The CEO could have posted a video of himself snorting cocaine off a hooker's ass while he was wearing blackface and it would have done less damage to the company.
Quote from the Slay the Spire dev, after saying they're either going to migrate the next thing they have in the works to a different engine or Unity walks it all back-
We have never made a public statement before. That is how badly you fucked up.
Slay the Spire sold at least 1.5 million copies. It's a $25 game, although goes on sale to around $10. So, it made somewhere between $15-$37.5 million gross, lets say roughly $10-$25 mil after Steam/etc cut.
Unity's new plan charges $12,500 for the first 1.1 million installs. It charges $24,000 for 1.1-1.5 million installs, $10,000 for 1.5-2.0 million, and another $10,000 for 2.0-3.0 million. If Slay the Spire 2 sells the same as before, they're paying 0.2% to .1%. If Slay the Spire sells double compared to before, they're looking at paying 0.1% to 0.04%.
I don't see how they migrate to a different engine for less than $40k-$60k. Any delay in their game that sold tens of millions of dollars has to cost more than that. It seems like they made that statement as a knee jerk reaction and I would be surprised if they follow through with it except to virtue signal, since it's very obviously against their own interest to do so.
Devs dont get 100% of the sale money. They get a cut of a cut and unity charges per install, so they stand to lose basically all their revenue and profits from a computer running a script...
Actually they're looking at paying whatever the fuck unity decides to charge them because unity decides how many installs you've had using their magic algorithm and they can change the deal at any moment to decide you owe them more money. I honestly think the whole thing could be ruled unconscionable in court if it ever comes to that.
Remind me at the end of the year to make a post saying 'which company inflicted the biggest self harm in one move this year' as I think Unity is at least in the top 5
The warning signs were all there from your post, just seems they were waiting, soaked in gasoline for it to spark and this one decision is the match that burns them to the ground.
Off the top of my head, for this year, serious contenders for the Top 5 should be:
Dove (lookat dis hamplanet washin heself)
Volition (haters gonna hate).
InBev (tranny pisswasser).
Textron (you will buy our knockoff Pilatus and be happy).
Unity (lol you thought this shit was free as in speech).
Serious runners up could be Ford (Chinese cars and EV trucks), Boeing (fuck you, Delta, who run airplane market).
They've driven Delta to the point that Delta is buying Airbuses willingly. There have been a few cases where a Boeing executive has essentially told Delta "lol you will buy what we build, and fuck the 757".
It's really annoying because there are very few big time engines out there. I tried making something with Torque and felt bad for it.
A friend of mine has made sure Unity is now an enemy in his game.
John Riccitello -my spellcheck wants it to be spelled Reinstall- has been fairly scummy this entire time. It makes me wonder why the company bent so far so hard to hire him.
I hope most devs move to Godot or blender based engines rather than unreal. UE is nice and all but Timmy could die tomorrow and then there's no telling what would happen. This is when you realize how important open sourcing is.
Back to Unity, I think the only thing that would save the engine + share price would be a Microsoft acquisition. That would actually be a really good move for them.
Yeah, my biggest worry about Unreal is what'll happen once management transfers to some corporate asshole. I'm sure there's people who might have a beef with Tim, but I think most would agree that Epic could be so much worse under different management.
Epic tried forcing exclusivity onto pc, is actively a front for chinese spyware and has one of the biggest if not the biggest freemium cancer ass game, which IIRC pioneered the faggot "battlepass" thing.
To be fair.. fortnite battlepass was generous. Finish battlepass, get next battlepass for free and extra vbucks to save for cash shop.
But yeah. I hate all battlepasses. I miss loot boxes that you can get from playing the game. I never not gotten a skin from overwatch. I had all the coomer skins and i had so many duplicates, i had 80000 legacy coins. If its a fun game, you naturally play alot and you naturally get stuff.
Selling temporary bullshit, manufacturing grind to get the skinnerbox addiction effect, cutting out cosmetics from a game to resell to the players - that shit is never generous. It's cancerous.
