A fresh report into Unity’s hugely-controversial decision to start charging developers when their games are downloaded has thrown fresh light on the situation.
MobileGamer sources say Unity has already offered some studios a 100% fee waiver - if they switch over to Unity’s own LevelPlay ad platform.
The report quotes industry consultants that say this move is an “attempt to destroy” Unity’s main competitior in this field: AppLovin.
Why’s it always end up being fucking ads?
I hate late stage capitalism. I want off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride.
Shareholders prefer constant steady income over one time purchases. Hence why they prefer subscriptions and ads.
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Nothing will ever change.
You know it, I know it, we all know it.
There is only one thing to be done.
Sir, this is a
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I mean quite the opposite. Ff you are talking about the plebs, you would have a point but the Unity changes they are now trying to force through are going to other companies who typically don’t like it when you mess with their income unexpectedly. They likely will switch to a new engine with their newer projects, so they don’t have to deal with a surprise change.
Sure, bud. You do that.
Had me in the first part NGL.
But leaving democracy because capitalism is bah? No.
Democracy isn’t an economic system. You can have communism with democracy and capitalism without it. You maybe wouldn’t get elected as a straight up communist — like an unreformed Maoist or whatever — but democratic socialism is popular across the world.
Whilst Communism itself (i.e. the utopia were everybody has the same - i.e. Equality Of Outcomes - which, by the way, has never been achieved anywhere in the world) isn’t anti-democratic per-se, the only ideologies that aim to reach it, such as Marxism and all its derivatives, have it being done via the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat (hence the revolutions and then takeover of power in all the self-proclaimed “Communist” countries), which is most definitelly anti-Democratic.
However Leftwing principles aren’t incompatible with Democracy, so Leftwing ideologies exist - such as Social Democracy - which strive for “the greater good for the greatest number” without the need for autoritarian means (i.e. using things like Universal Healthcare, Universal Education, Progressive Taxation and other such things within the context of Democracy, to make the society more equal, especially in terms of Equality Of Opportunities). None of these expects to ever achieve Communist - they actually accept that it’s impossible given human nature - but still try and make a more equal society which maximizes the quality of life for all people.
This stuff has definitelly been done in practice in Democratic nations (for example those in Scandinavia) overlayed on some amount of Capitalism, though as of late with Neoliberalism (which is definitelly incompatible with it) things have been going backwards even there.
I think it’s quite oversimplifying it to say that any ideology that aims for a more equal world is “communism” as that one is quite a specific outcome which can’t really be achieved without forcing people to do certain things against their will and, as history has shown everytime that’s tried, the outcome of taking over power to try and reach Communism is never Communism but rather a new Elite who keep themselves in power through repressing, claim to be representatives of the Proletariat (which giving themselves all kinds of priviledges the proletariat never has) and use certain slogans to try and pass themselves as leftwing.
Judging by the Communist Party in my own country - with it’s habits of Party First in everything (even above those they claim to defend), always having things approved by unanimity in their conventions and hard-on for autocrats - I very much doubt we will ever see anybody coming from that background capable of taking their country in a more equal direction within the constraints of Democracy: they’re simply far too autoritarian, mindless slogan parroting and tribalist to be capable to, in a democratic society, create the necessary consensus for the steady and stable moving of a country towards a grand objective.
Democracy isn’t an economic system.
Yes true.
Communism is both non democratic, and an economic system. You cannot have democracy and communism at the same time.
Socialism is in the same vein, but today we often conflate it with social democracy (which seems to be the best of the two worlds nowadays IMO).
Communism is not democratic. Read up ffs. It’s not democratic.
I know they do, and I hate it so so much…
That’s why I’m gonna buy Procreate Dreams even if I’m not an animator.
Well yeah. Subscriptions make a shitload of money compared to a one-time payment.
The ride never ends
It’s either ads or crabs
Tortoises?
Don’t you just love when a company creates a problem just to go and try to sell the solution?
It looks like a protection racket with extra steps. An unpleasant solution presented by the problem creator. Why is this not banned?
Game design 101 since the first smart phone.
IBM sure does suck donkey balls but I really don’t think that particular thing is their fault.
I wasn’t blaming any single entity. And really the first smart phone wouldn’t be accurate either, probably the first iPhone. Not so much brand, but popularity. Once the market became so large, and they started to realize they could get people addicted, regular games were over.
Game devs: “No thanks, we’re waiving the fees by using a different engine.”
I’d imagine that game devs, just like Unity’s shareholders, like predictability in profits. Even if it’s more expensive overall for them to move to Unreal for their next game, it could be worth it to avoid future calamity.
The problem is because you pay per install you could end up owing Unity more money than you actually make. Especially if people uninstall and reinstall your game a bunch of times for whatever reason.
sounds like a good way to protest
How did a good way to protest? It’ll just rack up your bills.
The correct way to protest is just stop using their platform.
I hope the large studios that use unity sue them into oblivion for breach of contract, because changing the deal after the fact is utterly unacceptable. How a business is supposed to operate if other businesses just change the terms of the deal retrospectively.
