The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn't track for me.
The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes makes less money than this so-called runtime fee.
I beg to differ, I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no revenue share/royalty pledge they had earlier, and ironically came up with an even worse monetization scheme.
In my opinion, the only reason this whole fiasco happened is because Unity the company has too many headcounts and has too much expense, and the reason for that is they grew too big, and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth, even if the company is much healthier if it had stayed smaller.
Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we ended up here. I think that says a lot.
> I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no revenue ...
Not quite. Unity merged with a company that sells mobile ads: ironSource. They are direct competitors of AppLovin, the dominant player in that market. The terms and backroom deals that Unity is offering devs will waive these fees if they use Unity's ad products instead of AppLovin. This is clearly an attempt to abuse their position in one market (game engines) to bolster their position in another market (mobile ads).
Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use their other (presumably inferior) products.
As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course the new fees will remain.
They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.
Based on the backlash, my prediction is that Unity either quickly reverses course (damaging their brand a little and perhaps costing the CEO his job) or stubbornly doubles down (damaging their brand a lot and giving Godot and others an opening to eventually rival them).
> Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use their other (presumably inferior) products.
The Personal and Plus tiers in particular now need to basically find additional 50 or so cents per install (factoring in platform fees and publisher fees), whereas for Pro and Enterprise tiers that figure is closer to under 10 cents).
In other words, once you start having to pay the Platform Fee on the Personal or Plus tier, it very quickly becomes cheaper to just get a Pro subscription and have the Platform Fee go away for 800'000 more installs on Pro (on top of the 200'000 you get without the platform fee on Personal/Plus).
For Personal tier you start paying after 200'000 installs (threshold), whereas with the Pro tier you start paying after 1'000'000 installs (threshold).
That gives us 1'400'000 installs that we need to pay for with the Personal tier and 600'000 installs that we need to pay for with the Pro tier, for which the runtime fee will be calculated and which are above the corresponding thresholds.
For the Personal tier, which has a fixed rate, the platform costs are then:
1'400'000 * 0.20 = 280'000 USD
For the Pro tier, with the volume discounts, the platform costs are then:
If we assume that a publisher might take around 50% (just an example value in the spreadsheet I used; though in practice can be as low as 20%), then that figure becomes:
On top of that, there are also the platform fees (like Steam might take 30% of your revenue straight off the bat, other platforms might take less), so the figure then becomes:
Personal full cost (overhead): 0.5 USD
Personal after 30% platform cut: 0.5 - (0.3 * 0.5) = 0.5 - 0.15 = 0.35 USD
Personal after 50% publisher cut: 0.35 - (0.5 * 0.35) = 0.35 - 0.175 = 0.175 USD
Pro full cost (overhead): 0.085 USD
Pro after 30% platform cut: 0.085 - (0.3 * 0.085) = 0.085 - 0.0255 = 0.0595 USD
Pro after 50% publisher cut: 0.0595 - (0.5 * 0.0595) = 0.0595 - 0.02975 = 0.02975 USD (close enough to 0.03 USD)
While the exact percentages might change, Unity asking for say 0.20 USD per copy (or effectively 0.175 USD in the example, because the first 200'000 don't have the runtime fee) means that you'll need to make more gross revenue per copy than that, because your publisher and the platform will both take some of that for themselves.
> As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course the new fees will remain.
I think you've got this wrong. Unity is (multiple really, but for the purposes of this) two products - the engine and unity ads. Unity ads is the money maker, this is an attempt at bridging that gap. Ultimately unity don't care how they pay you, they just want to know that if you're building a successful game off their products, they're going to get paid. They can't do a revshare (because for some insane reason they talked themselves out of that a few years back), so they're left with something that quacks like a revshare, but won't negatively impact their most profitable customers and force them to reconsider.
Ultimately, I think that's as far as they got with the analysis and failed to consider well... everything else.
> They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.
Any game whose monetization strategy is "ads" is uniformly trash-quality shovelware. They're not here for the long haul, they're here to optimize short-term profit and dump as much garbage on the app store as they can.
> They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.
Well if the reports are to be believed, developers were signing agreements with Unity which allowed them to make unilateral changes to fees. If so, devs really do have no business sense.
IANAL. In US contract law, a contract that includes a clause allowing one party to unilaterally change the terms at any time may still be enforceable, but there are limitations. Such clauses are often subject to scrutiny and may be challenged if they are deemed unfair, unconscionable, or against public policy. Courts may consider factors like the balance of power between the parties, the clarity of the clause, and whether there was mutual assent to the changes.
I'm not familiar with the specifics of Unity's usual contracts, but this is the kind of thing that a court might not take Unity's side on.
Probably very little. Are you implying that they were right to have signed agreements with Unity which effectively gives them controlling rights to the developers’ companies?
I could see that, but based on the massive stock unloads from numerous high level execs right before hand, it seems more likely to me that it's just another company that's going to be cratered inside of a year, stir up tons of controversy and legal problems with stupid decisions, and then everyone responsible will leave after the bankruptcy up millions of dollars. And another perfectly viable business will be stripped and sold for parts on the market because that looks better on balance sheets than just making and selling a product these days.
