That seems like monopolistic behavior on Unity's part. Wouldn't this action run afoul of antitrust laws?
30% market share is not a monopoly
Antitrust laws prohibit anti-competitive practices generally, not just literal monopolies.
Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay
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Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay
#92What I'd like to see is that this fiasco encourages studios to produce their own engines rather than using the pre/existing selection. I'd happily wait another 5-7 years for a new game on a new engine then have a new game in two years that feels identical to others. And then open-source it and let the creativity roam free.
I disagree. It is a lot of effort to build and maintain an engine. To be more precise, there is no such thing as a pure engine, but a platform with tools. Hardly anyone can build these things alone or even with a small team. Most indie games and devs would not exist without Unity and it makes perfectly sense to use services from 3rd parties. We all do, we all rely on others. On the other hand, a steady and trustworth…
The engine is the medium gamedevs work in so it does highly effect the types of games they even think about designing.
For instance the kinds of games made in RPG Maker vs Threejs vs Unity vs Pico-8. So by having more engines we'd get more types of games because the different constraints of those engines would impact the games developers will make.
Hence like I said the engine is the medium.
Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's just no way this change is actually gonna happen. Many prominent indie developers have already announced they'll be switching away from Unity for future projects, and you have to think that larger studios are drawing the same conclusions. The ship is sinking. Unity will retract this. Switch to revenue share or whatever. They'll eat a huge loss of trust because of this idiocy, but they'll remain a relevant gam…
Revenue share is going to be worse for most indie developers - the .20 install fee is only bad for extremely high volume, low ARPU games. Basically mobile F2P. They deserve a different payment option, but switching everyone to revenue share is would be much worse for a typical Steam, $5+ indie game.
IMO the problem is more the arbitrariness of the change than the specific fee structure. It applies to games that are already in development, it applies to games that already shipped. Even if it's strictly legal to pull that rug (I have my doubts), no one wants to build a business at another company's whim. Everyone is wondering if Unity just turned X% of their customers into sharecroppers, who's the next Y%? For indies that will be an especially acute concern since they have very little leverage.
Better fixes in no particular order: a grandfather clause, delay the new fees, fire the CEO.
Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay
#94This really does seem like Unity is destroying their business for pennies. Mobile game display ads seem like a very, very low value business to be in and I would imagine rates are going down all the time. Unity may manage to wipe out AppLovin by burning down the rest of their business, but winning king-of-the-hill on top a pile of ashes does not seem to be a high value position. Edit: It's as if Unreal wants to be ki…
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Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay
#95Am I misunderstanding something here? This seems like a racket scheme! (As in a "shame if some 'hacker' on 4chan were to 'install' your already shipped game a million times a second racking up our new fee... unless you do what we want" type of extortionary deal.)
Has anyone called the FBI about this?
Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay
#96What I'd like to see is that this fiasco encourages studios to produce their own engines rather than using the pre/existing selection. I'd happily wait another 5-7 years for a new game on a new engine then have a new game in two years that feels identical to others. And then open-source it and let the creativity roam free.
I don't think this changes the enormous benefit of not having to build your own engine, specially for indie games. To me this is encouragement to avoid situations where you can have the rug pulled out from under you, i.e. either go full open source or have a better license agreement than Unity was offering.
Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's just no way this change is actually gonna happen. Many prominent indie developers have already announced they'll be switching away from Unity for future projects, and you have to think that larger studios are drawing the same conclusions. The ship is sinking. Unity will retract this. Switch to revenue share or whatever. They'll eat a huge loss of trust because of this idiocy, but they'll remain a relevant gam…
They've gotten commodified. It's going to be like being Oracle in a Postgre/MySQL world. You'll have some big legacy customers who just can't switch. But the market as a whole was primed to pack up and leave anyway. Gamedev has high turnover, and what the new kids are going to gravitate towards is what works immediately for them, which Godot superseded Unity on out-of-the-box experiences a long while back, and now ha…
I wonder what they are thinking in making this move then. Someone mentioned Genshin as the big legacy customer and someone answered on why it doesn't make sense. So why do they think this is a good move? Is there really enough profit to be made off legacy customers?
Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay
#98That seems like monopolistic behavior on Unity's part. Wouldn't this action run afoul of antitrust laws?
Typically antitrust laws apply to a company using a monopoly in one industry to behave anti-competitively in another. Unity is behaving terribly, but they aren't a monopoly, and this isn't really even anti-competitive, it's just shitty. There's a greater case that they aren't properly representing the fiduciary interests of their shareholders.
In this case, it seems that they are wanting to leverage Unity's dominance in mobile gaming as a way to out-compete rivals in the mobile advertising space. Questions for lawyers: Is Unity's share (more than 70% of the top mobile games in the market) large enough to be a monopoly? Is this move to displace rivals in advertising behaving anti-competitively?
Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay
#99That seems like monopolistic behavior on Unity's part. Wouldn't this action run afoul of antitrust laws?
30% market share is not a monopoly
Unity itself claims more than 70% of the top mobile games in the market. https://unity.com/solutions/mobile
Re: Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay
#100Right now it's 0.20 per install. In a year, it could be $1 or $5 now that the door are open to it.