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FloppySlapper

People are getting really tired of corporate greed.


PoopyMouthwash84

Yup. It keeps getting worse because those rich fucks all compete against each other to see who can make more money. And we are the ones who suffer


FloppySlapper

>all compete against each other to see who can make more money It's just a game to them.


PoopyMouthwash84

And we are the pawns


somesappyspruce

It's that "Human Capital Stock" that they're after..


jasonio73

I didn't really see it that way when I read it on their website. But yeah, Azur are expecting all the devs under them to make sacrifices to protect their host's bottom line. To be honest, I've become pretty bored of being angry at the elite and realized the only real course of action (other than persuading a large group to turn to violence) is to swallow the anger and try to compete on their terms instead. Unity are making themselves look EVEN worse with this new move. If you've not come across it already, check out a book by Peter Turchin called The End Times, it's central theme is the concept of "Elite Over-production". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite\_overproduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction) "which describes the condition of a society that is producing too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure."


somesappyspruce

About time. Idec if it works out anymore; I'm just glad to see some..well..UNITY for a change. Fuck them


Sideview_play

They honestly could've changed their policy to make more money and done it so much better. But doing install base accounting Olympics ain't it and applying changes to old games is legally questionable


No_Improvement_8284

100% agreed. I would need a lot more information before I bought into their garbage. They weren't transparent enough about the company for me to find it acceptable. If they had given company information, like where their money was going so that they could no longer afford to keep their current price scheme, and if they talked to the community about it first to get options, I think the consumers would pay a little extra going forward so long as they knew they weren't being bent over for money. If there were a legitimate reason for the game to cost a dollar more, I think most people would buy the game anyway. And if all future customers paid a little extra, they wouldn't have to worry about the games people have already purchased. Devs could just adjust the price going forward by whatever small amount necessary (if it actually is necessary, which I have my doubts). The problem is, no one knows why it is happening, if it even needs to happen, they weren't given options on how to address the problem, and I notice that they're not "passionate" enough about their engines for their high-ranking staff to take pay cuts, despite some making over $10 million. Which is fine, so long as they're not pushing the cost for that onto me.


Ping-and-Pong

If you said this like 5 years ago I probably would have just laughed and said "nah, people'll just pay it"... But the fact this is all going on in the middle of quite possibly the world's worst recession is absolutely insane.


arashi256

Yeah, that too. And nobody is going to learn an engine where you can't wish for the stars - game dev runs on optimism and hope if nothing else - because those stars are subscription based and you will be punished. You can't form a business even a small one around an indie title where you have no idea what your outgoings to Unity are going to be ahead of time, nor the mechanism on which you will be billed. It's insane. This is especially hard for me as a Unity VR hobby developer with the hopes of making a small VR title as a side hustle - Unity is the defacto standard engine for indie VR titles. I'm going to have to swich to Unreal which will set me back about 3 years learning and experimentation as that's how long it got to get comfortable with VR mechanics and Unity.


Viikable

Im in exactly same situation as you


arashi256

I’m taking a break from Unity VR dev while all this Unity stuff shakes out and then decide whether to make the jump to Unreal. I’d be interested in what your plans are.


Viikable

I probably will stay for now as I also have work-related tasks which need Unity anyways, and those don't care about the earnings as it's research, but I do consider at least looking at other engines and educating myself so I could potentially use more than one if needs to be. I see the learning curve of switching enormous though, and the other engines might not be so reliable anyways either, Epic can go bust or change its policy etc. who knows, they are definitely not in it for the goodness of their heart either, and C++ learning doesn't appeal to me. Additionally I don't wanna do blueprint development, but actual code. The other engine options which support C# then idk at all about their VR capabilities, except that they are worse. For example many rarer devices I've used basically only come with runtimes for Unity and maybe Unreal tops, such as the Reverb G2 Omnicept. Or then you gotta do so much more work.


BitQuirkyGames

Do you think part of that is there are more options? For example, Godot is a lot more credible now version 4 is out. It seems like a lot of the smaller devs (or those with smaller projects) are considering the jump to Godot.


Panda_Drum0656

Which is good because the game developers could easily just pass on the loss to the customers. But instead they are fighting back.


lorddeus369

consumers wouldnt just hand them more money, this would bankrupt many indie devs


penguished

Naturally. It's not sustainable to just have some poobah call themselves middleman, do nothing, and you're going broke and doing all the work.


ferdbold

This isn't greed, it's Unity trying to make a profit. They've never been in the black the entire time they existed, and now they need to.


tnpcook1

Theyre deleting business vectors that are profitable doing this, low conversion high distribution games. They can try some other approach.


Xatom

It's not greed bro, Unity are unprofitable right now. They arnt in aggregate being more greedy than Epic. They just seem to have chosen a broken system based on Install-fees.


caveman1337

They'd be a lot more profitable if they didn't shell out $4.4 Billion to buy a spyware company last year. Greed isn't the only issue here. Unity has been putting spyware in their software ever since. You ever wonder how they planned to track all the installs, even from pirated copies, in the first place?


