The Death of Unity | Hacker News Reader

The Death of Unity

gamedeveloper.com

290 pointssp332236 comments

>Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar.

Not only that, but with this predatory practice of taking any percent (steam, apple) or fix dollar value, makes just having a game up a potential liability. If you need to refund anyone you are refunding the full $0.99 from your account, despite you only made $0.46 (steam and unity are going to keep theirs, its on you as the publisher to make up the difference). If you had a disastrous launch and had a majority of people seeking a refund, well not only did you hard work and effort not pay off, you owe $$$$ on top of that. In theory this liability is like shorting a stock and the loss potential is virtually limitless, you could end up owing millions.

It's also catastrophic for services like Game Pass where the developer gets a flat fee regardless of how many people install the game. You can take a flat fee that seems reasonable based on an expectation of 100k installs, but then your game turns out to be a smash hit and it gets a million installs. Now you're on the hook for a massive amount of money to Unity but the money you got is barely enough to cover it, if it covers it at all.

Our game Void Bastards was in gamepass for 2 years and we had many million installs.

If this thing was already in effect during that period, would you have been screwed over?

That situation sounds horrible, is that actually a thing? Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place?

The standard models are a % of revenue (i.e. Unreal Engine - fine for flat advance services like Game Pass), a flat licensing fee (old Unity, old Fmod, etc), or an ongoing fee per-title/per-seat (current Unity, stuff like Wwise). This new fee-per-install model Unity is adopting is relatively rare.

Game giveaways like Game Pass and Epic Games Store's free games are generally based on a flat advance. I think PlayStation Plus's free games are also a flat advance, but I can't personally attest to it. There are tables out there of how much money Epic handed specific developers for their games and how many copies were installed that I think leaked during the Apple lawsuit, and in some cases developers earned much less than Unity's 20 cents per copy due to the number of installs.

Ideally this flat advance model would have been widely protested by the industry, but there is a huge audience of struggling indie game devs for whom a flat advance is a desperately needed lifeline, so it's been successful.

> Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place?

What kind of protest do you expect to see? The change was announced just now.

>Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place?

they always have and always will. But revshare and ESPECIALLY residuals (tangential to this topic) are costs that the elite will fight to the grave to not give out.

Indie devs are simply taking that gamble and unironically working for exposure. profits are razor thin in games and the market is fickle, so it's much preferable to have a guaranteed minium than to negotiation revenue/profit shares. if they become "too successful" they simply need to use that newfound exposure to negotiate a better deal next time.

I’m sure Unity would prefer a revshare it’s just that it would be much harder and more expensive for them to enforce it (and even impossible at all outside of the developed countries and especially in China).

And yeah, of course there would be much bigger backlash for their largest clients who probably prefer this new model. Which IMHO doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable if you’re on Pro (which you current have to be anyway if your company has over 200k revenue)

> is that actually a thing?

Probably not, I’m not a fan of these changes but most people seem to really over exaggerating because they don’t understand how the new (very convoluted) pricing model works.

The $.2 install fee (only for users living in “rich” countries) seems to be there just to incentive developers to upgrade their subscriptions to Pro which offers much higher revenue/install limits and lower fees above them.

That's true! It means no Unity game can come to Game Pass. Just that is enough to kill this proposal by Unity.

> it gets a million installs.

I highly doubt many/any(?) games os Gamepass or Apple Arcade were created using the personal edition (after all they already have a 100/200k per COMPANY revenue limit. would MS really pay less than that for any game and you have zero sales every else?)

On Pro you’d only have to worry if your downloads went significantly over a limit. Which is concern in this case, just relatively a much smaller one. In any cases it seems to create some false incentives for fixed fee developers (unless the publisher agrees to pay the fee which would be pretty reasonable)

IMHO so far the biggest issue with these pricing changes seems to be that they are way too complicated. It was unreasonable for them to expect that most people commenting online would bother looking at more than a single number (or would understand their current pricing model for that matter)

It's apparently even worse. An update or patch counts as an install from Unity's perspective. So does an instantiation in a browser of their web player.

Do you have evidence for that claim? My understanding is that Apple takes their cut after any refunds have been settled[1], and the same appears to be true for Steam[2].

1: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/does-apple-keep-its-c...

2: https://www.techradar.com/news/how-steam-refunds-are-a-bless...

Also worth noting that the unity fee only takes effect once you're making a pretty large amount of revenue, so most devs will be unaffected. Still shitty and I'm glad I made the switch to Godot a few months ago, but not as bad as people are making it out to be.

Revenue isn’t profit. So if you build a toy game and it takes off without a solid business and pricing plan you could be stuck and have to shut it down. Seems like that makes Unity is a very bad place to start.

Yeah I mean, there's a reason I'm not using it.

Several reasons.

I've been "game development adjacent" for most of my career. By that, I mean I'm not a game developer, I'm mostly a web developer, but I've done a lot of game development-like things in my projects over the years, including a 4 year stint where I built a VR app for foreign language training.

My impression during the last 20 years of my career is that game development lacks a lot to be desired in the "professionalism" side of software development. At least, on the indie side. I obviously don't know anything about what large studios do. But large studios aren't using Unity, either.

In the non-game development world, almost all of the best tools for development are free and open source. There are several different packages to choose from for any task, and they all pretty much integrate together. They support well-defined, open standards. Their developers work hard to make the software be stable across minor versions. And the tools--and thus the pipeline of developers--between small and large projects, small and large teams, are largely the same (caveat some scale-managing orchestration tools that one can get by without perfectly fine without users ever noticing on the small scale).

Before you might scoff-in-JavaScript at that statement, just spend some time trying to do indie game development. I've yet to encounter even a major version upgrade in a web dev tool that was as painful as even some patch upgrades were with Unity. Alternatives are vastly different. There's very little code one can share between even two .NET-oriented game engines. Thus picking one of those alternatives effectively shuts you out of the larger job market.

I used Unity heavily for about 5 years, after already having extensive, other software development experience. I very quickly grew a reputation with my peers for being very effective. Most of that effectiveness was just me writing tools to fix all the technical project management deficiencies in running a Unity project. Developing in Unity felt like the 6 months that I'll never get back of my early developer life doing FoxPro development. Unity is like Crystal Reports. Unity is like Dreamweaver. All those things in enterprise dev were also shitty, take-it-or-leave-it siloed tools. Yet I only ever encountered them in large corporations being ran by pointy-haired managers. And one would certainly never start a personal project using one of them.

"In the non-game development world, almost all of the best tools for development are free and open source."

I think part of the equation is that in that space most of the hard problems have been solved for the past 50 years - so while computing at whole is young, some common expectations have started to crystallize and this is apparent in the expected quality of open source tools.

However, in general IMO the software engineering -quality of an open source offering is inverse proportional to it's innovation and novelty. The more niche the domain, the likelier it is the open source there is sub-par per expectations - and not to fault the open source enthusiasts there! It just seems high quality open source either needs some diamond-level craftmanship from few contributors, OR a massive, massive userbase with professional interest aligned with the project.

In open source, another way to view this, is that in popular domains there are hundreds of competing teams creating similarish solutions to similarish well understood problem-solution domains, and then word-of-mouth quickly drives community to contribute those perceived as "highest standard".

From another point of view.

You still need fairly esoteric skillset to contribute to game tech. There are lots of things that simply are not taught that well together, and everyone needs to do lots of hard work to enmesh these concepts in their head to a whole. The work is not magical or rocket-science-hard, just something esoteric that manages to combine stuff from super hard or poorly defined domains like numerical computing and art into what is basically a frivolity. The implied hard work means you need same competence basically to contribute to game tech meaningfully where you could be curing cancer, doing actual rocket science or something of actual impact. As a field, games have an abysmal reputation of abusing talent and naivety. Anyone in their right mind absolutely not driven to develop games will choose any other field. Hence it's no wonder game tech is kind of ... random often.

If it’s free you want have to pay anything?

If you managed to get over 200k installs and 200k revenue you can just upgrade to pro and increase these limits to 1 million.

