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Unity Overhauls Controversial Price Hike After Game Developers Revolt

20 points by McScrooge 3y ago

compacct27 3y ago
Thank God, literally interviewing with them tomorrow
- dehrmann 3y ago
  If you don't need the job, really do ask them these hard questions. Your personal financial stability is on the line, so be very careful about joining a company that is this detached from its customers.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    If they are applying for an engineering position the people interviewing won’t be able to answer them and the HR interviewer might just cross him out of the list entirely. Back in the day Unity used to have company wide discussions before most very major decisions (even when they still had 500-1000 employees). That’s long past. Hardly anyone in the company knew anything about the new price model before it was announced.
- havnagiggle 3y ago
  Please report back any questions you ask them :)
  - compacct27 3y ago
    “So are you guys…okay right now?”, but more interviewy
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  "Could you please explain how decisions are made regarding corporate strategy at the executive leadership level?"
  - tetris11 3y ago
    "We smile and nod at the devs, and then go spend long romantic weekends with the sales team."
- rf15 3y ago
  Good luck! Better use this advantage.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Unity will limit fees to 4% of a game’s revenue for customers making over $1 million This is 20% cheaper than Epic, correct?
- malermeister 3y ago
  ...but with the added expense and logistical burden of having to track all your installs nonetheless.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    For many it will be much cheaper than that. Maybe even less than 0.05% (depending on how they track installs)
    - malermeister 3y ago
      How exactly would you track your installs? Say it's an offline-only game that is on GoG, how would you possibly know whether or not somebody copied the installer to another PC and installed it there?
      - ffgjgf1 3y ago
        Yeah. I’m not even sure someone at Unity knows. I’m just guessing that most games bought on Steam for instance wouldn’t be installed on more than 5 unique devices or so. Without DRM (maybe even if it was cracked?) you’d be paying for every install of a pirated copy which would be absolutely absurd.
PeterStuer 3y ago
This one is going into the textbooks on how to not conduct a revenu model change. Most of their customers are way to locked in for them to change engine in the short or even medium term, but this will have significant future impacts.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  They could just a get a new CEO… of course they won’t (because almost the whole board is just as deranged) but that could largely fix this issue.
gumballindie 3y ago
As some folks like to say, “the cat’s out of the bag”. I am surprised open source isnt a bigger deal in the game dev world. The web is ruled by it. As i’ve been looking at godot recently, coming from the open source world, it was a breath of fresh air being able to read the source to understand what the engine does, and even to be able to make changes that suit my needs. You dont have to pick godot. Any open source engine that works for you is a good choice. Imagine you are leveraging work done by people with a similar need and similar challenges, instead of a bunch of disconnected business folks and product managers that build engines for the sake of building them. The engineers working on unity are great but we all know how engineering is enshitified as soon as business folks take control. I’d say this to game devs - if open source works just fine for some of the most complex web and operating systems out there it will work great for game dev. Dont be afraid of making the switch.
thaanpaa 3y ago
The lack of interest in developing a custom game engine today surprises me. It should go without saying that using a tool like Unity can help you get going quickly, but when it doesn't exactly fit your original game idea, it can and does often turn into an uphill battle. Directly utilising the SDKs without the use of middleware grants the most freedom, and technologies like DirectX were actually designed to simplify life to begin with.
- krapp 3y ago
  99.99...(some arbitrary significant digit)% of "game ideas" are perfectly capable of being represented in Unity or most modern game engines. For the rest, it's easier to change your concept rather than put off shipping for several years to build a competitive engine just to scratch your specific programmer itches. Plenty of people do start their own custom engines. The problem is, a general purpose game engine of any relevant quality is comparable in complexity to a modern web browser, most game developers don't have the time or talent to handle that, and once they get past a gee-whiz renderer and maybe loading textures, they wind up in the weeds and never ship anything again. Don't get me wrong - I've done it. I've got the corpses of several "game engines" including the ersatz one I'm building around a roguelike that I haven't and may never finish, but it isn't a satisfactory general solution for most people.
  - popcorncowboy 3y ago
    The old "there are two types of game devs, those who make games and those who use games to write engines/toolsets". Those solo game devs on Youtube building their magnum opus are inevitably the latter. It's a different kind of fun, but yeah, don't expect to ship anything.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    > For the rest, it's easier to change your concept rather than put off shipping for several Plenty of games still have their own custom engines. Also you have games like Rimworld which pretty much only use Unity for rendering and cross platform support.
  - 3y ago
boffinAudio 3y ago
This whole spectacle belies a decided lack of ability to think like ones customers do .. if Activision had thought for a moment about what it would be like to have their own titles subject to these same license impositions, they'd have had ample warning about how the rest of the market would respond. But, they simply didn't think about this from their customers' perspective - and this is itself a very shocking circumstance for a million-dollar industry to ignore. It goes without saying that if you can't think like your customer will, then you're not ready to deliver them a product. If you think your customers are your product, you're in dark territory, as well. Have Activision been treating their third-party developers like they are chattle? It sure seems like it in this case.

