6 ms·

You're arguing in bad faith, just stop, you've been a total dick to the community and you keep digging this hole deeper.

tomnipotent 3y ago
> You're arguing in bad faith Because I'm not throwing out low-effort "woe poor game developer" vibes and am instead expecting more? I've actually made effort to model how this could work, rather than exclaiming "this is going to ruin indie game developers!". Bad faith is making unsubstantiated claims and then getting mad when asked to back it up.
- fzeroracer 3y ago
  Have you actually worked on a game in any sense or fashion?
  - tomnipotent 3y ago
    Yes, casual web games. Millions of units, high eight-figure to low nine-figure in gross sales. Tens of billions of online game sessions. I helped start an early online gaming site called GameRival.com that's most famous for Gold Miner and powering MySpace Games, and later led engineering for Grab.com (before the domain was sold off for taxis or whatever it is today). I still run into Gold Miner clones at casinos even to this day. Have you?
    - danShumway 3y ago
      So what's particularly funny about this is that Unity has since clarified that transmission of the runtime over the web via streaming or browser plays counts as an install, and your nine-figure sales compared to tens of billions of sessions would have been impossible to do profitably under these terms. And yet you're still on here defending them and somehow forgot that the F2P genre existed when doing your math. If this is your background then this conversation is even more ridiculous; you should understand what it means to have more installs than profitable users because that was literally your business model. So why are you having trouble connecting the dots here about why developers would be concerned about these changes? By your math you were making pennies per-session. How are you having trouble understanding why even a 2-3 cent additional cost for each session would be a problem for that model?
      - tomnipotent 3y ago
        We didn't build our games on a platform that required royalties. And when the tools we did use had unexpected cost increases, like Macromedia Flash Communication Server, we built our own to replace them. When the advertising model became untenable, we switched to downloadable purchases and a subscription model. Unexpected changes to supply chain happen. Cost of goods go up, or sometimes even disappear altogether. That's business. It's an absolute punch in the throat that Unity has decided to apply these fees retroactively and with so little advance notice, but the onus is on the game developers to adapt and change their models to the new reality. There seems to be plenty of outrage without me, so I don't understand why you seem so adamant for me to be sympathetic to businesses that are only profitable with the charity of another company. There's more than enough room for us to have different perspectives. What's ridiculous is that you seem to think that there's only one right answer or reaction to this, and that it just happens to be yours.
        danShumway 3y ago
        > I don't understand why you seem so adamant for me to be sympathetic to businesses that are only profitable with the charity of another company. That is... certainly a way to phrase the conversation we've had and it is certainly a way to characterize the complaints that developers have with Unity's changes, as if they're simply looking for charity handouts. I would suggest that part of the free market and part of Capitalism and part of business is that when platforms make decisions that hurt a lot of developers, sometimes those platforms get criticized publicly for those decisions. That's part of how business works; bad publicity is one of the penalties businesses pay for bad PR decisions. ---- Of course you don't have to sympathize with developers, but it's disingenuous for anyone to claim that these changes won't impact developers or that critics of these changes are just ignorant of actual game development practices. > It's an absolute punch in the throat that Unity has decided to apply these fees retroactively and with so little advance notice is a pretty different phrasing from how you talked about those developers in your other comments, and it's ironic that you seem to hold such disdain for them given that your own industry experience would not have been possible under the same terms that you dismiss in other comments above as having virtually no impact on the majority of games. Again, I'm not trolling for sympathy here, I really don't care if you care about developers. It's just not good for you to spread misinformation about the potential impact of the changes or to act like the pushback to the changes is based on inexperience or ignorance rather than legitimate grievances about their potential impact on whether or not Unity is usable for entire segments of the market.
    - fzeroracer 3y ago
      So in the same situation where you lambast mobile games for not meeting profitability, you admit you've worked on games that would've fallen into that same situation. And despite your belief that you were not dependent on any sort of intermediary platform I believe many games on that platform including Gold Miner were made using Adobe Flash, so you were in fact using a platform that could've been nickel and dimed just as much as Unity is now. Except you had the advantage of those games being made at the advent of the internet before rent seeking companies clawed their way into the middle. The fact that you've been spreading misinformation or being downright disingenuous about many of the points you've been making makes me believe that many of your points are false.

