Comment on Unity deleted these terms, don't let them get out

• 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.

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  • 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 ?

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    • 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.

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      • FLX@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I failed my question.

        Would you pay 20ct every time a user open a pdf you made ?

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  • 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?

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    • 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.

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      • theterrasque@infosec.pub ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        A few points:

        • If your revenue is above $100.000 the last 12 months, you need a professional license. Which you pay for. The “free for smaller games” is what allowed Unity to gain it’s current foothold in the market.
        • It takes years to develop a game, and Unity announced this pretty recently (September 12). If you had a plan that would be profitable with ads or microtransactions and you and your team spent years making it, you’d suddenly might not have a business model any more. And for games already released, it might not be profitable keeping it up any more. Unless you have a way to predict the future, that point is completely moot. If you started developing a new game the last … 5 days, sure. But then you’d probably pick a different engine that doesn’t have such a requirement.

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• 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.

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