots of choices for engines and Unity doesn't owe them a free engine. Lots of professional developers / publishers use Unity but in my experience that is because Unity is really easy…

One of this big problems is that this change doesn't just apply to new Unity titles, but every single Unity title already released. This means that if a developer released a Unity game a few years ago, they're still on the hook for these new fees, despite the fact they never agreed to it. These developers are now forced to pay these new fees (even if the fees eclipse the ongoing revenue for a game), or de-list the game entirely. This also completely erodes trust with Unity, as even developers willing to pay the new fees are scared that Unity will unexpectedly add more costs in the future.

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#142

Post by anonymousab »

gambiting wrote: post #86
LMYahooTFY wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide examples where this has been used in then industry? With the examples you listed doesn't it require an account to authenticate first before achieving this? Furthermore, is this not easy enough to spoof? Without account based authentication (which as far as I know Unity does not use/require?) what stops me from spinning up VMs or emulators repeatedly to attempt to install bomb?

>>Can you provide examples where this has been used in then industry? Microsoft tells you if you install the game on too many devices. >>With the examples you listed doesn't it require an account to authenticate first before achieving this? Uhm, no, that's how it's implemented but it isn't required. >> what stops me from spinning up VMs or emulators repeatedly to attempt to install bomb? Nothing, but it would be very…

Install count and hardware based DRM in games is notoriously bad. Reports of "I changed a graphics card and now the game is locking me out" are as old as time.

It is a solution that can be done more, or less, correctly or fairly. But the problem is that it is easy to get it wrong, it is easy to implement this incorrectly.

Given how slipshod and slapdash these announcements and responses and walkbacks have been, you can't really have any faith that they will fall into the "right" side of things.

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#143

Post by mannerheim »

belltaco wrote: post #129
mannerheim wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Steam ... is a monopoly >Its competitor Epic

Epic is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year on it and will eventually shut it down. The only reason it ran for so long was because it's not a publicly held company and Tim Sweeney never liked stores taking a lot of developers' revenue.

>A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, 'single, alone' and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, 'to sell'), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular thing.

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#144

Post by sickofparadox »

imbusy111 wrote: post #73
sickofparadox wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a side note, I always find it quite amusing when for-profit companies accuse another for-profit company of being unfair by wanting to make more money. Maybe because most people think you shouldn't announce that you are going to fundamentally alter the way your payment model works for the reason of "We didn't make ENOUGH profits last quarter". Article was written by a soulless mba-style cretin. Into the garbage it…

Why is a perspective from a "soulless mba-style cretin" discarded, if it is presented in a logical way? Unity is a for-profit business after all, and a public one.

Because mba-style cretins with no souls are the overseers pushing these extractive and rent-seeking decisions into every facet of our lives. The article's title, if I am being fair, is correct, but the author never mentions that people such as himself are cause of these symptoms.

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#145

Post by Timon3 »

gambiting wrote: post #134
Timon3 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your small paid game goes viral = you pay a small fee per install, but since you are making money on these sales this is functionality identical to perfentage of revenue(please convince me otherwise) and I don't see the problem. No, that's the issue! It's possible for you to owe more to Unity than you took in from the sale. It's not tied to your revenue. If a user re-installs your game too many times you will li…

>>It's possible for you to owe more to Unity than you took in from the sale. It's not tied to your revenue I think you don't understand what revenue is. It's entirely possible for a revenue based percentage system where you lose money on every sale. In that sense this system is the same - under some circumstances you can lose money on a sale. >> If a user re-installs your game too many times you will literally owe Un…

> I think you don't understand what revenue is. It's entirely possible for a revenue based percentage system where you lose money on every sale. In that sense this system is the same - under some circumstances you can lose money on a sale.

I perfectly understand what revenue is, thank you. I am not talking about a revenue based percentage system where you lose money on every sale.

Please explain to me how a developer can owe more than their revenue in a system where they owe a percentage of their revenue. You literally stated "but since you are making money on these sales this is functionality identical to perfentage of revenue". How can this situation happen in such a system?