Back to Unity, I think the only thing that would save the engine + share price would be a Microsoft acquisition. That would actually be a really good move for them.
Nah, Microsoft would make some decent changes on the frontend for usability and improve code formatting like they did with XNA in the first few years, and then forget it exists like a ton of their other API (Microsoft Works, anyone? Silverlight ring a bell? Spark?).
Unfortunately Microsoft has had a horrible track record with design services and sustained scalability.
as a shitty hobbyist dev who published shitty games before, part of me is like "hey if I ever made 200k off a single game you can take your 20 cents from my future installs."
I'll just raise the price of my games from $2.99 to $3.29 (extra dime to offset pimp daddy Steam's piece)
But the other part of me is like... man there are these steam sales and 99 cents mobile games and they're gonna get dinged 30 percent by the store and 20 cents from Unity, that leaves them with 50% of their $1 ask. That really messes with the sales strategy.
I should just go to gamemaker or say fuck it and do pico-8 and give up my dreams of making the next Fear and Hunger, Vampire Survivor, or whatever jank indie smash hit.
Yeah, I think I should pivot to Godot, mostly used Unity because I paid for a Humble Bundle course a few years ago and learned from that. But I think I can handle GDScript especially since its close to Python based on the last 30ish minutes of learning it. Static typing for variables but can inference within dictionary variables... wtf? (not a big deal but it's like "You better be explicit as I cannot inference an int from a string but I totally could if its in a container!" made me chuckle)
Open source, free, I'm not working on anything atm, perfect time to pivot.
One small caveat, which I only mention because it might be one of the few options for devs who've already released a game made on Unity (and don't want to get retroactively fucked), is that they might be immune to the bullshitty "charge per game installation" and likely the 200k gross profit thing if they never update their Unity software.
Essentially, they can't be held by the contract changes if they never sign and agree to the new terms.
Otherwise, absolutely everyone should fucking abandon Unity right now and make them pay for even trying to set such an insane precedent in the software industry.
This is disappointing news. A decade ago I released three games using the Unity engine which combined got hundreds of thousands of downloads. There were a lot of bumps in the road (looking at you, mobile provisioning and constantly outdated API's) but the games were pretty solid and the developer community and plugin ecosystems were supportive.
I know Unreal is not immune to this happening someday, but I hope it won't happen before my upcoming game begins to sunset. There are other good engines to consider if it does...but my days of writing my own engine are well behind me.
Unity was a joke a decade ago not only because of l33t 10x real Dev snobbery at the easy engine for noon devs, but because of weird early tech faults. IIRC there was a physical god object in the game world (or at least a single game) that represented the back-end code; don't delete this object. The consensus now is that it's a serious engine being corporately mismanaged and a mess. The only thing that piques my interest is their somewhat recent work on incremental garbage collection.
Up until today, I thought big companies didn't have source access to the c++ core, the way Source, IdTech3, and other licensed engines do/did (enterprise and industry plans do). It's still ridiculous that the $2000 seat/year plan doesn't, but what do I know about mid-large business expenses. Ideally, all stable companies would give more of a shit about vendor lock in, but we're governed by the Gervais principle. UE4-5 being source available at all levels makes it stupid for a 50+ employee studio to utilize Unity.
I expect very few Devs to react to this to by actually switching engines. I expect ongoing support and expansion plans to just suddenly crater for most of them.
The CEO could have posted a video of himself snorting cocaine off a hooker's ass while he was wearing blackface and it would have done less damage to the company.
The CEO that sold 2000 shares right before the announcement was made?
Not just any EA fuck.
He INVENTED Ultimate Team loot boxes with FIFA 09, which have DESTROYED AAA sports video games.
Quote from the Slay the Spire dev, after saying they're either going to migrate the next thing they have in the works to a different engine or Unity walks it all back-
We have never made a public statement before. That is how badly you fucked up.
Slay the Spire sold at least 1.5 million copies. It's a $25 game, although goes on sale to around $10. So, it made somewhere between $15-$37.5 million gross, lets say roughly $10-$25 mil after Steam/etc cut.
