They should honestly just move their engine anyway. Unity has played their hand, and showed they are willing to make changes to their pricing retroactively.
Yep, they might roll back the changes this time but they’ve shown where they want to be and now we know. They’ll work their way slowly towards it instead of a sudden change now and it will be less noticeable and harder to fight legally when they do that
The exact same thing was said about Reddit execs like Huffman. They never cared enough to compromise. We’ll see if the Unity execs are similarly terrible people, whose greed will destroy the company. Seems like the trend these days.
I think most developers can see the writing in the wall there, but switching mid-way through a project will be costly and time consuming. If the changes were fully rolled back, I would still bet many would finish what they working on and then switch for their next game.
Problem is that if your current unity game is successful this year, and then they reimplement the retroactive charge next year, you’re still screwed. If you can afford it then it’s best to change now in order to avoid that mess that might mean you have to delist your game
I’m not sure it’s legal to implement it retroactively. I’d be very curious to get an attorney’s perspective - seems a lot like trying to unilaterally change a contract after both parties have signed. But I have a hard time imagining anyone being willing to develop using Unity going forward.
I feel like any company with a legal department would surely check with them before announcing something like this. But maybe unity is so poorly ran they don’t have a legal team or didn’t check idk
I think you overestimate how much they care about doing illegal things. They will try it, and if someone can prove it’s illegal, they’ll pay a minor fine and stop, maybe. Otherwise they’ll get away with it. That’s how corps look at laws.
I mean you’d think so, but look at how often companies get into lawsuits for clearly illegal shit. Plenty of places will still try to enforce arbitration/NDA clauses that have no actual legal basis or consequence.
There’s no way this is legal unless it’s already in a contract – and even then, it might still be illegal. The notion of charging people more money because you’ve raised your prices after they’ve already bought something just breaks economics completely. You’d be able to sell a bunch of a product for cheap, and then later say sike and charge everyone a lot more.
I’m sure companies would love to do that, but no company exists in isolation. Every single company is buying something from another company to sell their product. If they could do this to their buyers, then their suppliers could do it to them. It would probably end up cancelling any gains you’d get.
I’m guessing this was a move their executives made without any consultation with legal, because it’s the kind of idiotic move only they could think of.
I have a feeling a lot of the engine devs from unity are seeing the writing on the wall and looking for places to jump to. Betting they have a brain drain soon
I bet they will do so for their next game but reimplementing a entire game is FAR easier said than done, something like that could very well bankrupt a smaller studio!
I mean it’s easy to reimplement entire games if you’ve built it modularly. Just swap your core game logic to run on another library and the game works the same it did before.
Edit: 'course, exceptions exist like if you wrote everything using their proprietary coding language, instead of using something universal.
Edit 2: It MAY still be possible that a translation/compiler exists that’ll run as a plugin in a proprietary engine, and converts it into something universal.
Game Dev isnt just code. Remaking a project from scratch is a massive undertaking. Porting the code could be difficult too especially if relying on core unity libraries.
It also depends on how many engine unique features you used, and what optimizations you applied. It’s certainly possible, but doing it without changing any game logic will require very complicated translation layers which will likely cause performance issues. It might very well be easier to treat it as a porting and refactoring project. You might not even realize which behaviors are unique to each engine if you don’t regularly develop in multiple engines.
This is true, and I vouch for gamedevs to first test other engines to see the differences.
Calculating for the future is extremely important in pretty much everything.
Also I wouldn’t say there would be performance issues, unless you somehow completely screw up coding and compiling said code.
Projects should work on top of a bottom layer, or translation layer as it’s sometimes called; game logic calls for functions from there, instead of directly from the engine. This is also important for code security.
_move_entity might be calling the proprietary unity_move_object with a different reg stack, but when compiled the performance should be +/- 0.
Not untrue, but it helps to adapt your future projects if done in such a way.
It does require more expertise, and it takes more time, thus it’d have to be the first thing done for the project, not something you do after everything’s done already.
Technically you’re not wrong. The work is done, the logic already exists.
But systems like Unity aren’t like other code where you can rip one section out and still have 80% of a working codebase. Game engines are as fundamental to most of their game code as the language it’s written in. It’s not like you can just drop things into unreal or godot, connect a few interfaces and call it good. You still have to write the whole thing from the ground up.
As I said, it depends on how it’s built. And how proprietqry the engine is.
Unity from what I know supports universal code/mesh/texture formats, but if the devs opted for the “easier to use” proprietary systems- well, that’s a problem.
Now what I don’t know is how easy are scenes to export in Unity. They’re probably built with Blender or something else though in most cases, unless Unity has drastically changed.
Assets are safe, but they often need to be re-rigged or re-formatted. It’s still a non-trivial task though. Levels will need to be rebuilt, open worlds have to be started almost from scratch, and a lot of other things I can’t think of off the top of my head.
The real problem is underlying systems. Unity often handles networking, render engines, game logic and most other things. The reason Unity was so popular was because it was easy to use (and free). Game code will need to be at minimum heavily refactored, if not rewritten, as anything that interfaces with the engine needs to be changed over. Just like you can’t just port c++ -> c# without major changes, you can’t port a game engine without major changes too.
Unless theyve built everything as a separate code bundle, only interacting with the engine at a bare minimum, there’s no way to change with minor impact. It’ll be a huge project that will also require the engineers to learn a new stack that behaves differently, further slowing down the process.