> I agree that Unity shouldn't be charging per install if the dev can prove all installations were done by the same user.

But that is exactly the issue. Unity is charging per install, even if the dev can prove all installations were done by the same user. So why are you saying:

> From my perspective it seems like a lot of complaining is being done by people on Unity Personal licences who are now upset they will have to pay to use the engine if they actually make money

if you yourself agree with the point people are making, which is that Unity should not be charging per install?

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#146

Post by Jochim »

SL61 wrote: post #126
dwallin wrote: post #66

It’s not the fact that Unity wants to make more money from its engine that has gotten people so up in arms about it, it’s the way it was structured. If they simply took a percent of revenue, everyone would have shrugged, you might have had some indies complaining, and the world would have kept on turning. Instead, they made a couple of compounding missteps. An install based fee creates a massive amount of uncertainty…

And, if I'm reading the details correctly, it seems like it's going to push developers toward charging recurring subscription fees for their games. If I install a game 20 times in the span of a decade, the devs are being charged over the long term while I only paid once.

It'd be more likely to just kill Unity.

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#147

Post by sickofparadox »

belltaco wrote: post #121
whaleofatw2022 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk if steam is a true monopoly though. Almost every big US publisher has their own platform (i.e. Origin, EGL, whatever the hell Ubi is doing nowadays) for distribution. There is also GoG, but I feel like that is not a good option for Indies. Still, they get a huge shout out because of their retro collection and friendliness to that subgenre. For indie developers, there's always Itch.io with the option to try Steam…

And many of those publishers are now also publishing on Steam because it's close to a monopoly. Like Blizzard recently with Overwatch and soon their other games. And Microsoft published games.

Once WoW is on Steam, then this argument might hold water. Overwatch being put on steam was a desperate attempt at boosting the player count of a game suffering severe player drop-off. Steam was simply an untapped well of users to draw from for Blizzard.

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#148

Post by wing-_-nuts »

m00x wrote: post #125
smitty1110 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity skated by on their freemium pricing and easy programming languages. Unreal has been technologically superior for _years_, only held back by the high revenue split, the footguns the Blueprints came with, and how daunting the C++ interface could be. The real nail in the coffin is less the pricing changes in and of themself, but that they can make it retroactively applicable. This means that this pricing is also s…

Unreal isn't great for 2D games, and other small games that don't need all of its power. It's amazing and has unprecedented quality/perf, but being so powerful makes it hard for newbies to pick up. Godot on the other end will be a perfect fit for what Unity is leaving behind. It's not only free, but OSS, and maintained by amazing people.

It only takes one 'whale' studio using unity to say 'you know what, we're going to give half of what we used to pay for unity to godot' to really speed development of key features. OSS is nothing if not persistent.

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#149

Post by pjmlp »

starburst wrote: post #68
Airsinner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Unity is the best by a mile it works.

But that's the thing, it isn't, it's simply good enough, get the job done and is so popular that employing people that knows it is easy. I agree it is a good value proposition which is why it is the industry standard for mobile games. However, it isn't some marvelous piece of technology that's irreplaceable and when you factor the fact that they can come up with any kind of ridiculous fees and breaking their TOS at w…

It actually is, in the ecosystem of engines having C# as the main language.

Now that the trust is broken, this will also have a big impact on using C# for game development.

Re: Unity’s pricing is a symptom, not the cause of tougher times for the industry

#150

Post by pjmlp »

jeremyjh wrote: post #111
BudaDude wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't always true. C# outperform GDScript. Even GDScript 2. GDScript is great for quickly programming certains events. But if you want to create complicated systems that using require thousands or millions of data points, you will notice the speed difference.

And C++ outperforms C#, so native modules are always an option where you really need performance. Yes, you have to build for every platform but most projects really won't need it - but its there so you know you have options when you do. GDNative is also an option to avoid building the core engine, and its still at least as fast as C#.

Except most Unity users don't want to write C++, if they wanted to, they would have chosen another engine in first place.
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