3 ms·

Choosing installs to collect revenue on is stupid because it isn't tightly correlated to revenue for a game: Demos, bundles, free week-end tryouts on Steam, fr

by loupol 3y ago

Choosing installs to collect revenue on is stupid because it isn't tightly correlated to revenue for a game: Demos, bundles, free week-end tryouts on Steam, free-to-play games and other specific cases all lead to high install counts without necessarily generating the matching sales. It's especially stupid because Unity has good market share on mobile, which is a juicy market but with a fixed price per install, free-to-play and low-priced (0.99$, etc...) games will never choose Unity for new projects, because the percentage of revenue you will lose on those is going to be prohibitive. A less worse metric to collect on would be actual game sales count, but that's still horrible for promotional sale events and low-priced games (assuming fixed cost per sale). The sensible and simpler option would simply be a percentage of revenue past a threshold like Unreal Engine and CryEngine for example. I see two possible outcomes: * They stick with this pricing policy, and cash in on the fact that a lot of game studios are heavily invested in Unity at the moment and will take time to move away to extract a shit-ton of money short term in the meantime. Long-term it will probably crash and burn, but they're fine with it as long as they can milk enough before that. * They wait for the outcry, say they've listened to the community, roll it back and introduce a more sensible royalty system with percentage of revenue, which the community grudgingly accepts since it's less worse than the initial option.

manojlds 3y ago
Third outcome - Microsoft acquires them ( given the impact to Gamepass and C#)
- moron4hire 3y ago
  Unity is so wholly siloed away from the rest of the .NET ecosystem that I doubt Microsoft really cares about Unity regarding its impact on C#. Like, a lot of Unity developers think they know C#. They really don't. Most of the Unity developers I have met know a very, very small subset of C#, and almost nothing of .NET in general. That's not meant to be any shade-throwing at Unity developers. It's just that they are, for most purposes, completely different things. I can't take someone who has been working in Unity for the last 5 years and easily put them on any other kind of .NET project. The same for going the other way. The underlying language commonality is the least of the concerns. A small part of this is how most of the .NET framework isn't exactly great to execute in the middle of a hot update loop, but a much larger part is because of how Unity is built, having reinvented their own wheels for many things that could have been contributions to the larger .NET/Mono/CLR/etc ecosystem.
jdougan 3y ago
Best part is you can bet people who don't like the developer of a game (for whatever reason) will "install bomb" the game.
- maratc 3y ago
  Next step: IBaaS, where you can buy a million install-bombs for a mere $0.1.
- dgb23 3y ago
  This may seem weird for outsiders. But it’s one of the first things that come to mind if you know about that subset of entertainment consumer culture. The target of this kind of hostility is _usually_ mainstream media, but nobody is safe. It’s a weird mix of entitlement and hate that drives this.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- loupol 3y ago
  It does look like there is a lot of potential for abuse, depending on how installs are tracked. If it's some DRM system, pirated copies might or might not be counted, and of course "install bombs" would potentially be possible in theory. Which means a need to find ways to potentially exclude those installs from counting towards the count. This introduces crazy complexity when really you could have simple revenue share which is much more easily auditable.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    I mean, there's going to be a web endpoint that gets hit to count one installation. That is definitely going to remain a secret, so no one could possibly run wget in a loop to say their steam account installed it a million times.
    - salawat 3y ago
      ...How do you propose they'll hide the packet going over the network, that decodes to a GET or POST request? I assure you. That endpoint will not remain secret no matter how hard they try.
wink 3y ago
Also I suppose most people will auto-reinstall everything when they get a new phone via Play, no matter if they will actually continue playing that game. That seems pretty far-fetched for PC users. Either they copy their Steam library (or the standalone install) or not reinstall everything they own.

by loupol 3y ago

manojlds 3y ago

Third outcome - Microsoft acquires them ( given the impact to Gamepass and C#)

moron4hire 3y ago
Unity is so wholly siloed away from the rest of the .NET ecosystem that I doubt Microsoft really cares about Unity regarding its impact on C#. Like, a lot of Unity developers think they know C#. They really don't. Most of the Unity developers I have met know a very, very small subset of C#, and almost nothing of .NET in general. That's not meant to be any shade-throwing at Unity developers. It's just that they are, for most purposes, completely different things. I can't take someone who has been working in Unity for the last 5 years and easily put them on any other kind of .NET project. The same for going the other way. The underlying language commonality is the least of the concerns. A small part of this is how most of the .NET framework isn't exactly great to execute in the middle of a hot update loop, but a much larger part is because of how Unity is built, having reinvented their own wheels for many things that could have been contributions to the larger .NET/Mono/CLR/etc ecosystem.

jdougan 3y ago

Best part is you can bet people who don't like the developer of a game (for whatever reason) will "install bomb" the game.

maratc 3y ago
Next step: IBaaS, where you can buy a million install-bombs for a mere $0.1.
dgb23 3y ago
This may seem weird for outsiders. But it’s one of the first things that come to mind if you know about that subset of entertainment consumer culture. The target of this kind of hostility is _usually_ mainstream media, but nobody is safe. It’s a weird mix of entitlement and hate that drives this.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
loupol 3y ago
It does look like there is a lot of potential for abuse, depending on how installs are tracked. If it's some DRM system, pirated copies might or might not be counted, and of course "install bombs" would potentially be possible in theory. Which means a need to find ways to potentially exclude those installs from counting towards the count. This introduces crazy complexity when really you could have simple revenue share which is much more easily auditable.
- fragmede 3y ago
  I mean, there's going to be a web endpoint that gets hit to count one installation. That is definitely going to remain a secret, so no one could possibly run wget in a loop to say their steam account installed it a million times.
  - salawat 3y ago
    ...How do you propose they'll hide the packet going over the network, that decodes to a GET or POST request? I assure you. That endpoint will not remain secret no matter how hard they try.

wink 3y ago

Also I suppose most people will auto-reinstall everything when they get a new phone via Play, no matter if they will actually continue playing that game. That seems pretty far-fetched for PC users. Either they copy their Steam library (or the standalone install) or not reinstall everything they own.