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Penny Arcade - Comic - Undercraw
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Undercraw
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Posts
So Jesus can flog him with a hastily-made bullwhip?
So its not surprising that this kind of environment has attracted ilk like John Riccitiello.
Have a feeling he'd just try to monetize him though.
He's way late to that party
The person who brought up regulation isn't trying to protect people from developers. It would be regulation to protect developers from development tool makers.
Regulating for the sake of gamers is a whole other argument.
I just don't know how realistic it is to expect useful or meaningful regulation from Agencies that fundamentally do not understand the industry. The fundamental problem is the issue of licensing, which often acts as a binding contract that one party of the contract is allowed to change unilaterally at any time. What needs to happen (and not just in the video game industry) is an update to regulations regarding licensing that grants both sides some of the same protections offered in normal contract law.
The thing is.....right now, most Government bodies just have bigger fish to fry and don't have the time or resources to overhaul regulations regarding software license agreements. We are likely going to have to wait until some other shit gets settled first.
Well, that is one of the things that need to change, and it's not specific to this industry. And there's been a lot of legal analysis posted that some parts of it may already be illegal in the UK and various European nations. You don't have to really understand the industry to understand that you shouldn't be able to buy a tool and use it to develop another piece of product, only to have the manufacturer of that tool say, "we've decided that the stuff you've been working on for three years using our product is going to start generating royalties for us."
And this isn't a hot button political issue. The government gridlock isn't about stuff like this. They have to have something to do while not doing anything about the stuff that is highly partisan. Contract law is highly regulated, mainly because it's very understandable that you need to have all parties very aware of things that might disrupt their business. It's the glue that makes a lot of the modern business world (for all its faults) possible.
It seems like it's hard to pin down exactly the method by which developers get paid from Gamepass, as the articles I read make it seem like each gets a deal that's relevant to their needs. Which, for argument's sake, let's say is "fair".
So Unity needs to go to Microsoft or EA, or whoever and talk to them about getting their cut, not bleed the developers. I understand Unity employs people who work hard, have families to feed, and don't want to live in a van down by the river, so these services shouldn't bypass their revenue model.
But it's on them to evolve their revenue model specific to the ecosystem, and not just start burning stuff down because they see that as the easiest or most expediant way to get their dollars.
The big difference between Epic Games and Unity (the company) is that Epic also has Fortnite and other games to help keep them in the black. So while they might not be making profit from Unreal Engine, Epic Games overall is still a profitable company. Unity does not make games themselves. They do not sell a box product. They do not run a storefront like the Epic Games Store (which I also have read is not profitable). The point being, it's hard to draw a direct comparison between Epic and Unity, because their overall portfolios and depth of products are way different.
It used to be, way back in the day, that the companies that were making the most desirable game engines were also making games with those engines. The Quake engine was highly used back in the day (mid 90s). Id Software made their money from selling game boxes of Quake 1, Quake 2, and Quake 3, which all used the same underlying engine (it was upgraded along the way). Other games, such as Half-Life 1 and Jedi Knight 2 also used the Quake game engine. So id Software got a bit of money from licensing the Quake engine, but the vast majority of their money was box sales of Quake games.
Valve got into the Engine game with the Source engine, although it never caught on as big as other engines. But they did license it out. They also made a bunch of games in-house with it, and their money came from those games. Steam is a juggernaut today, but it hasn't always been that way. When Steam debuted, it was small. And digital game sales were just a tiny blip in a sea of physical media sales. And there were only like 4 games total available on Steam when it first launched. Obviously at this point Steam has become Valve's biggest source of income and cash cow. But when it started, they propped up Steam with the money they made on box sales of games. Same with their engine.
Unreal Engine started as a video game with Unreal 1 and 2, and then Unreal Tournament. And then the Gears of War games, and then Fortnite. Epic has always had game sales to supplement their engine licensing, which again, I've read is not very profitable (or profitable at all).
Unity doesn't have any of that. Which is why they're leaning so hard into pushing in-game advertising, in-game cash shops, and now they're trying this per-install thing. They have to make money somehow, otherwise they'll go broke. So I understand the why behind all these bad decisions. I'm not excusing them. They're awful, horrendous, terrible decisions. And amusingly enough, these decisions are doing the reverse of their intended goal of making Unity into a profitable product. They are getting negative business as a result of this. But the fact remains that Unity does have to make money somehow, otherwise the engine goes away and then nobody benefits from it. The problem is in the how. Not the why.
And to add to that, the entire reason Unity got such popularity among a specific slice of developers (mostly indie), is because it was priced in a way that wasn't really sustainable. So they're in a bit of a catch-22 right now.
marketing is unneeded to exchange goods and services for money
worldwide almost all such exchanges are made sans marketing
One place where Unity can get into a lot of trouble is that they've changed the licensing terms after previously having terms that stated licensees could use old terms. They tried to quietly remove that text, but there's little reason to think it wouldn't be binding, IMO.