I’m not a fan of these changes and the whole model seems too convoluted but the fees don’t seem to be that unreasonable.

It seems they are actually even lower now than they were for a subset of users.

At the least it will essentially kill Unity as an option for F2P games (where only a low percentage of users are "pay users"), which (on the mobile platforms) is where Unity so far rules supreme. No wonder they want a cut of that sweet F2P money, but at the same time F2P games have such a high "churn" that Unity could very quickly become irrelevant in that sector as old games (or at least game clients) are replaced with new ones, and most of those games are not so complex that they would be chained to a specific engine forever.

> kill Unity as an option for F2P games

Will it though? That $0.20 fee seems like a red herring (and not such a big deal unless most of your users are in US, Western Europe etc.) and hardly anyone will pay that much. Why would they?

Anyone who makes over $200k is already using Pro and your per install fee is unlikely to be above $0.05 or so, maybe you van even get it down to $0.03 or $0.02. Which still might be a significant hit for some but that alone is unlikely to kill Unity in the F2P mobile market.

Also considering how much some of these game developers are willing pay for Ads $0.05 can’t be a very significant amount for them.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really like this whole pay per install thing or where Unity has been heading over the past 4-5 years in general but I don’t think these new fees will be such a huge hit for 90%+ or all their clients.

The fee isn't revenue-based, it's install-based - and not based on hard numbers.

Also, demo installs apparently count against that threshold https://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/1701717971016790508 (their original reply https://twitter.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607)

The fees don't kick in until you get to a certain number of lifetime installs. Once you start paying the install fees the price per install drops quite rapidly too.

The fees are also PER-GAME so one popular game wont cause your new game to cost a bunch immediately.

It sounds way less bad than what people are making out to be (still not free, but should anything be?)

Maybe?

...but it's not really very clear is it? They've done their best to make it simple, with multiple examples in the FAQ, but fundamentally, what they're introducing is a very very complicated scheme.

Multiple rates, multiple tiers.

> All determinations, calculations of installs, and revenue related to the Unity Runtime Fee will be made by Unity in its sole discretion.

Ouch, expensive. Don't worry:

> Qualifying customers may be eligible for credits on the Unity Runtime Fee based on the adoption of Unity services beyond the Editor, such as Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPlay.

How much?

> please contact your account manager for ad monetization

Got a problem with that? Not what you were expecting?

> Unity may also waive all or any part of the Unity Runtime Fee in its sole discretion. As we implement this program, customers may see an invoice for an amount less than the full number of installs (or for $0) to help with the transition.

> We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.

Some amount. With some discounts. Based on your subscription, maybe? Or maybe you just get credits?

...

I mean, trivially, yeah, sure. Did you make more than $200000 in the last year? Probably not. So, you probably don't care, and this doesn't have anything to do with you.

However, it's really a bit shit to go from a predictable fee to an arbitrary rolling fee which you can't easily predict; and you can't, because despite all their examples, they've really failed hard at two things:

1) How much will it cost?

Not, you tell me later how much it will cost. Not, I get a surprise bill I can't afford in a month. Me, without you input, calculate how much it will cost. How much will it cost? It's pretty clear to me that the answer to this is who the heck knows?

They decide what an install is.

They decide how many installs you had.

They decide how much of a discount to give you.

They decide how much to charge you.

They decide how to deal with any disputes.

Does that sound cool to you? It doesn't really seem cool to me.

2) When will the rates / terms / values change?

There's no rules. They decide that too.

Published a game today? Well, in a year maybe it'll cost more than it costs now per install. Maybe not. Who knows?

...

It's easy to say, 'its no big deal'; but unpredictable pricing is very very bad. They've totally messed this up by making it too complicated and too bespoke.

based on revenue and installs. But any slightly decent mobile launch is going to have 200k installs (especially since Unity is STILL counting this per device, not per account).

200k revenue is a higher mark, but far from a high mark. Especially for mobile games. those mobile packs can go up to $100 a pop, so if you got 2000 purchases, every free customer is costing you.

> >Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar.

Out of curiosity, how does 0.99 * 0.7 - 0.2 = 0.493 come out to 46 cents?

This is factually incorrect. Steam (And I suspect Apple too) handles these challenges pretty transparently and fairly and don’t leave you on the hook.

Frankly speaking - there’s a lot of comments similar to this in tech, especially when espousing the solutions that crypto may offer for these “problems” that are built on ignorance or misunderstanding of how the industry actually operates.

Having been in more discussions about “disrupting games” than I can count, almost every one of them was driven by outsiders with zero appreciation.

While Steam’s fees are on the higher side, the depth of publisher features offered by steamworks is incredible and are likely saving average developers the fees many times over

Facebook famously had the illusion that if you made distribution free, you could dislodge game developers from Steam (see FB Gameroom). Educating people on the 999 other reasons why developers choose steam , was painful.

Worked with selling games on steam. Op’s scenario would happen in the current model.

You’d only pay $0.2 for a subset of your users above 200k (installs in outside of the top ~15 richest countries are $0.02)

Not that I’m a fan of those changes, but I’d bet the $0.2 fee is only there to encourage anyone affected to upgrade to Pro.

The fact that most people will only see a single number and ignore the rest of the quite complicated pricing model says a lot about their marketing department… I mean what did they expect?

You're forgot to first subtract VAT ;-)

What I am confused about is WHY is the CEO taking such a brain-dead executive decision on a stable, profit earning cash-cow. I mean - this is something that all high-level executives should have pointed out to Riccitiello as a very dumb idea. This isn't rocket science or some financial black-magic wizkid deduction.

This is basically committing hara-kiri on the product and looks to be effectively a company killing decision, unless there is something we are missing ?

The obvious answer is Wall Street brainrot:

Stable profits are worthless. (Forget the fact that, y'know, they keep the company alive, everyone paid, and everything that actually matters to 95% of people working fine.)

All that matters is growth. Growth is what gets CEOs praise from shareholders, bonuses from boards, and even-higher-paying CEO jobs elsewhere.

> Stable profits are worthless

Unity never had those though or any profits for that matter (they have been burning cash for almost two decades..)

> All that matters is growth

Yeah, but in this case they have been more focused on growing their costs rather than revenue (which is not exactly ideal even from the "Wall Street" perspective).

Now, that's a different matter—the post I was replying to posited that they were stably profitable (and I have no outside information either way).

If what you say is the case, then this is still a dumb move, because it's still acting as if the choices existing Unity developers have are "pay Unity whatever they want, or get out of the business", but it's at least not quite as directly related to Wall Street brainrot.

> pay Unity whatever they want, or get out of the business

I guess it's down to how the video game/engine market works. A tiny proportion of their users make massive amounts of money while essentially paying peanuts to Unity (well.. I guess at least in relation to what value it provides compared to storefronts/ad companies/platform owners etc.), while the bulk makes barely anything.

They don't want to go with a rev. share model due to various (pretty valid reasons) and therefore they seem to be really struggling with monetization. So they came up with this Frankensteinian compromise/abomination which hardly solves anything:

- most of their biggest customer will continue paying pennies (as % of revenue).

- most users are under the 200k/1000k limit so these changed don't even affect them in short term (of course it might make them reconsider whether they really want to continue using Unity)

- the not that large but very vocal (their corporate won't go around complaining on twitter/reddit/etc.) group of mainly indie developers in between is kind of screwed (at least if they make F2P or cheap mobile games). However it's not like they pay Unity that much money currently, so their executives who obsessed with maximizing short-term revenue growth don't have any reason to care about what happens to them.

In finding the middle ground between these sentiments -- you'd admit it won't pass a criteria for proper arguments, right -- it feels IT has been playing a lot of bait-and-switch and sucking a lot from VC without returning much. Which might be weird thing to say here, though...

> stable, profit earning cash-cow

But it's not. Unity is extremely unprofitable as a company (-50% operating margin.. lol..).