If you don’t use anything from the engine itself, implement everything from scratch, only using the engine as an entry point that launches your own code, and pay unity two thousand dollars per year per seat for that privilege - I guess porting should be fairly easy.
If you ask me engines should be free for most indies (UE, Godot?), because they’re not making millions. But yeah. I get it’s not feasible for most new devs especially, and senior devs have better things to focus on.
Not moving is what they’ll do if “changes are completely reverted and TOS protections are put in place”. In such a case, while punishing Unity is still desirable, there won’t be installation fees that justify the costs of rewriting the game.
This. It's not easy or trivial but as a long term strategy, they should already plan investing efforts into consolidating something like Godot or another FOSS engine. They should play like you calm down an abuser you can't just escape yet while planning their demise when the time has come.
“ reportedly enforcing uncompensated overtime, allegedly trying to pay staff below minimum wage, and a toxic work environment cultivated by an alleged abusive leadership.”
Uhh… today’s AAA studios have THOUSANDS of employees, hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets, and huge IPs on which to draw. Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, Diablo, Warcraft, Mass Effect, Dragon Age… these studios have VASTLY larger resources than Larian. Like, an order of magnitude larger. This is gaslighting and whining. I’m not having it. Do better, AAA devs. Do a lot better.
Well I wouldn’t say that exactly. GTA 5 had a huge budget and a huge team and it’s objectively a better product if you compare the two (which is only to say they’re both great games but the bigger budget game has and does more).
It’s a matter of the motivations of the developers and their financial backers. If your goal is to make an ok game that maximizes profit focused mechanics, most of these AAA developers are hitting the mark perfectly. If your focus is to make a good game like it seemed to be with the BG devs, they absolutely hit the mark and are being rewarded for it.
This is just a reminder to an industry that is trying to tell us that pay to win mechanics are the standard that they do not in fact get to dictate what those standards are. We do. If a game is shit people will abandon it even if you poured millions into that product. The recent battlefield game is a prime example of this. Even something as guaranteed as a new battlefield game isn’t enough to overcome a shitty leadership team emphasizing the wrong things. The community bailed on their product and they’ll never get them back. All those millions in guaranteed revenue are gone forever.
GTA V story mode was an excellent game, but it’s hard to realistically say a game from one genre is better than another, apples and oranges and all that.
GTA V’s online multiplayer, however, at this point is such a shitstain that I think it alone is enough to make the distinction clear.
It is. But only in so far as the content and scope of the game far surpasses anything a smaller developer could ever hope to accomplish. You may prefer one over the other, totally fine, but objectively speaking you get way more out of gta 5 content and scope wise than bg3.
As others point out gta online is a dumpster fire but it’s still massive and allows you to do endless amounts of things, racing, heists, owning property, running businesses, etc.
This is just a reminder to an industry that is trying to tell us that pay to win mechanics are the standard that they do not in fact get to dictate what those standards are. We do.
Quoting for emphasis. We control the purse, we have the voting power of the wallet.
Blaming consumers, in this instance. You could well be right that the problem is internal but in that case that’s where it needs to solved. Or if they want to get the support of consumers, be honest with their reasoning. Crying that the expectations of consumers are too high doesn’t help at all. It just makes them seem out of touch with reality.
Don’t you fucking dare say that name. I have never in my life seen a game with so much promise be self fucked so hards by it’s own devs that it kills the game in its tracks.
NO ONE FUCKING ASKED FOR A BATTLE ROYALE - AND WE SURE AS SHIT DIDNT ASK FOR PAID BATTLE ROYALE SEPARATE FROM THE MAIN GAME.
…UGH.
EDIT: I WAS THINKING OF BATTLERITE BUT MY FRUSTRATION IS STILL VERY REAL.
The only way Unity can realistically fix it at this point is to pull a WotC and not just backtrack all these changes, but implement a legal mechanism that guarantees changes like this cannot ever be retroactively applied to past versions of the engine.
Well not to discourage them but I like Epic games because every Thursday they give me a free game sometimes two. Hell all the 100 games I own on their platform I gotten for free. So maybe that’s why it’s not profitable?
Beyond that I see no monopoly every game on their I can find on Steam and so far have had no issues with it.
They literally pay for exclusivity. It's weird that people seem to selectively ignore that every time someone brings up their desire to get free games from them.
Epic still has to pay the developers even if they give away the game for free. I'm happy to help bleed Epic dry by taking their free games. But I will never ever spend a single cent on their platform.
You’re lying to yourself. They pay a fixed amount for the giveaway and it doesn’t matter if the games are claimed. If anything, you owning a game on Epic means you’re more likely to mention it to your friends and possibly get them to use the platform and spend on it.
Yes, but those buyout prices aren't negotiated in a vacuum. When the number of entitlements goes up, studios will demand higher buyout prices. There's a reason free game quality has been lackluster lately. Studios demand a higher buyouts and Epic doesn't want to spend too much money, so they go with smaller titles.
I’m pretty sure the prices are based on the projected sales using industry knowledge and tools like SteamSpy, created by Epic’s head of the publishing strategy at the time. It’s not common that a publisher participating in a giveaway would get to use their own figures from a prior giveaway to change the price offered by Epic, while the others’ figures are available only for the games in those leaks. In other words, claiming many copies in the present is extremely unlikely to have any effect on the future buyout prices.