I don't think this is a problem of company structure. It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened. But if you hire the former CEO of EA - a guy with no low level industry experience and who left his last job because of poor financial performance - then this whole fiasco seems like it was inevitable.
A CEO under who EA introduced lootboxes. A person that proposed that when player runs out of ammo could make an easy instant payment for a quick reload.
Unity engine seems to flounder under him, despite rather insane headcount (7,703), acquisition spree laden Unity Technologies with significant debt...
I am not impressed, not with his ideas and even less with his results.
For comparison, Larry Elisson (Oracle) has distasteful business practices, but very profitable.
I have a few friends that work or have worked at Unity. This is purely anecdotal but from what I've heard it sounds like the place is fairly dysfunctional at this point. A lot of the dysfunction that exists now wasn't there even 3-4 years ago.
Then consoles all but killed arcades because it turns out no one really wanted to keep feeding quarters (and then dollars) into an unfair game even if that turned out to be cheaper than buying a game outright. Removing that monetization strategy improved the quality and diversity of games as well. I'm not keen on rolling back the clock to that version of yesteryear.
A key difference is that you paid nothing up front to play an arcade game compared to Battlefield 2024 (or whatever). There's decades of expectations/inertia not having microtransactions on home games, but I understand that is what publishers are trying to fight against.
It's worth noting that the death of the golden age of arcade games was due to no small part of the rise of console games. People didn't want to pump quarters into a machine to keep playing, they wanted to buy a game once and play it forever.
This guy wasn't proposing anything as crazy as pay-per-bullet. There's lots of games with limited ammo and you find more in the environment. Even in Doom you might run out of ammo for your favorite gun and need to put it away until you found another ammo pack in the level. This is why Valorant has a knife you can switch to, because if you waste gun ammo you run out on your main weapon. In Fortnite you have to find ammo and weapons in chests, etc. This guy was proposing an option to pay to refill your inventory immediately. But people heard "reload" and assumed something completely different.
The real problem with his proposal is it quickly falls apart if you think about it for even a minute. It's a classic pay-to-win mechanic. And once something is pay-to-win it becomes a slippery slope and a race to the bottom for the game makers. Every game has some amount of edge cases where you're playing only to realize "Damn, I'm out, this sucks. I'd pay a buck right now to refill." But once you add in some options to pay in those scenarios, the game maker has a perverse incentive to no longer make it an edge case. Some PM will realize if they make the rare event 10x more likely they'll make 10x more $$$$ and they're off to the races. They start messing with the ammo drop rates to create "pinch points" and now your super fun game really does require you to be "paying to reload" and it's not fun anymore.
This guy was trying (and failing) to present it as a player benefit but the reality is he know exactly where this road lead. It's the same place EA games with loot boxes landed in the end.
Arcades in the 90s used the countdown clock,more lives type buy in. You bought time, or they would make the game so seriously hard you had to feed it quarters to keep the game going. Paying on an instant 'hey you could use more ammo for 50cents' at a exploitive time is something I am surprised we did not see as a mechanic in arcades. But they probably would have if they had thought of it. But the idea of feed more quarters in to keep playing was most certainly there.
I remember there were arcade games where your health continuously drained and inserting another quarter would heal you. That's worse than a per-bullet price because you were losing even when there were no enemies on the screen.
I don't remember the titles because I played those kinds of games exactly once and never again. Total rip off.
It sounds like you're talking about Gauntlet Dark Legacy. I also remember guides about how to leave levels with more health than you entered them (there were ways to regain health). It's hard to single this series out as "a total ripoff" among all kinds of arcade games designed to extract quarters out of you. You can't expect someone to stay on a screen or backtrack forever. Some games use a timer, some throw an endless amount of mobs at you. The nature of the game (which was built in part around exploration) was that they used the health amount as HP + timer.
I don't think that's a thing in arcade games. There are pay to continue in arcades, and pay to win in regulated gambling that are light on gaming aspect, but never seen one in arcades.
Maybe it's similar to how there are "Dungeons and Something" || "Something and Dragons" but somehow never both?
Except this was in connection with Battlefield 3, a title you’d have to buy. So it’s more like buying the arcade machine but somebody still takes quarters from you anyway.
I saw a reddit comment from a Unity developer that alleged that Unity told them not to worry about the changes because this dev used ironSource for their ads. ironSource merged with Unity last year and other commenters were speculating that this whole thing is a play to try to coerce the huge amount of mobile games that are made with Unity to switch to ironSource.
To parent's opinion, I'd respond that bad management is a possibility in any company.
However, a broken revenue model misaligns incentives and makes user-bad decisions a certainty.
Laying it at the feet of management is blaming the messenger -- the root cause was revenue and expectations being strategically unbalanced.
It's surprising how many people watch companies make "dumb" moves and gnash their teeth over "how could they be so stupid?"
They're not being stupid... they're looking at the cards they have in their hand, what they need to win, and playing it the best way they can.
As people have quipped elsewhere in the comments, there were no ways Unity could deliver the financial performance that was expected of them, with a developer-friendly business model.
