Hacker News Reader

So?

This isn't the first time unity made drastic changes without warning. Sure, people are upset above the new pricing but they're really also very upset about the rug pull.

Sure many people love free stuff. However, 1) Unity isn't free 2) People understand that businesses need to make money. If Unity instead explained that they're losing money hand over first and need to change things up and here's a bunch of ideas I bet Unity could've landed a run-time fee without all this complaining.

The App stores provide distribution for software. This is network, storage and eyeballs.

Unity doesn’t provide any value for the marginal install that it is charging for.

A better comparison would be to Unreal which charges a royalty after $1M of revenue. Kind of sucks that it is percentage based but seems more sane to tie it to revenue than installs.

Its the install tracking and fees related to non revenue metrics that really has people super mad.

The install tracking will be borderline malware based on Ironsource's reputation. All they needed to do was take a cut of revenue.

Without that, people wouldn't be as mad.

Indeed. As a user who has played Unity games in the past this change makes me want to stay the hell away from games built on Unity in the future. There has been little transparency on how they're tracking installs and what other data they're harvesting while they're at it.

I think the core reason for how intense the outrage is is the installations are completely unpredictable for developers. If Unity had went to a revenue split it simple royalty per sale people would be upset but ultimately it would have died down. It's the unpredictabilty that is really the problem.

> I'm still not fully convinced that Unity's new pricing is unfair.

Maybe. Although the per install stuff is beyond idiotic.

However, starting last week, no one can trust them to not change their minds at any time and retroactively.

>The flat pricing model will disproportionately effect cheap mobile games, which I suspect was on purpose. Even then, I hardly see this as a problem. Just scrolling through the top games on any mobile store, most of it looks like low quality crap produced by large companies that figured out a successful formula for virile games.

The point was for unity to make money off hugely profitable free-to-play games (like falls guys, among us, genshin impact, and pokemon go). Unity is not aiming to make the quality of games go up.

I think we are saying the same thing. In that quote, I am clearly am not claiming that Unity's aim is to increase the quality of games. Their new model is meant to cash in on successful games. Some of them, like the ones you pointed out, are good games that absolutely can afford to pay the royalty. Many mobile games on the other-hand, are terrible and really only profitable because they make slim margins on lots of downloads. I for one, don't really care that those games hurt as a side a effect.

The backlash wasn't against the new pricing but against the absurd metric and the retroactivity of the change. It broke the trust in the company