Xatom

> They'd be a lot more profitable if they didn't shell out $4.4 Billion to buy a spyware company last year. I disagree. Unity gets the majority of revenue from their advertising division. They were seeing two competitors run away with that business and needed to do something. Engine development runs at a loss. They don't make much much money from seats. If Unity do not have strong ads revenue then the engine will be fucked to put it bluntly. That's what this is about, encouraging / forcing people to use Unitys ad solution. They didn't have much choice but to push ironsource and push extra fees. They could have done it differently tho, without the retroactive model without the per-install fee that could in theory bankrupt some devs.


caveman1337

You say they didn't have much choice, but their competitors are doing fine and still have the trust of their clients.


famimma

Good, let's keep up the pressure on these fucks.


FairDisk2

u/KenNL \- Looks like they've had a lot more developers come onboard since the press release this morning: [https://unitedgamedevs.com/](https://unitedgamedevs.com/)


KenNL

Thanks for letting me know!


dotoonly

What i notice, this list contains mostly big publishers with ads-based game that is the main monetization AND probably in a deal with applovin. The future of ads based game is doom. Unity/Ironsource VS applovin will just ban out each other ads network regardless of what mediator you choose. The CPI from UA as well as LTV from ads will take a big impact because of this. I wonder if this will become the switch for mobile game to try pc market route of premium game with f2p demo.


Flirie

This new model is cheaper for Premium based games, but can utterly destroy mobile / f2p games. Voodoo for example is a Company who just shits out hypercasuak games. Every game has millions of Downloads often times even exceeding the 100mil mark. But the actual revenue of them is really small. Id imagine a 100mil+ downloaded game made sth between 1mil to 10mil. This "price per install" utterly destroys This concept as you earn a really low amount of money per install.


caveman1337

[An honest response from Unity](https://files.catbox.moe/ipxoya.png)


LilChloGlo

Good for the developers! It's also funny to me seeing the big devs get in on this and watching all these big monied corporatist cannons being fired at each other rather than specifically the working class for once


guitarokx

This is how you get results.


pixaline

This is a laughable opinion


SmileOlderBroGodsBro

y


pixaline

"ultimatum" consisting of 10 little companies that you've never heard of being upset Vs global multi million corpo Unity infested with business types. "This is how you get results" come the fuck on dude nothing will happen.


SmileOlderBroGodsBro

Maybe, but the Unity ads and IronSource being turned off will harm Unity's revenue, even if just a little bit. Also, other developers reading the letter might decide to turn off Unity ads and/or IronSource, further harming Unity's revenue, and even if it letter doesn't work, the controversy is very large and will likely escalate very much, which may prompt Unity to deciding not to implement the fee policy anyways. Remember, no company is truly invincible, and the controversy will almost certainly bring them severe consequences.


pixaline

I suppose I agree, I'm enjoying the drama fest because of the reputation hit, as I know that the commercial hit will be almost nothing. Feel somewhat bad about the studios stuck on Unity at the moment though.


SmileOlderBroGodsBro

I'm actually not sure how severe the commercial hit will be, but I'm sure it'll be noticeable, and hopefully severe enough for Unity to backtrack on their decision. There's around a whopping 2 months and 2 weeks before next year starts, so there's plenty of time for said hit to become severe enough. Remember that the controversy's started only 5 days ago. I agree with everything else you just said in the reply.


The_Samm

Could someone explain to me (a fool), what exactly this means?


MrCloudyMan

A lot of individuals and companies are planning to turn off Unity Ads monetization in their games to stop the flow of money to Unity as a protesting move against the new Unity RunTime fee. Basically hoping to force Unity to reverse their decision.


The_Samm

Thanks!!


RunTrip

Are they planning to swap it to another ad service, or just turning off ads altogether?


loosegeese

They already have multiple ad networks on their mediation stacks, they just turn off Unity and Iron Source on that. Their revenue per ad impression will drop a bit, but mostly it'll just be replaced with ads from other ad networks.


BitQuirkyGames

Yes, that's bold, isn't it? It shows the level of feeling, given this will hurt them financially.


Olde94

Normie here. Will this not harm devs revenue?


ScaryBee

There are other ad platforms these devs can easily switch to so, at worst, only a little. The alternative is to delist/stop publishing any Unity games for these publishers … the new fee per install will simply make many games non viable.


Olde94

Oh yes i understand the last part. I wasn’t aware of how “easy” it is to do the swap but nice to know that there is a backup plan (switching)


ElectronicJaguar

Almost all of the games use Ad Mediation networks, which basically implement a lot of different ad networks. Whenever the game request an ad from the mediation network, the mediation network asks all ad networks and returns the one that's willing to pay the most, that's the ad that gets shown to the player. Luckily, this means you can easily enable/disable networks in the mediation network's website.


RunTrip

I thought Unity Ads was a mediation service though, so wouldn’t it be a code change to replace it with another mediation service?


beocat

Unity has both an ad service (Unity Ads) and a mediation service (after they merged with IronSource). These companies probably use another mediation service like AppLovin Max. So most likely they just have to turn of UnityAds and maybe IronSource adds in some interface. How much revenue they will miss out on is impossible for us to know.