This. Active usernumbers are more worth to them than the small fee they pay the Devs. Everyone who “just redeems the free games” is helping them actively.
I mean, I get why people hate this, but some games would literally not exist if not for that exclusivity funding. For example, the newly released Alan Wake 2 is completely funded by Epic. I’d say at that point, the exclusivity is fair game.
After Control’s success, I’d imagine AW2 still would’ve been made even without Epic’s exclusivity/publishing deal. If anything, Control’s timed EGS exclusivity hurt their numbers until they eventually hit Steam.
Epic funding games development was only a recent thing. For the most part, they were buying exclusivity for games that were already set to be released or were already in active development. The other reason why this was hated was because they bought exclusivity for games that were crowd-funded back when the store was newly opened.
They are literally releasing their games on another platform that actually requires them to put money into the project again to develop a port. So yeah, even PS atm is better than Epic.
So Playstation releasing some of their games literally years later as often sub-par ports is better than being able to play a game day 1 native on PC? I’d love to hear to the logic for that lol
You also don’t like exclusives and want ppl to be able to play the way they want.
…and somehow Playstation - actively releasing their games on PC, investing time, money & effort - are worse than Epic who just want to lure ppl to their store/launcher and actively taking away the choice of playing method?
And they release them day 1, without the multiple year wait from console release, and not as shitty ports. Fuck yes that’s better than PlayStation, it’s a no-brainer.
I’m truly baffled that anyone could have this take seriously. PC =/= Steam.
Wow… Seriously? No they release it for their launcher exclusively not for pc.
If you’re talking platforms Sony is WAY MORE OPEN than Epic ever will be, we can just pray they fail hard and this practice doesn’t become the norm (again)
Sony & Xbox once used to have exclusives for their platforms. Xbox opened up completely and releases everything to PC as well. Sony opened up later and now brings their games to PC as well. Sometimes a year later, sometimes a month. So they’re multi Plattform now and you can choose where and how to play it.
EA and Ubisoft decided to open up their LAUNCHERS and give you the choice where to buy& play - it’s not completely open, because often you’ll still need their browsers but it’s a step in the right direction.
So the trend seems to be to open up more to reach more people and sell more games that way.
EPIC on the other hand is completely closed, buying exclusives for their launcher or for a certain time. It’s a shitty approach to force people to their store and they still aren’t profitable - that’s the only good thing about epic proofing that this approach doesn’t work anymore.
Are Sony/Xbox/EA/Ubisoft perfect? No. - but they all get that being more open is the way to go. They don’t do it because they’re nice or want us to be happy with games - They do it because it’s profitable, but coincidentally that’s a good trend that’s worthy of support.
Okay, fair, there are some exclusives. But reading through these, wow, nothing of value is lost.
Most importantly because for the newest ones like AW2, they’re just on a 1 year Early Access release in a lot of ways. Every time someone I know bought a game there, I was grateful they did the paid (as in, they pay, not get paid) bug testing work for the poor devs. And then once it releases on other stores, you can buy a somewhat patched-up version, and usually for 25%-50% off.
“Let’s release a worse product. Hey, no one likes it. Okay, let’s spend money on games so THEY can essentially force people to use our software. Hey, still, no one really likes it. Okay, let’s try to give away stuff for free. Hey, people use our thing for the free stuff but still no one likes it for any other reason.”
They just keep spending money to up their numbers and their product is still missing features and inferior to competition. They spend big money on exclusivity, but that is only temporary - if that’s how you’re getting your customers, you’re going to have to keep doing it forever to retain them. If people only use you for free stuff, you’re just going to have to keep giving stuff away at a loss to retain them.
This model is not sustainable. You’re not doing anything that aligns value with your customers besides just throwing free stuff at them. That’s not a business.
What’s especially sad to me is they could literally have just spent that same money to improve their launcher and have an actual product. Instead they’ve invested in temporary stats. They’re essentially bankrolling other devs on games with temporary popularity instead of in their lifelong product.
Using other games exclusivity as sway into your ecosystem only works when you have a good product the person would be interested in but they haven’t seen it yet. EGS is currently something people are essentially coerced into using but no one really gets any real value out of it other than “well I couldn’t buy this game anywhere else”
I think it just depends on how long they can do this. I think they are banking on getting the fortnite kiddies hooked on the store. They typically have far less disposable income (yet they still charge kids for 20$ skins), they will most likely not have a super large steam library (probably due to the aformentioned skins) so they are banking on the store being that kids default to Epic rather than steam. Its not terribly odd since Steam basically did the same thing, when it used to have those mega sales with the flash sales and the such. That is when the love for Steam basically exploded and its been cruising on that hypetrain for a while.
Plus it’s not like there wasn’t room for a good shopping client, if you go smart about it.
Steam had at the time - and still has - tons of bad UI design, stemming for its very old layouts wrangling with newer client additions and changes. Plus Steam for the longest time until the new client solved it had serious issues with late boots and hanging closures. GOG had just tried to bring out their own client a few years before, but in the move to GOG Galaxy had gotten a lot of ire and fucked a lot of things up. All the per-developer clients were berated constantly.
There was room there. But Epic, hell, this is so not it. Your client is so much worse than even the bad competitors…
Steam may suck at extra goodies like streaming but they sure as hell don’t suck at selling games. Constant sales, cloud saves, pre-downloads, a solid friend system for co-op games. They nail all the important shit and that’s really all that matters to most people.
