Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

The unity devs at my last game were constantly providing feedback and fixes to Unity. That’s a lost resource I haven’t seen anyone mention.

> but they'll remain a relevant game engine For a little while. The problem is that Unity is a public company, merged with a malware company, and (currently) headed by somebody with no understanding of their own customers. But nobody looking to make games right now is going to start using Unity. Many indie developers are going to transition off, and the major players who still use it are likely going to find that Unity is going to start squeezing them to keep any semblance of profitability. Maybe big games like Genshin/Cities Skylines/Pokemon Go stick with it, but Unity doesn't survive that transition.

> they'll remain a relevant game engine

I think "loss of trust" is understating it. This is an existential threat for lots of studios, and I can't imagine them placing future bets on the platform.

Revenue share is going to be worse for most indie developers - the .20 install fee is only bad for extremely high volume, low ARPU games. Basically mobile F2P. They deserve a different payment option, but switching everyone to revenue share is would be much worse for a typical Steam, $5+ indie game.

They've gotten commodified. It's going to be like being Oracle in a Postgre/MySQL world. You'll have some big legacy customers who just can't switch. But the market as a whole was primed to pack up and leave anyway. Gamedev has high turnover, and what the new kids are going to gravitate towards is what works immediately for them, which Godot superseded Unity on out-of-the-box experiences a long while back, and now has the tutorial content to accompany it.

What Unity has in its favor is mostly in the Asset Store, but that's shifted towards being a commodity as well.

> There's just no way this change is actually gonna happen.

You under-estimate the degree to which companies can be driven by an exec determined to have their way.

That explanation makes no sense, because their changes were achieving the exact opposite. Genshin has a high ARPU, $0.01 per install will capture basically none of that. (Yes, $0.01 because the Unity fees are regressive, the fewer installs you have the more you have to pay per install. Genshin Impact obviously will fall into the bucket with the lowest cost.)

If the goal were to get a cut of Genshin while treating everyone else as a rounding error, they'd have changed the contract to be a revenue share. Or they would not have made the install fees regressive.

Except that Genshin will not be subject to it. Genshin Impact is made by Mihoyo, a Chinese company. In order to sell Unity licenses to Chinese customers, Unity Technologies created a joint venture called Unity China, and, as is standard Chinese government policy, it must be majority-owned and controlled by Chinese entities. The majority owner of Unity China? Mihoyo.

(On top of that, it makes no sense — Genshin would be a poster child for revshare: a single entity that has made billions off microtransactions and that can be easily audited in one go.)

So Unity is a digital ad company that gives away a game engine, or sells it at a loss, as a way to sell ads targeted based on what they know about the people playing the game. Ad revenue is in decline across the whole industry, so now Unity is looking to get a bigger slice of the pie by displacing AppLovin as the data harvester/ad provider

Aside: I wonder how much user data Unity-based games harvest from mobile devices. This may shed some much-needed light on privacy, advertising and mobile games.

I wish they'd go the way of Epic and make an actual game with their engine. Maybe they could make some extra income if they made anything good.

They've tried a few times and given up each time. It's pretty embarrassing when they've done things like released a fully featured multiplayer FPS demo that doesn't actually work out of the box and has a custom editor tool manager, custom scene loader, and custom networking layer that were never merged into mainline unity. Meanwhile they still have no official stable networking module. The old functional one was sunset and the new ones are still in beta.

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/FPSSample

> This project is based on Unity 2018.3

> NOTE: Due to a bug in Unity 2018.3, you have to take the following step right after the initial import: 1 Search for Firstperson_Projection in the Project search field. Select the 4 shaders, right click and reimport them. 2 If you have script compile errors related to entities, you need to remove and re-install the entities package.

> One day soon we will remove this note and there will be cake.

> Once the editor is ready, open the Project Tools Window by navigating to FPS Sample > Windows > Project tools.

> Keep this window docked as you will use it a lot. From here you can open the levels, build assetbundles and build standalone players.

https://github.com/UnityTechnologies/open-project-1

> Note: As of December 2021, Open Projects and Chop Chop are not in development anymore.

While $340 million is nothing to sneeze at it would only make up 18% of Unity’s revenue if that’s what they’d make off of ads.

Which makes me wonder where the rest of their revenue comes from, but I’m too lazy right now to go through their financial statements to find out.

This is the biggest issue. Unity have clearly signaled that the previous and current user agreements to use their software are useless as they may be retroactively changed at any time.

What company would put their bottom line at risk dealing with these terms?

It's a huge business, but it feels like it's much more of a commodity business.

Changing out the ad network is probably a matter of a fairly simple swap out of highly componentized components. I'm sure devs bounce from network to network fairly quickly chasing better revenue or support experiences.

Changing out a game engine is much heavier plumbing.

From that perspective, Unity might be going for a tail-wags-the-dog approach: making their ad platform stickier by tying it to something sticky, but then you'd expect to see something more direct towards that goal like "we don't allow use of other ad platforms in Unity projects".

They also went for a lot of splash damage on non-mobile scenarios-- ad-supported games don't really exist on the desktop (yes, a modest exception for some casual titles, typically stuff like Facebook-based games)

I don’t disagree but in this day and age, this kind of uninspired management is all most corporations care for.

The days that, say, a company whose main bread and butter is engineering is seeking out an engineer to lead their company are well and well and true behind us.

Nowadays most companies are looking for a “number go up” guy.

It's like the classic startup ideas around "People need to organize their consumption of X, so if we just put in a button allowing them to buy X next to their lists they'll buy it from us!"

Missing the point that most people don't want that.

That article misrepresents what happened with the stock

It's a lot easier, I think, to switch from D&D 5E to Pathfinder 2e than it is to switch from Unity to Unreal/Godot or whatever. The stakes are a lot lower, that's for sure.

To clarify my analogy: D&D == gaming, WotC/OGL == Unity, Pathfinder == Unreal. You can still work in the "gaming" domain, but switch from Unity to Unreal. Similar to how some D&D tabletop studios are switching from OGL to Pathfinder while staying in "D&D" domain.

You're talking about the consumers, and you're 100% right in regards to them. But you seem to be equating D&D fans to the game studios, and I see that as a false equivalency.

Consumers of Unity games == consumers of D&D

Companies based on the OGL == Companies based on Unity license

WotC/Hasbro == Unity

D&D consumers =/= companies based on Unity license

In both cases, a large corporation (WotC/Hasboro, Unity) captured the space with promises that their platform would be free to use in perpetuity. In both cases, smaller companies were built around this garuntee; they naively thought that in perpetuity meant in perpetuity. In both cases, these smaller companies that popped up grew the large corporations to what they are today.

In both cases, the corporation tried to sneakily revoke the older agreements to trick these smaller companies into a terrible deal. In both scenarios, the corporation displayed rent-seeking behavior and proposed changes that would destroy the companies that helped them become what they are today.

> Fans can't just go and become fans of "free and open source D&D"

Not sure what you mean by this, but my friends and I are and always have been fans of "free and open source D&D" because that's literally what D&D has always been. That's why so many were angry with the OGL changes; thats why the OGL changes got dropped. And, once Hasboro tipped their hand, many did transition to free and open source tabletop games that respect their third party creators and consumers alike https://www.polygon.com/23587624/non-dnd-dungeons-dragons-og...

> I guess this could also be a play to make Microsoft interested in buying them out when money crisis hit.

That would be a stupid idea. Companies that are in financial trouble tend to be cheaper to buy, typically a lot cheaper if there’s only one serious buyer candidate.

If they think “when we’re almost broke, we can sell out to Microsoft for X million”, certainly they can get at least the same amount now that they aren’t?

Xbox doesn't provide a game engine, just lower level APIs. Unity is a popular way to get games on Xbox for folks who can't build their own engine. Further, things like HoloLens run Unity as a first class dev environment.

