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.
The pronoun mod took away pronoun choices. It was created by an obvious transphobe, and Nexus got rid of it because they have no patience for obvious transphobes.
Seriously the assumption of free time that corpos have for their consumer base is WILD, but it just feeds into the ‘must have 100% market share’ mentality that drives the culture as we lose every shred of our living moments on anything but living
It’s a weird visual bug. The only solution to remove it (so far) is by using console commands. Open the console, click on the asteroid, then type disable on the console.
I was already disappointed with the unimmersive the space travel is in the game, and this bug just added itself to the list of disappointments.
Some technical notes: When I looked at the asteroids using the console, I expected them to be STATIC Objects; they were actually something called CONST iirc. Just some fun facts.
In best case, I will play the game after the first patch after 2.0 + PL. Good that I’m still in my first playthrough in Baldurs Gate 3. So if the patch comes around the weekend of the 6th of October, I should be fine.
I mean, what price point are we talking? I'd spend $20 to let my niece mess with it a couple times, but if it approaches a full priced game it's not happening.
"I’ve had numerous conversations with the LT of Nintendo about tighter collaboration and feel like if any US company would have a chance with Nintendo we are probably in the best position. The unfortunate (or fortunate for Nintendo) situation is that Nintendo is sitting on a big pile of cash, they have a [board of directors] that until recently has not pushed for further increases in market growth or stock appreciation.
“I say “until recently” as our former MS BoD member ValueAct has been heavily acquiring shares of Nintendo and I’ve kept in touch with [ValueAct CEO] Mason Morfit as he’s been acquiring. It’s likely he will be pushing for more from Nintendo stock which could create opportunities for us.
Honestly to me the real shame is everyone’s retirement is tied up in Wallstreet, but no one is personally voting, that’s all done by investment managers. Even in the cases where people get their proxy votes, they mostly throw them away.
Retail investment is a quarter of the market, but only 32% of retail shares had their votes cast (vs 80% for the market as a whole), and on average only 12% of a firms retail accounts vote at all.
To be fair I think Polygon have misunderstood the email.
Calling it "second run Stadia PC RPG" implies Microsoft thought it was going to launch as a Stadia exclusive for it's first run. This was back in 2020 when Stadia was still a thing, and trying to sign up exclusives.
That doesn't mean Microsoft underestimated it, but that it thought it'd already have had a run on Stadia which would make it less likely to be an important title for Microsoft.
Their publisher also expected the game to have about one-tenth of the actual players. I don’t think anyone knew how big it would be.
Absolutely.
The $5M also refers to what they thought Larian would want for it to be included on Game Pass.
Yes and that’s precisely my point. Because they didn’t see how successful the game would be. Otherwise, they would have thought of a much bigger number.
One of the main issues with Stadia is that they didn’t even do the basics. I saw basically no marketing, and on top of that, I heard all kinds of rumors about the business model that were entirely false. They made no effort to combat the misinformation. It was never the case that you literally had to purchase the game on top of the subscription fees, but that was like the number one issue brought up in every discussion.
There was a bad experience version you could use without a subscription to games you purchased outright, and they included "free" games with your subscription, but to get a reasonable experience you had to pay for both.
The subscription was only necessary if you wanted to play in 4K or wanted "free" monthly games. Everything else worked just fine without the sub, with no change to performance.
From everything I can see, you did have to buy games on Stadia. They would give you a free game a month, but if that wasn't the game you wanted to play, you had to buy it. The base version of Stadia was free, but the Pro version gave you a discount on games - it did not make them free.
This is the official support forum and there are many Q&A's about purchasing games:
... If you have an Android device, you can also try via the Stadia app to purchase games (once purchased, you can play them everywhere, on mobile, TV or PC).
I couldn’t figure out how to do anything with one without paying the subscription. The interface was horrible and clearly designed to force you into subscribing before you could even use the thing.
It was never the case that you literally had to purchase the game on top of the subscription fees
It depends on the game. There were a bunch of games under “Stadia Play” that came along with the subscription, GamePass style. And then there were games you had to outright purchase.
The main problem with stadia was Google. I knew it was doomed from the start and that’s why I never bothered with it. I actually know a lot of people that didn’t bother with it because it was from Google. It’s basically a self fulfilling prophecy at this point that most of their shit ends up on the Google graveyard.
A lot of people actually don’t trust Google anymore since they’ve already been screwed over many times by them.
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