Yeah, if I’m reading that right they’re complaining that they’re stuck at phase one of enshitification - lose money on aquiring users. The reason behind that is they’re not able to monopolize the market for their games. “These damn mobile stores won’t let us turn the corner and put the clamps on our users. Fix it please.”
If you count all of Steam’s features (Steam Input, Big Picture Mode, Proton etc), then Epic has decades of catching up to do. The problem is that usually executives will choose the “easy way out” of problems, so let’s just give free games instead of making a good platform.
But hey, at least they didn’t give it a set end date; from the very start of their “strike” the reddit mods straight up admitted that they couldn’t stay away from their unpaid powertrips and leave their octogenerian mothers’ basements for more than 2 days, and instantly folded at a single empty threat to take away the only thing in their lives that’ll ever give them purpose and make them feel like they wield power over others.
Now it’s down to just the low-effort memes, ”religious people bad”/“reddit good everywhere else bad” circlejerks, unhelpful advice, and edgy 14 year olds who just discovered politics, thinking homophobia and fragile masculinity are “based” and that they’re communist because they hate their home country because something something pronouns, know 2 russian words (both obscenities), have been playing too many WW2-themed games and say comrade every 4 seconds all despite coming from money themselves and supporting a war being waged by a far-right regime.
There are some special interest subreddits still running almost like before. Subs with a population of a few thousand, with the active members using names that pertain to the sub
Those haven’t moved, at least the non-techie ones haven’t
Hey some of us said we’d go on indefinately and after being told to open decided to maliously comply only. /r/baduibattles a sub I started is now only letting posts be of New reddit or the Reddit app. User involvement has plummeted, there are fewer posts, each with votes and comments. Automod also posts telling people to join us at !bad_ui_battles
And they know precisely what’s at stake, and that in any case continuing to use an engine now run by dangerous morons intent on destroying it for a quick buck will not be an option, as we all know Unity will strive for its stated goal of screwing them over like this, be it suddenly and shamelessly like they’re hoping to do or by slowly boiling the frog over many years. And then those devs would lose everything.
The devs can’t afford to fold. The other forum’s powermods folded because they not only could’ve afforded to, but also because upon realizing just how expendable they were, they didn’t want to risk losing the source of their god complex. That, and given that site’s users’ history of bringing feathers to knife fights their failure to enact the change they wanted was hardly surprising.
I think this one will work. Most of these games are already "multihomed" on different ad networks and display the one that is most profitable to them at any given time, or a semi-random mixture. The differences in profitably aren't that huge, and it will get even worse if advertisers run away from Unity too. Unity is making an absolute killing from their ads division, and this is now being threatened.
And who are the advertisers? Other game devs. The whole mobile game advertising scene is one gigantic ouroboros with the ad platforms cutting off a huge portion in the middle. If you leave, you're going to both stop showing ads and stop your advertising there.
I haven’t play games with ads in years, but O remember getting a lot of Christian ads, like Bible verses and such. It was even worse that regular buy shit ads imo.
Yeah on second thought it's maybe a bit more vivid than intended, but it fits what I think is going to happen. Below the top 1-2% of mobile games, it's one big pile of endlessly recycled advertising money. Spend a million in ads, make $800k in ads and $500k in microtransactions, and the $300k is where you have to pay everything else from. Unity is about to bite into that hard and doesn't care if it leaves behind some wounds.
Don’t feel bad about pirating AAA titles. See, the creatives and people that actually put work into the game have already been paid - usually at least. There are cases like Bethesda, who stole work from their composer - and so you’re not taking any profits from the people that matter.
Any money you’d pay to license a game would mostly just go to shareholders and greedy execs.
Yeah so their studio gets downsized, closed or merged. The big companies don’t care about the people. Tech lost 10k dev jobs last year, plenty of talent out there desperate.
And with the advent of AI tools and such much more work will be expected from fewer people. It’s a cutthroat industry that chews up passionate workers and spits them out when it’s done abusing them. The big companies definitely deserve to crash, and if a little bit of piracy can help induce that then I’m even more for it.
Seriously though, whilst the budget they can give to Godot and FNA is small compared to what other, bigger devs/publishers could give, I find their commitment remarkable and very much in-line with their goal of empowering developers and gamers alike
Considering FNA and Godot, $100K is gonna do wonders to both projects, specially with the additional $1K
They might even better afford to have developers working full-time at the engines, or deal with stuff like infrastructure, licensing, hosting and other costs
True! Considering Godot and FNA’s current size this is indeed going to catapult them to a different league, which I guess is what Re-Logic was setting out to do :P
Epic donated $250,000 in 2020, Kefir donated $120,000 in 2021. Godot Devs started W4 games and raised $8.5m of which their goal is to support Godots growth.
$100,000 is nice and will allow them to continue but it’s not “league changing” money or anything for them.
You‘re forgetting that this doesn‘t only come with money, but also free press, which is sometimes worth more as it would expose more people to Godot‘s existence, any of which may potentially donate :P
Yeah, inflation rate is high, so central banks are trying to counteract that by basically slowing down the economy, so that our normally scheduled inflation countermeasures kick in appropriately. Well, and the usual way to slow down the economy is to make it more costly to loan money, i.e. increase interest rates. Which means investors can’t just pump money into any company anymore, they want that money to actually pay out to cover those interest rates. And that means companies need to actually be profitable to get money to finance their operation.