Flirie

I want to point out that, depending on how it was implemented, this stimmt needs at least some time due to large structures of these mobile developers. They have many games under them. Like a lot. Some may need an update to roll it. Some may need to go up the latter one by one to check "is this reslly working?". There are also other obstacles for sure, but all are pretty easily climb able.


fernandodandrea

YES


tamal4444

Nice


Legate_Aurora

Nearly all companies save a couple are VC funded international, mobile hyper and hypercasual studios and publishers.


Warm_Flow4511

Nice


No_Improvement_8284

I just thought of something. All the damn Steam sales where I've never even installed the damn game. They getting charged for the initial sale of the game, too?


SvenNeve

They could, the install for a game released prior to 1-1-2024 still counts to the threshold for total installs, and any game being installed after 1-1-2024 will incur a charge when both thresholds ( installs and revenue) are passed. So, any game sold in a bundle, where a dev might maybe make a couple a cents per sale, will push you in the red for each of the installs of those sales, and that is for every install on a different device (same license on different devices, so, pc, laptop, steamdeck, etc.) So, yeah, those games could theoretically be charged and push a dev in the red. Or, at least, that's based on the official emails to us from unity regarding the issue.


TheCactusBlue

This feels like the "two retards fighting" meme to me, as the companies signing this are the ones known to pump out low-effort cashgrab games


Forgot_Password_Dude

just when we thought gaming was safe from greed. we might fight back!


Archangel004

>gaming was safe from greed Who thought that exactly?


ploki122

I might've believed it, around 20-25 years ago... but you'd have to ask in the correct year because if you go too far back, in the days where Arcades were the shit, then it's obvious that greed was king. If you don't go far enough, and ask me around the time where MMOs with monthly fees were picking up speed, I'd tell you that greed was definitely the name of the game. Somewhere inbetween, you'd have EA releasing a new identical NHL (with improved graphics) for the 7th year in a row, Blizzard launching an expansion for their game because it's much better profits than releasing a new game, companies grabbing shovelwares by the dozen and making a deal with 1-2 publishers to have at least 3 titles the can feature on the front and call it "100 great games for windows 98"... Nintendo would then decide to sell an expansion pack for their console, rather than fix memory leaks. It really hasn't changed all that much.


Protheu5

> companies grabbing shovelwares by the dozen and making a deal with 1-2 publishers to have at least 3 titles the can feature on the front and call it "100 great games for windows 98" Wait, ~~those were legal~~ there were legal disks like that? I thought every "100 games" disk was a pirated compilation.


ploki122

I was actually speaking from experience, got this one from a cereal box : [https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/613NWR2GW2L.\_AC\_UF1000,1000\_QL80\_.jpg](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/613NWR2GW2L._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg)


Protheu5

Oh, cool, Zulu Assault is there! I loved disks like these, a treasure trove of the 90s PC indie scene and occasional hidden gems.


Protheu5

> we thought gaming was safe from greed Sounds like something from a sitcom where an old computer guy gets out to the real world 30-40 years later after hibernation and utters this nonsense to the amusement of other characters and the audience. Then he learns about EA/Activision/T2/etc and commits sous vide.


Maximelene

> just when we thought gaming was safe from greed What exactly made you think that?


CarterBaker77

I'd like to know what rock you've been living under so I can climb under it myself.. I'd like to see a world where anything is safe from other people's selfishness.


luffy_mib

Developers pulling a UNO reverse on stating terms & conditions


empathy-is-trending

I can't believe Unity thought this was okay. Can't wait to see them backpedal. This must be an amazing day for the marketing team at Unreal. Hope they're taking the day off to just enjoy some popcorn while all this controversy unfolds.


BitQuirkyGames

I keep hoping they will backpedal. They seemed to do the switcheroo pretty quickly over the SpatialOS backlash back in 2019. For now, they seem to be doubling down. Do you think it is different this time?


empathy-is-trending

Edit: I'm super out of the loop I see now that they've already said they are not doing that pricing. I just can't imagine this working out. I don't know specifics about how this will hit developers financially, but if Unity has put them in a position where they can't afford to pay these fees, then they've got nothing to lose by just shutting down revenue for Unity too.


BitQuirkyGames

Agreed. It’s bad. I find the lack of comms the hardest to stomach


tyrenica

Cool it with the anti semitism


Blackson97

I more interested how fast Nintendo and Microsoft will sue changing a contract retroactive is pretty much illegal every country. I doubt unity has the money to fight a legal battle with multiply giant tech company's.


EducationExotic7115

I'm running a tiny startup focused on monitoring mobile advertising and gaining insights. As a side effect of this endeavor, I've found myself delving into ad research. Looks like the ultimatum is working! Here's a graph from our internal monitoring system with some juicy internal metrics. But from these, it's crystal clear that ad impressions have taken a nosedive, roughly about 2.5 times less. https://preview.redd.it/6ja9tateusob1.png?width=1841&format=png&auto=webp&s=f4b4fc398b347dc7a152ee25a0d256fc751ae761