4 ms·

I don't get it. If someone gives you something that is vital for your product for free, and the license does not guarantee your free usage in perpetuity, and y

by fefe23 3y ago

I don't get it. If someone gives you something that is vital for your product for free, and the license does not guarantee your free usage in perpetuity, and you can't take the source code and maintain things yourself if the vendor changes their mind, ... surely that's on you then? Did you think they didn't need to buy food and pay rent? To me as a complete outsider this move reeks of desperation on their part, not malice. Maybe you should have taken steps to prevent this instead of complaining about it after the fact? Turns out you can't pay people in exposure forever.

moron4hire 3y ago
I quit on Unity several years ago for this sort and many other reasons. But honestly, that isn't a decision a lot of people can make. For me, I just went back to doing web development. For someone in the indie game market, you either develop in Unity or cut yourself out of the employee pool.
gmerc 3y ago
You know, we’re taking about decades here. That said - both Epic and Valve are private and that is probably the better razor. Be extremely vary VC/Public companies because they will come under pressure to slaughter golden geese when the time comes.
oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
Even if you agree with the overall move, surely you recognise that some of the details — charging developers for users installing the same product multiple times, or even pirating it — are flat-out wrong? Not even just wrong from a moral point of view, but from a "this can't possibly work" one too.
- fefe23 3y ago
  Oh don't get me wrong! I don't agree with the overall move. I just think their customers should have seen it coming from a mile away. Capitalists are going to capitalist. Just like I thought the cloud customers should have anticipated that the cheap introductory lure offers would eventually run out and then they'll have to pay real money for the services. I'm a bit daft like that.
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    Some will simply never have considered it — these risks are well-known in tech communities, but less-so in the general public, even including some game developers. Others will have considered it and weighed it up like any other risk. It's possible that a terrorist will destroy your warehouse, but the chances are so low that it's not worth shutting down your business over. You're still entitled to be angry at the terrorist for doing it, though. This isn't even a normal 'capitalists being capitalists' move, this is a 'capitalists going insane and dousing everyone in petrol' one.
adamors 3y ago
Always this comment on these threads. Unity existed for 18 years in a particular capacity now it's being changed. It is not unreasonable to not be prepared for a change like this or to be upset by it. > Did you think they didn't need to buy food and pay rent? Poor multi-billion dollar company Unity Technologies has managed to corner the entire segment of the market in 18 years and now they have to pay for food and rent.
- fefe23 3y ago
  Doesn't matter how big the company is. At some point the investors will want their pound of flesh.
pjc50 3y ago
Unity was not free for all before this, only to a small section of the market. Plenty of the people complaining were already paying. We cannot have an advanced society where everyone lives and works in tiny self-reliant bubbles that are hugely duplicative of effort because they cannot trust others not to rip them off. (Think about it, HN: do you really want a world in which nobody ever dares buy any SaaS or ongoing-license product, making those unsaleable and unstartupable?)
DexesTTP 3y ago
I don't think you understand the policy. Unity isn't doing what Unreal did and asking for a cut of every sales. That would be surprising, that would be impactful, but that would be a manageable amount of money. Unity is asking for a fee on every _install_ of the game, even if it amounts to one single sale of the game. Quoting their FAQ[0]: > 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. That means that if you sell a game for $1, and if a user reinstalls it 6 times over the course of their ownership of the game (changing computers, just uninstalling/reinstalling to free up space every now and then, adding or removing mods, etc...), and you made more than 200.000 sales... You now owe Unity $1.20 for that user. And you only earned $1 from that user. Sure, you can pay Unity 1500/year/developer to rise the threshold to $1 million and lower the fee to $0.15 per install, but that's not a "deal". That's a racket. This is absolutely, completely unsustainable. And not like "this will cost some money to companies" unsustainable, more like "it will be cheaper to hire people to port our game to another engine" unsustainable, as the person handling the business side of Among Us stated yesterday[1]: > This is legit the kind of math I'm doing too. I've learned that Unity's fee won't be retroactive which is delightful, but also Among Us gets enough dls per month that I could just hire two whole people to port AU away from Unity instead of them taxing us for 0 added value. And that's not accounting for business models like bundles or game passes. AGGRO CRAB, the developers behind the upcoming "Another Crab's Treasure" game announced earlier this year and coming out early next year, has stated that they are unsure whether their GamePass release will be sustainable for them[2]: > This means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If only a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business. To be more exact and add some context, as reported by journalist Stephen Tottlio[3], Unity executive Mark Whitten stated that the fee would be sent to Microsoft: > As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft. This will, however, deincentivize Microsoft to publish games made by studios who use Unity because Microsoft would be potentially publishing at a loss, which of course they don't want to do. So, not the exact same impact to developers, but the same difference for them. And of course, that's not accounting for all of the "freemium" models here and there. And I don't mean microtransactions, I mean games that lock part of the content behind a paywall but propose access to most of the game for free. That business model, sustainable so far, is now literally going to end up with Unity asking for more money than you earn a year. (and yeah, this is a real risk for some companies. Anduo Games, the company behind the NSFW game Third Crisis, is still wondering if they're in that exact situation and what they can do about it[5]). This move is just bonkers. Like, it's a business model where just using a game engine means that you can end up owing more money to a company than you earned over the lifetime your game. And this is why people are not happy about this move. [0] https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/ https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packa... [1] https://twitter.com/forte_bass/status/1701696983617180010 https://twitter.com/forte_bass/status/1701696983617180010 [2] https://twitter.com/AggroCrabGames/status/1701691036832309260 https://twitter.com/AggroCrabGames/status/170169103683230926... [3] https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-ma... [4] https://itch.io/post/8572430 https://itch.io/post/8572430 (the link is to a comment and is fully SFW, the game this comment is about isn't)

by fefe23 3y ago

moron4hire 3y ago

I quit on Unity several years ago for this sort and many other reasons. But honestly, that isn't a decision a lot of people can make. For me, I just went back to doing web development. For someone in the indie game market, you either develop in Unity or cut yourself out of the employee pool.

gmerc 3y ago

You know, we’re taking about decades here. That said - both Epic and Valve are private and that is probably the better razor. Be extremely vary VC/Public companies because they will come under pressure to slaughter golden geese when the time comes.

oneeyedpigeon 3y ago

Even if you agree with the overall move, surely you recognise that some of the details — charging developers for users installing the same product multiple times, or even pirating it — are flat-out wrong? Not even just wrong from a moral point of view, but from a "this can't possibly work" one too.

fefe23 3y ago
Oh don't get me wrong! I don't agree with the overall move. I just think their customers should have seen it coming from a mile away. Capitalists are going to capitalist. Just like I thought the cloud customers should have anticipated that the cheap introductory lure offers would eventually run out and then they'll have to pay real money for the services. I'm a bit daft like that.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  Some will simply never have considered it — these risks are well-known in tech communities, but less-so in the general public, even including some game developers. Others will have considered it and weighed it up like any other risk. It's possible that a terrorist will destroy your warehouse, but the chances are so low that it's not worth shutting down your business over. You're still entitled to be angry at the terrorist for doing it, though. This isn't even a normal 'capitalists being capitalists' move, this is a 'capitalists going insane and dousing everyone in petrol' one.

adamors 3y ago

Always this comment on these threads. Unity existed for 18 years in a particular capacity now it's being changed. It is not unreasonable to not be prepared for a change like this or to be upset by it. > Did you think they didn't need to buy food and pay rent? Poor multi-billion dollar company Unity Technologies has managed to corner the entire segment of the market in 18 years and now they have to pay for food and rent.

fefe23 3y ago
Doesn't matter how big the company is. At some point the investors will want their pound of flesh.

pjc50 3y ago

Unity was not free for all before this, only to a small section of the market. Plenty of the people complaining were already paying. We cannot have an advanced society where everyone lives and works in tiny self-reliant bubbles that are hugely duplicative of effort because they cannot trust others not to rip them off. (Think about it, HN: do you really want a world in which nobody ever dares buy any SaaS or ongoing-license product, making those unsaleable and unstartupable?)

DexesTTP 3y ago

I don't think you understand the policy. Unity isn't doing what Unreal did and asking for a cut of every sales. That would be surprising, that would be impactful, but that would be a manageable amount of money. Unity is asking for a fee on every _install_ of the game, even if it amounts to one single sale of the game. Quoting their FAQ[0]: > 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. That means that if you sell a game for $1, and if a user reinstalls it 6 times over the course of their ownership of the game (changing computers, just uninstalling/reinstalling to free up space every now and then, adding or removing mods, etc...), and you made more than 200.000 sales... You now owe Unity $1.20 for that user. And you only earned $1 from that user. Sure, you can pay Unity 1500/year/developer to rise the threshold to $1 million and lower the fee to $0.15 per install, but that's not a "deal". That's a racket. This is absolutely, completely unsustainable. And not like "this will cost some money to companies" unsustainable, more like "it will be cheaper to hire people to port our game to another engine" unsustainable, as the person handling the business side of Among Us stated yesterday[1]: > This is legit the kind of math I'm doing too. I've learned that Unity's fee won't be retroactive which is delightful, but also Among Us gets enough dls per month that I could just hire two whole people to port AU away from Unity instead of them taxing us for 0 added value. And that's not accounting for business models like bundles or game passes. AGGRO CRAB, the developers behind the upcoming "Another Crab's Treasure" game announced earlier this year and coming out early next year, has stated that they are unsure whether their GamePass release will be sustainable for them[2]: > This means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If only a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business. To be more exact and add some context, as reported by journalist Stephen Tottlio[3], Unity executive Mark Whitten stated that the fee would be sent to Microsoft: > As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft. This will, however, deincentivize Microsoft to publish games made by studios who use Unity because Microsoft would be potentially publishing at a loss, which of course they don't want to do. So, not the exact same impact to developers, but the same difference for them. And of course, that's not accounting for all of the "freemium" models here and there. And I don't mean microtransactions, I mean games that lock part of the content behind a paywall but propose access to most of the game for free. That business model, sustainable so far, is now literally going to end up with Unity asking for more money than you earn a year. (and yeah, this is a real risk for some companies. Anduo Games, the company behind the NSFW game Third Crisis, is still wondering if they're in that exact situation and what they can do about it[5]). This move is just bonkers. Like, it's a business model where just using a game engine means that you can end up owing more money to a company than you earned over the lifetime your game. And this is why people are not happy about this move. [0] https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/ https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packa... [1] https://twitter.com/forte_bass/status/1701696983617180010 https://twitter.com/forte_bass/status/1701696983617180010 [2] https://twitter.com/AggroCrabGames/status/1701691036832309260 https://twitter.com/AggroCrabGames/status/170169103683230926... [3] https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-ma... [4] https://itch.io/post/8572430 https://itch.io/post/8572430 (the link is to a comment and is fully SFW, the game this comment is about isn't)