They would be fine if they hadn't started burning money like there is no tomorrow after their IPO back in 2020. The company was still unprofitable but had decent growth and would've broken even in a year or two. Then they decided that they need to double their headcount (to almost 8000 people...) in two years and start buying random companies for exorbitant prices (I guess why not? Money is free after-all).

Now they don't have a choice and have to maximize their rev. growth or the company is f**d. IMHO the engine itself would probably be in a much better spot had MS (or even FB) bought them 5-10 years ago and they could've easily paid as much as their current valuation minus Weta, IronSource, whatever they bought before.

> company killing decision, unless there is something we are missing ?

Probably. I mean the pricing changes seem to be very complicated and most people are only looking at a single number ($0.2) which seems to be there only to force everyone above the 200k revenue/install threshold to upgrade to Pro tier. Seems like 80-90% of all users won't pay anything for installs and the average for those who do is probably to be somewhere between 2-5 cents which is not unreasonable financial (it still seems like a slightly bizarre price model in general).

The way they presented this seems to be a disaster marketing wise. But about on par given the general level of idiocy amongst their upper management (especially their "marketing department").

It's not profit earning. Unity lost almost a billion dollars last year. This is a move of desperation.

The usual reason for this kind of thing is prep for acquisition.

They are taking the nuclear option to push free to play mobile games to adopt their advertising platform, after rejecting a buyout offer from their main competitor earlier this year. If you use their ad platform in your games, they will likely negotiate favorable terms on the fee schedule. Indie PC games aren't even on their radar for this transaction.

The decline of Unity is sad. Unity got so many things very right in their pre-IPO years. They made rapid prototyping and development of 3D games much easier than anything that came before. Being able to develop in C# was a huge win, especially for small teams and solo indie, and it made developing for multiple platforms easy, and took away a lot of the pain of native mobile development for Android/iOS.

But Unity has been declared dead/dying before, I suspect it'll have a long future ahead in some form even if it's no longer the obvious go-to engine choice for indies and mobile developers. A lot of people have invested a lot of years into their Unity skills as well as projects/codebases.

Bringing John Ricitiello on as CEO (former disgraced EA CEO) should have been a yellow (or red?) flag that things had reached their peak.

I wonder how many company funds went to reputation management to drive an obscure NY Pizza Palor on google above his name on a direct search after the molestation charges leveraged by one of their C-Levels

> the obvious go-to engine choice for indies and mobile developers

What do you think has taken it's place?

There's a lot more indies talking about Unreal, and also Godot. Too early to see how much of that talk will translate to shipping finished games, though.

Artists are excited by the potential of UE5, as Unity's rendering tech has stagnated somewhat. But making a UE5 Nanite/Lumen game is likely to be limiting your audience rather a lot, with high hardware requirements.

I've heard a lot about Godot but the last time I really looked into it, years ago at this point, it wasn't quite ready for prime time.

Is it ready nowadays? Looking at their showcase it seems I've played a few games using it without knowing.

I’m not sure, I haven’t used it myself in a few years and back then my experience was like yours. However I do know that it has improved a lot since then, especially with the 4.0 and beyond releases.

Is it there yet? I don’t know, but it’s improving constantly and making strides and things like what’s happening with Unity will only gain Godot more support. I think it’s just a matter of time.

Open source and consoles are a difficult mix, due to NDA issues. Not necessarily a showstopper, though:

https://w4games.com/2023/02/28/godot-support-for-consoles-is...

> Is it ready nowadays?

What does "ready" mean?

"Can you develop and ship a non-trivial game with it, ideally on multiple platforms, without spending loads of time debugging the internals of the engine?"

What does "non-trivial game" mean?

Also what does "spending loads of time debugging the internals of the engine" mean? I have worked on small and large (AAA) games with both custom and 3rd party engines and all of them needed a lot of time both profiling (to make things faster) and debugging (to avoid/fix[0] bugs) the engine internals. Where is the threshold where that time is "loads"?

Without being specific on the requirements how can one respond with "yes" or "no"?

[0] "avoid" for the 3rd party engines that we tried to not change much as it'd affect engine upgrades later, "fix" for the custom engines

For one example.

> Projects written in C# using Godot 4 currently cannot be exported to iOS

With unity or unreal it's one click as long as you're using a Mac.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/export/expo...

If you know you might be targeting iOS, you'll be using GDScript, right? It's one of the first choices that comes up in docs or online discussions when you research which scripting language to use.

Seems so: https://godotengine.org/showcase/

Can UE5 be used to make lightweight games? Is it possible to target wrak hardware if you don't use Nanite or Lumen?

Absolutely

Godot. For 2D (especially mobile) games Defold is a strong contender that can boast billion dollar have releases.

Nothing has, yet. Even with the current announcement cost terms, switching engines mid-development could be more expensive.

For new projects, Unreal Engine does have interesting terms for indies.

Definitely Godot.

IPO's are usually the beginning of the end as far as a company being responsive to its customers and producing quality. From the time an IPO is made, the company is responsive only to its shareholders and that's it. Thanks, Bork and Friedman!

A thought occurred to me a few weeks ago... it was another Hacker News thread, forget which, but someone had mentioned the specific case law which cemented this fact. Maybe it was Ford himself? The details escape me, but afterwards, companies were forced to prioritize shareholders above all else.

But legislators aren't exactly forbidden from creating new types of companies. As ignorant as I am of most things business, there is today more than just the "Inc." and LLC. They've even created various non-profit and charitable corporations that are prohibited, by law, from distributing profits.

This being the case, why not a new type of corporation that was somewhere in the middle? Able to distribute profits (perhaps even with limitations on when they can withhold them, like so many of the big tech companies). Ones where the shareholders still get some (statutorily defined, so that case law can't come in and fuck it up) priority, but that when shareholders are acting only in short term interest, they can be overruled by those in charge of managing it.

I think you're talking about fiduciary responsibility. CEOs can be removed if they're shown to be acting against the interests of the shareholders which is why a lot of them look like ass holes.

> This being the case, why not a new type of corporation that was somewhere in the middle? Able to distribute profits (perhaps even with limitations on when they can withhold them, like so many of the big tech companies). Ones where the shareholders still get some (statutorily defined, so that case law can't come in and fuck it up) priority, but that when shareholders are acting only in short term interest, they can be overruled by those in charge of managing it.

There are of course alternate ways of structuring companies that prioritize the needs of groups of people besides shareholders like worker co-ops. The issue with these is that it can be difficult to raise capital to start or grow these businesses because there's less incentives for investors to give you their money.

> companies were forced to prioritize shareholders above all else

Publicly traded companies have to state what they prioritize. It's as simple as that. If they don't, they must prioritize profit, but not short-term profit.

That rule is usually blown out of proportion, it just can not explain the modern companies behavior.

(But yeah, they must prioritize shareholders. That means that the shareholders are the ones that decide that stated priority, into whatever they want.)

> specific case law which cemented this fact. Maybe it was Ford himself? The details escape me, but afterwards, companies were forced to prioritize shareholders above all else.

I think there was a thread (don't recall if I saw it on HN or reddit). Someone said Dodge brothers (?) sued Ford (?) because Ford was trying to give it's employee raises (?) or reducing their working hours (?).

They're referring to the Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. lawsuit

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Basically Ford wanted to cut shareholders dividends to dramatically increase production and the number of people employed in his plants while at the same time cutting the costs and prices of his cars.

He told his shareholders that the goal was the long term benefit of the company and the value of this strategy to them was not a consideration for the plan.

Shareholders didn't like it and the Dodge brothers, who were among the largest ones, indeed sued him.

The court held that Ford could not lower consumer prices and rise employee salaries. It also upheld the order requiring that directors declare an extra dividend of $19.3 million.

Many people point out at this lawsuit when questions arise as to why corporations squeeze as much value as they can for the shareholders at the expenses of basically everything else.

So Dodge Brothers themselves were shareholders.

So this is more about shareholder rights? They can vote for board members, and then those board members can direct strategy.

It seems like a corporation can do all these things that Ford was planning, it just has to factor in shareholders.

