this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
199 points (98.1% liked)
Games
16369 readers
790 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Finally an article that goes beyond the drama and misinformation. It is not just about the new fee, which realistically is nothing compared to what you would owe epic for the same level of success.
What sucks is the shadiness and the deceptive nature of it all. I am sure the executives felt really clever and thought it would almost fly under the radar After all, they managed to spin this as not-a-royalty after years of boasting that Unity wouldn't have any.
The new changes are essentially this :
You're forced into going with the pro or enterprise license past a certain revenue (which was sort of a thing already).
You're forced into serving Unity ads, or else you get charged a some royalties, which realistically should still be less than what UE charges.
You're forced retroactively into it, as they deleted the old TOS behind the scenes.
They're definitely not being upfront about their intentions, and due to their complete aversion to mentionning the word royalties, they managed to deceptively make up a lie that sounds worst than the actual truth. Even though this is a move targetted at multi-mullion dollars productions, actual students and hobbyist are now worried about being charged per user downloads, which is not happening.
It is sad to see, Unity went from being owned and operated by people who truely cared. I worked there for a number of years and most leaders and employees truely believed they were a force of good in this otherwise shitty world. It is crazy how much the company changed in just a number of years/months. It sucks, and whoever ended up in charge robbed both the employees and the users of something great.
John was a smooth talker, and even as the company was turning corporate and seemingly stepping on old values, he was very good at making sensible arguments and justifying the company transformation. I can't help but feel deceived now. Ultimately I left the company because I disagreed with so many decisions. Virtually my entire backlog was stuff I disagreed with and I just couldn't justify waking up in the morning. We're long past the "Users first" slogan which made Unity so popular with indies.
You're leaving out what's really the key problem with the new pricing, which is that it is per install. It's an unlikely but very possible scenario that a developer could lose money (inexpensive game with an abnormally high number of reinstalls).
The pricing incentivizes "live service" or ad-supported games that constantly extract revenue from users rather than "buy once" games.
Also, what's stopping Unity from running bot farms that just install games over and over again to generate revenue for themselves from developers.
Their pricing is based on "trust me bro" currently, since they don't have details on how it will work. They say it was installed
inumber of times, therefore you owe themj. No need for a bot farm when they can just lie, since we have no way to verify their numbers.