On the surface that is the case, but once you're a publicly traded company you're beholden to your shareholders, not your customers, so your goals and incentives changes drastically and "bad management decisions" gets made.
You think the management made a mistake, I think the management (as a result of going public) is the mistake.
That’s a simplistic view. “Beholden to shareholders” does not mean prioritising short-term gain at all costs. That’s not just my ideology, it is how publicly traded companies work a lot of the time, including the one that I work for.
To imply that there’s such a stark binary difference between a privately held and publicly held company misses a lot of nuance. Investors can want a quick out or be in for the long game in either case. The controlling parties pre-IPO have plenty of knobs they can turn to limit drive-by influence if they choose. If a company gets fucked by going public, it was already fucked before it went public, because the people behind the float either didn’t care about protecting the company, or didn’t know how.
In theory, that's true. But what I see every day is the opposite. It's essentially what people are calling "enshitification". Mostly short term decisions that screw customers up for a quick buck.
I do agree that private does not mean good. It all falls under the CEO/Founders in my view. But there seems to be way more greedy short term thinking leaders out there.
I can probably count in my hands the amount of companies I follow that are not prioritizing the short-term. Maybe I just don't follow that many companies and I'm biased, but that's the impression I get.
Public companies seem to have an even higher rate of short-term profit seeking though.
It starts out noble. Once a company goes public, the first few town halls after the shareholder call the CEO or CFO will be like, "Don't worry about the stock price, we're better than all the other short-termist companies, we care about long term quality and blah blah."
But bit by bit, little by little, like Pavlov's dogs the employees get trained to peek at that stock ticker around reporting time. And over time they sync up their decision making with that schedule, and internal planning starts to reflect it. And new initiatives get created and judged by investor reactions. And it's all downhill from there :-(
Sorry, it sounds like you're defending the system that doesn't empower the public good. I hear reports time and time again that private companies that go publicly are burned by the artificial and unnatural need for constant growth. Going public serves greedy individuals (shareholders) that have no connection to the service or product that real people depend on.
The CEO's role though is to help make the stock attractive to other investors, not just optimize for their own personal finances. I personally would expect most CEOs to hold a significant portion of their stock awards as a show of confidence in the future value of the company - if the CEO won't hold the investment, why should anyone else?
> if the CEO won't hold the investment, why should anyone else?
I don't think you understand how many shares a CEO has. There are directors at Unity throwing around hundreds of thousands of shares and I'm sure the C execs have an order of magnitude more than that. You never want all your eggs in one basket, if only because you don't want everything to be beholden to the power of your country's economy (something even a CEO can't control).
Surely the CEO has both interests, and securing resources for themselves is of higher priority than securing them for others. They might be expected to hold proportionally more of it than others, but I also would not expect any half intelligent person to put all their eggs in one basket just for the benefit of others.
>It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened
TBH I think the growth argument is better. Ricetellio isn't some especially bad CEO, and I'm sure 50 other CEOs woulda done the exact same thing if it wasn't him. Which is exactly why every other tech company was also hit with massive layoffs this year.
It's not some standout, it's the 20th consequence of actions every other public company pursued. Look at all the industries Unity tried to branch out into in 4-5 years and you see why they became balooned to 7K employees: https://i.imgur.com/3Ume4Qm.png
> Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we ended up here. I think that says a lot.
I've been thinking a lot about private versus public companies. Most of my favorite products come out of privately held companies. There is something about the incentives for publicly traded companies that encourages them to make poor choices. I think it is because there are effectively two forms of revenue: selling products/services and selling stock. And those two things often conflict with eachother to the detriment of the customer. However, with a privately held company, the loyalty is primarily to the customer. Thus the products are better because they need to be to keep the company afloat.
I don't think that means that public companies shouldn't exist, but I wonder how an individual can structure their publicly traded company to avoid having the company misalign its incentives with those of the actual paying customer.
My current theory is to focus more on revenue sharing instead of stock price. For example, dividend stocks. I don't think it completely solves the problem, but it at least moves things in the right direction.
>My current theory is to focus more on revenue sharing instead of stock price. For example, dividend stocks. I don't think it completely solves the problem, but it at least moves things in the right direction.
This can't be directly enforced. You can't make laws for what people to "focus" on.
Though there is a way to indirectly push this notion: Restrict all stock ownership to be a minimum of 10 years. This indirectly puts more focus on dividends.
It also puts more focus on the core misalignment you're alluding at but failed to see explicitly: The misalignment between short term gains and long term gains.
In the end whether private or public they care about profit over customer. But private owners tend to care about customers because customers represent an overall bigger gain in the longer term and private owners are playing the long game.
If all stocks had a minimum 10 year ownership requirement it will change all corporations to focus on long term gains. I believe this one change can fundamentally fix the problem we have with corporations.
Maybe we can test this.
The other thing that needs to be changed is public responsibility. If a company dumps illegal nuclear waste in some river, directly ask for minimum fines from all shared holders. First divide the fine by the shareholder amount, charge each shareholder. Then if it's below a 500 dollar minimum add the remaining amount to get it up to 500.