So does that mean all these businesses were always doomed to fail anyways, just living on borrowed money/time, and now the bill comes due, they’re all fucked?
Kind of. In the past investors were willing to be more patient, and company values were artificially high, because they were based on potential profits rather than actual profits. That’s shifting a bit as interest rates go up.
Eh. Most of these companies were profitable. Just not seeing the exponential growth that the stock market dictates when interest rates are high. Unity, not so much, but its revenue was always fine, its just a really poorly run company. Who knows where they piss the kind of money they are pulling in to.
I’d guess that companies that failed to turn profit when money was cheap are most likely doomed. However not all of the hype companies are like that. Some could be barely profitable, but shareholder pressure might push them to heavier monetization practices.
A lot of the wealth created by venture capital and the service economy were only ever possible with the help of what is essentially free money. With the increase in interest rates and the collapse of a major venture capital bank, those corporations dependent on low interest payments are going to collapse as well.
As interest rates climb and venture capital dries up, the companies who were just scraping by, or dependent on debt loading during development have had their runway cut short.
We are getting to the point where companies aren’t going to be utilize fronting a huge amount of debt as a strategy for long term growth.
Unity looks to be one of the companies who wanted to utilize the slow boil tactic perfected by the likes of Google or Amazon. Where they front the cost of tons of free and convenient services, hoping that companies become dependent on them, slowly creating fees over time until they become profitable.
If I were a guessing guy, they’ve hit the end of their run way, and have failed to secure a new injection of capital sufficient enough to make the payments on their loans. Likely their options have come to find a way to make your payments, or you’ll be giving your entire operation to a bank.
Simplified: If you can borrow 1 Million USD for 0% apr and earn 1000 USD with that, you have 1000 USD in profits. Now change the apr to 5% and you are 49,000 USD in the red.
This would make sense if Unity increased their fees, but it doesn’t make sense to invent a new revenue stream based on a metric you can’t even accurately measure. That’s profit-seeking.
I’m guessing it’s their last ditch effort to remain in good solvency. A board member making trades before a big change is almost always a sign of the rats abandoning the ship.
Why can’t they remain solvent by adjusting their fee schedule though? It’s the same boilerplate terms other engines seem to make ends meet with. There are many different ways to correct course in the scenario presented, but the action taken doesn’t suggest that’s the scenario they’re in. Corporate profit-seeking is the primary driver of the inflation in the global economy - I think the above commenter has put the cart before the horse.
Why can’t they remain solvent by adjusting their fee schedule though?
Likely they’ve been remaining solvent through private equity, which has probably dried up. Their fees were probably just enough to entice further investment, but most of these companies operate on paying loans with new loans until they can become profitable in the long term.
Usually when a price hike that doesn’t make sense happens, it’s because they’ve failed to get a new injection of capital to remain in solvency. So they have to speed up the fee schedule to make their payments to the investors.
Corporate profit-seeking is the primary driver of the inflation in the global economy - I think the above commenter has put the cart before the horse.
It’s a public IPO, they don’t have to be profitable, they just have to appear as if they will be profitable to increase share price. This kind of hike is not something that a public IPO would do as it will assuredly drop stock price, which is illegal unless there is no alternative.
Without providing any basis for their charges, and without a way for devs to independently validate them, I can’t see how the charges could even be considered valid legally, let alone pull them out of insolvency. A dev fee per fingerprinted installation doesn’t have any precedent in the SaaS space to my knowledge. I don’t think it would be illegal for an IPO to do this if it was truly meant to increase longterm profitability - e.g. price speculation that’s happened today could similarly happen for any reason at any time on any stock. But the point is it won’t work without a monopoly they don’t have - they’ll have to go back on it (at least with regard to games already released), or end up in costly litigation
Without providing any basis for their charges, and without a way for devs to independently validate them, I can’t see how the charges could even be considered valid legally
Ehhh, it very well might not be. But service providers have an awful lot of control of their platforms and who and how they allow access to it, and for how much. A lot of the interpretations in IP courts when it comes to the digital service seem to be about 5 years behind the actual industry. Add on the fact that a lot of the people running the IP courts barely know how to operate a computer, let alone the ins and outs of digital media and we usually get an environment that’s skewed towards the industry.
A dev fee per fingerprinted installation doesn’t have any precedent in the SaaS space to my knowledge.
I think it would be interpreted pretty close to what reddit did with their API access. Technically it’s just a different type of service fee, and it’s backed by a pretty simple logic of offsetting the cost of the involved traffic.
I don’t think it would be illegal for an IPO to do this if it was truly meant to increase longterm profitability - e.g. price speculation that’s happened today could similarly happen for any reason at any time on any stock.
The main sticking point would be that you would have to prove that there is a logical path to long-term profitability that surpasses or offsets the resulting devaluation of pursuing a completely different profit model.
I think it really depends on how big the devaluation will be at the end of everything, and if they loose large clients specify their reasons for leaving.
It’s all pretty complicated, but Im still guessing theyre having solvency issues, just by looking at their IPO price since the last quarter of 2021 they’ve lost about 50% of their value without any real signs of recovery.
