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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.