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The outrage is that this pretty much kills hobbyist game devs in Unity. Unity was great because it allowed small devs who aren't seeking to make a profit to put
by danjoredd 3y ago
The outrage is that this pretty much kills hobbyist game devs in Unity. Unity was great because it allowed small devs who aren't seeking to make a profit to put stuff out there relatively quickly. I used it myself all the time in college. Now imagine a game you made...for free...goes viral and you pass your threshold. Now you owe Unity a bunch of money.
Not every project needs to seek to make money. Sometimes you want to put something out there for the sake of putting something out there without worrying that you are going to need to pay up for it.
While we are at it, I want to shill my personal favorite engine...Godot. I know its fairly well known in the HN scene, but I think that this should be a push to use more free and open-source technology in game dev, rather than relying on a bunch of corporate black boxes that can turn predatory at any minute.
- tomnipotent 3y ago> hobbyist game devs in Unity Is it a hobby if you're making more than $200k in a 12-month period? Most hobbyists will likely be unaffected by this, and those that are will see very small fees less than what Visa charges to process a credit card transaction.
- yesimahuman 3y agoDoesn’t this only kick in if you’ve hit a revenue threshold, which won’t happen for a free game?
- danjoredd 3y agoI must have misread it
- gs17 3y agoCorrect, and it seems to be per game, which is better than before, since it seems to allow Unity Personal for making free/small things in any setting.
- squeaky-clean 3y agoFree games generally have ads. The revenue calculation isn't for sales revenue, it's for all revenue.
- ncr100 3y agoYes, It seems harmful. There are scenarios where the $ number goes negative, for your net, for a modestly successful game .. is negative tens of thousands of dollars. There is no provision against software piracy, or competitors/griefers artificially inflating your install account.
- tomnipotent 3y ago> There are scenarios where the $ number goes negative Show me legitimate scenario where this is true.
- anonymousab 3y agoFreemium games with millions of installs but maybe only a couple hundred k of revenue. The model of "having a bunch of users but only a couple of them pay money" or ad-supported so the ARPU is really low is not uncommon, and certainly more of a likely sweetspot for a smaller game or studio to find themselves in.