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Comment by MrGilbert | Hacker News Reader

They also donate 1000 USD each month to each project moving forward.

I still wonder how the discussions at Unity went, thinking that a per-install fee for already released games would be a great idea. Sounds like the result of a compromise.

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These are the kind of decisions that I (almost) can’t imagine happening at a private company. When the developer of a product you use goes public, you can expect with absolute certainty that it will become measurably worse over time. It might not happen quickly, but it will happen.

You changed from private to public, I assume you mean public in both cases or this doesn't make sense.

No, they're saying they can't imagine it happening at a private company, but can once the company has gone public.

MBAs rolling in to milk the cow dry, run it to the ground and sell scraps for profit can happen in private company as well.

The sea-people of our times are the CEO people..

Bronze age civilizations were wiped out by the sea-suite.

It's rarer though. These MBA beancounter types get attracted to public companies like flies to a pile of bull dung because it's far easier to get compensation tied to stock prices/valuation there, and it's easy to direct a stock's price upward (headcount reduction is the most common thing that will send it upwards).

They do it because it succeeds. How many shitty things have we seen normalised and spread because consumers just accepted it and paid up?

Exactly. I agree. I also find it surprising when people talk negatively about certain companies or capitalism in general, but then continue to spend a lot on various products including the companies they criticize. Companies are not making money up (apart from some fraud cases like Enron).

In the '90s, a friend of mine was in the pharma industry. During a training session, the question came up: "Is it possible to market a useless drug as a panacea?" The straightforward answer, according to the trainer, was "Yes—if the projected profits surpass the potential liability costs." All of the outcry was likely anticipated when they made that decision.

Inversely, heard at a very large AdTech company when a room full of engineers was told about then-upcoming GDPR requirements:

"Can't we just pay the fines?"

"No. The fines scale as a percent of revenues."

If the percent is less than the profit margin…

Depends on if the opposite (following GDPR) give more profit margin then this one.

n% of a multibillion dollar company? The shareholders would be out for blood!

The "percentage of global revenue for the whole parent corporation" was the genius bit in GDPR.

Otherwise Facebook could've just founded Privacy Violation Inc and done all the bad shit there. There's just one employee, Frank, and he's paid minimum wage.

Now if, for example, Youtube fucks up the GDPR fines are calculated on the global annual revenue of all of Alphabet Inc.

> All of the outcry was likely anticipated when they made that decision.

You can always miscalculate.

Reminds me of the insurance company dialogue in Fight Club..

I can't fathom the logic. Why not do a slice of revenue like Unreal does, and calibrate the percentage so you make the same amount of money as you would have otherwise made had you done it per-install? Happier customers and identical revenue.

Their USP was that they had no revenue share. Somehow they thought that the current retroactive per-install model would go over better than reneging on that promise.

But how little can you know about your own product and your customers, by suddenly treating an AAA game that is sold for a fixed big price, where a fee per install might make sense or is affordable, the same as all those little games, where many are free to play (add financed, or as a free demo with full version unlockable)?

I mean, how can you not see that? Or was the thinking, screw that market, we are only catering for AAA games now? Even then it makes little sense as the revenue share like Unreal does, would make more money.

It likeley was something along the lines of: "they need us, they will have to find a way to pay us, if they want to continue existing."

It was more a heavy-handed tactic to get small ad-supported game developers to switch to using Unity's ad network rather than their competitors.

Not AAA games - the real target here is mobile games. Those far exceed any profits the AAA industry generates.

Indies are a necessary casualty in the eyes of Unity (or more accurately: they're just not considered).

Unity is the engine behind some of the most popular mobile gacha games. MiHoYo (Genshin/Honkai Impact) uses it for everything, so does Type/Moon (Fate Grand Order). They want a slice of that pie. That's where the real money is. Those games rake in hundreds of millions of dollars every month.

Hence also why the charge is by install and can be waived if you use Unity's adtech offerings.

For most indies prices shouldn’t really go up that much and for some others this is actually a discount (the 200k limit is now per game and not company and you already had to upgrade to pro after that).

For 90-95% if not more of their users the financial aspect is not such a big deal. The way they announced it and planning to implement (retroactively and how do they even track “installs”) is a way bigger issue.

Oh, man.

I worked as a community manager for a free-to-play mobile gaming company in the US about 10+ years ago.

The gacha mechanic just absolutely ruined games for normal, everyday users. You had random moms and grandmas write in with the sweetest messages asking for features or reporting a bug.

For the most part, their feedback and requests went right into the garbage can.

Meanwhile, we had people from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore spending $40K USD per week on in app purchases.

Gacha is effectively gambling and exploiting users' propensities for addictive behavior. We would jokingly call it the "Gotch Ya!" mechanic.

Feature roadmaps, bug fixes and A/B tests were all about "optimizing the funnel" -- i.e., how do we get these whales to spend more money or more parts of the app.

Good god, it was so demoralizing.

It's an attempt to use a small part of their revenue (unity) to coerce ad-based games to use their ad network rather than their competitors.

> slice of revenue like Unreal does,

China (and some other countries). They won’t declare their full revenue and you won’t be able to find it out, it’s expensive to admin and there is hardly any legal recourse anyway.

Also their biggest clients would probably hate rev. share even more than this.

There is one 'good' aspect I can see.

Nearly all worthless trash games on steam, those that need more resources than anything else, those where you easily get stuck, those with generally no gameplay. Shine a very bad light at unity.

A unity splash screen is and always was a sign that the game might won't work on my setup.

Maybe this will drive away all these shitty games. That's definitely mostly just good for the brand, but IMO kinda necessary as the brand stands for shitty games for some.

> Maybe this will drive away all these shitty games

but why?

when the cost scales per install, it shouldn't hit small trashy games harder, should it?

(or am i missing something like large one-time payment?)

It was only after you hit $200,000 in sales for a year.

If it doesn't even help against that issue then I have no theorie either

the ability to make "worthless trash games" is the only reason that the indie industry can exist at all. there are huge communities around sharing small lower-effort projects (which countless well-received games started out as) and gatekeeping an engine to enterprise customers only would be a far far worse decision than what they've already done

besides, the rates only kick in after your profit reaches 200k so it wouldn't do anything

To be fair I am not talking about small indie games with creative gaming aspect.

Go to steam, sort any 3d category by price and be amazing by the amount of reskinned unity shooters, RPGs, whatever.

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