Doc Blaze

oh right, you mean those people with furaffinity accounts 🤭

you mean these guys right?

The most natural diet supplement of all time (unfortunately it tasted terrible until they combined it with banana cream smoothie powder).

another horrible outcome for humans: a super race of gigantic, muscular rats with high libidos (that multiply very quickly) and want to overtake our food supply and keep us as pets

wait, I’m confused. Is drake upset or nah?

you are wrong, potatoes are our friends.

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80 percent of unity users don’t pay and a large percentage of the 20% remaining don’t pay close to enough to maintain the engine. they did this on purpose, so it’s their fault, but it is the truth. most large studios these days that actually hit the numbers to pay unity are doing more with AI so they are paying less and those who the changes actually were attempting to make up lost revenue from. as I said, either way the “seats” model is dead regardless.

honestly as shitty as the changes were (and of course they were trying to make profit) they were actually attempting to help devs at least financially. For many use cases the install fee would come out as less than a 1% rev share. It was the other shit that made it worse, the install counting malware proposal, and the uncertainty behind the legitimacy of the numbers. (demos, piracy, repeated reinstalls)

if you’re interested in the insight from a tech investor who is familiar with the situation from the inside, but remains unbiased as someone not employed by unity, check this link for a good breakdown of what Unity’s leadership was actually thinking when they cooked this insanity up.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1702054746411221386.html

(ironic considering we’re talking about unity but you may need to scroll thru the shitty ads to be sure you can read the whole post).

The harsh truth is even if they lose half of their current users they will end up making more anyway, even with the amended changes. They planned to lose a large chunk of their user base, regardless. The “seats” model is dead now that AI is changing how game development is done from the ground up. And they needed to do this because they were never profitable (the engine’s development costs hundreds of millions of dollars) and couldn’t really compete with unreal when it came to the type of customers they could actually pay for the engine from

With all intentions of respect, and in complete agreement that Unity’s new terms are alarming, If you dont have any intentions of tracking your sales unless you are forced to by the creators of your engine you are using, I’m questioning if you have the chops to be a successful dev in the first place. This is why the vast majority of devs don’t even make enough to even pay Unity the fee and should just stick with a publisher instead of trying to handle the business end of things on their own.

well technically, if they shut up and did nothing they’d go under. unity operates at a loss right now. if you’re interested in what actually went down in the talks when they cooked this bullshit up, this is a good read from a tech investor who has some insight into unity leaderships new business model while being entirely unbiased:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1702054746411221386.html

Unity’s dilemma:

It’s extremely expensive to build/support an engine used by millions of devs, across 25+ platforms (+ multiple device generations), producing 100K+ games/yr across various art/render styles

Unity has a small army of 3K+ engineers working on it

~80% (est.) of Unity users don’t pay anything for the service. Unity’s ads business (highly profitable) funds the engine business

The engine business is not profitable standalone

It’s not sustainable

The strategic question for Unity was always: assuming the low cost of the engine, what other developer services can we provide to developers to increase average revenue per user (ARPU)?

The runtime fee was a shock to me: only a year ago this option was completely off the table

So what changed for Unity and why now?

1. The macro enviornment has resulted in hiring freezes. For a seats license model like Unity’s, this means poor revenue growth

2. GenAI will result in smaller teams building AAA quality games. Smaller/efficient teams = great for studios’ profits but bad for Unity’s seats model

3. Apple privacy changes (ATT/IDFA) pushed game monetization towards IAP and away from in-game ads. Hurts Unity’s ads business

4. Dev adoption of Unity cloud services like Unity Gaming Services, DevOps, etc likely hasn’t been strong enough to make the engine biz profitable

it’s the best way to do a rev share. pretty sure unreal engine lets you self report too. If you start a business you can’t complain about having to run a a business by tracking sales.

I feel like most digital stores already gives you all the statistics you need to make this trivial though. Steam even reports the difference after refunds/returns for you.

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that’s the only thing stopping me. I’d do it with a couple bottles of water for half the money. the water doesn’t even have to be particularly accommodating, just relatively clean where I won’t get a disease, so you could even leave a decent size puddle of muddy water inside the pit and I am in for just 500K.

everybody loves kung fu fight-ing! HUH!

I wonder if it will be that integrated. perhaps if you’re a PC player you can solve all these issues for most non multiplayer games by simply cutting the internet out when you’re not using it to download updates from steam.

if it’s just like a taco bell skin dlc, I’m fine with just ignoring it. it’s the same thing as 47 having the clown costume in hitman. it’s an ignorable goof at worst and maybe at best creates an interesting choice for modders.

don’t get me wrong this is fucked, and John riccatello should really be dismissed after the wave of lawsuits overwhelm unity.

I’m the good friend and will confirm

I get triggered as a gamedev when people complain about dlc because if a game came out and it was $200 for all the content made you would probably scoff and pirate it. The harsh truth is nobody wants to front the actual production cost of games anymore. PS2 games were $40 back in 2003 when my old ass was entering high school and you could still find a decent slice of pizza for just over a dollar. It’s 2023 and it’s basically the same price now after 2 decades of insane inflation. You may find an outlier or two on steam but even AAA titles tend to stay 60 or under.

It’s honestly the best option. Just buy the base game then. By definition you don’t need anything else. You get what you afforded and you don’t get upset. Don’t forget the company that made Payday filed for bankruptcy not too long ago. This isn’t quite EA shitting out a Madden update with the same code and 3d models. They were restructured and probably have loans or investors to pay back. I’m just happy we got a payday 3.

go ahead and downvote, but just consider what I said with an open mind afterwards.

Y’know what, at least it’s a naturally occurring solution to climate change

You can downvote me but you know I’m technically correct