unity drama.
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#unity #drama
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unity drama.
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#unity #drama
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At 21:00 I explain hoyo being a shareholder of China Unity for the short attention spans that thought I left that tid bit out.
Anywho, I’m speaking with my client who is an accountant. He understand the business on a profound level. That said, he believes John (former Ceo of EA) was brought specifically to make money at the expense of the China unity entity. They are entirely separate entities with % of ownership but this does not mean they necessarily work for the same team.
Finally someone actually did some research instead of going "oh hoyo has shares in unity they won't have to pay" absolutely ignorant that's not how businesses work.
Unreal engine's pricing model is based on the philosphy of equity. This means that people who have less are give more and people who have more are given less.
The way you implement it is really simple. Can't believe they don't have the IQ for this but anyways. What you do is say, if you game brings in money over these thresholds, then for every 1000, 10 000, 100 000 etc the multiplier gets increased for the amount you have to pay.
So:
$1000 a month – no payment
$10 000 a month – every 10 downloads pay $5 extra
Something like this, this will hit your target audience the best.
incoming statement at end of 2023, newly announced patch for genshin/honkai ll be delayed due to some software changes in the game.
few weeks pass, sudden maintenance. suddenly games run on unreal engine
😆
Actually you're incorrect… originally unity had a one time purchase which granted you a license they phased that out in favor of subscription based and now this fiasco…
I was an original purchaser way back with version 2….
Been using it for like 15 years now I have a 12 year long project that was in development untill this runtime spyware fee and multiple titles released which ive since deliated due to this change…
Unity also makes 30% of all asset store purchases so all total ive spent nearly 3/4 of a million dollars on unity and unity related products and im walking away we can't trust them anymore and im not going to risk my employees livelihood on some darth vader wanna be close whims
I liked this video,I wont mind more videos like this.
14:20 actually the unity runtime is needed to run the game. That's their given reasoning for the price increase. It's literally called "unity runtime fee"
Damn unity has some balls going after, mihoyo, pokemon AND Microsoft..
Now existing games using unity have to shift to unreal engine even if it take a long ass work
If rumors are true, Mihoyo has started looking for a game engine developers.
I had no idea what was going on, so I appreciate you doing the legwork on that research and letting us all know the deal. Press 'S' to spit on Unity
What's so sad is that with some consultation with developers they could have really made something similar really work. Instead they built a castle on sand and burnt all the bridges. This will hurt them for a long time.
But the better Install price for the for the higher tier say installs per month. After maybe 1 or 2 months how many games are getting 1mil+ downloads a month. so even in the higher tier your still going to be paying the highest lower fee
Doesnt Genshin Impact also use a modified verasion of the Unity engine called the Genshin Engine?
22:00 they dont need to increase the sub fee, they need to get peaple to switch over to any kind of sub model.
that said many smaller "armatures" we are doing a project but ods are that it will take us 3 year and 20 member coming and going and thats if we are lucky. before we have anything thats worth putting out.
for them just having a small studio sub would probably be a good start 20 seats for 60 a year kind of deal… remember thoes are 5-20 teenedger whit zero budget that probebly making a "game" whit copyrighted music and sound effects they found in the game/data/sound/SFX/sound.wav folder of an other game.
and the biggest problem whit the install fee is that so many devs are against it is this.
on a 5% sale fee you pay 5% of the sale and thats it no more thats one transaction and then no more transaction on that sale.
on the instalation fee that means I as a dev need to account for how many times my game in is lifetime migth get reinstalled.
and let me put it like this I will soon install age of empire 1 from 1995 (about 30 years by now). and I know peaple that have reinstaled that game 15+ times over said 30 years.
and that is something a dev should not have to think about.. what if a player/user reinstal my game 15+ years down the line… that should be consider a good thing because that mean the game was good (hopefully) and not a case of financial stress.
Unity isnt smart, Hoyo already predicted this, cuz they are a Chinese company in China.. So they use s modified version of Unity, so thats a big fail, they should have known China is famous for stesling other ideas/existing IP/existing anything and make it their own.
I got to say this. What they are doing right now is pure evil. Can't just take money from other company just because they want.
