![]() Remember that really nice charity bundle we did, for like racial equality? Yeah, that had 800,000 downloads. We started calculating in the indie scene, what a charity bundle would cost. Any game with low sale price? Instantly screwed. ![]() Destiny has a lot of downloads, not all of them convert to monetization, right? So those games, instantly screwed. Those are games that depend on lots of downloads. Yes, per-install fees are really that bad (short version): View: Īnd yes, the game does actually boot. To underscore the absurdity of Unity taking days to make a statement that they're going to make a statement, Caves of Qud dev Brian Bucklew ported the ASCII version of his game to Godot in "~14 logged hours" over the weekend, as documented in an epic Twitter thread. I'll dig into the actual story in a bit, but first, a comparison. All that's left is for Unity to make a public announcement of Technically Unworkable Install Fees 2.0, and run a feedback poll on the changes, which will get them (even more) publicly BTFO'd by the Internet, just as Hasbro did. The repeated doubling down, followed by an attempt to retrench around a barely different (but still terrible) version of the same plan, is exactly what happened back then. ![]() People have observed/joked that Unity appears to be following the Hasbro playbook from this year's earlier OGL fiasco, but that's now unironically true. Really, really need an employee to post that shit to YT ASAP. The story is (at least partially) based on a recording of a Unity all-hands meeting. Nobody tries to buy out the engine until Unity goes bankrupt. Apple is also notorious for changing anything and everything about their hardware, software, and development on a dime and making everyone else deal with it, so why would they care about this? Legacy is not a word in their vocabulary. I'm sure Apple isn't happy about Unity's nonsense, but like I said last time: are they $14 billion dollars unhappy? That's Unity's current market cap. It's basically Big Tech Monopoly 101 - if money is free, keep burning cash until everyone's locked in, then make them bleed. A per-install metric, with no defined upper bound, that continually costs money, is a financial black hole, ruinous to smaller devs, and can only be mitigated with terrible monetization tactics (which also might turn customers off of your premium game.)Īlso remember that Unity chose to run at a ridiculous, currently multi-billion dollar cumulative loss, for years. This is a complete misrepresentation of the dominant sentiment - which is that a rev share would have been fine, thank you, because devs can actually plan around that. The only thing I can think of is either a) dumb pride that means they don't want to copy Epic, or more likely b) to make money they would need to have a much lower revenue threshold than Epic because they are more indie-focused, and having the same % model would make them directly comparable and strictly worse, which will make them look bad.Ĭlick to shrink. But Epic does this because they have Fortnite money, and so are basically giving it away to the 90% to make money only on the 10% whales.Īs to why Unity doesn't also propose this, I don't know, and I doubt they'll ever say, because corpos never explain this stuff. There is not a point where Adobe is like "your wedding photography business made more than £200,000 this year so we are going to take a % of your revenue". If you run a photography business you probably use Lightroom/Photoshop, and pay £n/user/month for access to that software. Unity is currently (as in prior to this stupid change) a seats-cost per user per month-model, which is what most professional software uses. The push to ad rev, the focus on installs over sales (due to ad rev/microtransactions), the complete ignorance of piracy on PC, console network traffic lockdown, etc.it kinda makes more sense when you see it through the lens of constantly updated and online mobile games that rely on ad rev and microtransactions (as piracy matters none there).Ĭlick to shrink.This is Epic's model, it is free until a certain threshold then it's x%. Everything to do with console/PC is just hand waved because it never really mattered to Unity. (edit- i'm referring to previously released games on older versions of Unity here) The console networks are locked down pretty hard, so unless there was some crazy backdoor that Unity could turn on at a moment's notice (which I would say isn't realistic), they are looking to developers to just use the 1 download = one install type of thing that you would see on the mobile game platforms.Ī lot of this move makes way more sense when you realize that it was made for a mobile game development audience. On consoles, I don't believe this is possible.
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