Unity's new plan charges $12,500 for the first 1.1 million installs. It charges $24,000 for 1.1-1.5 million installs, $10,000 for 1.5-2.0 million, and another $10,000 for 2.0-3.0 million. If Slay the Spire 2 sells the same as before, they're paying 0.2% to .1%. If Slay the Spire sells double compared to before, they're looking at paying 0.1% to 0.04%.
I don't see how they migrate to a different engine for less than $40k-$60k. Any delay in their game that sold tens of millions of dollars has to cost more than that. It seems like they made that statement as a knee jerk reaction and I would be surprised if they follow through with it except to virtue signal, since it's very obviously against their own interest to do so.
Devs dont get 100% of the sale money. They get a cut of a cut and unity charges per install, so they stand to lose basically all their revenue and profits from a computer running a script...
Actually they're looking at paying whatever the fuck unity decides to charge them because unity decides how many installs you've had using their magic algorithm and they can change the deal at any moment to decide you owe them more money. I honestly think the whole thing could be ruled unconscionable in court if it ever comes to that.
Yeah it borders on extortion. "We updated our terms so you now owe us 100 million dollars" isn't something you can just do out of nowhere
Remind me at the end of the year to make a post saying 'which company inflicted the biggest self harm in one move this year' as I think Unity is at least in the top 5
The warning signs were all there from your post, just seems they were waiting, soaked in gasoline for it to spark and this one decision is the match that burns them to the ground.
Off the top of my head, for this year, serious contenders for the Top 5 should be:
Dove (lookat dis hamplanet washin heself)
Volition (haters gonna hate). InBev (tranny pisswasser). Textron (you will buy our knockoff Pilatus and be happy). Unity (lol you thought this shit was free as in speech).
Serious runners up could be Ford (Chinese cars and EV trucks), Boeing (fuck you, Delta, who run airplane market).
I'll be honest after that MAJOR fuck up where their planes LITERALLY fell out of the sky, I'm surprised Boeing still exist.
They've driven Delta to the point that Delta is buying Airbuses willingly. There have been a few cases where a Boeing executive has essentially told Delta "lol you will buy what we build, and fuck the 757".
Don't forget wizards of the coast with the ogl debacle
Dove has been doing this for years. It's their whole business plan at this point.
It's really annoying because there are very few big time engines out there. I tried making something with Torque and felt bad for it.
A friend of mine has made sure Unity is now an enemy in his game.
John Riccitello -my spellcheck wants it to be spelled Reinstall- has been fairly scummy this entire time. It makes me wonder why the company bent so far so hard to hire him.
I hope most devs move to Godot or blender based engines rather than unreal. UE is nice and all but Timmy could die tomorrow and then there's no telling what would happen. This is when you realize how important open sourcing is.
Back to Unity, I think the only thing that would save the engine + share price would be a Microsoft acquisition. That would actually be a really good move for them.
Also because unreal is just so samey. Everything looks like fortnite.
That isnt the engines fault. That is devs too lazy to tweat the defaults in the "stock" components like the character controller.
Everyone said unity games are all the same but genshin impact is unity and i wouldnt know it until someone told me.
Yeah, my biggest worry about Unreal is what'll happen once management transfers to some corporate asshole. I'm sure there's people who might have a beef with Tim, but I think most would agree that Epic could be so much worse under different management.
Epic tried forcing exclusivity onto pc, is actively a front for chinese spyware and has one of the biggest if not the biggest freemium cancer ass game, which IIRC pioneered the faggot "battlepass" thing.
Steam let developers screw around with your games and spy on you first and we have the same problem when gabe disappears.
Difference between a store selling a bad product and the store being the bad product. For now, steam is miles better than epic has ever been.
To be fair.. fortnite battlepass was generous. Finish battlepass, get next battlepass for free and extra vbucks to save for cash shop.
But yeah. I hate all battlepasses. I miss loot boxes that you can get from playing the game. I never not gotten a skin from overwatch. I had all the coomer skins and i had so many duplicates, i had 80000 legacy coins. If its a fun game, you naturally play alot and you naturally get stuff.