Pissed off share holders paying 500 will definitely get corporations to stop doing random crap. Maybe even funnel jail time to board members or C-level execs. If a corporation is responsible for deaths it's justice to place actual people responsible rather then giving "jail time" to a corporate entity that doesn't actually exist.
> If all stocks had a minimum 10 year ownership requirement
Then nobody would ever buy that stock, because they have no exit if things go south.
And then that's combined with
> If a company dumps illegal nuclear waste in some river, directly ask for minimum fines from all shared holders. First divide the fine by the shareholder amount, charge each shareholder. Then if it's below a 500 dollar minimum add the remaining amount to get it up to 500.
Again, who would buy that stock? What reward is worth that risk, especially when you've banned them from selling stock even if they see the company is doing shady stuff?
You wouldn't buy that stock because you represent people with short term interests. And that's the point.
You're a gambler, you dive in and immediately exit. Nobody buys assets this way in reality... when you buy a car or toothbrush you don't dip in and dip out like a mad man. Paper stocks removes reality away from assets and lets you buy 0.000001% of a shoe and immediately sell it in 1 second. The economy isn't improved, and instead you create a market of buying and selling paper. It's too abstracted. We need to lower the abstraction.
People buy assets for utility and long term investments. When people do HFS it's basically a gambling ring, you're making money off one idiot trying to sell paper to the next idiot. This influences the board which influences corporate behavior to cater to your gambling tendencies.
10 year terms makes it so you make money by putting your money in an ACTUAL investment to create something better. The company caters to your long term interests. You invest in Tesla because you expect the company to change the entire automobile industry and you expect that business endeavor to succeed in 10 years. Hype, bullshit and just trying shit out because gamestop seems fun will no longer be part of the equation.
Maybe 10 years is too long. Make it 5 years.
>Again, who would buy that stock? What reward is worth that risk, especially when you've banned them from selling stock even if they see the company is doing shady stuff?
Right so if the company knows this, then they wouldn't do shady stuff because they need to establish a reputation such that a person is willing to entrust a 5-10 year investment with them. The point of this restriction is to create incentive for companies to be good.
Corporate psychology is psychopathic due to the disconnect between action and responsibility. Criminal action is abstracted, long term gain is abstracted, the point is to remove these abstractions.
Who would buy the stock you ask? People who think the company is good. People who believe in the company. Not people who want to gamble on the company.
Thus if those are the ONLY people buying stocks. Then you tell me. What does a company HAVE to DO to cater to those PEOPLE? They have to be better. Truly better.
If you remove all abstraction away from the financial system you get rid of the dollar and suddenly you have the bartering system which is way to inefficient. But you make the abstraction to high and suddenly you have bitcoin and a bunch of other cryptos representing worthless shit. And you get corporations who have the mass psychology equivalent to a psychopath. It's a gradient of abstraction and I think we're too far on the abstraction side of things. We need to lower it a bit and that's what my proposal is doing. Unlikely to ever happen though.
I apologize for not being clear in my comment. None of my musing was meant to allude to public policy or law. It was about what an individual (or group of individuals) could choose to do with a corporation to avoid perverse incentives in the future. I'm not really interested in directly enforcing anything.
To make a play on an old programming joke:
Once there was an individual who noticed there was a problem with society. He said to himself "I'll use the State to change things!" Now there were two problems.
The first part of my comment doesn't require a state change. I'm sure you can issue securities with a 10 year clause.
The second part of my statement is that while I largely agree with you we Still have state controlling things in the world and it's largely a good thing. You don't want a world without the State controlling an aspect of the free market.
It's not that you don't like the State, it's just that adding additional controls can lead to large unanticipated side effects. Especially sweeping changes like some of the ones I proposed. Totally get this.
That doesn't mean it won't work. Like UBI, these ideas need to experimented on and data needs to be gathered to verify whether it will work. You can't dismiss the fact that that changing public policy Won't work because it currently DOES work.
It just depends on the business in question, and the external pressures on the business. Jeff Bezos managed to not pay dividends for years by focusing on value, but also by zooming ahead of the pack in a greenfield environment that was ludicrously profitable. Low margin businesses, private or public, will struggle and have to do something to offer value for money; e.g. make a smaller chocolate bar that's the same price, and a larger chocolate bar that costs more.
On selling stock: I think this is a bit silly. A company can't just sell its stock as a viable strategy. What happens when it runs out? And who would buy it anyway?
In the USA, corporations just do stock splits or run a corporate vote to issue more shares. Also many large tech companies use stock as total compensation for employees, so the "selling" of stock can be indirect as a form of revenue. Instead of paying employees cash, they pay in stock, which frees up more cash for other things. Thus they don't need to have as high of true revenue margins to pay employees well. Big corporations understand that a lot of paper value is fungible one way or another.
A stock split doesn't increase anything. E.g. they might double the number of shares, but each share becomes worth half as much.
Issuing more shares only works if there's a reason to believe the underlying value has increased. No one will buy shares in a company that keeps on devaluing its shareholders' existing holdings.
