bruno
@bruno
  • Like, who exactly is this targeted at? Is this about F2P games? Is this about Game Pass?
  • If you have a legacy game with a lot of installs and also a current game that makes money, are you now going to be on the hook infinitely every time someone chooses to reinstall your old game?
  • Are demos counted as 'installs' for purposes of this?
  • If The Gamers get mad at a studio, can they cause them to incur Unity runtime fees by repeatedly reinstalling the game?
  • Is John Riccietello on crack?
  • Should John Riccietello and every last Unity exec be fed to rats?

mcc
@mcc

What I am 100% convinced, reading this announcement (and the wordy-but-explains-surprisingly-little "FAQ") is that Unity specifically believes their "audience" is creators of cookie-cutter, app-store-flooding "free to play"/live-service games, and this announcement is them admitting out loud that they believe this and they're no longer even thinking about any other user. The "free to play" crowd is the only group of developers for whom this change makes sense. And by "makes sense" I don't mean "is a good deal". I mean that's the only lens through which the announcement is coherently understandable at all. These are the only customers who are going to be able to look at the deal and be able to evaluate "is this a good deal, or not" rather than it just being extremely confusing.

For indie/itch devs, the structure's bafflingly punitive. The seeming failure to even consider demo installs, demo web embeds, things like Epic Store giveaways makes the rules impossible to follow. For AAA devs, the price is so bafflingly lowball it's unclear why Unity would even bother. But for "FTP" developers, this is a column in a spreadsheet. FTP is already, to my understanding, based around a calculus of "you have a cost for user acquisition, you have an average expected income per user, when the second number dips under the first you discontinue the game". These are also the devs for whom the flippable-asset/"AI" pack-ins on the new pricing plan become a deal-sweetener (rather than just confusing, or a moral reason to boycott). What Unity's plan does is add a small amount to the user acquisition cell in the spreadsheet, probably just high enough that Unity carefully planned it would not quite be enough to make the FTP devs switch away. The effect on anyone else is just not something Unity even thought about.

I'm really worried what this means for game preservation because it potentially creates an incentive of a type which has never existed before for pure-digital games, to simply stop distributing a game at the end of its "lifetime" instead of giving it away free or massively reducing the cost.

I wonder how well that Godot plugin that claims to be able to import Unity scenes and assets works.


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in reply to @bruno's post:

It's still free to use, but now if you've made 200k in the past 12 months and you've had at least 200k installs in total, ever, then every time your game is installed you owe them some money

so if you've got a successful game and the internet decides they want you ruin you, they can collectively uninstall and re-install the game thousands of times and you'll go bankrupt! 🙂

Unity did a good job of entrenching people in its ecosystem. Godot Engine is FOSS, but switching from one thing to any other thing is going to be a slow process, assuming desired features are at parity.

And if it's an in-dev game, you're probably looking at a year or more of lost time switching. Because learning the new thing and moving stuff that was (hopefully) already working to new thing is gonna break things.

I once heard someone say they thought Unity's interest now was courting government money because they had tapped all the game dev they could, but I guess billing departments can always innovate.

This reminds me of that time Oracle wanted to charge all the developers who brought along a copy of the Java Runtime. In that case, Microsoft just lol'd and spent a couple years building up its own Java Runtime from OpenJDK. And that's why Minecraft used Java 8 for so long before suddenly using the latest stable version of Java. Alas that the solution here is not so easy.

He's the inspiration for the bad guy in NMH3, who also shows up in Travis Strikes Again by physically assaulting the creator of one of the in-universe games and butchering it to make it more marketable. Said game is also literally a sequel to Shadows of the Damned, which John Riccitiello messed with while he was head of EA.

  • Are demos counted as 'installs' for purposes of this?
  • If The Gamers get mad at a studio, can they cause them to incur Unity runtime fees by repeatedly reinstalling the game?

hypotheses, from the perspective of a software developer:

  • this billing will be done off a telemetry tag that executes as close to first launch as possible;
  • the telemetry tag will contain a unique device identifier and a title ID tied to the publisher's Unity ID account;
  • the publisher account associated with the title ID will be billed an install the first time the server sees a new (device identifier, title ID) pair (i.e., Gamers can't "install-bomb" a publisher);
  • the documentation will contain a note that you should use the same title ID for the demo of a game (if any) and the retail release, to avoid being double-billed. someone will miss this and get extremely freaked out by it, and depending on how good their account manager is/whether or not they become a cause celebre they might manage to get the charge reversed.

in reply to @mcc's post:

this is punitive even for F2P; if i have 200,000 downloads, and only $200,000 revenue, i have to pay them 20%. if the downloads go up but the revenue doesn't, because its a F2P game, i have to pay unity more even though I'm not earning anything extra. it's an idiotic decision from top to bottom and is the apparent fever dream of c-suite moneymen.

What if Unity's thought process was that the F2P clients would look at that math, and then take Unity's offer (see "Fee reduction for use of Unity services") of "but if you add OUR ad network to your game, we'll CONSIDER reducing your per-install cost!"

For indie/itch devs, the structure's bafflingly punitive.

Itch Bundles will retroactively be destructive to devs come the full implementation of this in January. I think the 2020 racial justice bundle alone has roughly 800,000 buy ins, which would make any Unity game in that bundle qualify if it's a popular one.

I wonder how well that Godot plugin that claims to be able to import Unity scenes and assets works.

If I'm Godot (or any other competitor) I scrap my plans for the rest of 2023 in favor of the Unity Import pipeline. Plugins, tools, documentation, tutorials, everything.

Yeah. Godot might not do this because they have no funding source other than donations and so their incentive structures are weird. But Epic is very well positioned to do this

Juan Linietsky, one of godot heads isnt very fond of being so confrontational towards unity cuz of how godot operates being open source with sponsor and community donations . It just has a different vibe that doesnt need throwing shade

The is the least incoherent explanation I've heard so far. I'm still not sure it makes sense for Unity the company and will hurt them greatly, and hopefully they will day-0 patch it to be less bonkers, but yes I think you've figured out why they came up with this plan in the first place.

I want to stress at no point did I mean to imply this is a good plan for Unity in either the short or long term. My point is only that it seems to reveal the narrowness of who they view their "customer" as being.

I'm not really sure it'll be bad for unity, if the platform lock-in is strong enough, which it probably is, then it's a small spike in user-acquisition cost. Unfortunate, but probably not world ending. I expect what they're doing is just looking at where the most money is moving in their userbase, and inserting themselves directly into the most convenient revenue stream. AAA doesn't use unity very much. AA does well, but it's a small industry, indie doesn't make money. mobile f2p is huge money and it's overwhelmingly unity powered (for now, anyway).

or rather, i don't think it'll hurt them in particular. they've already hurt themselves by living on the hype train of growth and market capture for years. but eventually you stop growing and people start asking questions. reaping sowing etc etc

I think Unity is about to discover that their developer lock-in is a much more short-term effect than they previously believed.

Even if we're only talking about F2P world, the churn rate there seems to be quite high.

whether or not they believe their audience is F2P game devs, that is definitely their targets. which very well could just mean that Unity sees them as a big untapped source of cash

the new policy mentions that developers may be able to get credits or discounts if they use Unity's monetization platform, Unity's ad services, and so on. that basically screams that they're aiming this dead-on at microtransaction-heavy games

sounds to me like a carrot-and-stick thing. the stick is threatening F2P developers with a flat fee per user, regardless of whether the user pays anything. the carrot is offering discounts if they get into Unity's monetization ecosystem, where Unity can start taking a cut of those transactions directly. either way, Unity gets paid