Funny thing is mihoyo, the genshin devs are actually developing their own engine and is currently aggressively recruiting engine devs, so this probably ain't gonna affect them much
Bro, I truly respect the effort you put into not only studying the content you’re getting into but the delivery to simplify and get your point across is remarkable. Ty
Very great video. Not only did I learn a bit more about the situation, but so did you, while researching, because you got curious. Maybe an odd thing to say, but it makes me happy.
You also did a phenomenal job at explaining everything in a way that is better to understand, than just reading all these documents and articles myself. I honestly enjoyed listening to you talking about this topic very much.
It looks like the overall expense of unity for a huge company like hoyoverse is still going to be lower than what they would pay to unreal engine, though not by that much. They are keeping themselves competitive for games that are big, but are making themselves worse for small dev companies. So is that going to be their niche compared to unreal engine?
Surprised to see you cover this, though pleased! I'm sure a lot of players don't know about what's happening.
I'd like to bring a bit more perspective as a developer with some insider knowledge (and maybe correct some small things ^^).
As developers, we're not actually opposed, as a group, to Unity gaining more money. The thing is, the company is losing money every term. It doesn't make any profit and, as you said for unreal, it's not a charity, so it's understandable. Yes, they're trying to get more money, but this is not just them trying to bring their profit to the moon…it's them trying not to go bankrupt, which I think is a pretty revelant information to take into account.
You seem to be skeptical that games like Genshin were the target but, actually, it seems to be true. Before the decision was released publicly, it was announced to the employees as Unity (who, of course, gave all the counter arguments we've seen everyone make since then, so they were aware of the issues before the announcement) and even then, that open goal of targeting very big games was given to the employees, apparently in a convincing manner. Why convincing? Because most games don't ever gain 200K$, actually. So it wouldn't impact everyone…though not only the big companies, which is the issue. If the decision actually impacted those big names only, I'm pretty sure no one would have cared, not gonna lie. That being said, ever since the company went public on the market, it's been pretty uncomfortable. They fired a ton of people a few months ago, and it was ugly (though I understand it's pretty usual in most countries to just fire people almost without prior notice). But a company going public changes a lot of things and this is probably a big part of the problem – the CEO now being a sales/marketing person and not, you know, a developer. That guy is definitely trouble.
As a sidenote, I think comparing the way game engines work to Adobe softwares is a good way to explain it, I didn't realise it wasn't clear to the general public ^^
Let's talk a bit about their decision now.
First, to pay per install, you have to answer not 2 but 3 conditions: Use unity PERSONAL (which many people didn't understand because their communication was very stupid and so unclear it's almost comical), have over 200k installs and over 200k$ won. I believe you're probably right when you say the goal is to encourage people to pay the subscription fee.
If we're being honest: the first condition is very reasonable. If your game is getting over 200k$ then you're a pro and the personal licence isn't for you anymore. That being said, the very idea of paying per installs is stupid as heck, even if you don't take into account the issue of how you're going to count (at first they said they had no way of makeing the difference between legit and hacked installs, same for multiple installs by the same person, etc, and now they say they can which asks a lot of complex questions, about privacy for one). Second, 200K$ may seem like a lot – you said it's easy to attain such a number as a game developer which…well, it's not untrue, but it's not exactly true either. I'll try to explain.
Most games actually never attain such numbers. You're in the top 5% of steam games if you get 200K$. If your game is popular and does work – pretty unlikely, even if your game is great – then yes, you'll probably reach 200K$ pretty fast. However, this sum does not represent profit. When you develop a game, you have to pay the developers right? 200K$ is a measly sum and most games cost wayyy more to develop. We don't realise that because indie games are often passion projects and the people working on it just, don't pay themselves while working on it and live on their spouse's income or unemployment benefits. But this is a great loss of money and, despite wages being criminally low in the games industry, 200K$ won't bring you far, even with a team of 3 people. Just to give an idea, with 3 people developing for 2 years (not realistic, this would be very fast development), that leaves you with a bit over 8K per month, which you need to divide between 3 people, amounting to 2.7K$, which is not what the employees will see on their bank account (they'll have around half). So, measly wages for very efficient work, and now you have to pay money you don't have to unity (you don't have the money because you've used it to either pay or reimburse the wages).
