3 ms·

That situation sounds horrible, is that actually a thing? Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place?

by 9dev 3y ago

marcosdumay 3y ago
> Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place? What kind of protest do you expect to see? The change was announced just now.
kevingadd 3y ago
The standard models are a % of revenue (i.e. Unreal Engine - fine for flat advance services like Game Pass), a flat licensing fee (old Unity, old Fmod, etc), or an ongoing fee per-title/per-seat (current Unity, stuff like Wwise). This new fee-per-install model Unity is adopting is relatively rare. Game giveaways like Game Pass and Epic Games Store's free games are generally based on a flat advance. I think PlayStation Plus's free games are also a flat advance, but I can't personally attest to it. There are tables out there of how much money Epic handed specific developers for their games and how many copies were installed that I think leaked during the Apple lawsuit, and in some cases developers earned much less than Unity's 20 cents per copy due to the number of installs. Ideally this flat advance model would have been widely protested by the industry, but there is a huge audience of struggling indie game devs for whom a flat advance is a desperately needed lifeline, so it's been successful.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place? they always have and always will. But revshare and ESPECIALLY residuals (tangential to this topic) are costs that the elite will fight to the grave to not give out. Indie devs are simply taking that gamble and unironically working for exposure. profits are razor thin in games and the market is fickle, so it's much preferable to have a guaranteed minium than to negotiation revenue/profit shares. if they become "too successful" they simply need to use that newfound exposure to negotiate a better deal next time.
- ffhhttt 3y ago
  I’m sure Unity would prefer a revshare it’s just that it would be much harder and more expensive for them to enforce it (and even impossible at all outside of the developed countries and especially in China). And yeah, of course there would be much bigger backlash for their largest clients who probably prefer this new model. Which IMHO doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable if you’re on Pro (which you current have to be anyway if your company has over 200k revenue)
ffhhttt 3y ago
> is that actually a thing? Probably not, I’m not a fan of these changes but most people seem to really over exaggerating because they don’t understand how the new (very convoluted) pricing model works. The $.2 install fee (only for users living in “rich” countries) seems to be there just to incentive developers to upgrade their subscriptions to Pro which offers much higher revenue/install limits and lower fees above them.

That situation sounds horrible, is that actually a thing? Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place?

by 9dev 3y ago

That situation sounds horrible, is that actually a thing? Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place?

marcosdumay 3y ago

> Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place? What kind of protest do you expect to see? The change was announced just now.

kevingadd 3y ago

The standard models are a % of revenue (i.e. Unreal Engine - fine for flat advance services like Game Pass), a flat licensing fee (old Unity, old Fmod, etc), or an ongoing fee per-title/per-seat (current Unity, stuff like Wwise). This new fee-per-install model Unity is adopting is relatively rare. Game giveaways like Game Pass and Epic Games Store's free games are generally based on a flat advance. I think PlayStation Plus's free games are also a flat advance, but I can't personally attest to it. There are tables out there of how much money Epic handed specific developers for their games and how many copies were installed that I think leaked during the Apple lawsuit, and in some cases developers earned much less than Unity's 20 cents per copy due to the number of installs. Ideally this flat advance model would have been widely protested by the industry, but there is a huge audience of struggling indie game devs for whom a flat advance is a desperately needed lifeline, so it's been successful.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

>Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place? they always have and always will. But revshare and ESPECIALLY residuals (tangential to this topic) are costs that the elite will fight to the grave to not give out. Indie devs are simply taking that gamble and unironically working for exposure. profits are razor thin in games and the market is fickle, so it's much preferable to have a guaranteed minium than to negotiation revenue/profit shares. if they become "too successful" they simply need to use that newfound exposure to negotiate a better deal next time.

ffhhttt 3y ago
I’m sure Unity would prefer a revshare it’s just that it would be much harder and more expensive for them to enforce it (and even impossible at all outside of the developed countries and especially in China). And yeah, of course there would be much bigger backlash for their largest clients who probably prefer this new model. Which IMHO doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable if you’re on Pro (which you current have to be anyway if your company has over 200k revenue)

ffhhttt 3y ago

> is that actually a thing? Probably not, I’m not a fan of these changes but most people seem to really over exaggerating because they don’t understand how the new (very convoluted) pricing model works. The $.2 install fee (only for users living in “rich” countries) seems to be there just to incentive developers to upgrade their subscriptions to Pro which offers much higher revenue/install limits and lower fees above them.