So if shareholders wanted to paint all the plants purple, they have some rights to force that.

Is this correct: It doesn't have to be about profits, it is just about control?

Existing corporations can already do what you describe.

The fiction that a corporation's fiduciary duty to its shareholders means "profits above all else" didn't become a thing until the 1980s, when Reagan's "greed is good" became the driving mantra of capitalism.

A "B" corporation, for example, is just a C corporation that has voluntarily agreed to a set of governance rules.

'Profits above all else' came primarily from three sources: 1) The 'Chicago School' emerging from the University of Chicago economics department, most active from the 1950's to the 1970's, and of which Milton Friedman was the exemplar; 2) The 'Powell Memo' that corporate lobbyist and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell wrote to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971; and 3) The efforts of Robert Bork, who was a militant critic of antitrust regulation and believed that mergers and acquisitions were good because they always lowered prices for consumers, and led to the creation of greater shareholder wealth.

And with OSS alternatives like Godot available, it's getting harder to justify using Unity.

Game consoles.

I see this as an opportunity for Godot. I'm not sure if it's a good opportunity, though.

What about them? Which one do you want? https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...

Godot can't include game console-specific code because its open-source license is incompatible with the various game console API licenses. But that doesn't mean you can't have have your Godot game on a console.

What about C# support on game consoles with Godot?

what about it?

There was a company recently launched by some of the people behind Godot that is specifically aimed at providing game console support in line with what other engines offer.

https://w4games.com/

Yeah, does it cover .NET though?

What do you mean by "cover .NET"?

I don't know, do you cover .NET?

I think Hank covers .NET.

Did not know this, but from the docs [0]: "Lone Wolf Technology [1] offers Switch, PS4 and XBox One porting and publishing of Godot games."

I supposed there could be some way the core team could setup a different group targeting closed source SDKs (even maybe for a fee... as a way to finance the main open source development?). For instance monogame is open source and supports most popular game consoles [2].

0: https://lonewolftechnology.com/

1: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...

2: https://docs.monogame.net/articles/platforms.html

Happy to see the end of Unity as a Linux user. The Linux versions of games were very poorly optimized, and instead of native ports we got buggy, slow, unstable games, for years.

Also Unity games were mod unfriendly, meaning that those games are mostly dead by now.

And I don't know what it was exactly, but Unity games (specifically the RPGs) seemed to lack some sort of gritty realism with character interaction and movement. It just seemed cartoony and missing some sort of UI feedback that made the game feel 'real'. Maybe because of lag because of the terrible engine, I don't know.

Maybe one day a Linux engine remake of Unity will make all of the amazing RPGs playable and moddable again, like Pillars of Eternity 1/2 or Wasteland.

Is unreal any better on linux or do you expect foss platforms like godot to significantly increase in useage?

Fwiw it wasn't very hard to get Unreal Editor to compile on Ubuntu. No issues running example files. I haven't really sunk my teeth in too far yet though, so I guess we'll see.

> Also Unity games were mod unfriendly

That's got nothing to do with Unity. A game being mod friendly is 100% a dev decision.

For an example look at Cities: Skyline, lots of big mods and it's a Unity game.

I have the exact opposite experience, as a gamer. With random games and custom engines, it's a coin toss whether I could make Wine / Proton work. If it was a Unity game, then it would surely work. Unity games also have very active modding communities, for example see Valheim. I'm not sure about mod friendliness, there are a lot of mods, and applying the mods was straightforward, and they integrated with the game experience nicely.

Who cares, apparently "Linux Gaming" is all about running Windows games under Proton these days.

The biggest issue, unfortunely is that all the other engines that offer C# support as the main language, lack the AOT compilation toolchain (including game consoles), the graphical tooling including debugging and profilers, asset store with people living from it, and above all, being fully endorsed by all major game platform owners and VR/AR hardware.

So anyone that wants to replace Unity, despite their missteps, has a long to catch up to.

The .NET ecosystem has recently added "NativeAOT" compilation as a first class feature, and Unity's gall-bladder relationship to Mono (instead of migrating to Dotnet Core, they continue to work off their own Mono fork) has opened up a space where anyone programming C# now has the once-hard-to-reach AOT holy grail for consoles now just behind an XML flag.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...

Native AOT is still WIP, behind .NET Native, and someone has to implement the consoles backend, and runtime support.

Unity’s software is permanently in a WIP prerelease state (and then it usually gets obsoleted in favor of something even less stable). Good luck making a game with their multiplayer package. I have full confidence that better .NET game development stacks (plural!) will emerge. Maybe even ones not based on some ungodly mutated version of Mono from decades ago.

C# has had multiple non-Unity AOT solutions [1] for a while. I worked on multiple shipped C# games for the PS4 and PS Vita that didn't use Unity.

1: BRUTE, Mono AOT, and CoreCLR NativeAOT among others

Yeah, with various levels of tooling experience I would bet.

Good point. The Unity AOT toolchain is really unique and optimized for games in ways that other .NET AOT approaches aren't. The keywords here are IL2CPP and Burst Compiler. Both represent a years of investment into big efforts and aren't replicated easily.

This is just Unity being Unity. I still remember Unity vs Improbable drama years ago when Unity changed the license without prior announcement. [0]

> Heard from inside Unity that the blog post was reviewed for weeks and internal concerns about poor / confusing messaging, Game Pass, etc, were all ignored. It's resignation time for some folks.[1]

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dispute-between-unity-improba...

[1] https://twitter.com/georgebsocial/status/1701678249086992478

Unity's site is all about real-time development, visualizations and things of that nature, not game development. Did they recently rebrand or has it always been this way? Could this have something to do with the perceived downfall? Are they now just targeting a different audience?

They are trying to compete with Unreal. It really is "monkey see, monkey do". They see Unreal develop tech for movies and TV, they buy Weta Digital. They see Unreal advertise tools for visualization, architecture etc., they do the same.

They've been trying hard to expand their userbase beyond games.

And as a result, losing focus on the needs of game developers.

See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344 - "Unity plan pricing and packaging updates"

It's linked in this article as "the latest and final straw".

Related ongoing threads:

Unity plan pricing and packaging updates - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344

The New Godot Development Fund - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481872

Before the popularity of commercial game engines, each game was built bespoke, which had some advantages, but took a lot of time, and made each port a chore. One of the greatest things Unity provided was a relatively easy pipeline to console releases, making ports more about platform quirks than full recoding.

This heavily implies Unity was responsible for the advent of commercial game engines and game engines being licensed to third party developers, which is bullshit. This was done with many game engines long before Unity, such as iD Tech, RenderWare, the Build engine, GoldSrc, the Unreal engine, even the GameMaker Studio engine.

Source, GameBryo, LithTech, ...

Unreal is the best comparison but the original statement isn't entirely bullshit. What Unity did (as does Unreal) is make the game engine more as a platform as the goal in and of itself. That is, wide feature set, mostly stable APIs, incorporating developer feedback, deprecation/evolution paths, etc... whereas other engines like idTech are more like a static library drop that you're expected to then tweak & adjust to your needs. And those other engines were often developed for a specific game, and then sold as more of a "why not?" than being the goal of the development. idtech, for example, was consistently developed very specifically for the id flagship game of the generation, and it's design decisions & tradeoffs reflected that. There's a reason that as widely used as the idTech 3 was at the time, it also was nearly exclusively used with FPS games - the engine wasn't a good fit for other things, and id wasn't really investing in changing that.

It's not unlike the library vs. framework debate of the modern JS world. Unity & Unreal are more frameworks, while most other engines are libraries.

RenderWare is a better comparison than Unreal, since Unreal was developed first as an engine for a flagship game and only later licensed out.

From Wikipedia on RenderWare: It was licensed over 200 times. The scope went towards an integrated middleware with low level APIs for rendering, physics, audio, AI all of which are extensible through plug-ins which also serve the official high-level API. The aim was to reduce the learning curve by also including service and support for licensees. With RenderWare Studio an integrated development environment including a debugger was included.[3] RenderWare themselves claimed a 70 % marketshare across studios that choose an external engine in 2003

> since Unreal was developed first as an engine for a flagship game and only later licensed out.

