I hate to have to justify layoffs but it’s at least true that lots of studios are unexpectedly (from a couple years ago) hemorrhaging cash right now. anytime inflation is so high for so long, discretionary spending on entertainment is near the first to get cut from consumers budgets. people aren’t sitting at home like we were in 2021 only buying digital entertainment anymore.
Evidently, all of Epic Games’ business had been “heavily funded by Fortnite” in the last six years, and different parts of the company became “disconnected” from their revenue streams.
Wait, so youre really telling me me Epic giving away a ton of free games on EGS every single month and free unreal engine marketplace assets to devs as well as regular epic megagrants was never a financially sustainable move?
Psssh. In other news, salt is salty. 🤭
I honestly believe Tim is not going to f–k this one up though, as a former one he clearly cares about the game dev community and as majority shareholder he isn’t needing to be driven by profits as much as publicly traded Unity head John Riccatello is.
Plus, fortnite is still a goddamn cash printer, just not printing as fast as they expected.
I could hear that gabeN is running an underground fight klub in his basement and my opinion of him wouldn’t change. the man is a national treasure and the savior of my childhood. godspeed, Gabe! 🏎️
seriously, you’d think with the holiday season coming up studios would be crunching to get their games ready in time, but since unity shit the bed and epic took their lead it’s been nothing but bad news in the AA and AAA space
respectfully, what is this? it’s just a subject. what discussion are you having about NPCs? are they good, bad, unnecessary bloat? improving with the pace of AI? the best 10 NPCs of all time? NPCs based on real characters? I don’t really want to risk a click until I know what I’m fully getting myself into.
God damnit if I didn’t open this post to write this, verbatim
Honestly after unity shit the bed and payday 3 looks like a turd they probably realized they don’t need to try as hard anymore on unreal and fortnite, respectively
epic is a lawful good with epic mega grants, but their partial owner tencent is lawful evil. if Sweeney ever loses a controlling amount of shares to them, I’m likely done with them for good.
The harsh truth is even if they lose half of their current users they will end up making more anyway, even with the amended changes. They planned to lose a large chunk of their user base, regardless. The “seats” model is dead now that AI is changing how game development is done from the ground up. And they needed to do this because they were never profitable (the engine’s development costs hundreds of millions of dollars) and couldn’t really compete with unreal when it came to the type of customers they could actually pay for the engine from
80 percent of unity users don’t pay and a large percentage of the 20% remaining don’t pay close to enough to maintain the engine. they did this on purpose, so it’s their fault, but it is the truth. most large studios these days that actually hit the numbers to pay unity are doing more with AI so they are paying less and those who the changes actually were attempting to make up lost revenue from. as I said, either way the “seats” model is dead regardless.
honestly as shitty as the changes were (and of course they were trying to make profit) they were actually attempting to help devs at least financially. For many use cases the install fee would come out as less than a 1% rev share. It was the other shit that made it worse, the install counting malware proposal, and the uncertainty behind the legitimacy of the numbers. (demos, piracy, repeated reinstalls)
if you’re interested in the insight from a tech investor who is familiar with the situation from the inside, but remains unbiased as someone not employed by unity, check this link for a good breakdown of what Unity’s leadership was actually thinking when they cooked this insanity up.
it’s a known strategy in tech startups and most non inventory based businesses in general (think moviepass) to undercut your competition to try and get as much market share as possible, even operating at a loss, and then slowly turn up the prices on your users once they are locked into your system and make back the lost revenue over time. I don’t agree with it either, but the y-combinator business tech crowd seem to love this model, so I can’t really say if it’s a bad decision or not.
I can however, point to evidence that it’s a popular business model, if you don’t mind accepting hacker news and y-combinator articles, as well as YouTube media of startup CEOs in earnings calls, but I refuse to defend it otherwise. These are often people with lots of money and advanced stem + business degrees however, so Im not going to sit here and act like I easily know better than them. I can say it did work for Google, but this is after they already were dominating with ad revenue and had the means to slowly introduce ads into every platform they owned ( youtube, maps, android). Popular platforms like DoorDash also have yet to become profitable, despite commanding a 70% market share on food delivery.
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
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.
I feel like most digital stores already gives you all the statistics you need to make this trivial though. Steam even reports the difference after refunds/returns for you.
it’s the best way to do a rev share. pretty sure unreal engine lets you self report too. If you start a business you can’t complain about having to run a a business by tracking sales.
With all intentions of respect, and in complete agreement that Unity’s new terms are alarming, If you dont have any intentions of tracking your sales unless you are forced to by the creators of your engine you are using, I’m questioning if you have the chops to be a successful dev in the first place. This is why the vast majority of devs don’t even make enough to even pay Unity the fee and should just stick with a publisher instead of trying to handle the business end of things on their own.
A fresh report into Unity's hugely-controversial decision to start charging developers when their games are downloaded has thrown fresh light on the situation....
