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Penny Arcade - Comic - Disunity
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Disunity
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Riccitiello
Former EA exec.
No son of mine!
OK actually, yeah OK, it's you.
Yeah even if they had a monopoly it would have been a bad idea. But this decision was made in a market that not only has competitors, but the barrier to switching is software based instead of physical. But even in optimal circumstances this just seems like an incredibly shortsighted move unless one has reason to not care about losing a large chunk of their customer base.
You say that like it makes it easier, when in fact that makes it much, much harder.
https://insertcredit.com/opinion/unity/
I work at a major VR games studio and we're several years into development of our next game. Hopping engines for this one isn't really feasible. And hopping engines for the next one might not be, either. We target a wide range of VR from PC to standalone to console. Unreal Engine does not do VR well for anything but very powerful PCVR. Unreal Engine looks better, but all that is wasted when you're doing VR or have to hit lower powered devices. One thing Unity does really well is keep up with VR standards and keep scalability in mind.
Godot is a great idea, but they will always have the same issues most free software does. Software takes a lot of time and money. Unless a number of industry players make funding commitments, Godot will always remain behind in terms of keeping up with features. Right now, for example, Godot doesn't support consoles. If you want to support your game, you have to fork over money for someone else to port it, using a custom in-house extension of Godot they've made that supports consoles. And which they put a lot of money into knowing that they'd be able to make it up in people hiring them for ports. Third-party ports are fraught with problems and I don't want to make this post huge.
And that it, really. That's all the (even slightly feasible) choices we have. Yes, VR adds its own problems (not the least being that our potential install base is that much smaller), but we're not that far off from what non-VR studios have to consider.
UE is not more expensive up front. Both Unity and UE have "personal" versions that are free. Their pro versions are $1500/seat/year for UE and $2040/seat/year for Unity (yes, Unity is more). All versions of UE come with source access. If you want source for Unity, you pay $4950/seat/year for enterprise. UE has an enterprise tier as well, but it just adds the extra support (like Unity's enterprise).
Also, Unity will sometimes decide that you have to start paying them for pro. The last company I worked for was a startup that had not made a single sale yet. However, some Unity investigator saw that we had receiving a PPP loan (the info is public) and decided that we now had to pay them $1500/user. (Good news! Now that they are charging out the ass for per-install, they're not forcing anyone into Pro based on whatever dirt they can dig up.)
The difference in pricing has been the royalty structure. UE has a royalty structure that doesn't kick in until you reach $1 million gross lifetime sales on a game. Then you owe 5% on gross incoming going forward (not retroactive), on that game. Your next game has its own sales tracked and starts over at $1 million. This is the standard agreement that applies to all UE versons. If you are a big enough player, you negotiate with them up front and you can make a deal to not pay any royalties (but you'll pay them more up front).
UE's license explicitly states that even if they change the pricing on new UE versions, you can stay on the same version with a game and keep the original pricing.
Unity, on the other hand used to be easy. No royalties. They made a huge deal out of it as a differentiator with UE. Now it is not easy. It is a more complex pricing structure, and it is still in flux as they try to do damage control. For the free version of Unity, it kicks in when you make gross of $200k and 200k lifetime installs in the last 12 months. For the more expensive license, it's $1m/1m in the last 12 months.
It is a flat fee per install, not per sale or on gross income. It is the same fixed price whether you sell your game for $60 or for $1. It is retroactive. I can't stress that last bit enough. It is the most expensive (20 cents per download) for the free version of Unity. Again, most punishing on a new indie with a breakout game. Edit: I feel I should clarify and say that the counter for $/installs is retroactive. The actual fee isn't charged retroactively on previous installs.
It does not matter which (numerical) version of Unity you are on. The license will always apply. Even if you do not update versions, any changes to the pricing are explicitly going to apply to you. Also, new pricing they just announced kicks in in less than 3 months (jan 1), and "the last 12 months" includes all of 2023.
If you didn't already, I think you get the picture on why Unity devs have responded so strongly to this move.
Depends on your definition of such. It's not like say, a situation where some supplier in another country has a physical monopoly on the only viable mines for a specific rare earth metal that your systems cannot work without, and short of hiring mercenaries to accomplish overthrowing the local government, you just have to bend over and take it for the rest of foreseeable existence.
What Unity is doing is asinine because they are creating a massive incentive for a competitor to [eventually] form. And they don't have a stranglehold on the code mines to stop it.
My definition of such is the real one in which Unity is being used in the real world. No other definition really matters one single bit in the context of this discussion.
Hey Anon, the easier way to read the last sentence might've been " I maybe would not have done a FAQ ". Tycho's saying they shouldn't have done the interview. It might've done less damage to Unity if they'd not done anything at all.
