a) the company truly believed people would pay;
b) They believed that the fallout would not be that bad; or
c) Worst case, they did not consider fallout at all and just said raise it.
But they overestimated how locked in their customer base were and how much more resourced game developers were to challenge them on their shenanigans than third party Reddit app developers.
Unity has none of those things. It's a stone cold tool designed to make money for game developers and there are clear alternatives in Unreal and Godot. Now sure there are people who've based their entire career around knowing Unity, but those skills are reasonably transferrable.
They were unfortunately also caught completely unprepared at the time and fell flat on their face when it was time to scale up to accept Reddit's migratory mass. I'm still not sure if I actually have an account or not because the registration process was half broken. Time will tell how prepared Godot was, but at least they released the somewhat more stable 4.1 recently.
It's a conflicting feeling since I'm still pretty bummed out by the api changes, but also recognize that much of the power mods capabilities were fueled by it.
This is the key for Reddit - there are no good alternatives.
Specifically for entertainment. That subreddit about the book series you're reading, the show you're watching, the video game you play, and the sports team you cheer for is hard to replace.
>, I'd say people are leaving Reddit, but unfortunately I'm not sure if any of the community-run alternatives are as popular as Reddit is now (or was before the user exodus).
Well, I'm here on HN :). There is no perfect community driven alternative, but between HN, Tildes, and various Discords I get most of what I wanted. Also keeping an eye in the long term on certain forming sites.
But there are a few niche subjects I use reddit for so it hasn't been a complete migration. Once I find any community talking about mobile gaming scene I should be fully set.
lemmy.world is the instance I chose, and I'm having a fine time there. Things could be a bit more livelier, and I'm sure it'll happen with time.
This was a process that already started before the policy changes around API access though.
I'm not quite sure about that.
A lot of groups who defaulted to Reddit actually got off their ass and set up a Discourse or Discord. I consider Discord a huge step backward, but those who set up Discourse groups are now in a much better place.
So, a lot of the technical people who made Reddit the "go to" place for searching are now gone. As that half-life of the knowledge of those groups kicks in, the usefulness of Reddit is going to slide down.
Still am hoping for a true replacement one day. Keeping eyes on what communities popped up when the next surge inevitably happens. The real issue is grabbing the right power user who will generate a bunch of content to engage with, and that's hard to do.
Fate/Grand Order is one of the most profitable games on the mobile phone market, it literally makes millions and it's written in Unity. As far as I'm aware, Lasengle (the developers) don't actually have a Unity source license so they'd fall under this deal.
The console/desktop market just... was not a consideration.
Small correction: FG/O makes billions. Over 7 billion, in fact. https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/09/11/fate-grand-order-hi...
Western games basically never pierce in Japan, not for lack of trying.
Japanese mobile games extend from their life and media consumption habits
If you look around lately, everybody is desperately scrounging around for more revenue and fewer free tiers/accounts/features/etc. Many of the strategies to do so will falter or fail, as here, but they’re being made all over the place.
Either a wave of greed culture happened to spontaneously wash in, or an investment economy built around perpetual exponential growth and potato-tossing is preparing for a bleak future.
A higher risk-free rate of return from e.g. Government bonds entails higher 'required rate of return' for all other investments in the economy
Suddenly, all companies need to increase their profits by 3-5 percentage points, while their costs are increasing across the board. So they need to increase sales (hard/expensive), reduce costs (might not be possible), or raise prices ('easy' to do, but customers might not accept it)
This generates bad pr with customers becsuse customers just want their (very long standing) issues fixed and instead they announce a billion dollar acquisition-merge with ad tech and a bunch of other new products for different industries. So when the pricing changes hit these already frustrated customers, the backlash was severe. You don't fix the core issues and charge more for the engine you broke in some places?
If we had shareholders happy with steady profits we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. They'd focus on the core product and have much leaner teams that do R&D for maybe 1-2 new products. But that's now how the stock market works. .
I do agree with the sentiment that we have become too accostumed to not paying for certain things. The question is whether I like it enough to pay to keep it around.
Probably money. You don't seem to have considered the alternatives, one of which may have been mass layoffs or even total failure. Asking for more money is never easy, but I don't think that means companies just shouldn't do it.
But yeah, the revenue on everyone else is likely what they were after.
A game engine is fundamentally a year of learning investment on the side of the game dev before employment. For a business a game represents half a decade or more of an investment, and several man-centuries oinvested.
The Unity team severely misunderstood what the liability of being an unstable partner would look like. And did so by trying to extrapolate based on a gamer/redditer not being entertained as long/efficiently as expected.