They are? Maybe we have a very different idea of marketing. I don't just mean the marketing industry, and I live very far from the USA. The farmers who sell produce near me still put handwritten signs up, price their goods in relation to store-bought produce, tout the importance of organic food and supporting local business, leave earth on some produce, ask around about what sells and what's a good price, bring seasonal produce, and many many more minor-league instances of marketing research and commodification.
Yes of course it's literally un-needed, but everyone does it because they want more money than if they didn't do it. Even some comedy Ron Swanson 'Here is an apple! Would you like to buy it?' exchange still contains research, framing of a product, markers of quality and reliability, implication of future availability, and much much more.
But my post was in reply to the idea that games sell because they're good. Missing or ignoring that context is significant.
No, it really isn't. What Unity is doing is the only time I've seen people try to do "per install" charging. Usually it's per *user*, per *seat*, stuff like that. Not creating situations where the costs for a dev could be $50 or $50 billion for the same product revenue.
Also if they need to improve their cost situation, perhaps they could start with the $100 million they pay their top execs. That's about 7% of their total revenue.
Except, short-sighted executives will often forget that there is a limit on how much you can bleed your customers, and often vastly over-estimate where that limit lies. For example, I've been in the IT industry for over twenty years now. For the first 15 years of that the name Cisco was basically synonymous with core routers and switches. You could not build your datacenter without their hardware. In the last 5 years, Arista has been eating their lunch. Both of my most recent employers chose Arista over Cisco when building out their new datacenters. So, it doesn't matter how much of a stranglehold you think you have on the industry, you push your customer base hard enough, they will find alternative, even if it means enduring temporary pain points to get away from you.
It is just a tool. It's just that they've been able to create a legal framework to do all kinds of terrible things. I don't feel that makes it an unchangeable situation. Look at how hardware manufacturers have tried lock down their products with software licensing terms. For example, John Deere tractors. What that has led to is a rising "right to repair" movement to limit what these licenses can require. That didn't happen until it became obvious how much licensers will abuse license terms.
I could see the same thing happening with software with situations like Unity trying to pull crap like this. And you don't have to be a software expert to understand the principles, just like you didn't have to be a software expert to understand a tractor's software shouldn't be allowed to lock the owner - excuse me, the licensee - out of it.
The license terms never included any of that. It was the Terms of Service, which are a different thing. License terms change all the time. You accept license terms upon install.
This gets to the question of license revocability, though. If I accepted a EULA two years ago when I installed Unity 2019 and do not install updates since then, how can the EULA change? And if I have a copy of the installer on my drive, can I reinstall it? If it was as simple as "only the author has the right to copy". It's something that I don't believe is fully tested in court. There's more tests of the right to sale than there are the right to use, I believe.
Unfortunately, this kind of switch is much harder with software than it is hardware.
It will still wind up with the cash river gradually diminishing to a cash trickle, but it will be much, much slower. There's absolutely no way we'd go back and rewrite our old games with a different engine (and really, there is no existing engine that would actually do everything we'd need them to do), even though Unity claims the right to start billing for them now.
Godot is an up and coming engine, but it isn't console compatible right now. Meaning that to develop a game on the Godot platform is to accept that your product can never go to the Big 3. You're relegating yourself to the PC-only market if you select Godot as your engine. At least right now with the current version of Godot that exists today. In the future, they could expand and improve upon their engine and get that console support in there. But that would not retroactively fix games built on today's version of the engine.
Likewise, despite being a technical and graphical powerhouse, Unreal does have some weaknesses and blind spots that it's just not a great choice for certain genres of games, or certain art styles, or certain platforms. Unreal looks pretty, but it's not always the right choice.
And that puts smaller studios and indie devs in a really bad spot. Do they continue to use the engine that is objectively the best choice for the job? Or do they sacrifice vision, scope, style, and a whole plethora of other intangibles to get out from under the thumb of tyrants and John Riccitiello?
My understanding is that there is absolutely a pathway to publishing to console for Godot developers, it's just that once the actual game development has been done they need to go through a subsidiary organisation (called W4 I think?) and pay for the use of a proprietary, closed source version of Godot to do the thing with the console SDK compilation magic, and ofc pay for validation like everyone else.
Also, Godot isn't a new up-and-comer. It's been in development since 2001. It was in private use up until they opened it to the public in 2014. In comparison, the first version of Unity was in 2005. Subtract a few years for development and they're basically siblings.
And yes, Unreal Engine is not suitable for a lot of stuff. Not the least being that it's C++ based, which is a bit of a hurdle for smaller studios, especially ones started by people who aren't hardcore coders. C# is definitely much more approachable for this crowd. And as I stated elsewhere, UE just doesn't care to handle mobile VR well, so a non-starter for my company. UE is much more geared towards big AAA releases.
