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.
Comment on Unity deleted these terms, don't let them get out
kicksystem@lemmy.world 9 months agoJesus 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.
sfgifz@lemmy.world 9 months ago
pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works 9 months 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 9 months ago
Yeah, maybe. It is a bit of honeydick.
ratskrad@lemmy.world 9 months 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 9 months 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 9 months ago
These chatGPT walls of text are getting out of hand.
kicksystem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Didn’t use ChatGPT, but you’re the first person to accuse me of that. Funny times :)
artic@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
Corpo shills nyeed learn to shutup
themajesticdodo@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Did you bring your clown makeup with you from reddit or did you just buy a new set?
kicksystem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Haha, well you are the joker, so maybe I can borrow yours?
themajesticdodo@lemmy.world 9 months 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 9 months ago
Dammmn dude why are you so lame?
wahming@monyet.cc 9 months 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 9 months 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 9 months ago
It’s NOT based on downloads. Where are you even getting your info from?
kicksystem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
“We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.” - blog.unity.com/…/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat…
Eiim@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months 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.
kicksystem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Well, I am just going by what their own official statement is:
“We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed.”
blog.unity.com/…/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat…
But the link that you sent indeed sounds a lot more vague. It’d be a major mistake on their part if they are not going to be transparant on how they are going to do the counting.
FLX@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s not proportional at all wtf, get your facts straigth
kicksystem@lemmy.world 9 months 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 9 months ago
Your comment is total nonsense, there is nothing to prove.
Would you pay 20ct every time you open a pdf ? Why not then ?
kicksystem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Would you pay 20ct every time you open a pdf ? Why not then ?
No, but I would pay for a PDF reader based on the number of times I install this PDF reader if for some reason this PDF reader offers features that I can’t get from some open-source tool. Especially if that means I get support, bug fixes, support for different devices and the like, which Unity does. This is not an uncommon model at all.
theterrasque@infosec.pub 9 months 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 9 months ago
If it’s a free game then you shouldn’t be using a commercial engine. If you do use a commercial engine in a commercial setting then you need to make sure that you make a profit after you’ve payed your costs. This is not different from any other type of commercial enterprise.
If you are going to go with an ad based model for your game, like you suggest, then you should be able to make a profit if enough people use your game, which should be somewhat proportional to the amount of installs. People aren’t just going to install your product and never use it. What could happen of course is that they use it once or twice and determine it’s total crap and then don’t spend any time actually playing it, so not enough ads can be displayed. In that case you should indeed delist the game, because it isn’t viable. This should be easy to track based on the number of downloads and ads revenue. But of course if your game is crap then you can also expect people to not download it in the first place, so it isn’t a very realistic scenario. If your game is slowly becoming more popular, like you suggest, then you should be able to make enough of of it to pay your dues.
Perhaps what could happen is that you manage to stir up an incredible amount of hype around your game. A ton of people download it and then simultaneously determine it is crap without listening to game reviews and such. However, in this case I can hardly imagine that the business model was ad based revenue when you’ve got the marketing budget to stir up such a hype.
Nevertheless I wouldn’t say it is completely out of the realm of possibility to get cornered by Unity’s business model, or any third party business model as of fact, but it’s unlikely if you think it through. And that is actually part of the risk of entrepreneurship that you need manage. A friend of mine also had a clothing store and bought a bunch of clothes that in the end she couldn’t sell and needed to default on her payments. It happens. The clothing store industry is much harder than the game industry: you need to buy everything up front and then hope that you’re going to be able to sell it.
Unless you’re dealing with a liberal open-source license, you can’t just expect to go out into the world and use somebody else’s work without having to deal with these types of issues. And that is just fair, if you’d ask me.
kicksystem@lemmy.world 9 months 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 9 months 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 9 months 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 9 months 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?
kicksystem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Unity isn’t only a tool. Unity is also an ingredient. It’s shipped with the product and is an integral part of what makes the product work. Most OEM deal out there also depend on usage.
You want to ship a product with Neo4j (or any other software developer) under the hood? Go make an OEM deal with Neo4j and I’ll bet you it is going to be some deal that will be proportional to the amount of usage your product is going to get. Which is only fair of course.
Your race car driver analogy makes no sense by the way. A developer makes a product and that product is shipped many times to a lot of people. You could think of Unity as a pizza bottom and a pizza oven. The developer puts stuff on top, bakes it in the oven and then it is shipped to people. The developer has to pay for the pizza bottom and the cost of the tool will be discounted. The developer charges a price such that after subtracting the cost of the pizza bottom there will be a nice profit. Profit and cost will be proportional to the amount of pizza’s eaten.
Prizim@lemmy.world 9 months 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%
MBM@lemmings.world 9 months 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 9 months 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 9 months ago
Tracking revenue of thousands of developers over the whole world is impossible. Maybe put yourself in Unity’s position?
Theharpyeagle@lemmy.world 9 months ago
And tracking the installation of games across millions of machines is more reasonable?
kicksystem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s based on downloads. It is easy to track those.
“We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.” blog.unity.com/…/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat…
MBM@lemmings.world 9 months ago
It’s what Unreal does:
kicksystem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Once you hit a $1m target, they’ll be wanting to see your books yeah. That is a much smaller number and doable. Believe me, tracking revenue of other companies is a pain in the ass though. I’ve done a number of OEM deals and revenue based OEM deals are much more complicated than usage based OEM deals.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I was wondering how they would do it with tiny companies using excel spreadsheets to track… but if it’s only 1M+ companies they have to have decent books, so that makes it easy.