Overall this is a terrible decision for 2 reasons: first, the 200K$ threshold that is way too low. But, most importantly, the installs thing because I haven't seen something that stupid as a long time. It's also dangerous for marginalised creators. We just know people are going to hate-install games made by, say, black developers, or women, or queer people, etc. It's not a "worst case scenario" it's a "it's happened in the past and it's 100% certain it'll happen if unity doesn't change this decision". Just look at the harassment those developers are getting just for existing and daring to make games, that should be self-explanatory.
My personal opinion is that it's fair to want more money (to try and at least break even) but that this is not the way to go. Maybe unreal's way of doing things is the way to go, I wouldn't be opposed to it as long as the fee you have to pay applies to profit only, and not overall revenue. That could bankrupt small companies otherwise.
Also, for people who may not know, it'll be very difficult to just give up on Unity because we've built so many resources for years. I've been using unity for almost 10 years now. Unity doesn't actually have any real concurrence: no, Unreal can't do what Unity does. Unreal is fine if you want to do a FPS or a TPS, but you can't do 2D games, you can't do smaller games,etc. it's just not very flexible (which is fine, that's not what it's supposed to be). Smaller engines like Godot, though interesting, are just not there yet. They also lack the community unity has (unreal doesn't have 1/10th of unity's public resources so imagine for a smaller engine) which is an amazing help when you're stuck on something. That's the reason we're so lost (and annoyed): for a lot of us, we don't have another option. Also, games take a long time to dev, and thus, you can't change your engine in such a quick manner. 4 months between the announcement and the application of such a decision? I understand they're in a pinch, but this is perfectly irresponsible and unreasonable. A lot of games could just be lost that way because they don't have the means to develop the game again from scratch in another engine. Overall, Unity is an amazing software and I think you can see the possibilities when you see Genshin (some people think games made with unity can't be pretty, which is obviously false).
That being said, despite the company not listening to the employees when they explained the issue before, the public backlash may help. They WILL change the pricing because they don't have a choice, but it could end up being more reasonable. That's what we're hoping for at least. A lot of us will be in a difficult situation if they maintain this bullshit.
Sorry for the long comment, I hope it helps someone grasp the situation a bit more.
thanks for doing research king
Very 👏🏻 informative 👏🏻 video 👏🏻
Thank you for putting them research hours in so we can be more enlightened. Looking forward to how this saga unfolds.
The damage is irreversible, many game developers will have trust issues not just in Unity but also with any software tool with similar business model. Game companies with successful revenues with their status are capable of funding for their own game engine, if they really wanted to target these game titles/company, they could have simply applied these added fees based on revenue the title is making. Unfortunately what Unity gets is a stigma, "to stay away from" whether indie or AAA.
They should drop all of the subscription fees and charge 4% of total revenue over 250k or 1 million. Why should you have to pay for a subscription when you aren't making money? John riccitiello is a lifetime corporate scumbag.
There's a thousand ways for Unity to take more of a share from Hoyo's pie.
The reason they pick this specific way is because they not only want a share of the present pie, but also a share of the future pie if another big gacha success emerges.
Mihoyo has resources and talent to switch entire freakin engine if push comes to shove
This is the most informative video I’ve seen on this topic, good video Gacha Smack.
Unity was already dying. The engine itself was mediocre even compared to Unreal Engine 4 for big AAA pc and console projects, and Unreal Engine 5 is incomparably better for both the development team (developers, artists, level designers, etc.) with the insane tools it has and the end-user (gamer) because of how insane the games can look and play with all the new goodies (which can be somewhat achieved in Unity, but with multiple times more effort = time + money).
Every big developer has already announced that they will do their new games using UE5 (CDPR, Bioware, and many other), dropping either their own in-house engines or Unity.
It's already over, they are just trying to make as much money as they can before they go down, but this backfired making the ship sink faster.
As it is now, companies like hoyoverse would have to pay all the subscriptions, plus 4% of their revenue. Probably still less than 5% tho.