Compensation via share options isn't revenue, and I can't see how it's anything like revenue. They've just set aside a percentage of the business to be issued to employees. They haven't gained money. Yes that might mean they can save a little on junior salaries for employees who don't know that options don't mean much, but that's not revenue either.
The problem is, this isn't a question of, "Will Epic do something like this tomorrow?"
It's "Will Epic do something like this at any point in the foreseeable future?"
Will Epic's leadership decide to IPO in hopes of more money?
Will they take a lucrative private buyout from some other billionaire with more money than sense, like Musk?
Will they hire new upper management that persuades them they need to do something like this for Serious Business Reasons?
Will they retire and be replaced by people who do the same?
The problem is, if you build your game on Unreal, you're essentially betting all its future commercial success on one for-profit company's decision to remain Less Of An Asshole Than The Other Guy. The choice of what engine you use has suddenly become about much more than just "what features does it offer?" "How many developers know how to use it?" or even "What's the pricing structure today?" You have to worry about whether they'll get it into their heads, for whatever reason, to retroactively change their pricing structure in a way that ruins you financially.
On the other hand, if you build your game on Godot, or some in-house engine, you know you'll never need to worry about that.
Also worth noting: If the gaming industry, and the public at large, send a clear enough signal to Unity now that this is unacceptable, that makes it much, much less likely that anyone else will try to pull bullshit like this in the future.
There's another strong argument in favor of this point. This [1] is from Unreal's license:
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"7. The Agreement Between You and Epic
a. Amendments
If we make changes to this Agreement, you are not required to accept the amended Agreement, and this Agreement will continue to govern your use of any Licensed Technology you already have access to.
However, if we make changes to this Agreement, you will not be allowed to access certain Epic services or download the Licensed Technology unless you have accepted the amended Agreement. If we make changes, we will provide you with notice, such as by sending an email or giving you notice when you next log into an Epic service."
---
So in other words, if they do a bait and switch, you're free to keep using the old license for older versions of the engine. The reason I think this is telling is because they did this in the day and age where basically every EULA comes down to "We can do anything at any time, for any reason, and you can do nothing." For them to actually have this in their terms is a tremendous display of good faith.
Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at any time for any reason and without notice (the “Updated Terms”) and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1). If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity will endeavor to notify you of the modification. If a modification is required to comply with applicable law, the modification will apply notwithstanding this section. Except as explicitly set forth in this paragraph, your use of any new version or release of the Unity Software will be subject to the Updated Terms applicable to that release or version. You understand that it is your responsibility to maintain complete records establishing your entitlement to Prior Terms."
---
EDIT: Oh wow. How sketchy. That page on Github is only their "additional terms". When you go to their terms page itself you find [2]
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"1.4 Modification
Unity reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to modify, discontinue or terminate the Services. Unity may also modify the Agreement at any time and without prior notice. If we modify the Agreement, we will post the modification on the Site or otherwise provide you with notice of the modification. We will also update the “Last updated” date at the top of these Terms. By continuing to access or use the Services after we have provided you with notice of a modification, you indicate that you agree to be bound by the modified Terms. If the modified Terms are not acceptable to you, your only recourse is to cease using the Services.
Notwithstanding this Section 1.4, any modification of the Unity Software Additional Terms is subject to Section 8 of the Unity Software Additional Terms."
---
There is some serious lawyerizing going on there that makes this largely incomprehensible to me at least, probably by design.
I can't see how anything less favorable to the devs would not be instantly rejected in court, especially in the EU ?
Speaking of which, I don't see why the Unity using devs can't just keep using the old version of Unity, and therefore never have to accept the new license ?
(Of course I assume that Unity would have made it extra-annoying, because these changes don't just come out like that, but the point here is to give themselves time to find an alternative to Unity.)
I think this comes down to ambitions. Unity wanted to be an advertising company and when that goal started slipping away, they did something drastic. Epic wants to be a store and a virtual production platform. Who knows what they’ll do if those goals seem impossible.
It’s also worth remembering that Epic isn’t the good guy here. When incentives align, most corporations are capable of some pretty awful stuff. With Epic specifically they made accidental purchases in Fortnite very easy and then intentionally buried the refund button outside the store under an obscure settings page [0].
> Unity wanted to be an advertising company and when that goal started slipping away, they did something drastic. Epic wants to be a store and a virtual production platform.
Epic "being a store" just happens to allow them to collect a ton of personal data and push a whole lot of ads. Seems like they want to be in advertising too.
That all hinges on a motley combination of rationalizing, squinting, guesstimation of intentions and projecting future behavior of unpredictable third parties. One could have with equal plausibility made an assessment that Unity would not proceed with self-inflicted wounds, yet here we are.
Just like the "I've got nothing to hide" argument fallaciously depends on assumptions about the coherence of motives on the part of people violating your privacy, "I've got nothing to worry about" depends on assuming reasonable motives from private actors. It is a lot less strenuous to reason from a place that is agnostic about future intentions of third parties.