No it means instead of review bombing a game, you reinstall bomb it to cost the publisher a load of money.
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okay i misread that. I thought you were meaning like, a way of costing unity more money in the end.
Lol nope. Not even fucking close. You’re gonna die, Unity. You have only yourself to blame.
Ooh yeah FOSS forever!
Screw this. Boycott unity.
The conspiracy theorist in me says Unity planned this whole thing out to get less resistance on this thing they actually wanted to roll out; announce a super shit change that will intentionally outrage everybody, then say “ok, we won’t do it if you agree to use this other shitty model instead”.
Anyways, big shoutout to Godot for existing as an open-source alternative.
That’s not a conspiracy theory that’s like entry level MBA stuff.
Hey remember that time Unity bought IronSource so they could integrate ads more aggressively? Unity stopped being a game engine at some point they’re just an ads company now
There should be a law against offering something for free for a long time, until many other businesses rely on it then make it pay to a point of breaking all those businesses. It’s one thing changing the price of a product that’s customer facing but if you market to other businesses that’s not okay. I guess it’s up to businesses to look in the contract for a clause that states that the product will be free forever or that they need X time warning before making it pay.
Tech companies wouldn’t exist. It’s literally most of their business plans.
Good.
Changing from free to paid is fine. Doing it retroactively is not.
Once a game is in development using their product the terms need to stay the same.
I disagree. If you state that it’s free until X bench make and you make the change after that benchmark it’s fine. If you don’t, then users should be able to seek compensation
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The vast majority of “new” tech companies operate at a loss.
This is a bullshit hypothetical that has no relevance for Unity. Unity is a well established company, that has been very successful after they revised their model to be more Indie friendly. This is a money grab attempt pure and simple. And it’s a money grab that is so bad it might actually kill Unity.
Unity technologies has never made a profit since it was founded. It’s still a company aiming at growth by burning money. Their losses have only increased since they went public.
I’m pretty sure that when Unity was headquartered in Denmark it made a profit. But I may be mistaken, because it was hyped as a danish enterprise success.
When they changed the license to be more Indie friendly a few years back, that too was hyped as a huge success.
But I can see on Wikipedia that Unity Software Inc. has a negative net income of $921 million on revenue of $1.4 billion.
That’s an insane loss, meaning that they basically operate at 50% loss! How or Why they ended up that badly is beyond me. It’s so bad it smells like something is not quite right with those numbers.
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They work with you to make your code more performant
I wasn’t talking about whether they have expenses, If I recall correctly they have about 7000+ employees.
Generally that kind of company only collaborate on huge projects, smaller projects don’t get that level of service, bust are generally referred to a developer forum, where their questions may be answered by in-house personel. This is as I understand it common, but I’m not a pro gaming programmer, although I used to know a few decades ago.
Fun fact, the story now is that it was a Unity employee who made the death threat!?
It was a private company back then so I don’t think there is financial info available. But at least it seems that the reports they filed for IPO indicated they had made loss for a few years prior.
My problem with it is not monetizing; it is the changing of your monetization to affect games that were sold under a different model. If this was just the new TOS, ok fine. It would suck, but it’s their right to make whatever shitty monetization they want. But retroactively inflicting this on games? Shocking the development world with only a few months warning when game development takes years? No, that is not ok.
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This is such a dumb move.
Forget about ethics for a minute, if there is an alternate option that doesn’t cost as much money then developers would obviously make use of that option so in any environment where alternate options exist companies have a limit of how obnoxious they can be and get away with it.
Somehow unity forgot that Unreal and Godot exist.
Honestly, if I had any stake in them I’d be wondering why Unity is so desperate for money.
Every tech company is desperate for money right now. Funding isn’t coming in at the same rate it did for the last 10 years and now everyone is desperately trying to make a profit.
Crypto is a hell of a drug.
It wasn’t really just crypto. The American government subsidized a lot of loans and did a lot to stimulate the economy post 2008. Those policies are now catching up to us. Crypto didn’t help anything, but it also wasn’t the root cause.
I’m pretty sure this is just unequivocally worse. This is how Ads end up in paid games. Unity is speed running their complete collapse as the dominant player in the market.
Elon Musk: speedruns enshittification on Xitter
Unity: “Hold my beer”
It’s enshittification all the way down
That’s worse, you fucking assholes.
The first one was assholish, but this one is outright insulting.
AppLovin? What kind of a stupid name is that? What, are they trying to be an Irish R&B singer?
It was either that or Mohammed
I heard it could’ve been Aladeen, but they didn’t know if it was too positive or negative.
They hired the same marketing firm to come up with a name that McDonalds’ used.
Time to polish off my unreal dev skills, something tells me those jobs about to be hot.
Better off with Godot
No, I’d be better off polishing off my existing skills using a technology that currently holds a significant market share in the industry.
Technically concepts do that… not tools. You can do the same bashing with a hammer or a wrench
Unity have yet to discover that nothing happens quietly on the internet.