20 points by McScrooge 3y ago

compacct27 3y ago

Thank God, literally interviewing with them tomorrow

dehrmann 3y ago
If you don't need the job, really do ask them these hard questions. Your personal financial stability is on the line, so be very careful about joining a company that is this detached from its customers.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  If they are applying for an engineering position the people interviewing won’t be able to answer them and the HR interviewer might just cross him out of the list entirely. Back in the day Unity used to have company wide discussions before most very major decisions (even when they still had 500-1000 employees). That’s long past. Hardly anyone in the company knew anything about the new price model before it was announced.
havnagiggle 3y ago
Please report back any questions you ask them :)
- compacct27 3y ago
  “So are you guys…okay right now?”, but more interviewy
toomuchtodo 3y ago
"Could you please explain how decisions are made regarding corporate strategy at the executive leadership level?"
- tetris11 3y ago
  "We smile and nod at the devs, and then go spend long romantic weekends with the sales team."
rf15 3y ago
Good luck! Better use this advantage.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> Unity will limit fees to 4% of a game’s revenue for customers making over $1 million This is 20% cheaper than Epic, correct?

malermeister 3y ago
...but with the added expense and logistical burden of having to track all your installs nonetheless.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  For many it will be much cheaper than that. Maybe even less than 0.05% (depending on how they track installs)
  - malermeister 3y ago
    How exactly would you track your installs? Say it's an offline-only game that is on GoG, how would you possibly know whether or not somebody copied the installer to another PC and installed it there?
    - ffgjgf1 3y ago
      Yeah. I’m not even sure someone at Unity knows. I’m just guessing that most games bought on Steam for instance wouldn’t be installed on more than 5 unique devices or so. Without DRM (maybe even if it was cracked?) you’d be paying for every install of a pirated copy which would be absolutely absurd.

PeterStuer 3y ago

This one is going into the textbooks on how to not conduct a revenu model change. Most of their customers are way to locked in for them to change engine in the short or even medium term, but this will have significant future impacts.

ffgjgf1 3y ago
They could just a get a new CEO… of course they won’t (because almost the whole board is just as deranged) but that could largely fix this issue.

gumballindie 3y ago

As some folks like to say, “the cat’s out of the bag”. I am surprised open source isnt a bigger deal in the game dev world. The web is ruled by it. As i’ve been looking at godot recently, coming from the open source world, it was a breath of fresh air being able to read the source to understand what the engine does, and even to be able to make changes that suit my needs. You dont have to pick godot. Any open source engine that works for you is a good choice. Imagine you are leveraging work done by people with a similar need and similar challenges, instead of a bunch of disconnected business folks and product managers that build engines for the sake of building them. The engineers working on unity are great but we all know how engineering is enshitified as soon as business folks take control. I’d say this to game devs - if open source works just fine for some of the most complex web and operating systems out there it will work great for game dev. Dont be afraid of making the switch.

thaanpaa 3y ago

The lack of interest in developing a custom game engine today surprises me. It should go without saying that using a tool like Unity can help you get going quickly, but when it doesn't exactly fit your original game idea, it can and does often turn into an uphill battle. Directly utilising the SDKs without the use of middleware grants the most freedom, and technologies like DirectX were actually designed to simplify life to begin with.

krapp 3y ago
99.99...(some arbitrary significant digit)% of "game ideas" are perfectly capable of being represented in Unity or most modern game engines. For the rest, it's easier to change your concept rather than put off shipping for several years to build a competitive engine just to scratch your specific programmer itches. Plenty of people do start their own custom engines. The problem is, a general purpose game engine of any relevant quality is comparable in complexity to a modern web browser, most game developers don't have the time or talent to handle that, and once they get past a gee-whiz renderer and maybe loading textures, they wind up in the weeds and never ship anything again. Don't get me wrong - I've done it. I've got the corpses of several "game engines" including the ersatz one I'm building around a roguelike that I haven't and may never finish, but it isn't a satisfactory general solution for most people.
- popcorncowboy 3y ago
  The old "there are two types of game devs, those who make games and those who use games to write engines/toolsets". Those solo game devs on Youtube building their magnum opus are inevitably the latter. It's a different kind of fun, but yeah, don't expect to ship anything.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  > For the rest, it's easier to change your concept rather than put off shipping for several Plenty of games still have their own custom engines. Also you have games like Rimworld which pretty much only use Unity for rendering and cross platform support.
- 3y ago

boffinAudio 3y ago

This whole spectacle belies a decided lack of ability to think like ones customers do .. if Activision had thought for a moment about what it would be like to have their own titles subject to these same license impositions, they'd have had ample warning about how the rest of the market would respond. But, they simply didn't think about this from their customers' perspective - and this is itself a very shocking circumstance for a million-dollar industry to ignore. It goes without saying that if you can't think like your customer will, then you're not ready to deliver them a product. If you think your customers are your product, you're in dark territory, as well. Have Activision been treating their third-party developers like they are chattle? It sure seems like it in this case.