Those are ink printers so this track.

Don’t you just love being fed plausible deniability BS over and over and over again. I’ve lost friends over this bs. People who always argue in bad faith, always invoke plausible deniability, always min/max each interaction with hidden motives - should be given no attention and credibility. Unfortunately, those people strives in corporate environments, and as you would expect, they’re often responsible for marketing, PR, sales, and corporate strategies. Corporations are the annoying lying friends you don’t want around.

They’d be losing even more money.

Netflix is profitable, Spotify never was. The differences between the realm of movies and music are so numerous that I won’t even bother listing them. Music and movies studios concerns are vastly differents, their economic realities are vastly differents, the product is too.

That is sort of the issue when mixing good conscience with capitalism. Either the goods are valued at what we’re willing to pay, or either they’re valued at what we think the profit margin of the business should be, but mixing the two ultimately leads us to fall for PR crap. Business are quick to gather sympathy when the margins are low, and we fall for this PR crap, but then as soon they own a part of the market it turns into raising the price as much as they possibly can.

That being said, Amazon became what it is because Bezos was hell bent on not rug pulling customers, at least in the early years, so it is possible they would decrease prices eventually to gain market advantage, that’s their whole strategy.

Normal feels like I am controlling the vision frustum (where I want to look at), and inverted feels like I am moving the camera itself, as if it was a physical object. I can play both but I definitely have to remind myself what I am trying to control when making the switch.

I vastly prefer non-inverted, because I like the idea of just pointing where I want to look at. I hope it makes sense. All of this apply mostly for games with orbit camera.

There’s apps to sync your stuff when you move to another platform. It won’t be perfectand certain features on certain apps are paywalled, but you should get a fairly acceptable copy of your content after using a service like this.

I’ve found that communities that are both mainstream and related to technical subjects to always get filled by people who know just barely enough about the subject to spread self-assured disinformation.

You won’t really have this problem with super-niche stuff, or stuff that isn’t mainstream enough like a pilot community. Gaming in social media is definitely cursed.

Fair enough, this is an atrocious billing system, but I I firmly believe that this is simply a gimmick to get around charging royalties without calling it so. Maybe I am biased, but the people working at Unity are not monsters, and I believe the employee who posted publicly and stated that the people implementing this system made sure that it would be under-reporting installs is speaking the truth. I think there is this misconception that Unity is simply gonna fire an event for every install and charge you directly for each report, but there is no way that this will be this simple. In all likelihood they will use this to keep a list of the popular games, and the actual fee will be based on heuristics like estimated sales and whatever other analytics and ads generated by the game clients. Sure it is a “trust me bro” system, yes it’s bad, yes it could be abused, I think it is fair to call it out and ask for a more transparent system, but deep down I just don’t believe that Unity is evil and did this to abuse the developers.

In all likelihood THEY will be the one forced to under charge, and really they’re doing this to force you into their ecosystem so it is likely that they will reach out the studios individually before incurring the fees. The whole thing is worded in a way that past a certain level of success, they will charge you royalties unless you play ball with them and serve ads and buy in other services. I would not blame anyone for calling it scummy, but I think it is important to understand their motives, they want to force your hand to use whatever they’re selling. The installation fee is just a smoke screen, they have nothing to gain bankrupting studios by making up numbers. Of course, this is just my own take. I think I have a fairly good understanding of how they operate, but I could be wrong.

Finally an article that goes beyond the drama and misinformation. It is not just about the new fee, which realistically is nothing compared to what you would owe epic for the same level of success.

What sucks is the shadiness and the deceptive nature of it all. I am sure the executives felt really clever and thought it would almost fly under the radar After all, they managed to spin this as not-a-royalty after years of boasting that Unity wouldn’t have any.

The new changes are essentially this :

You’re forced into going with the pro or enterprise license past a certain revenue (which was sort of a thing already).

You’re forced into serving Unity ads, or else you get charged a some royalties, which realistically should still be less than what UE charges.

You’re forced retroactively into it, as they deleted the old TOS behind the scenes.

They’re definitely not being upfront about their intentions, and due to their complete aversion to mentionning the word royalties, they managed to deceptively make up a lie that sounds worst than the actual truth. Even though this is a move targetted at multi-mullion dollars productions, actual students and hobbyist are now worried about being charged per user downloads, which is not happening.

It is sad to see, Unity went from being owned and operated by people who truely cared. I worked there for a number of years and most leaders and employees truely believed they were a force of good in this otherwise shitty world. It is crazy how much the company changed in just a number of years/months. It sucks, and whoever ended up in charge robbed both the employees and the users of something great.

John was a smooth talker, and even as the company was turning corporate and seemingly stepping on old values, he was very good at making sensible arguments and justifying the company transformation. I can’t help but feel deceived now. Ultimately I left the company because I disagreed with so many decisions. Virtually my entire backlog was stuff I disagreed with and I just couldn’t justify waking up in the morning. We’re long past the “Users first” slogan which made Unity so popular with indies.

Java feels archaic compared to C#. I am not sure what problems you’re having on Linux? This sounds like a very outdated take tbh.

It is pretty damn close to actual C# nowadays. Some version, I think it was 2019, really upped up the scripting backend.

I am curious, what exactly is missing in the latest LTS version from .Net what makes it so clunky to use for students? Afaik it is pretty solidly close to actual .Net 4.7 nowadays.

Yes, very much. Unity has an army of highly-paid developers, some of which are behemoths in the industry and built other highly-regarded technology. It could be done, I mean, I don’t think Unity was particularly efficient spending its internal resources, but it is gonna take a while for other open-source engines like Godot to catch up.

Unity employees have extraordinary working conditions and pay. It sucks that their hard work gets tarnished by stupid executives and poor PR but let’s not paint the employee as a victim here.

I agree with the essence of your post, but the part about Unity already charging devs proportionally based on sales is not true. The editor is currently licensed per-seats and there is currently no cap to how much money you can make if you run the enterprise license, which is 5k/year per employee.

You’d be crucified in most communities for pointing out something like that though. Brand loyalty and addiction to outrage is rampant with gamers and tech enthusiasts.

What? The revenue threshold is mentionned over and over again, there is even a table with the revenue brackets. The info is right there, in the article and in the Unity blog post. Are you so addicted to outrage that you won’t even get your basic facts right? I am done here.

Installs don’t matter until you make 200k dollars per year, or over a million dollars on pro. I am not sure how I could be more clear.

I am not defending the absolutely awkward pricing model of Unity.

Do you think we should also give them a flat 30% then? 1/3 of your gross is massive, and we could argue Unity is just as important in the execution of your game.

As far as I am concerned the comparison with retail does not hold. Retail runs on thin margins. Steam on the other hand is absolutely massive and afaik is one of the most, if not the most profitable business per employee in the USA. It is absolutely greed. They have nice features but we’re all forced to pay whether or not we use them. But of course this is Gabe, the guy who tried to replicate 1:1 the absolute horrible business model of MTG on digital. Billionnaire gonna billionnaire.

This is not the point I was trying to make. Replace “recoup” by whatever term you see fit I don’t think they are owed this money either. They are trying to cut on their quaterly losses tho, which are massives.