😬
Not a good long term strategy.
Yeah them floating that model tells me they are stuck in Enterprise model thinking, where an entity they are leasing to has control over what machines get software installed on them. And when.
But that's not how the consumer gaming market works at all. Hell, you can buy a game on steam and have it installed on multiple devices, despite only making one purchase. You can't make simultaneous use (under normal ops, yes, I know there are ways around that, no one needs to get pedantic) of those installs, so why should there be multiple install charges to the developer? And passing it along to the consumer is going to fly like a lead balloon.
And that's before getting into the whole issue of managing to somehow track installs.
From what I read, they already had phone-home code in their installers. About a year ago they merged with a company that did this kind of thing.
https://www.adexchanger.com/mobile/unity-officially-seals-the-deal-with-ironsource-as-in-the-merger-is-complete/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstallCore
https://www.pcgamer.com/unity-is-merging-with-a-company-who-made-a-malware-installer/
Yeah I can see that running afoul of data privacy laws real damn fast if they aren't very careful about their execution. And given how they've botched just the initial PR so far...not holding my breath until they get it right.
*waves tiny American flag*
Retroactive contracts are also not legal in some places, like the EU
Don't worry though Unity, the EU wouldn't dare apply real penalties to a US corporation
Oh, we very much knew this was their strategy. It's why Riccitiello's earlier assholish comments about monetization have been front-and-center in this conversation. They also haven't been quiet about it. It's in huge bold font right under the license fee breakdown on their website announcement.
This also reminds me of the argument that another big player should just buy Unity. The ads/monetization is a big reason they want. The big ad players like Google, Amazon, Meta, etc. have to worry a little about antitrust. Especially because they are unpopular with both of main political parties (for sometimes different and sometimes similar reasons). Gobbling up one of the biggest engines in the gaming market would put a big target on their back.
Apple might be feasible, since they're currently pretty far down in the list of ad sales (only a paltry few billion dollars a year). But they have their own concerns with buying a company whose primary revenue stream is from sales to Windows PC users. Even with legal ramification aside, it just might make little sense to them.
And even that is odious as fuck given that even if a developer stops selling a game on Dec 31st, they can still be on the hook for new installs, no matter if they consented to them happening. Might as well dissolve your company and create a new one at that point.
Yes, it's dumb as fuck.
During the back-pedal, they claimed that the fees would be paid by the publishers/platforms that are selling the game. So in theory, that would no longer happen because they couldn't buy it anymore. But because of the fucking dumbness, what if they get it some other way? What if they still had the installer lying around? What a clusterfuck.
And of course needless to say I will be most reluctant to consider buying any Unity game in the future.
With the exception of ours. Please, do buy our game.
Just don't install it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16ilfui/a_deep_dive_on_why_unitys_new_install_based/
Frankly I think Unity is just going to handwave away all these issues as acceptable edge cases. If they think that reinstall bots and pirate installs aren't a problem, they'll probably try to weather the storm of dissent online.
I'm extremely curious if current unity installs phone home. Just because the company acquired a malware installer doesn't prove it one way or the other, though we'd be fools to assume they're not considering it. I don't think so, I'm fairly certain I can run unity .exes offline, but I don't have the technical expertise to do the research beyond that.
This is all they'll say so far, which isn't much:
But the one thing they haven't said is "no." That tells me a whole lot.
Also another bit of not-really-information:
They did originally confidently answer that yes, re-installs will count. They reversed it on the backpedal.
Here's the current answer:
Here's a fun bit about unlockable demos:
So, yes, if you have a full game demo that is unlocked with an IAP, they'll count it as an install even if the IAP is never made.
Also, on the topic of piracy, they posted this in xitter:
But in their FAQ it just says:
And the obvious question (to these answers to obvious questions they didn't bother addressing in the first place, or addressed in the exact opposite of the right way) is HOW? How will they figure out what's a pirated install vs a purchased one? How will they figure out something is a reinstall? How will they figure out some steam key came from a charity bundle and not from a purchase?
Unity's confident reply to all of this is, "Trust us, bro."
Because they absolutely plan to bill you for it. And yeah, you can say "I don't think that's legal" or "There's no way they could ________." But if it's your fate on the line and you just have to hope for some nebulous happy ending, you'll have serious concerns about your future, even if you don't ever develop another game in Unity again.
LOL.
Thanks, that was exactly what I was confused about! And it seems pretty obvious in hindsight. Feeling a bit silly.
The text is now corrected so it was definitely a grammatical error.
And when you go to sign the contract with UE or whatever new engine you license...."I see you have outstanding debt to another entity." "It's to Unity." "Got it. Carry on."