2y ago

Unity's self-combustion engine

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Unity's self-combustion engine | This Week in Business

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Finally an article that goes beyond the drama and misinformation. It is not just about the new fee, which realistically is nothing compared to what you would owe epic for the same level of success.
What sucks is the shadiness and the deceptive nature of it all. I am sure the executives felt really clever and thought it would almost fly under the radar After all, they managed to spin this as not-a-royalty after years of boasting that Unity wouldn't have any.
The new changes are essentially this :
You're forced into going with the pro or enterprise license past a certain revenue (which was sort of a thing already).
You're forced into serving Unity ads, or else you get charged a some royalties, which realistically should still be less than what UE charges.
You're forced retroactively into it, as they deleted the old TOS behind the scenes.
They're definitely not being upfront about their intentions, and due to their complete aversion to mentionning the word royalties, they managed to deceptively make up a lie that sounds worst than the actual truth. Even though this is a move targetted at multi-mullion dollars productions, actual students and hobbyist are now worried about being charged per user downloads, which is not happening.
It is sad to see, Unity went from being owned and operated by people who truely cared. I worked there for a number of years and most leaders and employees truely believed they were a force of good in this otherwise shitty world. It is crazy how much the company changed in just a number of years/months. It sucks, and whoever ended up in charge robbed both the employees and the users of something great.
John was a smooth talker, and even as the company was turning corporate and seemingly stepping on old values, he was very good at making sensible arguments and justifying the company transformation. I can't help but feel deceived now. Ultimately I left the company because I disagreed with so many decisions. Virtually my entire backlog was stuff I disagreed with and I just couldn't justify waking up in the morning. We're long past the "Users first" slogan which made Unity so popular with indies.
- You're leaving out what's really the key problem with the new pricing, which is that it is per install. It's an unlikely but very possible scenario that a developer could lose money (inexpensive game with an abnormally high number of reinstalls).
  The pricing incentivizes "live service" or ad-supported games that constantly extract revenue from users rather than "buy once" games.
  
  Also, what's stopping Unity from running bot farms that just install games over and over again to generate revenue for themselves from developers.
  
  Fair enough, this is an atrocious billing system, but I I firmly believe that this is simply a gimmick to get around charging royalties without calling it so. Maybe I am biased, but the people working at Unity are not monsters, and I believe the employee who posted publicly and stated that the people implementing this system made sure that it would be under-reporting installs is speaking the truth. I think there is this misconception that Unity is simply gonna fire an event for every install and charge you directly for each report, but there is no way that this will be this simple. In all likelihood they will use this to keep a list of the popular games, and the actual fee will be based on heuristics like estimated sales and whatever other analytics and ads generated by the game clients. Sure it is a "trust me bro" system, yes it's bad, yes it could be abused, I think it is fair to call it out and ask for a more transparent system, but deep down I just don't believe that Unity is evil and did this to abuse the developers.
  In all likelihood THEY will be the one forced to under charge, and really they're doing this to force you into their ecosystem so it is likely that they will reach out the studios individually before incurring the fees. The whole thing is worded in a way that past a certain level of success, they will charge you royalties unless you play ball with them and serve ads and buy in other services. I would not blame anyone for calling it scummy, but I think it is important to understand their motives, they want to force your hand to use whatever they're selling. The installation fee is just a smoke screen, they have nothing to gain bankrupting studios by making up numbers. Of course, this is just my own take. I think I have a fairly good understanding of how they operate, but I could be wrong.

Unity is mad that mobile game companies acquire millions of users in a few months as they transition from soft launch to global, and then sell their companies for millions - if not billions - of dollars.
They want a cut of that pie, and in true unity fashion, they chose the most inept way of doing that.
If you have developers of games like Cult of the Lamb feeling scared, you did it wrong.
You protect your indies, you protect the people making art with your product. The people who invested 3 million and are making billions in the mobile ads game? That's your target.
How they could be this inept is astounding...
Also, I'll echo the other commenter's statement in saying the article is very well written. They just weren't able to really answer the "why" portion very well. John Riccitiello wasn't wrong when he said this plan wasn't designed to affect 90% of their customers - but it also doesn't mention how that remaining 10% makes more than that 90% combined.
Ffs Unity, get your shit together...
- This is like the dude who sells the pickaxes getting mad at the miners when they find gold. So he tries to incorporate some sort of pay per swing model. Absolutely horrendous idea if you don’t own the entire market on pickaxes.
  
  It's more like the mine owner getting mad at the people who find gold, but it is overall a correct analogy. The issue is that, keeping up with the prior metaphor, there are no other viable gold mines in the area - so the owner has started to ask themselves "why shouldn't I charge more got access to my mine?"
- Companies always do this shit, penny wise, pound foolish.
- They're wet go, John Riccitiello! That's why I recognized that assholes smirk in the thumbnail. He used to be president of EA. No surprise he's brought those scummy tactics over to unity.

An incredibly well-written article.

Magic, thanks for posting this. I've been trying to find a good and clear explanation of that been going on since I started reading about people getting upset with unity during the week.

18 comments