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Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

1800/person/seat is a pretty minimal cost, at least in the US. Even if you're paying your people 40k per year, it's a 5%-ish increase in costs, at most. Probably much less once you factor everything else in.

I'd be interested to know how many non-hobbyist devs are seriously affected by this.

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As a ps3 owner who was considering that it might be fun to make a simple game or utility it's a total non-starter.

Of course I can make a game for free on my desktop, laptop or phone and have many options available. But I was literally just last night thinking about making something for use with a controller on the sofa and bookmarked Unity for further consideration. I'd rather use Godot but I don't think that works with consoles at all.

It sounds like this still works for older versions of Unity? I am not imagining anything elaborate/commercial. The ps3 is not the best computer (or even console) I own, but it's one I like and use daily, even if just for a few minutes to play an old game or watch streaming video.

Edit: after looking around Unity's website it seems they're just not catering to hobbyists at all any more which I guess makes sense from their business perspective. Oh well.

Unity is completely irrelevant here, your first question should be "Will Sony give me the software and the hardware to make a PS3 game/software?" and answer in 2021 will most likely be hard no because PS3 is so old at this point (remember that retail console is not a devkit nor a testkit). Which only leaves homebrew toolchains to explore, and they are not supported by any of big engines today.

I already knew the answer to that, but up until recently the free/cheap tier Unity let you output for ps3.

But how do you install on the actual hardware without an official dev kit? If you're just previewing on PC then nothing has changed.

The PS3 security is completely broken at this point so that’s a moot point. You don’t need a dev kit.

I don't think this answers the question.

Is there actually a guide showing anyone having been able to click build in a recent version of Unity and run the output on a PS3?

Because I'd be shocked if that actually worked, back in the PS3 days I'm pretty sure Sony was shipping modified builds of Unity just like Nintendo

Yes, the price is very affordable for even small independent studios knowing that engine licensing costs are one of your biggest non-labor expenses, but the price is also set high enough that an individual will easily have it out of budget.

Only hardware is marginally more expensive, and only sometimes.

I find their pricing very well calibrated.

Looks like the dream isnot completely dead: https://wololo.net/2019/09/24/a-look-at-udk-ultimate-a-modif...

(Also, talk about putting the whole story in the URL...)

Thats a ton of money for something an indie dev won't even own or be able to possess once the subscription is up.

Indie dev is super saturated. It's hard to make money without a ton of promo and virality.

Yet another predatory subscription licensing model. Thank god Unreal Engine is open-source.

Seems like these types of devs go to PC first anyway, since the cost of getting started there is so much less than consoles. I doubt anyone in the industry will be too broken up about it.

UE is source available but it is not open source. You owe royalties if your game makes over a million. It's a nice model though.

Dude if UE makes me a millie I would happily hand them 5% for it, considering that would be all I owe them, ever. Especially for all the free assets they provide.

But right now, where certainties aren't...

Agreed. It's a very good model for building their customer relationship. I would be happy to give them 50k. It is revenues however, not profit. This might not look as favorable if you're running a moderately sized studio with payroll costs.

Basically zero, but it's definitely awful marketing to devs who imagine themselves successful.

Unity sure is encouraging folks to move to Unreal or Godot lately.

If you're porting to consoles and making at least 100k/yr then this is a drop in the bucket.

Not everywhere pays their people as well as the US :). For a lot of countries with many Devs this is a fortune

You only need one seat I think also. Just for when you're building to console (At least that's the way it used to be when you could only build to certain platforms on pro) Eg. If I was doing a build I'd just use the seat and if my colleague had it i'd ask him to relinquish it.)

The license doesn't allow doing that, you can't really mix free and pro on the same project (also if you work with multiple people probably the company has > 100k revenue). Of course Unity doesn't really have any good way to enforce this...

I do some mobile unity game development. Personally I would expect it to cost more to get games on console.

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