It’s not really an intricacy of IP law though, it’s kinda one step away from a contract saying “I get to write a blank cheque from you to me. Don’t worry, I’ll put in the right amount you owe, and if you don’t think I did just tell me and we can talk about it. I reserve the right to say no though”
To legally charge the dev, an invoice has to be raised. That’s a legal document, there’s an item on it, a quantity, and a price. If the details of the invoice cannot be verified by either party, it is invalid. About as fundamental a principle in contract law as you can get, I imagine.
The way it’s different to reddit is that Unity wants to charge per installation on unique hardware. That is, if you buy a license for the game, and install it on your PC as well as your Steam deck, then the devs need to pay 2x install fees.
It is in the fact that the game was built on their platform using their IP. They may own the game they created, but they don’t own the right to distribution, that’s a service.
legally charge the dev, an invoice has to be raised. That’s a legal document, there’s an item on it, a quantity, and a price.
That’s if you are doing product business, the service industry has more flexibility in their terms of service and how much they can charge for it. The option is typically to discontinue the service or to pay for continued service.
The way it’s different to reddit is that Unity wants to charge per installation on unique hardware. That is, if you buy a license for the game, and install it on your PC as well as your Steam deck, then the devs need to pay 2x install fees.
Right, and as a service they will claim that additional downloads are an responsible for the loss of additional revenue, one they wish to offset to the customer who created it.
I’m not saying that this is a good thing, just explaining that the service industry has a lot leverage in court.
And I’m going a step further to say that’s not actually a defensible argument. The distribution is a distribution of game licenses with associated terms, and those terms don’t dictate a limit to the consumer on the number of installations on hardware they own for private/non-commercial purposes. For Unity to argue additional installations per license represent lost value is an argument against the terms of the licenses, not the terms of their arrangements with devs.
Lost revenue obviously isn’t the reason for it, anyway. It’s almost certainly due to technical limitations of their data collection method resulting in them not being able to associate unique installations with their associated license. So the reason devs must accept a degree of inaccuracy that inherently favours Unity is that it would be illegal for Unity to be accurate.
The distribution is a distribution of game licenses with associated terms, and those terms don’t dictate a limit to the consumer on the number of installations on hardware they own for private/non-commercial purposes.
Right, but it’s not unity who is selling the game license. Nor are they limiting the end consumers ability to download the game as many times as they wish. They are just charging the dev for the use of server space and traffic.
argument against the terms of the licenses, not the terms of their arrangements with devs.
The arrangement with the devs is literally the only thing they have control over… it’s a service based company. Services are allowed to change their terms whenever they want, you don’t own access to their services, you pay to access them. If they change their terms of services and you don’t agree, you stop paying for the continuation of service.
TOS agreements are for the benefit of the company, not the benefit of the consumer. You can sue or arbitrate over the TOS, but it’s primarily only successful in cases involving negligence that harms the client e.g a leak of sensitive data that makes someone loose an important client.
Lost revenue obviously isn’t the reason for it, anyway. It’s almost certainly due to technical limitations of their data collection method resulting in them not being able to associate unique installations with their associated license. So the reason devs must accept a degree of inaccuracy that inherently favours Unity is that it would be illegal for Unity to be accurate.
I think that’s quite an assumption… servers cost money, sending a large amount of traffic through them cost money, it’s pretty standard for service companies to increase fees with increased server usage.
If I were a guessing guy, I would imagine that being able to track unique downloads would be kinda important for a gaming dev service.
And it’s most costly to increase interest rates not because those directly affect the investors, but because those interest rates affect the borrowers since the borrowers will need to make more and more money to be able to pay back the initial injection + interest.
If borrowers don’t think they can pay back, then they probably won’t borrow in the first place. If they do borrow but don’t make enough to pay back those loans + interest, then the investor loses out.
And if borrowers don’t borrow in the first place, then investors sit on their money when they could theoretically inject it into other businesses so they can earn on what they own, and not just let their assets stagnate (or decay). To investors, this might also be perceived as a loss.
Borrowing isn’t always the active part. When a company is listed on the Stock Exchange, then investors play the active role by buying or selling their stock.
Most investors don’t just have tons of money laying around. They have property, which they can list as security when borrowing money from banks. And then they lend that borrowed money to companies seeking(/allowing) investment. That means:
a) With high interest rates, investors do have a need for their lent money to pay out, too. As do the banks, because they borrowed it from the central bank.
b) Ultimately, lots of money will be given back to the central bank. The money is effectively removed from the economy then. If you’ve ever heard that inflation comes from too much money being in circulation, that’s how that ties back in.
I’m no expert either, though. I’m just summarizing what makes sense to me and what I’ve learnt from making this post a few weeks ago: feddit.de/post/2514573
Oh I see, so it’s like a merry-go-round, and everyone wants to have their money returned with more than they borrowed so that not only can they have some left over for themselves, but to also pay back those they themselves borrowed money from in order to lend in the first place. Recursive lending/borrowing up until the central banks, like you said.
Risky stuff. If any single entity along that lending/borrowing chain/network flops, it can send shockwaves to everyone else, all the way back to the central bank.
Well, with the current happenings around the world loans got a lot more expensive and that’s basically what internet companies run on since the start, many of them never made a profit but even others will run their buissines to the ground during inflation and shit!
Corporate suicide is so hot right now, all the cool companies are doing it. Are you really even trying if you can’t feel the pain of the bullet in your foot?