Selling temporary bullshit, manufacturing grind to get the skinnerbox addiction effect, cutting out cosmetics from a game to resell to the players - that shit is never generous. It's cancerous.
Epic cannot possibly be worse.
Nah, Microsoft would make some decent changes on the frontend for usability and improve code formatting like they did with XNA in the first few years, and then forget it exists like a ton of their other API (Microsoft Works, anyone? Silverlight ring a bell? Spark?).
Unfortunately Microsoft has had a horrible track record with design services and sustained scalability.
Suddenly the post purchase surcharge idea makes sense.
as a shitty hobbyist dev who published shitty games before, part of me is like "hey if I ever made 200k off a single game you can take your 20 cents from my future installs."
I'll just raise the price of my games from $2.99 to $3.29 (extra dime to offset pimp daddy Steam's piece)
But the other part of me is like... man there are these steam sales and 99 cents mobile games and they're gonna get dinged 30 percent by the store and 20 cents from Unity, that leaves them with 50% of their $1 ask. That really messes with the sales strategy.
I should just go to gamemaker or say fuck it and do pico-8 and give up my dreams of making the next Fear and Hunger, Vampire Survivor, or whatever jank indie smash hit.
Yeah, I think I should pivot to Godot, mostly used Unity because I paid for a Humble Bundle course a few years ago and learned from that. But I think I can handle GDScript especially since its close to Python based on the last 30ish minutes of learning it. Static typing for variables but can inference within dictionary variables... wtf? (not a big deal but it's like "You better be explicit as I cannot inference an int from a string but I totally could if its in a container!" made me chuckle)
Open source, free, I'm not working on anything atm, perfect time to pivot.
Notch was on twitter saying "Oh just write your own engine, I did it".
Maybe he doesn't realize that he is like the 0.01%
Yeah, but from a consumer perspective the bottom 99.9% of Devs are useless trash, so his relevancy really shoots up within the remainder.
One small caveat, which I only mention because it might be one of the few options for devs who've already released a game made on Unity (and don't want to get retroactively fucked), is that they might be immune to the bullshitty "charge per game installation" and likely the 200k gross profit thing if they never update their Unity software.
Essentially, they can't be held by the contract changes if they never sign and agree to the new terms.
Otherwise, absolutely everyone should fucking abandon Unity right now and make them pay for even trying to set such an insane precedent in the software industry.
From the sound of it, it's too late to walk something like that back.
We can add Unity to list of things EA has killed, even if EA is a former job for the Unity CEO.
The real question is does this kill C#?
This is disappointing news. A decade ago I released three games using the Unity engine which combined got hundreds of thousands of downloads. There were a lot of bumps in the road (looking at you, mobile provisioning and constantly outdated API's) but the games were pretty solid and the developer community and plugin ecosystems were supportive.
I know Unreal is not immune to this happening someday, but I hope it won't happen before my upcoming game begins to sunset. There are other good engines to consider if it does...but my days of writing my own engine are well behind me.
Two things.
Unity was a joke a decade ago not only because of l33t 10x real Dev snobbery at the easy engine for noon devs, but because of weird early tech faults. IIRC there was a physical god object in the game world (or at least a single game) that represented the back-end code; don't delete this object. The consensus now is that it's a serious engine being corporately mismanaged and a mess. The only thing that piques my interest is their somewhat recent work on incremental garbage collection.
Up until today, I thought big companies didn't have source access to the c++ core, the way Source, IdTech3, and other licensed engines do/did (enterprise and industry plans do). It's still ridiculous that the $2000 seat/year plan doesn't, but what do I know about mid-large business expenses. Ideally, all stable companies would give more of a shit about vendor lock in, but we're governed by the Gervais principle. UE4-5 being source available at all levels makes it stupid for a 50+ employee studio to utilize Unity.
I expect very few Devs to react to this to by actually switching engines. I expect ongoing support and expansion plans to just suddenly crater for most of them.