I was more referring to "modern" Unreal. Like UE4 didn't have any flagship game associated with it, at least not at launch. That transition seems to have happened over the life of UE3 which started life associated with a flagship game & genre, but by the end of it was a lot more diverse (such as Infinity Blade on iOS)

Good point about RenderWare, though

Well, I write one thing: https://godotengine.org/

People believing that in the mobile space Godot can be a replacement to Unity are delusional, in 10 years maybe?

Godot is a "mature" toy engine. There is not a single quality / money maker game that shipped on Godot.

> Godot is a "mature" toy engine.

This does not seem to be related to this:

> There is not a single quality / money maker game that shipped on Godot.

There's some missing context in the middle. I'm curious how one implies the other? I'd be game for chains of logic going from first -> second or vice versa.

I'm specifically curious, what is Godot missing?

Godot is missing the game that shows this engine is a viable alternative to Unity at large.

I mean look at the showcase:

https://godotengine.org/showcase/

It all looks amateur.

All the mobile dev work on Unity so you better have good reasons to change the entire pipeline.

so nobody wants to make a fancy looking game because nobody's made a fancy looking game... hmm...

You don't want to be the first one to make the jump.

Having wandered around a ton of game engines over the years, they all have the "showcase games, none of which really feel polished." I dunno... Godot's showcase has a lot that look quite polished.

I think from a business perspective, I'd be more at ease if they could advertise any profitable games.

Not that games need to be profitable, but there's some value in knowing other people tried and succeeded to use Godot commercially.

Someone should be the first!

Maybe having a game engine that is universal for mobile, console, and PC is the problem. I'm not interested in playing mobile or console games or the type of gameplay they encourage. I'd like a PC game engine for PC games.

Cassette Beasts and Cruelty Squad were both critically acclaimed, with Cassette Beasts also shipping on Xbox and Switch.

This seems like a negatively charged take. Vampire Survivors could have been made in a ton of different engines that are far far less capable that Godot, for example. The engine is not the thing that holds back a product from succeeding.

This is the same as saying "no FAANG company uses X language/platform so X is a toy", it's far too reductive and not actual reality.

As someone who’s played a lot of games… I disagree. These days I specifically avoid Unity games because they always feel janky, and yes it absolutely is the engine.

> yes it absolutely is the engine.

As someone who has used Unity a lot, it really isn't the engine. You're only noticing this is the whole "no good toupees" thing. The thing is, the Unity Assetstore makes it very easy to hack together something that kind of works, but because nothing will quite fit together it'll be a janky mess.

Do you think Rust and Escape From Tarkov are janky? (just off the top of my head)

https://rust.facepunch.com

https://www.escapefromtarkov.com

Yes to both, Tarkov in particular. Didn't that game have totally broken directional audio for over a year at one point?

Tarkov, while a great game, is very janky, and has a cheater problem. I have heard these things attributed to Unity, though I am not familiar enough with the details to say that's absolutely true.

Rust is fine though, in my experience. (and yes I do mean the video game in this context, hahaha)

Tarkov is a bad example. The devs are absolutely FLOGGING the entity count and their maps are huge with lots of little details. People give them crap for doing a bad job but the vision they have for the game would be difficult to pull off no matter the engine. They have been on an old version of Unity for a while and are currently moving to a newer version.

One big argument people have is whether the lighting in game is good or not. They do dynamic lighting, which can definitely cause some voidlike shadows, but people were arguing over whether Unity had tools to help with that or not.

Also, multiplayer is hard, but they have made some (very questionable) decisions like sending all clients the entire map entity list. Hackers abuse this to know where rare items are located and even the stuff other players have found or brought into raid. If I find a GPU or LEDX and put it in my bag, they instantly know and can come kill you to take it. This combined with issues with desync, audio not working correctly, invisible players...I don't think this is a Unity problem as much as it's just a complex game, a pretty small dev team, and they don't want to hire outside of Russia.

I don’t take it to that extreme, there’s great Unity content (walkabout VR mini golf comes to mind), but recently when I really played an Unreal Engine game again for hours (Satisfactory), I was floored by just how much better optimized it was. A similar, arguably simpler, game in the genre (Oxygen Not Included) is Unity and famously terrible on performance. I had just sort of accepted that was how it had to be. It’s not.

Oxygen Not Included is a _significantly_ more complex simulation than Satisfactory is as ONI is doing gas movement & thermal transfer mechanics across a large 2D grid.

Now compare Satisfactory to its actual genre-appropriate competitor, Factorio, and suddenly Unreal looks like a pathic joke. Factorio scales _so_ much better it's absurd, but that's really down to the quality & focus of the simulations being added by the game developer. None of it has anything to do with the engine itself (well, except that Satisfactory is limited by the number of game objects it can place as a result of an Unreal Engine limitation...)

Haven’t played that one much. Thanks for the added color.

Now imagine Factorio in Unity. Do you expect that to be better or worse than factorio on unreal?

I'd expect it to be equivalent since the task the engines are doing is well within both of their respective capabilities.

The engine is not simulating any of the factory logistics, that's all going to be bespoke code by the game dev and so there's no major reason to expect unity or unreal to behave meaningfully different here.

Sure there is: C# is substantially less performant than C++ code.

C# has a pretty good FFI system that can call into C++ code. Unity itself does that, after all, it's not entirely written in C#

Factorio is insanely well optimized. Any overhead is going to be noticeable.

Having played a lot of games isn't really much of a qualification, is it? I'm curious about your claim that Unity games "always feel janky". Which games gave you this impression?

Basically every famous unity game? Like Cities Skyline has always been a complete disaster. So is Kerbal Space Program and in Dyson Sphere Program there are all kind of issues where once your map reaches a certain complexity the game just falls over, and save files bloat to hundreds of megabytes.

What are you referring to with Cities: Skylines? I've never had any issues with it, it's a pretty polished game. The real issues only start cropping up after installing tons of mods on top of it.

And yeah, I feel like you're choosing some specific games while ignoring all the others. Tons of famous Unity games are great. Is Subnautica janky? What about Hollow Knight? Rimworld, Beat Saber, Outer Wilds, Cuphead, both Ori games - the list of major Unity projects can go on for a while, and I wouldn't call any of the above examples janky.

> Is Subnautica janky?

Yes: I could make the crashed burning spaceship pop into and out of existence by walking a couple of metres back and forth across the floating platform I was standing on.

They've never actually gotten the agent simulation to work. Traffic doesn't even use all available lanes.

The Ori games have terrible performance for pre-rendered 2d graphics. That's the exact kind of jank I'm talking about. Tons of microstutters. It's like using a '90s Java GUI app.

Really? I can't say my experience matches that at all. Hell, the developers got both games running on outdated Switch hardware at 60fps, even in handheld mode.

And even then, as far as I know, they're not really simple 2D games, but more of 2.5D. There are 3D background layers and 3D-like lighting and effect calculations, in addition to overall being very visually dense and complex. I certainly can't compare it to fully flat games, like the aforementioned Hollow Knight or Cuphead, etc.

Haven't experienced a single issue playing BattleTech, which is Unity. Based on the sheer number of games built on Unity I'm sure you'll find plenty of games that are janky because they weren't made well. That's not the engine.

For comparison, Unreal games that don't get extra optimization and love during development have engine-standard issues. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is notoriously affected by Unreal load/unload lag spikes, even on console. Every Unreal game will do this to some extent unless that behavior is dealt with since it's just how Unreal handles large texture swaps.

So yes, an engine can have known issues, but isn't it up to the devs to make a product that runs well? Unfortunately for Jedi: Fallen Order they just weren't given time to make it work well, just "good enough" for console, and it's even worse on PC. The sequel has the same issues.

Dave the diver is a successful game made in Godot : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1868140/DAVE_THE_DIVER/

Granted it's not a mobile game but still.