I’ve said this for about a decade now: I firmly believe this world we live in now is the inevitable, unavoidable result of having every company run by people with business degrees and no passion for the businesses they run. When your entire education was focused on how to extract one more penny from customers and how to psychologically make addicts out of everyone, this is what we end up with. I fucking hate it. Everything is enshitified and it sucks.
Agreed, VC have poured free money into excellent, but unsustainable businesses trying to chase ‘growth’ long enough that they can sell out just before everyone realizes that it won’t make money. It’s just a scam of rich people preying on other rich people.
Instead of trying to build a self sustaining company to begin with (which requires hard work to balance revenue against customer needs and desires) they build ‘free’ products that people love, but can’t make money, only to switch the company to crappy products that people hate, but now are trapped into using.
Our entire digital economy is built on these bait and switch companies and it sucks
I disagree. This is all the system working as expected. There is no such thing as infinite growth and yet we are conditioned to always need it or else it’s a failure.
result of having every company run by people with business degrees and no passion for the businesses they run
You’d think that even soulless business ghouls would’ve learned somewhere along the way to put a price tag on things like long-term customer loyalty and the soft power of your brand. So either they’re too dumb to take all the variables into account or they’re looking only at short term gains.
Short term gains, every time. These people will take a dollar today over ten tomorrow every chance because they have tunnel vision and only focus on immediate profits happening RIGHT NOW. Ironically the people most likely to drone on about investments are the least likely to really understand their functionality and what investing time or money into something is supposed to mean and accomplish. Most companies these days feel like their just trying to gobble up enough cash to survive their impending failure, it feels so bleak.
Sort of but not exactly, the recent shift is because money has gotten expensive and now investors are wanting to take a profit rather than tossing money around hoping to get lucky. So now these business types are scrambling to do anything that makes the business profitable when their entire business plan was unsustainable without the constant influx of money keeping them afloat under the guise of “growth”.
I think I disagree a bit. It is the owners of the companies that have no passion for what they do. They just want that particular position in their portfolio to appreciate or spit out dividends.
Then they put the MBAs in charge to get the most efficient use of capital.
We just live in a dystopia. The leadership will milk you dry, for pennies, for short term profits. When you’re this greedy, you can’t see more than a day into the future. It’s just another reminder than corporations aren’t your friends
What really bugs me is that it’s not even infinite growth they’re after. What they want is as high growth as possible as soon as possible. Planning a sustainable long term profit business would mean great employee benefits to attract and keep the best, a ton of funding for new product development, and building things slightly more expensive so that they last longer.
There is no financial analysis that would say cutting safety measures is a net positive to your money in the long run. The bill will come due and you’ll lose an extraordinary amount of money when things blow up or derail. If I make a change that raises my risk to 1% over a year to have a safety incident which would cost me 5 billion, I’d have to save more than 50 million each year with that decision for it to make me more money. Plus it would take 100 years for the realized savings to cancel out the event. If it happened before 100 years, I’m at a net negative.
All of that is to say that the stakeholders aren’t just greedy bastards, they’re also dumb as fuck. But that’s not surprising – the type of person with that much money didn’t get it from consistently working over time. They think playing fast and loose will work in their favor always.
Not just companies, but countries too. We’ve apparently reached the Age of Idiocy where everyone that got big is just doing these epic face-plants. I don’t know if it’s desperation, arrogance, greed, or a combination, but so many shitty decisions coming out left and right all over the place.
Late stage capitalism. You can’t expect year over year growth for eternity without running into a resource cap. Profit growth is all the shareholders care about because it’s literally written into United States economics laws that investors get paid first. All these dirty tricks and bad decisions are coming from CEO’s with limited understanding of the effects of their policies, trying to push for an extra 2% on top of their already obscene margins
This is the natural progression of the games-as-a-service model. Any game that relies on online support of some kind just to function will eventually cease like this.
Is it stupid that a vr game about a pet relies on online support to function? Absolutely. But it is what it is. Buy more offline games.
This is also the reason I’m all open source. Not just games, but seeing someone abandon a program hurts. Or just wanting to make a change on your own to suit your needs. I don’t have any big fancy programs, but I at least put my code openly on github.com for that reason. Both my “big” ones are just me using another program and realizing I could make something that worked better for me. At like 100x the time investment, but programming is fun.
Looking at the retro computer scene should make anyone a diehard open source fanatic, it’s god awful how much retro stuff relies on a single guy happening to find an old disc in their basement and upload it to the internet, and a lot of the time that never happened and so the software is just lost forever and the only way hardware can be used is by people writing their own software completely from scratch and sharing it with others.
And of course if they then don’t make it open source that’s extra fun.
It’s crazy how successful they’ve been off just making and selling a good indie game. They’re still doing free updates AND they can afford a $200k donation?
Terraria is like the anti-modern game. They absolutely refuse to evilly monetize their game at all. The playerbase is almost on their knees, begging them to move on from Terraria and make something else (not because Terraria is bad, but they’ve been at it for over a decade!) and they continue to churn out updates. The fanbase voted for a set of features to appear in Terraria 2, which they then turned around and scrapped, and added it as an update to Terraria. And all their updates are always free. And can’t forget about their amazing mod support.