Epic/Valve are privately held now, but if you build a team and game series on a proprietary platform, you are at the whim of the platform owner. It might be a low risk now given they are looking to scoop up teams ditching Unity, but nobody knows what will happen in 2 or 3 years.
>hinges on the premise that Epic ... is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit
Bahaha. Epic would eat their own grandmother if it got them an increase in profit. You better hope the Epic never becomes the only game in town, because then you will see what happens to who takes home what revenue.
"who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split"
Yeah, I wonder why, almost like they're trying to slowly gain market share lead to then have a monopoly.
Arguing that just because right now there's alternatives that don't seem like they'll do that, right now. Is not a good argument against open source.
if any of those engines can retroactively destroy your livelihood, or make games unavailable forever for users because of $ reasons, then that is a huge enough reason to simply drop the engine.
Unreal will get eventually damage from this unity move as well, if I was a game dev I would seriously consider Godot right now, luckily I am a software dev not a game dev, only game dev I do is modding warcraft 3 so I don't have to bother about that stuff
Epic will never have a monopoly as long as Steam exists. They aren't complete fools here, they realize this but are aware that even having a slice of that massive pie is enough to fuel numerous positions in the future.
They still wouldn't be a monopoly engine-wise, even excluding Unity you have Godot and O3DE as popular open source options. Ignoring that a lot of studios are now sharing internal custom engines, like Sony's studios with the Decima engine.
Bingo re: Unity going public. Once you have a stock price (and assuming your early investors aren't the most aggressive type in the first place) the goal then shifts to infinite growth, and lately tech companies (even Google Netflix etc) have had to make user-unfriendly decisions to justify ever growing valuations in the face of rate hikes. Unity isn't the first, but it has maybe done it the worst.
One of the "analysis" threads by a VC on Twitter mentioned the engine not making as much money as the ad business as "unsustainable". But it's the same nonsense Musk spouted with Twitter not being sustainable or "making a profit" -- it made a profit but not given the market realities deliberately hoisted upon it.
Nothing against Epic, but they have a strategic incentive to encourage people to use their store. Getting a discount to use the engine in exchange for a store “exclusive” is a cost that I see developers not really appreciating. There is no free lunch.
I don't think that's unusual. When Valve announced Source 2 for free, there was a similar discount to use the engine: the game must release on Steam. Maybe that has changed in the 8 years of no news about the release of Source 2 for developer though.
The question is not "do we _suppose_ that it's _likely_ that they _would_ do something similar?", but rather "is it _possible_ that they _can_ do something similar?"
If you're using a proprietary engine made by a for-profit company, the answer to that second question is always "yes", and the answer to that first question is always subject to change.
If you're using an open-source engine, the answer to the second question is "no" (because in the worst-case you can fork it to buy yourself time), and the answer to the first question is totally moot, because the first question is no longer a thing.
It's about risk management: optimism is not a strategy. Mitigation by removing the attack vector _is_ a strategy.
I think it is unlikely Epic or Valve will adopt something as overtly hostile to business users in their ecosystems as long as they are controlled by Tim Sweeney and Gabe Newell (respectively).
I think it’s anyone’s guess what will happen when that stops being true, but anyone under the age of 40 or so should recognize they will almost certainly outlive those individuals. Closed source means you are beholden to what their successor’s decide even if you (like me) are confident their current leadership will make good decisions.
I get that you're writing stylized speculations but in my experience in the games industry, every single point is wrong. It is the most upvoted comment because it touches on a bunch of first-principles-know-nothing boogeymen, but so it goes with Hacker News nowadays. You can keep reading to find out why, or whatever, my dog in this race is (1) I use Unity (2) I don't think they're going to change anything about these terms except maybe the installs issue (3) and the vast majority of people will continue to be unaffected by these pricing changes.
If people want to spend their breath agitating for something, it's to get Unity to share the source code for a lower price. That would actually help me make better games. At the scale where Unity pricing matters, the engine costs will take away from marketing spend.
> ...the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to... break the promise of no revenue share/royalty pledge... too many headcounts... privately held [is good and public is bad]... says a lot.
Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine. You can certainly believe there is. It's a complex piece of software and target platforms and technology are always changing, so it's understandable that it is expensive to develop.
>If people want to spend their breath agitating for something, it's to get Unity to share the source code for a lower price.
while I hate it being gated, it's not that expensive for a medium sized company to get source code access. $3000 + probably some per seat licenses that are orders cheaper than what you pay employees (even significantly underpaid game devs). if you get more than 250k installs you're already paying more than that to begin with with the new plan.
>Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine.
maybe for you, but to pretend there are zero alternative tools because you don't like shows more arrogance than the post you are criticizing.
>I'm actually not saying that one person should use one or the other - they are simply made to do and make fundamentally different things.
it's a tool at the end of the day. you can make Unreal engine 5 run Undertale and you can make Gamemaker run Crysis if you are determined enough. Most people here will be talking about the technical aspects of the engine, not the political/historical roles each engine has made.
I can kind of see where you are coming from but I disagree with the angle that Unity/Unreal are fundamentally different skillsets. they are ubiquitous enough and feature filled enough that the limitations come a lot from the team rather than the engine, with a few special edge cases.
