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Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
31–40 of 78 posts
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#32From [1], it seems they intend on counting "loading a unity game in a browser" as an install: > Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? > A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming inc…
This has 'MBA who doesn't understand contemporary gaming paradigms whatsoever' written all over it.
That, or it's straight-up done with malevolent intent, for some unknown reason, because I genuinely can't fathom this decision-making.
Counting online uses in combination with demo installs means that any game that makes enough money and puts out a web demo (which is a totally valid option on places like itch.io) will have to pay whenever anyone loads the demo. No potential for abuse here, especially since reloads and reinstalls will be counted as new installs.
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#33It sounds like the WebGL initialization thing is ridiculous. They better fix that. But aside from that, collecting a minimal fee seems fair enough to me. If paying 20 cents per sale of your successful game is ruining your life, maybe consider investing in some of the open source game engines.
Charging a fee based on sales would be reasonable. That's what Unreal Engine does (5% of gross revenue after the first $1 million).
Charging a flat fee per installation, even for games that have already been developed and released (many of them for free), is insane.
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#34It sounds like the WebGL initialization thing is ridiculous. They better fix that. But aside from that, collecting a minimal fee seems fair enough to me. If paying 20 cents per sale of your successful game is ruining your life, maybe consider investing in some of the open source game engines.
It would be more sane if it was per sale, but they are talking about per install.
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#35It sounds like the WebGL initialization thing is ridiculous. They better fix that. But aside from that, collecting a minimal fee seems fair enough to me. If paying 20 cents per sale of your successful game is ruining your life, maybe consider investing in some of the open source game engines.
You don't understand, the language says _per install_ not per sale.
This seems to include re-installs, multiple devices, new computers. I wouldn't have batted an eye at 20 cents per sale. Per _install_ is catastrophic.
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
They claim to have developed proprietary code to handle this situation. They don't offer up a lot of details. https://x.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607
Based on this, it seems like Unity's real goal is to achieve perfect price discrimination. For each game that gets sufficiently popular, they can fiddle with their unreviewable "proprietary" metric until it matches whatever they think the developer is willing to pay, and then send them a bill for that amount. It's a clever plan if you assume your customers are too dumb to notice what you're doing.
I can't imagine that a black box "you'll find out eventually I guess" pricing scheme would be acceptable for these same big whales of game development that they want to target.
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#37The installs thing doesnt make any sense. But, I've been a professional Unity dev for 10+ years and I have started learning Godot today; the reason is because I am very concerned about how would Unity possibly implement these policies? They would need to put secret analytics calling back to Unity servers in every build + secret killswitch they can trigger if you dont pay up. That is the reason. Tbh I've been waiting…
You and I might as well be the same person.
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has 'MBA who doesn't understand contemporary gaming paradigms whatsoever' written all over it.
That, or it's straight-up done with malevolent intent, for some unknown reason, because I genuinely can't fathom this decision-making. Counting online uses in combination with demo installs means that any game that makes enough money and puts out a web demo (which is a totally valid option on places like itch.io) will have to pay whenever anyone loads the demo. No potential for abuse here, especially since reloads an…
> malevolent intent, for some unknown reason, because I genuinely can't fathom this decision-making.
sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malevolence.
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are resting on the fact they have a near monopoly for indie and their only competitor is Unreal at this point.
Isn't godot up and coming?
Yes. It doesn't have the asset store quantity behind it yet however the actual development side of things is quick and relatively simple.
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are resting on the fact they have a near monopoly for indie and their only competitor is Unreal at this point.
I used XNA, then MS killed it for no reason, then I switched to Unity, been using it since 2012, today I'm learning Godot. Imo Godot is the new indie engine. it has the same feel as XNA and Unity. There's nothing wrong with Unreal, its a great engine, but it does not feel the same. XNA / Unity / Godot / indie engines, u just sit down and start writing C# code and can write your whole game and ignore the engine featur…
One niche Godot (or any OSS game engine) can't fulfill is seamless console ports.