The Unity train wreck is such a beautiful example of shitting where you eat.
All they had to do was to shut up and do nothing and everything would be fine.
Instead, they were greedy af and their continued fall would be almost entertaining if it didn’t highlight how shit the industry can be.
well technically, if they shut up and did nothing they’d go under. unity operates at a loss right now. if you’re interested in what actually went down in the talks when they cooked this bullshit up, this is a good read from a tech investor who has some insight into unity leaderships new business model while being entirely unbiased:
It’s extremely expensive to build/support an engine used by millions of devs, across 25+ platforms (+ multiple device generations), producing 100K+ games/yr across various art/render styles
Unity has a small army of 3K+ engineers working on it
~80% (est.) of Unity users don’t pay anything for the service. Unity’s ads business (highly profitable) funds the engine business
The engine business is not profitable standalone
It’s not sustainable
The strategic question for Unity was always: assuming the low cost of the engine, what other developer services can we provide to developers to increase average revenue per user (ARPU)?
The runtime fee was a shock to me: only a year ago this option was completely off the table
So what changed for Unity and why now?
The macro enviornment has resulted in hiring freezes. For a seats license model like Unity’s, this means poor revenue growth
GenAI will result in smaller teams building AAA quality games. Smaller/efficient teams = great for studios’ profits but bad for Unity’s seats model
Apple privacy changes (ATT/IDFA) pushed game monetization towards IAP and away from in-game ads. Hurts Unity’s ads business
Dev adoption of Unity cloud services like Unity Gaming Services, DevOps, etc likely hasn’t been strong enough to make the engine biz profitable
I don’t know shit about it, but I’m guessing the ad business isn’t really standalone itself. Guessing it’s the ad service that kicks in for developers that don’t pay for the engine. If that is true, it’s stupid to expect both to be individually profitable. It’s also likely the ad business wouldn’t be profitable if it didn’t have all those indie developers that have it incorporated into their games. Really sounds like a working system just wasn’t profitable enough, and they needed more blood from the stone.
it’s mostly the very large mobile apps like genshin impact or whatever it’s called that actually payed the fee, the vast majority of small and indie developers don’t usually make enough to even qualify for the pro plan. Unity’s seat model was always insanely underpriced for the value the engine provided - 3K senior software engineers @ $200K cost maybe 600 million dollars a year, and maybe 20% of users payed anywhere from three hundred bucks to a little over a thousand for unlimited engine access.
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