Thank you, I wanted to see quality examples like this. I'd love to find a list of high-quality polished games made in Godot, like this one.

Exactly. This debacle shows why truly open and free software is important.

You beat me to it. I don’t understand the licensing changes unless Roccitiello isn’t aware of both the existence of Godot AND its new C# support.

There will always be someone to say that an open source project can’t replace a mature, proprietary one since it doesn’t match all the features or ecosystem. Historically, this changes really fast once you make the licensing terms bad enough to make a large chunk of your customers and prospective customers leave and take a good risk with said open source project.

Roccitiello was also shortsighted when he was CEO of EA. It’s sad that history repeats itself.

IMO this move doesn't really hurt the hobbyists (200K installs + $200K over last 12 months). And Godot as an OSS still has to feed the hands that make it eventually.

You’re right, but the more hobbyists read these complaints, the more likely they’ll just use Godot as future insurance against Unity’s future quick cash grab schemes. Unity must be really hurting for additional revenue, and given that we’re at the end of cheap leverage, I predict that it will get worse for the people who stay with Unity

The thing that I like the most about Godot is that the binary weighs less than 200 MiB, compared to the several GiBs of Unity, and that you don't need to deal with any account, registration or license BS like you do in Unity.

However, one thing I don't like about Godot is their choice of a dynamically-typed, scripting language as their main programming language, instead of a statically-typed, compiled language which, in my humble opinion, would have been better.

I think it’s possible to interface with other (any?) language.

> However, one thing I don't like about Godot is their choice of a dynamically-typed, scripting language as their main programming language, instead of a statically-typed, compiled language which, in my humble opinion, would have been better.

I have never used Godot, but from https://godotengine.org/features/#script :

> New in 4.0: GDScript offers optional static typing support, boosting your coding efficiency and runtime performance.

and

> Godot is built to be extended, and that means you can choose a programming language not provided by the Godot team itself. Thanks to our community there are many language bindings for popular tools like Rust, Nim, Python, and JavaScript.

> New in 4.0: C++ supports comes officially in the form of GDExtension API, which gives you a way to script and program your game components for maximum performance without having to recompile the engine.

GDScript can be made to use static typing: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/g...

Additionally, C# has first class support and community supported languages include stuff like Nim, Rust, and Typescript: https://github.com/Vivraan/godot-lang-support

Compilation is irrelevant to a game engine scripting language. I think Godot does some magic on their end to make the interpreted nature of GDScript not matter from a performance perspective, but don't quote me on that.

Compilation is quite relevant when targeting mobile and game consoles.

Gdscript is an interpreted language but it is compiled to bytecode when exported which results in large performance increases. You can also improve performance by using static typing. Please continue with the smart ass responses about a tool you clearly don't understand though.

So what is the intelligent response for GDscript targeting platforms where only native AOT is allowed?

I've just started a project with big scope (for me) and after futzing around with lots of different frameworks/engines/languages, I restarted the project again (part of my process with some of my projects) using Godot 4. After some initial confusion, which is largely the fact that I have more of a "terminal" kind of coding experience, or just building everything from scratch and thereby escaping learning a bunch of APIs, I started to realize the "why" of things like nodes and signals.

Now I'm learning a lot and decided to stick with Godot for this project. My restarting phase is over and I'm moving forward now! I've been really enjoying it! The more I use it I really like it.

A funny experience today, in part due to google being "not terrible" these days (as we say in French), was looking up internationalization. The first hit was a youtube video that was in Indonesian with no subtitles. But in two minutes the guy showed the file structure and whatnot and it's super easy to use.

Sometimes (always-ish?) the docs don't provide examples, which I think would be helpful, and sometimes error messages could be different like, instead of "wrong args on function" it could tell you what the right ones are (like Rust), and I don't know how to refactor other than manually which is different when you're used to IntelliJ, but these are minor gripes.

Overall this experience reminds me of what got me into coding with Flash when I was a whippersnapper, when I felt it was really fun. It feels like you can make whatever you can dream of happen.

Then I read about Unity here today and how sell-outy they are acting it reminds me of another reason to continue using open source, or free software like Godot, or Reaper (free-ish) or Blender. We are starting to have really high quality options these days.

I really hope Godot forges foreward and I hope the ethics continue to serve independent devs. And I really hope there's less breaking changes than 3 -> 4, because it makes it kind of tricky to find references online when a lot of syntax changes. But hey I love python and I got into it in early v.3 days when most stuff was v.2 so I just started with the then bleedy version and that's what I'm doing with gdscript also using v.4 and so I guess I may just have good version timing when I start a language, that is if gdscript can become a little bit more backwards compatible at some point. But also, do what must be done. Sometimes things do need to change so I get that, but at a certain point in time there "should" be a baseline compatibility with self (IMHO) in software. Or to me, that is part of what makes software good.

Also if I'm talking to one with such power, can we pretty please have list comprehensions? And also if the gods desire, can we have the format string from python?

  comprehended_list = [v for v in a_list if condition]
  comprehended_dict = {k:v for k,v in a_dict.items()}
  formatted_str = f"typing stuff and then {any_typed_var}"
  # This basically calls the var's __str__() and then __repr__() as backup

Anyway this post is not meant to sound complainy, or begging (for slightly more pythonicism) but more so as funny although I'm not. Badum-Ching, I'll see myself out. Seriously though I think Godot is awesome. Please keep up the good work. Although I don't understand the "why" of being like python and then not. Like why rename .lower() to .to_lower()?

It’s a shame. Hobbyist developers and smaller studios have very little time to sift through all of these complicated pricing situations. The pay-per-installs prevents giving away a semi-successful game for free in donation packages, and adds new admin overhead. I don’t understand the goal… what new revenue stream will magically spring forth from these changes?

Unity is not my favorite engine to work with, and there was a long period of buggy, non performant console ports, but less choice is always worse.

It’s the endless struggle. Make developer tool backed by a corporation. Charge nothing / very little. Venture capital stops flowing. Start charging. Get increasingly expensive. Milk giant companies with stable revenues who don’t think it’s worth switching. Repeat forever.

The solution is only use open source for dev tools, or pay one-time fees.

I believe it when I see it. I would like to see it, but I doubt that a significant enough portion of developers are going to jump ship.

For smaller indie studios, there are definitely better alternatives, but when it comes to the big packages, there's really just Unity and Unreal.

This change really only hits the small studios and especially solo game devs, game conglomerates can probably just go "k, that's another 100k on top of a several million budget, raise the unit price by another $5 and call it a day".

Medium and big devs have much better rates... This actually really hits hardest the solo and tiny devs that make reasonably successful game. 200k revenue is not that much in over a few years or split between couple people.

The 200k is over last 12 months AFAIK, and there is an install wall you have to breakthrough to be eligible.

Many of my favorite games aren’t built on licensed engines.

Yes, xbill and tuxracer are my favorite games too.

Or, just one single example: Tears of the Kingdom.

It’s possible to do but increasingly few companies can spend a few years building their own engine versus paying for something that’s already been proven to work

> For smaller indie studios, there are definitely better alternatives, but when it comes to the big packages, there's really just Unity and Unreal.

Or big studios can just build their own engine. Lots of big studios still do this. Once they run the math on how much licensing will cost them, they realize they can pay several inhouse devs to just make a bespoke engine for the same cost. And then further amortize that NRE cost over several titles.

Will this licensing change hurt big studios in the short run? Unlikely. Could it hurt Unity in the long run once big studios realize they can just build exactly what they want inhouse for the same (or less) cost? Much more likely.

As for small studios: small studios eventually become big studios. If they burn the small studios now, they won't have big studios buying from them in 5-10 years.

The big studios are mostly developing on Unreal, or their own in-house engines. The exception is companies targeting F2P / mobile games, but they're the ones who're going to be impacted by the pricing changes the most.

