I personally mostly watch gaming streams as a background for work, never as focus activity. As a main activity I definitely prefer to play myself rather than watch others playing, with a rare exception when I’m just interested to see a few minutes of gameplay of some new game to see if I’m interested in it.
That seems like a lot. Elsewhere Sony was apparently planning to release 12 live service games by the end of the 2025 fiscal year (now halved to 6). The world of mainstream game development seems to be absolutely nuts at the moment.
Looks like I’m in the minority, but I subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online. My wife and I enjoy the extra Mario kart courses and I personally enjoy the N64 virtual console.
I think enough people have been exposed to enough subscription services that customers have started taking inventory of what they’re paying per month that they didn’t used to do, which means often signing up for a month and then quitting. I’m simultaneously surprised and not surprised that the access to online multiplayer only accounts for about 30% of the reason people subscribe to these things, but then those same customers doing that same accounting of their personal finances have probably done the math to realize that, long term, it’s cheaper to just play games online on PC, which is leading to consoles performing the way they’re performing lately.
long term, it’s cheaper to just play games online on PC
The companies are clearly coming to terms with this, as well. I’ll be avoiding Sony games on PC for the foreseeable future. After the Helldivers debacle, it’s clear that Sony is looking for ways to monetize PC players.
You know if anyone needs to be let go maybe it's the management who were spending like there was no tomorrow and are now throwing everyone overboard to stop the ship from sinking. Or, you know, just keep cancelling games and shuttering studios. I'm sure that'll work out eventually.
It’s mindblowing that the studio had 100+ people and their only game was apparently RUINER. I was convinced it was a smaller indie game, how could they have that many employees and only release one decently successful game in like 6+ years?
This would have happened sooner if it wasn’t for the cheap debt. Unsustainable businesses, hiring passionless staff and managers, mismanaging and producing sub par products.
Eventually people stop supporting these games.
When the money runs dry and it’s harder to borrow due to higher interest rates, you have to start cutting costs. And if your business is inefficient and bloated you have to downsize to survive.
Magic, thanks for posting this. I’ve been trying to find a good and clear explanation of that been going on since I started reading about people getting upset with unity during the week.
This makes sense to me, it looks like it’s $0.20 for each install, only if
you have passed a threshold of installs
you yourself are charging for your game
Which, I know Lemmy has issues with proprietary software, but if you are charging for your software and it’s built off this, I don’t think $0.20 is too much to pay them. Unreal takes a percentage I believe, sounds like this is a “keep the lights on” charge.
Is that really how it works? That seems like a pretty egregious oversight if so, couldn’t groups of people bankrupt devs, especially small ones with small file size games that are easy to reinstall over and over?
Nah, it's per device install. So unless you modify your PC enough to generate a different hardware fingerprint or go install a game on a fleet of laptops or something, most people won't be running up that counter too much.
After Unity's clarifications, I'm honestly kind of expecting the old "null-route the web address in the HOSTS file" to be a valid method to prevent their installer from phoning home to increment the counter. It's gonna be incredible if people start trying that just to frick with Unity.
The fact that we can even have this discussion should be proof enough to Unity that it's a complete non-starter of an idea to let user behavior influence the developer bottom-line.
I wonder if distributors could get away with doing that automatically. My gut instinct tells me that Unity isn’t stupid enough for that to be feasible long term, but… like you say, the C-suite bozos clearly aren’t listening to the engineers.
How many reinstalls? Because I have games I have bought 4 PCs/laptops ago, not counting some few more when I installed them in family members' computers to play with them. What about OS updates? Windows keeps insisting to move to 11.
Frankly, this doesn't sound reasonable at all. It's not even like Unity is doing any of the hosting to justify squeezing devs like this.
edit: Now it has been confirmed it's not measured on an unique hardware basis, any reinstall counts. It's just madness.
I saw that a short while ago and actually laughed out loud. The only thing left is to get the popcorn ready I guess because this is going to be hilarious.
especially small ones with small file size games that are easy to reinstall over and over?
Wouldn’t even need a small game technically. I’m pretty sure the only way to properly calculate would be running a postinstall script and someone could presumably just keep running that script
Hearthstone runs on Unity. I’m ok setting up a little something to let people constantly install and uninstall Hearthstone to bleed Blizzard dry… hell, once it’s discovered how your installs are tracked, I could see that leading to insane exploitation.
It is exactly what Unity means; they have doubled down on the clarifications. The precise point is to charge the developer for any install a user makes once they earn a (paltry) $200K.
It’s not rocket science to see that this is a very bad, very abusive idea and its targeted to hurt indie developers the most (as larger studios like EA would be on the enterprise plan and therefore on the hook for only 1/20th of the same usage).
Some simple math says that you would have to uninstall and reinstall a $5 game 20 times to completely nullify the earnings from your purchase.
It’s surprisingly easy to rack up installs; between multiple devices, uninstalls for bug fixing / addressing, the OS breaking it, modded installs having to be reset, making space for other games, refreshing a device… and so on. And that’s not even accounting for bad actors actively trying to damage a company.
Clearly without consulting anyone with a modicum of common sense.
It’s also possible its a move to deliberately piss of the customer base, so they can “back off” and implement a solution that still satisfies them, but looks like they let the “customer” (mostly) win.
For example: “We will charge $.20 for over 200K installs!” Backpedal: “We will charge $.05 for only the initial install after 500K installs!”
Pretty sure there are many documented instances of exactly this occurring, especially in the game dev industry unfortunately. (The goal was never the first offer, but rather to overshadow the real goal.)
But they already changed it from $0 to 0.2, how do you know it won’t be 10 dollars next year after you’ve already spent 5 years making your game?
What if you only were charging a dollar for your game and people like it so much they install it 5 times over the year? Easy to do with multiple devices or reinstalling OS’s
The problem is unity is forcing this on people who may have spent years and lots of money entering into a different kind of business agreement.
There are a lot of cases where this might suck if you’re a full time Unity dev. Getting on Gamepass was already a bit dicey as it cannibalizes sales, but now you got an extra Unity tax on that. (And you may get a LOT of installs on Gamepass)
Give a bunch of keys to a charity auction? Guess you’re paying extra. Got a demo that’s doing wonders on Steam NextFest? Those are installs. Is your game being pirated? Those look like installs, gotta pay up.
I don’t think this will bankrupt any dev, but all those above decisions will hurt.
I’m not a lawyer who can properly interpret the legalese but I don’t think this is the case.
Selling your game to a publisher or a third party to distribute it counts as the developer making revenue off the game.
Edit: Actually I may be incorrect - The apparent wording of the license says the publisher or distributor would pay the per install fee. I’m not sure how that would work, unless they’re planning to send a bill to Steam/Microsoft/EA/etc. I will have to reread the terms.
Charging "per install" as opposed to "per sale" will be goddamn awful. At best it might lead to DRM where you'll have a limited number of installs before you lose the game you bought.
as already confirmed by others, it is per install, not per sale. Meaning that if you uninstall your game and mhen reinstall it, the dev has to pay twice. You buy the game and install it on your pc, and your steam deck so you can play it whenever you want? developer pays twice.
Consider how it affects $60 AAA games vs close to free $1 games, it’s wildly disproportional and somehow the $1 game dev starts paying significantly earlier. Now consider how it affects games that make far less than a dollar per user, this is true of many free-with-in-game-purchase mobile games.
Then consider demos, refunds, piracy, and advisarial attacks.
It would have been simpler, more balanced approach, and have none of the pitfalls if they had just gone with a profit share scheme.
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