A fresh report into Unity’s hugely-controversial decision to start charging developers when their games are downloaded has thrown fresh light on the situation.
MobileGamer sources say Unity has already offered some studios a 100% fee waiver - if they switch over to Unity’s own LevelPlay ad platform.
The report quotes industry consultants that say this move is an “attempt to destroy” Unity’s main competitior in this field: AppLovin.
Don’t you just love when a company creates a problem just to go and try to sell the solution?
It looks like a protection racket with extra steps. An unpleasant solution presented by the problem creator. Why is this not banned?
Game design 101 since the first smart phone.
IBM sure does suck donkey balls but I really don’t think that particular thing is their fault.
I wasn’t blaming any single entity. And really the first smart phone wouldn’t be accurate either, probably the first iPhone. Not so much brand, but popularity. Once the market became so large, and they started to realize they could get people addicted, regular games were over.
Game devs: “No thanks, we’re waiving the fees by using a different engine.”
I’d imagine that game devs, just like Unity’s shareholders, like predictability in profits. Even if it’s more expensive overall for them to move to Unreal for their next game, it could be worth it to avoid future calamity.
Lol nope. Not even fucking close. You’re gonna die, Unity. You have only yourself to blame.
Screw this. Boycott unity.
The conspiracy theorist in me says Unity planned this whole thing out to get less resistance on this thing they actually wanted to roll out; announce a super shit change that will intentionally outrage everybody, then say “ok, we won’t do it if you agree to use this other shitty model instead”.
Anyways, big shoutout to Godot for existing as an open-source alternative.
That’s not a conspiracy theory that’s like entry level MBA stuff.
Hey remember that time Unity bought IronSource so they could integrate ads more aggressively? Unity stopped being a game engine at some point they’re just an ads company now
There should be a law against offering something for free for a long time, until many other businesses rely on it then make it pay to a point of breaking all those businesses. It’s one thing changing the price of a product that’s customer facing but if you market to other businesses that’s not okay. I guess it’s up to businesses to look in the contract for a clause that states that the product will be free forever or that they need X time warning before making it pay.
Tech companies wouldn’t exist. It’s literally most of their business plans.
Good.
Changing from free to paid is fine. Doing it retroactively is not.
Once a game is in development using their product the terms need to stay the same.
I disagree. If you state that it’s free until X bench make and you make the change after that benchmark it’s fine. If you don’t, then users should be able to seek compensation
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The vast majority of “new” tech companies operate at a loss.
This is a bullshit hypothetical that has no relevance for Unity. Unity is a well established company, that has been very successful after they revised their model to be more Indie friendly. This is a money grab attempt pure and simple. And it’s a money grab that is so bad it might actually kill Unity.
Unity technologies has never made a profit since it was founded. It’s still a company aiming at growth by burning money. Their losses have only increased since they went public.
I’m pretty sure that when Unity was headquartered in Denmark it made a profit. But I may be mistaken, because it was hyped as a danish enterprise success.
When they changed the license to be more Indie friendly a few years back, that too was hyped as a huge success.
But I can see on Wikipedia that Unity Software Inc. has a negative net income of $921 million on revenue of $1.4 billion.
That’s an insane loss, meaning that they basically operate at 50% loss! How or Why they ended up that badly is beyond me. It’s so bad it smells like something is not quite right with those numbers.
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They work with you to make your code more performant
I wasn’t talking about whether they have expenses, If I recall correctly they have about 7000+ employees.
Generally that kind of company only collaborate on huge projects, smaller projects don’t get that level of service, bust are generally referred to a developer forum, where their questions may be answered by in-house personel. This is as I understand it common, but I’m not a pro gaming programmer, although I used to know a few decades ago.
Fun fact, the story now is that it was a Unity employee who made the death threat!?
It was a private company back then so I don’t think there is financial info available. But at least it seems that the reports they filed for IPO indicated they had made loss for a few years prior.
My problem with it is not monetizing; it is the changing of your monetization to affect games that were sold under a different model. If this was just the new TOS, ok fine. It would suck, but it’s their right to make whatever shitty monetization they want. But retroactively inflicting this on games? Shocking the development world with only a few months warning when game development takes years? No, that is not ok.
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I’m pretty sure this is just unequivocally worse. This is how Ads end up in paid games. Unity is speed running their complete collapse as the dominant player in the market.
Elon Musk: speedruns enshittification on Xitter
Unity: “Hold my beer”
That’s worse, you fucking assholes.
The first one was assholish, but this one is outright insulting.
AppLovin? What kind of a stupid name is that? What, are they trying to be an Irish R&B singer?
It was either that or Mohammed
They hired the same marketing firm to come up with a name that McDonalds’ used.
Time to polish off my unreal dev skills, something tells me those jobs about to be hot.
And so continues the downward spiral of the enshitification of video games.
How many times are developers going to put up with being used as sticks for one group of rich assholes to whack a different group of rich assholes with before we start supporting open platforms?
Unity have yet to discover that nothing happens quietly on the internet.