"mostly", but there are notable examples. Intelligent Systems Fire Emblem Engage, Atlus' Shin Megami Tensei 3 HD port, or Bethesda Classic Doom re-release come to mind for bigger company Unity releases. It is less prominent in AAA, but not every company can afford to build their own RE Engine, and some companies chose Unity over Unreal, which in hindsight is stupid.

Or might be related to them working on the Wii U before, where Unity was officially supported (you even got a free license as a Wii U developer), while Unreal Engine 4 wasn't supported (until it was?). Maybe not a big deal given that there's like ten Wii U games in total, and that Unreal is supported on the Switch (Yoshi's Crafted World and Octopath Traveler come to mind).

The thing is it's still far cheaper than Unreal, so unless Unreal is dying too calling it death doesn't make sense.

Maybe? It seems like Unity is charging the fee per install [0], not per unique user.

So when I install my Steam games on my desktop, my laptop and my Steam Deck that's 3 installs. If I reinstall the OS, that'll be another install - or if I clean up my Steam library and reinstall later, etc.

Maybe this is acceptable if your title has microtransactions because you may get some ongoing revenue stream for that user - but otherwise?

And it's entirely unclear to me how this works with Game Pass, streaming, etc.

[0] - https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280

And then Epic goes "this week's free game" and now it's several million installs and the game studio's bankrupt. Because weaponizing this will happen if given the chance.

Does the studio not have to agree to Epic making their game free?

It's even worse according to the original announcement - it talks about a monthly rate per install.

I think the announcement is using confusing verbiage. From the looks of it it's a monthly fee for installs made that month.

Yeah it feels like a waste but as a business you should be able to calculate the cost of that, to me it still feels lower than the 5% from unreal. It's 1 cent per install after $1 million.

Even if you go crazy and install the game 10 times, that 10cents is less than the 25 cents unreal would charge assuming your game is $5.

With this new pricing model, it's not cheaper than Unreal for indies since the sale price of an indie game is typically much lower, and you're paying a fee per-install instead of a % of your revenue.

As a comparison point Unreal also has another advantage, which is that they waive the unreal revenue cut for sales on Epic Games Store, so that subset of your revenue (if you release there) is yours to keep. Unity can't offer any deal of that kind, all they can offer is discounts if you use stuff like their ads service (which is only appealing to F2P mobile game developers).

AFAIK, UE is completely free until you make your first $1,000,000 revenue? (then a 5% royalty rate beyond that).

These new Unity per-install fees could hit developers who aren't making money - for example F2P games, free demos, very cheap games (e.g. charity bundles), potentially even pirated copies (if Unity intend to track installs via analytics sent from the runtime?)

In reality, most indies fail and won't hit the 100,000 download threshold or the $100k revenue threshold. But it's a new fee to worry about, and one that gives Unity a lot of 'monetization levers' to pull more aggressively further down the road (tweaking the fees/thresholds)

It's also worth considering that Epic could change the UE pricing model significantly if their sole serious competitor starts to fade into irrelevance...

There are also lower limits of revenue and installs your games have to break through before Unity starts charging you $$.

Unity's install fees don't start until you hit 200k installs AND $200k revenue. If you buy the $1800/yr PRO then it doesn't start until $1 million just like UE. There isn't any concern for the hobbyists.

Ah, wasn't obvious whether it was an || or an && with those thresholds. Not so bad in most cases if it's an or.

There were also people who'd read it as a 'per install per month' (e.g. monthly active users) charge, as the pricing table refered to 'Standard monthly rate', which made it look pretty awful...

The bump is huge though! If your per-install fee costs $0.20 but you have 199,999 installs, you owe Unity $0. But the second a new user downloads your game, you suddenly owe Unity $40,000.

If they made the price increase continuous and charged for max(0, #installs - 200,000), then that would be something else, but the way they wrote it implies a bomb waiting to explode if your game gets too successful

> These new Unity per-install fees could hit developers who aren't making money

There's a revenue threshold to meet to pay the fee.

When your game engine's license can bankrupt you just because some game platform owner like Epic decides to put your game on as the freebie-of-the-week, so that you now owe several million installs times 20 cents, you take Unreal over Unity even if it costs more (or you start looking into Godot or the like).

This is how you kill a product.

Unity is cheaper only in certain circumstances. UE5 is free and then you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenues over $1m. This avoids a lot of the issues faced by indie developers with the new pricing model (having to pay for copies you give away, having to pay a flat fee that eats the profit margin of 99p games, needing to pay for a subscription up front etc.)

Unreal is cheaper if you intend to stay within the free threshold of less than $1 million in sales, you can't beat free. But if you have dreams of having a hit with more than $1million then I can't find any scenarios where unreal is cheaper. Let me know if you can think of an example. And very very quickly unreal is more expensive.

For example at $2 million in revenue unreal would cost $50k in royalties. Assuming a game with a price of $1 and 2 million installs unity is $10k in install fees. If your game is priced at $10, that's just $1k in install fee vs the same $50k in fees to unreal.

>Assuming a game with a price of $1 and 2 million installs unity is $10k in install fees.

Assuming Unity Pro ($2000 per seat per year) - first 1000000 installs are free, next 1000000 priced as follows: 0.15 * 100000 + 0.075 * 400000 + 0.03 * 500000 = 60000$ + Unity Pro for each seat.

You're right, I used the $0.01 as basis because I thought the fees were lifetime and you would quickly accrue over the 500k installs mark. But it turns out that it was per-month which makes unity much more expensive than I thought. That's shocking to me and means low earning games with moderate volumes would suffer painfully and pay substantially more than unreal. Damn that sucks.

Unity has internal champions for its features. Once those champions leave the company, that feature languishes and falls apart. Unity buys competing products, and then if the owner of that product leaves the company, it is no longer supported.

If the agreement changes underneath you as you're making the game, you can't budget for it, and trust is completely lost.

I have it on good authority that they just today learned what charity bundles are and how they work.

Imo, the price increase amount is basically irrelevant. Unity's reputation has already been rapidly shifting towards "untrustworthy" over the past few years because of the endless support problems and unfulfilled promises. At this point, I can't imagine pinning years of work on the hope that they won't pull the rug out from under you midway through production.

It feels like they've broken an implicit contract. This probably won't hurt studios pumping out mobile games, but it probably won't help their long term reputation or with the loss of enthusiasm in the community

>I know one such developer who is stuck, who's estimating this new scheme will cost them $100,000/month on a free to play game, where their revenue isn't guaranteed.

We can assume that this would mean running the game at a loss, because the author didn’t say that.

    We can assume that this would mean running the game at a loss,
    because the author didn’t say that.

A better assumption would be that they're likely to clear the $100k/mo, but as they said "not guaranteed" to do so.

I suspect that if the author would have intensified the statement to "they would go out of business with the new scheme" if they were certain to lose money.

> A better assumption would be that they're likely to clear the $100k/mo, but as they said "not guaranteed" to do so.

It’s funny that the vague $100k/mo figure is meant to evoke some sort of response from the reader. The implied assumption seems to be that Unity should not charge anyone this fee because free-to-play exists as an optional business model that a developer can choose to maximize revenue.

Like the boogeyman lurking in the closet is that any indie developer could wake up one day and their game is EVE Online

Tricky, company is losing money it seems. -192M last quarter according to google.

With such an incredibly popular product and rich ecosystem?

I don’t understand…

They went on a company-buying spree over the last few years

Growth of Unity but of questionable benefit to the core product.

They took on 4 billion in debt for their acquisitions so with current interest rates...

Are they fingerprinting machines? Seems like you could hurt a small dev by repeatedly install/uninstall a program.

Wouldn't this model be better?

Open source the engine and IDE, have inhouse teams and contributors working on it, ultimately it becomes the go-to for game dev.

Then, provide best in class cloud services for using Unity, all the game backend stuff, comms, etc.

Wouldn't this model work?

I agree, but wow this is a poorly written article

what was so terrible about it? I thought it was fine when I read it

I'm surprised Apple is so married to Unity as the main creation tool for their Apple Vision / MR stuff

There was a ton of content at WWDC about using SwiftUI for Apple Vision. Not just for 2D apps, but full 3D immersive apps.