There are caveats to all these things, of course. My 12 y.o. son tinkers with Blueprints in UE. He doesn't know a lick of C++ and never touches that.
Right, so you go to another organization that has built their own proprietary fork of Godot. That company handles the port for you and you don't see any of that source code. You do not get that engine for your own use. You do not modify the source code to make any changes needed for the port. You are beholden to that other company for all things in terms of porting.
Which really sucks. Your port's bad and you get blamed for it, but you have very little control of the process. You want to add a new thing, and now you need to go back and probably fork over some more money to those people to bring that thing to the ported version.
Random other thing people might be interested in. A breakdown of games on Steam and the engines used to build them:
https://steamdb.info/tech/
Standout quote:
Oh, it's definitely true for smaller studios, especially ones that have developers who don't actually come from a programming background. Or especially those that need to make launch titles and so have access to pre-release hardware that comes with all kinds of secrecy restrictions that they don't trust everyone with.
But it's also true that many other small and medium studios (I'd be classified as working for a small studio) do all (or most of) their own porting. Keep in mind that you're reading that quote written by the Godot people. They're going to have slightly motivated reasoning. Similar if you read what advice a game porting company will give you about porting. Every gamer knows how dicey ports can be, and how they can often be neglected compared to the original platform.
You're leaving out "we're waiting on (issue from the console company that only they can address)", unfortunately.
Though I suppose that could fall under your first point. But sometimes, it's something that we don't even need to change but they have to work through their byzantine process to figure out is fine.
And really, that's something that the company you hire also has to deal with. So you get to deal with those same issues, and with coding issues the porting company runs into. The ideal situation is that the porting company has so much experience that the first part happens less often. But from our experience, it still happens an annoying amount of the time. Especially since there's constantly new consoles coming out.
They will likely not. There's a lot of anti-trust concerns with anyone big buying Unity. (Even with the weak anti-trust enforcement in the US.)
https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee
TLDR:
Nothing will go in effect for current Unity versions. Only people using the Pro/Enterprise version 2023 LTS (which does not exist yet, as we're only on 2022 LTS (LTS = long term stable)). You can stay on the version you are on and are not forced to upgrade. (Though Personal makes you upgrade to Pro when you get $2M in revenues, so that's a little disingenuous to say it won't affect them.)
There will be no per-install charges, per se. After you make $1M in the last 12 months AND have 1M "initial engagements", they say you can choose either 2.4% of (new, post $1M threshold) monthly revenues, or "based on monthly initial engagements." That last part is annoyingly ill-defined, but at least it will never be more than 2.4% since you can choose. And all of this is explicitly self-reported, with no talk of audits.
This will help them put out the fire before the ship sinks completely. It's something that would have went over much more palatably - especially with the long lead time - than this whole fiasco. So I don't buy the "well, they just proposed the horrible one so that when people got made they'd propose a less horrible one and everyone would agree to it."
It's going to keep hurting them going forward. Godot is going to get a lot more love and attention and more importantly money and engineers than it did before. It's not going to help UE that much, because they take 5% already (when you read thresholds). But it definitely won't hurt UE. And more people that didn't really need nearly as much juice as Unity brings to the table are going to look at other less beefy engines as well.
I honestly think there's only one path forward for Unity that 100% saves them. They need to replace their senior leadership. John Riccitiello for sure, but he's not the only bad actor on board. He's just the most public one. They also probably need to sell to somebody that would be considered a neutral party.
I've actually seen it suggested that Unity sell their engine to Linux. That might not be a terrible idea.
But even if there was and that group could somehow buy Unity, there's another problem. The reason Unity supports ports to consoles is because unity is a company that can make contracts with console makers. Console makers only give out kits and information and authorization with some VERY beefy contracts. (For example, our company has a separate locked "black site" that houses pre-release console hardware, which cannot under any circumstances leave the room and is only accessed on a "need to know/use" basis.)
So it'd lose many of those things that would make it so useful, and move down a little closer to Godot.
Anyone else who would and could buy Unity have very strong anti-trust reasons not to. As mentioned earlier, imagine Microsoft buying it. They're already skating the line on buying game studios, due to fears of them using it to disadvantage the other console makers. Imagine them buying and controlling one of the most popular game engines, and by far the dominant one for certain classes of game makers.
I don't think there is such a thing (considering "Linux" isn't an actual thing that could buy anything, as I was pointing out).
You'd need a big enough company that somehow isn't already a player in the video game industry (and i'm not sure there such a thing as "a big tech company that is not a player in the VG industry in one way or another") decided to enter it by buying Unity, which would be a very weird way to enter. And would probably also be a stupid idea because big company that tries to enter the video game market while knowing nothing about it tends to make absolutely horrible decisions.