I wonder if it will be that integrated. perhaps if you’re a PC player you can solve all these issues for most non multiplayer games by simply cutting the internet out when you’re not using it to download updates from steam.
if it’s just like a taco bell skin dlc, I’m fine with just ignoring it. it’s the same thing as 47 having the clown costume in hitman. it’s an ignorable goof at worst and maybe at best creates an interesting choice for modders.
don’t get me wrong this is fucked, and John riccatello should really be dismissed after the wave of lawsuits overwhelm unity.
perhaps. I miss the days when you could airplane mode your way out of ads on your phone. the solution of course was to pay for premium games which are way better than a shitty skinnerbox anyway. but most casual gamers don’t want to
oh no stop, please, don’t make John riccatello tell us to hold his beer. think of his track record at EA. the out of touch competition isn’t even at full stakes yet. I have a feeling more is coming before the IPO.
did it really fail? I was under the impression it just became too much to maintain for a FOSS community, in addition to an already robust 3D modeling software suite. I don’t know how many people actually used it.
it is interesting to see unreal go a different route, they are making 3d modelers and even audio/video editing tools in house to try and make it so you never have to leave the engine.
what you’re searching for is a game called house flipper. it’s on steam, and after reading your post I am 100% confident you will love it and should look it up.
The next Sims game currently goes under the name Project Rene rather than The Sims 5, but that aside, we know a growing amount about EA Maxis' next social simulation. During today's latest Behind The Sims community update, they shared more, including the news that the next entry in the series would be free-to-play and without...
you never used open careers mod? it sort of works how like university life did. you get career progression from using associated objects, and are otherwise are free to talk to your coworkers, grab lunch, etc during the work day.
I get triggered as a gamedev when people complain about dlc because if a game came out and it was $200 for all the content made you would probably scoff and pirate it. The harsh truth is nobody wants to front the actual production cost of games anymore. PS2 games were $40 back in 2003 when my old ass was entering high school and you could still find a decent slice of pizza for just over a dollar. It’s 2023 and it’s basically the same price now after 2 decades of insane inflation. You may find an outlier or two on steam but even AAA titles tend to stay 60 or under.
It’s honestly the best option. Just buy the base game then. By definition you don’t need anything else. You get what you afforded and you don’t get upset. Don’t forget the company that made Payday filed for bankruptcy not too long ago. This isn’t quite EA shitting out a Madden update with the same code and 3d models. They were restructured and probably have loans or investors to pay back. I’m just happy we got a payday 3.
go ahead and downvote, but just consider what I said with an open mind afterwards.
I mean, their requirements are still more strict than steam. GabeN basically says as long as you don’t break the law or cause us to lose significant business from bad press (aka “straight up trolling”) with your game, and have $100 cash handy, you are welcome to shill your school project quality, my first Unity game shovelware here
CD Projekt employees form a union (gamedevunion.pl) angielski
Epic only realized it had ‘financial problem’ that led to layoffs 10 weeks ago (www.polygon.com) angielski
Epic Games to update Unreal Engine pricing for devs not making games (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
TIL: Gabe Newell has a second hobby next to Valve (lemmy.world) angielski
Heart of Racing sim on Steam when?
Five Former Ubisoft Execs Arrested By Police For Questioning About Sexual Misconduct Allegations (kotaku.com) angielski
Last Of Us Studio Naughty Dog Is Cutting Developers (kotaku.com) angielski
NPCs in Video Games [NakeyJakey] (youtu.be) angielski
Epic Games Cutting 870 Jobs, 16 Percent Of Its Workforce, also selling Bandcamp (kotaku.com) angielski
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Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle (www.wired.com) angielski
RPG Maker on the Unity debacle (lemmy.world)
No love lost: AppLovin helpfully releases tool to switch from Unity to Godot or Unreal (www.pocketgamer.biz) angielski
Unity to Cap Runtime Fee to 4% of Revenue Over $1M, Users Will Self-Report Figures (wccftech.com) angielski
The overhauled Runtime Fee policy plan being considered by Unity Technologies will cap the fee to 4% of the game's revenues over $1 million....
Unity will quietly waive controversial fees if developers switch to its ad monetisation service - report (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
A fresh report into Unity's hugely-controversial decision to start charging developers when their games are downloaded has thrown fresh light on the situation....
I wonder why Godot and Unreal are getting so much interest today (lemmy.today) angielski
EA confirms The Sims 5 will be free-to-play and co-exist alongside The Sims 4 (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/4968815...
The next Sims game will be free-to-play with paid DLC (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
The next Sims game currently goes under the name Project Rene rather than The Sims 5, but that aside, we know a growing amount about EA Maxis' next social simulation. During today's latest Behind The Sims community update, they shared more, including the news that the next entry in the series would be free-to-play and without...
Payday 3 is 14 days away and the devs have already revealed a full year's worth of DLC (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Tim Sweeney says Epic Games Store is open to devs using generative AI (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski