Jesus dude chill it. Somehow hating Unity is popular here, and don’t get me wrong I am also here because I hated the corporate asshole named spez, but this move Unity wants to make isn’t super unreasonable. They want to charge proportionally to the amount of usage. If they’d done this right out of the gate, nobody would have thought that is unreasonable. Unity is a great engine, they should be able to charge for it.
Comment on Unity deleted these terms, don't let them get out
kryostar@lemmy.world 1 year ago
So basically unity wants money even for games made on their engine before this shitty update. All older versions of games with older versions of unity are eligible to be monetized. Forget ethical, how is that even legal?
Unity, I hope you die. Sorry to all the Devs who put their soul into developing it.
kicksystem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
MBM@lemmings.world 1 year ago
Taking a fixed percentage of the profits/revenue is reasonable. Taking a fixed amount of money for every install is insane.
letsgocrazy@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Taking profits means that:
– They know the developer is making profits There are actually profits It can all be traced and taxed fairly and legally Non-profit developers aren’t punished
Doing it based installs is none of that.
It’s insane. It’s a stupid idea from an idiot who probably ignored everyone who told him it was a bad idea.
If I was a shareholder of Unity I would want this moron investigated for selling shares and then tanking the company.
No doubt they are going to buy shares at rhus lower price before they announce a total reversal or rhus plan.
kicksystem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Tracking revenue of thousands of developers over the whole world is impossible. Maybe put yourself in Unity’s position?
Theharpyeagle@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And tracking the installation of games across millions of machines is more reasonable?
MBM@lemmings.world 1 year ago
Once you’ve begun collecting money for your product, you’ll need to track gross revenue and pay a 5% royalty on that amount after $1 million USD in gross revenue is earned.
sfgifz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If they’d done this right out of the gate, nobody would have thought that is unreasonable.
More realistically, they’d never have chosen devs to become as popular as they are today. Something else would’ve taken its place, simple.
pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
If they’d done this right out of the gate, they would not have nearly the market share they have today, let alone all of the free advertising in the form of guides, courses, Q&As, and general expertise.
It’s a classic honeydick.
kicksystem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah, maybe. It is a bit of honeydick.
ratskrad@lemmy.world 1 year ago
But why do they want to charge based on usage? Their users are already subscribed. It’s not like they run cloud services or anything. There is literally no cost to them except for the self imposed analytics stuff.
kicksystem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Good question.
Let me ask you the reverse with a hypothetical: imagine that you spend a great deal of time building a library for generating realistic engine sounds, like this guy. Now you make an OEM deal with Sony and your work goes into the next version of Gran Turismo. Now let’s say everybody loves the new version, because of the great engine sound and a number of other awesome features. Would you want your work to be rewarded by how much value Sony extracted from it? You would right? (otherwise tell me why not and we’ll have that discussion, but I can hardly imagine you’ll say no to this)
Then put yourself in Unity’s position. It’s not one company you’ve got to track, but perhaps hundreds of thousands. New ones popping up, old ones dying without a trace. You want to be rewarded for your continuous effort based on how much value people are getting from your product. This is only reasonable, right? Now you’ve got to come up with a way to do that. So one way to do that would be to track the revenue of each developer and charge a percentage. This is mission impossible. Perhaps you can do that with the larger companies, who are less likely to forge data and easy to get hold of, but you’ve got thousands on thousands of developers that are making peanuts or making just enough that are one man shops. There is also no reliable way to get accurate revenue data from developers across the world. You can’t just ask the tax office of the Philippines or Norway for income statements of random developers. So instead they use a heuristic, which is very common by the way. The heuristic goes like this: revenue ∝ usage ∝ installs ∝ downloads (∝ means “is proportional to”, but in this context I think it would be better to say: “correlates highly with”) .
Now if you proof to me that downloads does not positively or significantly correlate with revenue made then I’ll agree with all the people who feel they need to hate on Unity right now, but the way I see it this isn’t an unreasonable business model.