I used to work on both Xbox and HoloLens at Microsoft, but this is all public info.

Yeah I made games in XNA, then Unity (for 10 years), now Godot since yesterday.

Monogame came in to fill in the XNA gap to a certain extent. Works pretty well as long as you're making 2D games. I'm trying to make a 3D game in it right now, and it's...okay, not great.

XNA is only a framework that does some basic low level abstraction. It is no where near a game engine

Eh xna and monogame together are still fine. Celeste was made with it

I hope it happens for real this time. I remember last year's kerfuffle when they merged/aquired Ironsource.

Either way, I want to get in on the early Godot waves while I can.

Sadly I haven't seen a (semi)professional, serious, 3D game made in Godot yet.

What's OpenXR support like in Godot?

"We know the math, but lack the eye."

I do have the eye, but lack the skills in my hand. I can do shiny art, but am so slow compared to an skilled artist. So why should I do their jobs?

Blender has also an asset store btw, but not really comparible (yet). But the blender foundation would be a player I would trust to invest in them. I always stayed away from unity and it seems my gut feeling was right.

There’s quite a few art asset marketplaces though. You’ll find most art is sold across all of them as well as it’s obviously easy to do. The move by Roblox to make their creator store denominated in dollars is likely a move to reduce the friction to attract these sellers there as well.

Its fairly trivial to buy art assets from the Unity asset store and port them to Godot, there are tools to do it automatically. They are just meshes and textures after all.

One of the others is Panda3D. It's not on a lot of people's radars but you can use it with Python and C++. It's pretty code oriented which might not be everyone's cup of tea but I enjoy working with it.

The Unity asset store isn’t limited to Unity (yet…). If you’re ising Unreal or Godot or whatever, there’s no reason you can’t use assets from the Unity store. (With the exception of code assets of course)

And being the best game engine with C# as the main language.

Antitrust laws prohibit anti-competitive practices generally, not just literal monopolies.

Unity itself claims more than 70% of the top mobile games in the market. https://unity.com/solutions/mobile

You can still break anti-trust laws even with a 30% market share.

Lets call it as it is, an oligopoly share.

In this case, it seems that they are wanting to leverage Unity's dominance in mobile gaming as a way to out-compete rivals in the mobile advertising space. Questions for lawyers: Is Unity's share (more than 70% of the top mobile games in the market) large enough to be a monopoly? Is this move to displace rivals in advertising behaving anti-competitively?

Thank you :)

Yeah, I’m sure it works, but not /too/ well.

And using a game engine lets you take those risks because you can iterate and release faster.

Studios will take more risk on a $3m game than a $6m game.

It's more the feeling of the mechanics, game-play. Certain aspects carry through regardless of the genre and how modified the engine has.

A game to me modeled in Unreal engine feels like all others created in Unreal.

The engine is the medium gamedevs work in so it does highly effect the types of games they even think about designing.

For instance the kinds of games made in RPG Maker vs Threejs vs Unity vs Pico-8. So by having more engines we'd get more types of games because the different constraints of those engines would impact the games developers will make.

Hence like I said the engine is the medium.

I'm not having any luck finding this. Do you happen to have a link?

It seems like part of the problem is they're being poorly managed https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/report-square-enix-mi...

I mean, not everything. It was criticized all over but Forspoken was still a 2023 release for Luminous.

On top of that, FF16 is using some custom engine as well. People assume it's a fork of FF14's engine, but nothing official.

There are plenty of free to play games supported by ads that are fun to play. It's also a great funnel for converting a non-paying user into a paying user to disable the ads.

We're well past "shouldn't be", unfortunately. Mobile tried premium games and it didn't work. They became free to play and there's only 3 real ways to monetize: ads, subscriptions (which include battle passes), and MTX.

Gabe Newell is always quoted for saying "piracy is a service issue". But it turns out it's a issue you can eliminate if you keep all your content on a server and the app is just a free, thin client. Mobile found its own way around piracy, and it found new markets even when "core gamers" left.