To name one: Unity and Unreal are awful for games with mass destructible environments for example. People CAN still make those, but that's the one case where it may be worth rolling your own tech. Essentially, you make your game separate from the actual unity layer and use Unity purely as a renderer, not for its game framework. I know Unity games that do this, and I think UE can do the same but I lack the knowledge there.
Completely agree. If I had to make a destructible game from scratch I would implement that tech in unreal rather than starting from scratch 10 times over.
And I'm not saying "from scratch". I'm more saying that I can't rely on Epic's actor/component framework to provide what I need. You can find other Middleware to help with mesh destruction and work around that as a base.
> Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine.
Depends on the game - the majority of Unity games can be done in Godot, as far as I can tell, because they're simple indie games with fire-sale assets (or even free assets) from itch.
Unity is not making the revenue they need, because their "popularity" is on free-as-in-beer games which no one is going to pay for anyway. It's just an added sword into their side that the majority of devs who use unity can switch to Godot with almost no difference to their (devs) revenue.
They simply serve very different audiences of both developers and end users. Their coexistence is evidence of how different they are from one another, not how fungible they are.
They really don’t at this point. Unreal has reached a point where it’s a better choice than Unity for nearly every single project. There’s still these pervasive beliefs that Unity is better for 2D or better for small teams, and it just isn’t true.
The one exception is junk mobile games, and even then I think Unreal is a completely reasonable choice.
Unity has been well and truly left behind with the gap widening every day and they know it.
Their coexistence is a legacy of a time where Unreal had not widened its viable use cases beyond triple A style 3D games, but that hasn’t been the case for years now. It’s just taking a whole for developers to catch up, and obviously there’s a lot of inertia with Unity projects and experience.
I am saying that only from the point of view of someone who has made and published a lot of games, in roles including developer and director, on a lot of platforms and dealt with a lot of engines. But I really hate making this about me. The outrage-driven discourse that people hitch onto to promote their shit is the worst excess of cultural materialism.
The most succinct explanation for the difference is that Unreal gets your game financed, Unity gets your game made.
> There’s still these pervasive beliefs that Unity is better for 2D or better for small teams, and it just isn’t true.
You're coming at this like a feature box checking sort of deal. There are so many bigger picture things going on with the differences between the two engines. I'm actually not saying that one person should use one or the other - they are simply made to do and make fundamentally different things. For example, if you're aspiring to make a top-ranked Steam game, it makes a lot of sense to use Unreal, because those are all multiplayer FPSes; and it also is telling you that you need a team of 10-100 people and at least an $8-$100m budget, because that's how much it costs to "enter" that space and build on Unreal. Your takeaway shouldn't be "for small teams" or whatever, because you're looking at the wrong stage in the pipeline.
And what I am saying is that they absolutely are not designed to do different things any more. That used to be the case, but Unreal has fully eaten Unity’s lunch here in a technical sense. The engine’s roots are in AAA first person, but they have grown it far, far beyond that. It is now a fully capable general purpose engine for anything from 2D puzzlers to AAA FPSes.
There just are not games any more for which Unity offers any legitimate advantages over Unreal. Unity has been incredibly stagnant as an engine for pretty much a decade, while Unreal has expanded its capabilities and feature set to now virtually fully encompass those of Unity. The idea that they are designed for different things is just out of date.
In 2023 I think the only legitimate reason to pick Unity, and this is a very good reason for what it’s worth, is experience with the engine. I say this as someone who published games in Unity in the past and has transitioned to Unreal. They are both general purpose game engines serving the same teams and the same games, with the exception that Unity cannot support truly top end games.
> and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth
Why is "growth" always interpreted as "higher headcount" and not "higher profits"?
Certainly a company that has continually growing profits without increasing costs would be seen as more valuable than a company that constantly increases their costs with revenue?
Does Unity hiring more Engineers actually increase revenue?
very generalized answer here but it comes down to:
1. you want to make sure product A is profitable
2. at some point Product A will reach a steady state (in some utopic future, but let's pretend). i.e. Product A will hit a point where its excitement will taper off.
3. How do you get that explosive growth back? New product. But you want to maintain old product.
4. hire more people to work on Product B. Have it launch, big growth!
5. then recession hits and it turns out you need stability. Product A is fine, everyone on Product B is fired
profits are important, but it's not the end all be all for how the stock market works. It may not even be the most important factor. You want to build excitement and become the thing big thing, even if it turns out to be a check you can't cash. So in that lens, Unity hires (or hired) more engineers or acquires companies to increase excitement, not necessarily to increase profits. "Product A" is ads, and right now even that isn't very stable for them, so I guess they are trying to find a new Product A.
Back in the old days, Game studios used to simply make games to build this excitement. It has a set track, a big time to announce and release for spikes, and your existing teams works on the next game. But more studios want to get that "Product A", so even games are investing more in GaaS for that steady income. It's what ended up happening to Epic with Fortnite, where their "Product B" is actually announcing exciting engine features.