One last thing. It is an oversimplification to say that Unity doesn’t have any cost to usage. Sure once the binaries have been built, there are no costs to Unity them being copied across the globe, but more usage means more demands on the developer, which translates to demands on Unity to make sure their engine works well on all platforms and devices and is able to keep up with the queries and demands of the developer. Imagine just having to QA the Unity engine; it’s gotta be an enormous undertaking. They’ve got to offer active support on a number of versions (n) of their platform for a number of platforms (m) and supported devices/hardware (o). That makes (n^m)^o combinations that could cause issues and then still that is an oversimplification. A game that is used a lot is going to hit a lot of these combinations and that’ll certainly translate into a lot more work for Unity to ship updates. So I would even argue that usage ∝ costs.
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 1 year ago
These chatGPT walls of text are getting out of hand.
artic@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Corpo shills nyeed learn to shutup
themajesticdodo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Did you bring your clown makeup with you from reddit or did you just buy a new set?
kicksystem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Haha, well you are the joker, so maybe I can borrow yours?
themajesticdodo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Haha, well you are the joker, so maybe I can borrow yours?
It’s OK. You can take your time crafting a reply. Don’t feel you have to go with the first one you think of.
Saltblue@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Dammmn dude why are you so lame?
wahming@monyet.cc 1 year ago
If they’d done this right out of the gate, nobody would have thought that is unreasonable.
That’s ridiculous. There’s no technical way they can accurately detect repeat installs on the same device, or pirated copies. Which means devs will pay out the nose for no reason. The outrage exists for a reason
kicksystem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s based on downloads. Of course those are easy to track. Outrage exists because people hate change. I get that, but it still isnt unreasonable.
wahming@monyet.cc 1 year ago
It’s NOT based on downloads. Where are you even getting your info from?
Eiim@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Nobody here is arguing from direct information, just implications of vague statements. Here’s where they spell it out in more detail:
…unity.com/…/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-upd…
Q: How are you going to collect installs? A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project.
Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game, will that count as multiple installs? A: We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs. (Updated, Sep 14)
Note the update there. They completely walked back their previous answer:
Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.
Which has lead to a lot of confusion. It seems like their “proprietary data model” is focused on another point, which is preventing install spamming. Or maybe it’s also about reinstalls, even though they “don’t receive end-player information” so that was impossible a few days ago.
FLX@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s not proportional at all wtf, get your facts straigth
kicksystem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Proof me wrong then. Downloads/installs is not proportional to usage? Sounds like a nice null hypothesis that is easily disproven with a bit of data.
FLX@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Your comment is total nonsense, there is nothing to prove.
Would you pay 20ct every time you open a pdf ? Why not then ?
theterrasque@infosec.pub 1 year ago
Let’s say you have a free game, that’s pretty popular. You offer some cosmetic stuff players can buy, and/or a few ads. The game gets really popular, and you exceed $200000 income. You also have millions of downloads of the game.
In that case you could end up owing unity money, because a download/install is not the same as a sale.
Now imagine you published this game a month ago and it’s popularity is climbing, and your income is slowly climbing too.
Do you gamble that the game will be profitable, or do you delist the game because you risk bankrupting yourself if you don’t?
kicksystem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You want to run a pearson correlation line throught the number of downloads and the amount of usage. You’ll find P approaches 1. I don’t have the data, but if you do I’m willing to take the bet.
kryostar@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Imagine you buy a licence for Microsoft Office, you make a word document, share it with friends/colleagues and you are charged a penny for every single time someone downloads that document on their device.
kicksystem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s only fair if I am making three pennies for every single time someone downloads that document. Microsoft Office made it possible and so the deserve a share.
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Sounds like you’re describing every newspaper, blogger, and scientist (who release scientific papers).
Does a race car driver who wins a race have to pay some extra money back to the auto manufacturer of his car?
Your logic is flawed. People buy a tool, and then what they do with the tool after that is up to them, and not the person who made the tool. Unless you want to go back and rewrite the gun laws?
Prizim@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Somehow the worst take ive seen in a long time. And to add to the convo they should have just did what unreal does with the 5%
calavera@lemm.ee 1 year ago
That’s what I thought also. I mean they could legally also add that for every instalation of an old game the developer would have to send nude pics to Unity CEO?
kryostar@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yup. Totally normal. It is part of the user agreement. We just aren’t aware of it yet.