The playerbase is almost on their knees, begging them to move on from Terraria and make something else (not because Terraria is bad, but they’ve been at it for over a decade!) and they continue to churn out updates
dont worry, im sure update 1.4.5 will be the final final final final final finalfinal update, and then they will move on.
Tbf it takes a significantly smaller team to develop a 2d platforming game like terraria. The overhead for art and design is mush simpler too than something like a Cyberpunk 2077
One of the, if not the best games in the last 15+ years.
I’m not exaggerating. At all. I am not a fan of a vast majority of “popular” modern games and think gaming has been on the decline since the mid-90s. In a massive pile of garbage “AAA” and “modern indie” titles, Terraria is the one shining, beautiful, wonderful spot that just gets gameplay right, with no gimmicks, no BS, no boring intrusive story, nothing but good, solid gameplay.
It’s one of my favorite games of all time. So all this makes me very happy.
Out of curiosity can you define “no boring intrusive story”? Because personally I’m big on storylines, so if they nail that part then that takes the game to a whole other level
I tried playing Terraria but gave up after an hour or so, precisely because I expected at least some kind of story and there wasn’t. It was also very awkward to control with a mouse and keyboard, I think it’s really supposed to be played with a controller. I might try it again now that I’ve got one, and less expectations
In some games storyline matters, in others… not so much. Games with a storyline trend to be less replayable in my experience. One exception I can think of is This War of Mine, that game is really depressing.
Story for me in games should be one that sets up the reason you’re playing the game and that’s basically it. No endless dialog or narrative during the game. Small bits of things that can advance the plot is fine, but most games these days seem to talk endlessly about things.
Terraria has zero of that. You’re in the Terraria world and that’s it. No real story to tell besides what happens in the world (show, don’t tell). It’s fantastic.
It’s time to dust off Terraria and go on a nice run again.
Edit: I will, of course, be first in line to buy any new games they release. They donated $100k to a FOSS project I use and love, thus to me as well indirectly, I can give some of my disposable income back to then.
They came out around peak indie craze, 14 or so years ago. I believe they were just behind Minecraft in terms of success. Total lifetime sales for their game have it outselling Skyrim.
Being a patient gamer isn’t strictly about money. It’s about not getting caught up in hype and making more calculated decisions. Even so, wanting to pay what you think something is worth is just good practice.
I'm not going to wait two years -- though I'm opposed to preordering -- but there are other benefits too. Two years down the line:
A bunch of bugs are patched. Even if Starfield is relatively free of bugs, there will be some.
The wikis for the game have been written up. Some obsessive person will have sat down and figured out the quirks of game mechanics and documented them. Understanding stuff like the relative merits of armor-piercing, bleeding, and so forth in Fallout 4 was complicated.
Starfield's expansion packs will be out.
Mods will be out, and there will probably be some pretty "must have" ones.
You'll have more hardware oomph to throw at the game, make it smoother/higher res.
Lmao I only buy games when they’re discounted too and suddenly I have 186 games in my steam library, most of them are still unplayed . I’m not in a hurry to buy more games with such a long backlog.
Mods are the very first thing that turns me off in a game. I want to play a game, not go stack mods on top of mods just to fix the shit the studio didn't feel like working on.
100% true - but if people feel the need to create so many mods, then there are probably lots of things people feel aren't good enough about the game. I'll admit my gaming time is limited, so just researching and adding mods could easily take all my time. I mean, fuck, I sold my Warthog HOTAS and went back to a cheap thrusmaster not because I liked the thrustmaster better, but because I was spending more time writing and fixing scripts and updating my bindings than actually playing the game. And every time an update would come out that would break a script I would spend pretty much my entire gaming time budget for a couple weeks just getting it running again. It got to the point where I just didn't play those games because every patch would change something and something (even something small) would break or be incompatible. I'm kind of over that.
But Cities Skylines 1 is borderline unplayable outside of Steam because the non-steam players can’t use that one third-party traffic mod on the Steam Workshop that fixes the annoying only-one-lane traffic jams the devs did jack shit about until their recently-released sequel
Boy oh boy everyone hates inventory limits and tedious management but devs still feel the need to make sure we have a reason to return towns and what not as the excuse.
Like fuck you, give me a better reason than inconveniencing the fuck out of me while I was out in your world having fun.
cough Baldur’s Gate 3 cough. Why impose an inventory limit if I can just send all the loot I’m gunna sell back to camp? And why no quick “send to camp” hotkey?! Right clickin n shiiittt
Hyperion+Endymion by Dan Simmons. Such a wonderfully written book that evokes so many sad feelings.
It’s veeeery slow (basically the entire first book is build up for the second one), but it’s so rewarding watching all the threads come together by the end.
I mean, we were clearly all so patiently holding our respective breath for this absolute genius comment of yours to grace our screens, O’ wisest of asses. What’s a little longer, really?
You spend less than $60 in two years’ time? Your Internet bill must be the cheapest on the planet. Your grocery expenses must also be next to nothing if you’re surviving on the warmth of your hot air whinging alone . Fascinating.
Yeah we pay an 80% markup just for existing and I hate it, but the gaming industry has been dropping quality while simultaneously increasing prices for some time now.
The only games in the last couple years I’ve paid full price for are CP2077, BG3 and Battlebit. Everything else is bought during the sales, usually at a steep discount, where many of these games should be priced by default.
Fuckin corpo dogs, they’ll ruin anything and everything they can to make a buck.
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