> 2. at some point Product A will reach a steady state (in some utopic future, but let's pretend). i.e. Product A will hit a point where its excitement will taper off.
> 4. hire more people to work on Product B. Have it launch, big growth!
Why is the answer "hire more people to work on Product B" and not "Move people from A to B and shrink the product A team to focus on bug fixes and security fixes"
I would think that the desire to hire a whole new team rather than move staff is what keeps Zawinski's Law [0] around.
It's not mutually exclusive. But it depends on Product B, and oftentimes these kinds of tech companies want to grow in completely different areas.
Take Amazon, for example: they have great engineers, but probably not too many game developers (or those interested in moving from current SWE positions to the game division). And they almost certainly had no artists on board, among other disciplines needed for a game. So when making Amazon Games they would have to mostly hire new staff. Not the best example given how they floundered for a decade, but I think that was a management issue over a talent issue.
Perhaps because it is generally well accepted that you can maintain stable profit margins with a fixed employee count, but increasing profits with a fixed employee count is not possible beyond the maximum potential of that fixed set of employees?
(Not sure, this is an amateur's guess on my part.)
> In my opinion, the only reason this whole fiasco happened is because Unity the company has too many headcounts and has too much expense, and the reason for that is they grew too big, and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth, even if the company is much healthier if it had stayed smaller
Also Epic only needs to look to their closest competitor to see this is a terrible idea.
That said, the author forgets to mention one more important advantage of open source alternatives like Godot: they avoid market manipulation simply by existing, as they block monopoly. Unity wouldn't risk _future_ customers if they were not as confident in their position (Unity is king on mobile, don't forget).
people trusted in unity for years, enough to build their products and careers on it and around it, and something like this still happened. was it foreseeable? even if it was, well what then, 'great, i have no options besides sucking it up or switching, since i built upon this'. what guarantees do epic/unreal customers have?
oh wait, this isn't about 'what worth does 'trust in company' even have', but more like 'public companies bad'
Has Unity ever said anything about turning their software into a platform, for instance asking for monthly/yearly subscriptions instead of a one time fee ?
If they did, that's when the devs (and especially teachers of future devs !) should have dropped it as soon as feasible.
platform isn't just about subscriptions, subscriptions don't really make a platform, and overall it'd be kind of a poor tell of whether it's time to jump ship. epic/unreal is kind of a platform (there's a bunch of stuff in their ecosystem that plugs in, etc.), so what, should people jump ship from unreal now
You're right, it's not a sufficient condition (pretty sure Red Hat offers Linux support in subscription form), you also need to have closed source software for a platform.
I don't know about the situation with Unreal, but I would be very wary of using it, considering Epic has been pushing a game Store. (And Unreal's source code is merely source available ?)
There is a secondary argument in favor of home-grown engines too. It's been very disappointing to see so many game companies abandon their own rendering technology in favor of Unreal. Terrible licensing rules might drive companies to go back to having their own engines.
gamers are weird like that. I think you can still be successul without crazy graphics, but the PR you will get around the net will be dreadful because people want to justify their high end rigs or their next gen consoles. And those people are disproportionately more likely to comment.
But you also can't listen too much to the core gaming audience because they also don't think more subtly about what makes a game fun. And despite that PR good looking games can still sell. No wonder the market is so unstable, it's audience is fickle.
It's not just graphics, it's everything. Look at Frostbite for example from EA. While a good shooter engine, they had to make significant changes over the years to adapt the engine to other genres of games, and that significantly bloated timelines. Jason Schreier has reporting on this if you're interested.
We kind of forget that a lot of custom engines aren't universal ones like Unity or Unreal that can adapt to anything you throw at it. Custom engines are largely hyper specific to the type of game they were making with it, everything else is experimental, untested, undocumented, or non-existent!
Frostbite is a weird example because they focused heavily on graphics over gameplay. It is also an FPS engine that was forced into powering an RPG, and without any real input from the developers in question.
I'm sure most larger gamedev companies can make a decent game engine on their own if extreme performance is not needed. The recent Baldur's Gate is a good example.
you're asking for consumers to temper their expectations. Just look at how much crap they threw at Redfall, and that was likely a game many people played on Gamepass for "free".
It sucks but part of that "need" for insane graphics is consumer driven. Even though Nintendo games get a lot of flack for how "weak" the Switch is, but their big IPs do cirlcles around the industry, all on one platform without even relying on MTX. But I guess Nintendo appealing to more than just the core gamers helps a lot. Come to think of it, it's surprising how few "family" AAA games there are these days.
okay, and I can point to a dozen games called unfinished that sold fine. We are far from over those days.
We're nitpicking at this point. Can we at least go back to the core topic and agree that critics and consumers are generally more sympathetic to games with good graphics?
The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes makes less money than this so-called runtime fee.
I beg to differ, I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no revenue share/royalty pledge they had earlier, and ironically came up with an even worse monetization scheme.
In my opinion, the only reason this whole fiasco happened is because Unity the company has too many headcounts and has too much expense, and the reason for that is they grew too big, and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth, even if the company is much healthier if it had stayed smaller.
Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we ended up here. I think that says a lot.