tomnipotent 3y ago

> You're arguing in bad faith Because I'm not throwing out low-effort "woe poor game developer" vibes and am instead expecting more? I've actually made effort to model how this could work, rather than exclaiming "this is going to ruin indie game developers!". Bad faith is making unsubstantiated claims and then getting mad when asked to back it up.

fzeroracer 3y ago
Have you actually worked on a game in any sense or fashion?
- tomnipotent 3y ago
  Yes, casual web games. Millions of units, high eight-figure to low nine-figure in gross sales. Tens of billions of online game sessions. I helped start an early online gaming site called GameRival.com that's most famous for Gold Miner and powering MySpace Games, and later led engineering for Grab.com (before the domain was sold off for taxis or whatever it is today). I still run into Gold Miner clones at casinos even to this day. Have you?
  - danShumway 3y ago
    So what's particularly funny about this is that Unity has since clarified that transmission of the runtime over the web via streaming or browser plays counts as an install, and your nine-figure sales compared to tens of billions of sessions would have been impossible to do profitably under these terms. And yet you're still on here defending them and somehow forgot that the F2P genre existed when doing your math. If this is your background then this conversation is even more ridiculous; you should understand what it means to have more installs than profitable users because that was literally your business model. So why are you having trouble connecting the dots here about why developers would be concerned about these changes? By your math you were making pennies per-session. How are you having trouble understanding why even a 2-3 cent additional cost for each session would be a problem for that model?
    - tomnipotent 3y ago
      We didn't build our games on a platform that required royalties. And when the tools we did use had unexpected cost increases, like Macromedia Flash Communication Server, we built our own to replace them. When the advertising model became untenable, we switched to downloadable purchases and a subscription model. Unexpected changes to supply chain happen. Cost of goods go up, or sometimes even disappear altogether. That's business. It's an absolute punch in the throat that Unity has decided to apply these fees retroactively and with so little advance notice, but the onus is on the game developers to adapt and change their models to the new reality. There seems to be plenty of outrage without me, so I don't understand why you seem so adamant for me to be sympathetic to businesses that are only profitable with the charity of another company. There's more than enough room for us to have different perspectives. What's ridiculous is that you seem to think that there's only one right answer or reaction to this, and that it just happens to be yours.
      - danShumway 3y ago
        > I don't understand why you seem so adamant for me to be sympathetic to businesses that are only profitable with the charity of another company. That is... certainly a way to phrase the conversation we've had and it is certainly a way to characterize the complaints that developers have with Unity's changes, as if they're simply looking for charity handouts. I would suggest that part of the free market and part of Capitalism and part of business is that when platforms make decisions that hurt a lot of developers, sometimes those platforms get criticized publicly for those decisions. That's part of how business works; bad publicity is one of the penalties businesses pay for bad PR decisions. ---- Of course you don't have to sympathize with developers, but it's disingenuous for anyone to claim that these changes won't impact developers or that critics of these changes are just ignorant of actual game development practices. > It's an absolute punch in the throat that Unity has decided to apply these fees retroactively and with so little advance notice is a pretty different phrasing from how you talked about those developers in your other comments, and it's ironic that you seem to hold such disdain for them given that your own industry experience would not have been possible under the same terms that you dismiss in other comments above as having virtually no impact on the majority of games. Again, I'm not trolling for sympathy here, I really don't care if you care about developers. It's just not good for you to spread misinformation about the potential impact of the changes or to act like the pushback to the changes is based on inexperience or ignorance rather than legitimate grievances about their potential impact on whether or not Unity is usable for entire segments of the market.
  - fzeroracer 3y ago
    So in the same situation where you lambast mobile games for not meeting profitability, you admit you've worked on games that would've fallen into that same situation. And despite your belief that you were not dependent on any sort of intermediary platform I believe many games on that platform including Gold Miner were made using Adobe Flash, so you were in fact using a platform that could've been nickel and dimed just as much as Unity is now. Except you had the advantage of those games being made at the advent of the internet before rent seeking companies clawed their way into the middle. The fact that you've been spreading misinformation or being downright disingenuous about many of the points you've been making makes me believe that many of your points are false.