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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

Unity makes a lot of moronic decisions imo.

* You have to pay to remove the unity logo from your games. This causes low quality games to proudly show the unity logo and well funded games to hide it.

* Very few devs are likely to release on console while on the free tier of unity pro but this has a daunting effect on the aspirational newbie, I guarantee. Lots of people have this silly habit of thinking about the monetary opportunity of their amazing solo indie game that will definitely never happen, but it still GETS THEM ON THE TOOL which is important

* Needless to say, breaking their own networked multiplayer setup and not even having a working replacement.

The engine really is fine, but the business is poorly run, and I feel that drives the trajectory of the engine downwards.

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I'd like to add the biggest issues from the point of view of a small independent game studio:

* Open bugs from years ago

* Refusal to fix bugs in the LTR = long term support version. They always try to weasel their way out by asking you to upgrade to the latest beta, which nobody will do mid-production.

* No source code access and no option to purchase it, because they are above negotiating prices with small companies.

* Bug reports are forcibly kept secret. For example, try searching for "Particle Rendering Errors & Flickering - Last light color in unity_LightColor0[] multiplied by random small number" which is a bug that affects 2018 LTR, 2019 LTR, and 2020 LTR and is still unfixed. (It's ID 1242620)

As the game developer, you're then forced to work around bugs in the Unity C++ core with pixel shaders and the stuff that they expose to C#, which is horrible for readability and (of course) very fragile.

Contrast that with UE where you have full source code and can step through things in a debugger...

The access to the source code is available, just not for free.

In our case, they were unwilling to even disclose its price to us. All we got was a slightly friendlier variant of "you cannot afford it anyway".

> *Very few devs are likely to release on console while on the free tier of unity pro but this has a daunting effect [..] this silly habit of thinking about the monetary opportunity of [..]

I fully agree, the idea that my small irrelevant hobby game might end up somewhat successful and I might be able to sell it on console and be maybe able to live from and for it for ~1 year or so are quite tempting.

On the other hand the idea that even if my hobby game gets successful I will most likely never be able to put it on console is quite off putting.

If your hobby becomes successful can’t you then upgrade to pro and port to consoles?

A lot of people will want to push to consoles to begin with, not to PCs. It's still a good deal if you're successful. But it's $1,800 lost if you're not. That's a big number to some hopeful newbie.

For a hobby game earning 1800 yearly in profited is a lot.

Not even speaking about you having to put it up upfront and every year (I'm not sure if it's every year you still maintain or sell the game).

I mean typical prices for mini hobby games are 5-10 at most 20, if we go with 10 it means you would need to have already had 180 customers before publishing on a game console which is you only target e.g. the PlayStation is a problem.

And sure that might not sound like much, but we are speaking about small hobby projects of often young people, potentially worried about how to pay their student loans or teen not yet earning money.

And sure they probably will target Steam first.

And sure in the sells aspects this doesn't matter for EA, but it will make more young people use different things for their first games.

It's not about weather it is expensive, it's about it feeling expensive for the next generation.

Furthermore when it doesn't matter from a sells perspective why increase the burden? Why not just reducing the "less expensive" limit from 200k revenue to 80k or so?

You pay for all the other tools that enable you earn an income.

How is Unity any different than any other tool?

If your business is profitable only if other people support you for free, you simply do not have a viable business.

To add to the list, Unity changed their policy on console development 6 days ago, and didn't tell anyone or even give an explanation (this article was written after a few developers noticed it in the license by chance). Whether or not it was a good choice is almost overshadowed by the lack of disclosure or transparency.

I'm pretty confident you're referring to the license change from the article and not an earlier license change, but June 30th is no longer 6 days ago.

The truth of the story is Unity just changed how Xbox builds work, and not much more.

Console manufacturers providing tools for development after you join their dev programs is bog standard stuff. In fact only needing a key is a huge step forward, back in the Wii-U days Nintendo would provide the actual binary of Unity Pro with changes baked in, not even a key.

If I had to guess Sony and Nintendo are paying some sort of fee to get those Pro licenses they then give to devs for free, and MS was relying on the fact that Unity didn't gate console targets.

Now Unity is forcing MS to join the program, which really isn't unreasonable to me. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's a way to recoup the very real cost Unity incurs supporting these targets to the benefit of the manufacturers.

Oh and I forgot my personal favorite. Filling my harddrive with TB of log messages saying the telemetry failed to phone home due to no internet when left alive overnight.

Seriously asking... what's the benefit of getting them on the tool if the tool can't be monetized? What's the angle here for Unity as a business model? Some kind of revenue sharing arrangement or something for if/when a game ends up successful?

Unreal Engine does revenue sharing and the whole engine is free to use for anyone wants to. IIRC until certain amount of money Epic takes no cut from the sales. That’s a million times better than what Unity is doing.

Yeah it's only 5% on revenues above a million on a title by title basis. Very generous terms and incredibly indie friendly. Probably more expensive for large successes, but imo much more preferable.

> Seriously asking... what's the benefit of getting them on the tool if the tool can't be monetized? What's the angle here for Unity as a business model? Some kind of revenue sharing arrangement or something for if/when a game ends up successful?

First to answer your question, luring in devs to the unity ecosystem is very good for unity because it creates a supply of unity devs who go on to create demand for the engine at studios. People don't like to switch tooling. It's sticky, like microsoft office.

But second, that's sort of my point. Unity is already fairly heavily monetized. You must already buy this license if you're making $200k or more on their engine.

But what if you're a solo dev who wants to publish something fun, small, and non-lucrative? Or something you think could be lucrative but is kind of a shot in the dark? $1,800 (per year) is a hefty price tag to take that shot. It doesn't move the needle on business revenue but it does scare away indies. Others are saying this is to get the console vendors to pay for it but honestly that sounds like its still adding a lot of friction.

That makes sense. Thanks for answering. I don't have much familiarity with Unity as a tool or as a company/business model, so I didn't realize they already had alternative monetization methods.

Do they still charge for the dark theme?

Not anymore, thankfully.

yes I used to pay for unity but if I were an aspiring dev today, I'd jump right into the unreal ecosystem as their freemium model makes much more sense to start in.

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