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.
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
I actually disagree with this… without support programs in place. And I really don’t think governments should be funding game engines.
The vast majority of “new” tech companies operate at a loss. It is the only way to make inroads in a market dominated by the Google and Microsoft and Apples of the world. They pull this off via crowd funding or (less so these days) venture capital.
If they actually get the market share they then need to actually monetize. Different companies have done this to different degrees and I am inclined to put Unity in the same category as Reddit in terms of “did you really think that would at all help?”
Because if the company can’t actually try to make a profit? They will go out of business, at best.
And while I think there are definitely problem spots, this… doesn’t actually bother me all that much. It fucking sucks for the developers and I do think there need to be “grandfather” clauses for those who already have products (curious how many people are trying to pull out of Fanatical or Humble bundles right now). But this is fundamentally no different than if unity went out of business today. Any developer worth their salt would need to sunset their games or start a port. Because the unity engine is a massive attack vector and vulnerabilities will be found. And it is better to be most of the way to a godot/unreal port when the CVE is published.
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.
I took a look at some of their investor reports while trying to explain this earlier but couldn’t make heads or tails of what was additive and what was descriptive.
But at a high level: It is very believable
Let’s take a step back for a moment and look at nVidia. It is a VERY common statement (I think even Jensen has said it?) that nVidia is not a hardware company: They are a software company. They spend a LOT of money on Solution Architects/Engineers which are basically people that you buy the time of when you make a large order. They work with you to make your code more performant on nVidia hardware and are why so many games (and everything else) blazes on nVidia but struggles on AMD (less so these days) and Intel (ha!).
I believe Epic does the same with the Unreal Engine
And, presumably, Unity does the same for Unity.
And those people are pretty well paid and only have so many cycles per day. That drastically increases your Sales/Marketing department cost but is pretty much a necessity to function in a market dominated by… the companies who have been doing that for decades.
And then you just have product development. A LOT of money is thrown in to trying to make the next Nanite or whatever in an attempt to distinguish your engine and get market share when the next wave of games release… two or three years later. Which is the other issue. Every expenditure is about making profit 1-16 quarters later.
Another aspect people don’t really understand: The major middleware/hardware companies always have their eyes out for new tech. And it is not at all uncommon to give a professor (or even a grad student) a giant sack of cash to work for the company for a year or two to implement feature X. Which is in addition to the army of Software Engineers who make feature X stable and 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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Just to add to my last point a bit:
This is actually very common in software development. Nobody is dumb enough to write ALL of their own software (okay… there are a few orgs…). So you are going to be dependent on third party libraries. Some are free and open source with licenses that aren’t GPL. Others are licensed for a small fee from other companies. And many are in the middle somewhere where you pay for support, but can use the software regardless.
And… companies change licenses over time. Open source projects change licenses over time. And sometimes, that means you can’t use it anymore. Or you don’t want to use it because the team really dropped the ball and it is a piece of shit. And that is when you get an all hands on deck to replace it.
One of our major partners recently dicked us over REAL hard by changing the terms of a license we were discussing with them to a MUCH worse one. And we are being pretty public about how unprofessional that was and “accidentally” talking about it when other partners ask us what tech we are using to do X. Mostly in the context of “Well, we were previously dependent on using Y but they actively misled us before changing their license. So we are in the process of migrating everything to Z”.
But… regardless of how salty we are and how much we and others are doing to poison the reputation of that company to those who hadn’t interacted with them before: We need to finish the port to use Z.