Unity has a lot of experience and marketshare in VR/AR.

Something like 85% of VR games/apps are made in Unity.

Only in rare circumstances does a price increase kill something. More often will a company die because they don't increase prices when needed.

Why is every article and discussion about this filled with misinformation? There are thresholds for the per install fee that I'm sure the majority of small indie developers will never hit. The idea that most Unity developers will switch to Unreal is laughable.

> The idea that most Unity developers will switch to Unreal is laughable.

Why?

(I experimented with both, and preferred Unreal's interface, open source code, and ability to use a compiled language, but have never made a game.)

The new prices don't seem that huge.

Yes, that's why it's clever.

The cumulative effect stacks up as they charge for every install & re-install of the app. That's the subtle shift of per install v. per user.

If the user has to reinstall the game due to the bug, the developer will have to cough up the fee.

If they have to reinstall because of hard-drive space hijinks, then the dev coughs up the fee.

If they get a new computer or a new device and install the game again...

See, https://twitter.com/gekido/status/1701673963578130534

It's higher than zero/game_sold, so it's significant.

Not when compared to the website's font

> According our last year numbers, we would owe Unity 109% of our revenue (1M of revenue against 1.09 of Unity Runtime fee), this means, more than we actually earn. And of course I'm not taking into account salaries, taxes, operational costs and marketing.

from https://old.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16hgmqm/unity_want...

> Unity was once heralded as the savior of the video game industry.

I’d expect more from GameDeveloper but I guess those years have long since passed.

About time. What makes a game unique in spirit is its engine.

What an absurdly facile perspective. While it's true that developers like Valve develop games only to take advantage of or exhibit new engine developments and Minecraft's revolutionary voxel engine likewise enabled a game that could not be built otherwise, you seem to be suggesting that eg all UE games throughout the last thirty years are undifferentiated "in spirit" because they share an engine.

What an insult to writers, artists, and game designers! None of them have managed to imbue their works with "unique spirit?"

Minecraft's engine wasn't remotely revolutionary, it was basically a 1:1 riff on an XNA game called Infiniminer that predated it. And its engine wasn't especially good. Minecraft's success is almost entirely due to its accessibility and the fundamental strength of its design - both things that are possible in any game engine. These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the original Java version, because it's really not about the engine.

I am not sure I would even call Minecraft as having a "game engine". An engine is usually generalized so it can be extracted and used for many games.

> And its engine wasn't especially good.

It was good enough. It's non trivial to do, despite appearances.

> These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the original Java version, because it's really not about the engine.

But is the Bedrock version even the majority? It's been out for years and adoption is very slow. If it was not for game consoles it might not have taken off at all. And the main reason is mods. Which are not part of the "engine" as you put it, and were enabled by the technology choice.

We would need to know how many Minecraft installs are on mobile and console, where Java isn't an option. I would expect it's a large % of the overall userbase, but I don't have access to the numbers. Switch and Android both open Minecraft up to a huge number of people who either don't have a PC or can't install Minecraft on it.

Agreed that mods are a big part of the experience and would only really have flourished using technologies like Java (what Notch chose), C# or JavaScript, not C++.

Fine, "Infiniminer's revolutionary voxel engine."

"What an insult to writers, artists, and game designers! None of them have managed to imbue their works with "unique spirit?"

As someone said, to the extent they have managed to do it -- and many have -- it was not because of engines like unity but despite them. I imagine all those people would have been happier if the engineers had made a custom engine for them (and quick).

There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine.

Every minute spent on re-inventing the wheel for the umpteenth time is time lost on actually writing and polishing the actual game. Tools like Unity were a godsent for small teams and solo devs who just wanted to write and publish games.

While libraries like SDL can lighten the burden somewhat, they are still no replacement for solid asset pipelines, visual editors, performance analysing tools, and a mature pipeline for multi-platform packaging and publishing.

> There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine.

This is wrong, there are tons of finished games that use custom engines. For example one of the most recent indie games i bought was Zortch which was made by a single person and used a custom engine.

EDIT: actually here is a page that collects some custom engines, ranging from big studios down to one man efforts, all with released games:

https://gist.github.com/raysan5/909dc6cf33ed40223eb0dfe625c0...

This is meaningless without percentages. How many devs didn't release their games for each game in this list?

This is not meaningless as the message i replied to claimed that developers who write their own game engine do not finish and publish games. That was factually incorrect.

What you are asking for is something completely different and unless humanity had some sort of hivemind to have universal knowledge, we can't really know as people start and abandon projects all the time.

The best we can do is some heavily biased guesses - and mine would be that the abandoned games in engines like Unity, GameMaker, etc where it is trivial to start a new project would be much more than even other engines (let alone custom engines).

Only programmers deal in absolutes.

That's an amazing list. And it hammers your point home. There are plenty of custom engines, it seems.

Huh, I'm not sure the full intent/scope of the list but Bungie shipped a LOT more games with custom engines than just Destiny. Marathon, Myth, Oni, and Halo, to name a few.

It is certainly non-exhaustive, i think it just mentions some examples. REDengine for example was used not only for Witcher 3 but also Witcher 2 and Cyberpunk 2077.

> There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine.

Which is why that silly "Quake" thing never went anywhere.

What was John Carmack thinking? How did he ever imagine "Doom' and "Quake" could ever get released?

That was a very different time. That era of pushing hardware to it's limits is mostly history when it comes to games.

These days, hardware is almost limitless* , the real scarce resource is person-hours of development time.

(*Ok, not limitless, there's still some people doing serious optimisation work on games. But for an average indie/mobile developer, it's more about avoiding fairly well known performance pitfalls than worrying about low-level optimisation or inventing really clever algorithms to gain back some speed)

Maybe a single person can't make a Triple-A game engine. That's not a problem, because a single person can't make anything else needed for a Triple-A game, either.

Photorealistic art assets? Voice acting from name actors? Really crappy hackneyed plots which fall to pieces under the slightest scrutiny? I think Bethesda actually has a patent on that. Lootbox mechanics which are a couple iffy election cycles away from a Senate subcommittee hearing? None of that is coming out of a bedroom developer. Writing a simple engine for a simple indie game with the kinds of art and mechanics a single person or small unfunded team can accomplish, however, is a lot more feasible.

This isn't really a very good example for two reasons

1. The concept of licensable game engines during the development of doom in the early 90s was hardly a common thing, and certainly nothing along the lines of a low barrier, low cost entry like unity used to be

2. Id software is very well known for basically being a tech company more than a game company, and later went on to make a great deal of money licensing out the doom and quake engines to other companies who could then focus on creating games without having to build a bespoke engine

You can appreciate the utility that unity provides without making false claims in the first paragraph.

There are ofc many successful games that were not built on top of a third party engine.

Including one of HN’s darlings Factorio for example.

> There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine.

Probably a true statement in a way that's difficult to verify. Nobody is keeping track of never released games, specially those that didn't really get started because so much work went on the 'engine'.

That said, there are some examples. Like Minecraft and Factorio. An existing engine might not have benefited those titles as much as they would a standard FPS game. They could be probably made using an existing engine, but the benefits might not be that apparent if you have to fight the engine and twist it to do what you want.

Going to larger studios, Elite: Dangerous has its own engine too - could they have used, say, Unreal? Probably, but then they would not be able to use many features, like the Unreal's terrain system, for their planetary landings and such(not without ugly hacks - or making it work like Starfield) and would likely have to code their own. If you are doing that, might as well skip the whole thing.

I'll still agree that in 95% of the cases there's an existing engine that will handle most of a game's use-cases. If one has access to the source code, this figure probably expands significantly.

You sure 'bout that?

> What makes a game unique in spirit is its engine.

This isn’t true about websites and frameworks or sculptures and chisels. There’s no reason why it should be true of games and their engines. It is a poetic statement though.

My opinion is that, in all of these processes, people are the ones that bring the spirit and thus are its source in the final product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com