[HN Gopher] Unity's Self-Combustion Engine
___________________________________________________________________
Unity's Self-Combustion Engine
Author : erickhill
Score : 98 points
Date : 2023-09-16 15:57 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gamesindustry.biz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gamesindustry.biz)
| htk wrote:
| There's really no way for them to recover the lost trust. Even if
| they backtrack everything the mistrust will be there. The only
| way out in the end might be to open source the engine.
| throaway3nfn wrote:
| _> The only way out in the end might be to open source the
| engine._
|
| Do you have faith they know to monetize an open source engine?
| Wouldn't that actually expedite the fall in their case?
| htk wrote:
| You're probably right, but when I put myself in the game
| developer's shoes I can't think of any other way for me to
| touch Unity again.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| > There's really no way for them to recover the lost trust.
|
| As many have discovered throughout the years, Companies don't
| need "trust" to be profitable
|
| Ubisoft has been a laughing stock for a decade, EA still holds
| the record for lowest rated reddit comment (feel your pride and
| accomplishment), and "it just works" in Bethesda world
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Honestly, I think it's a vocal minority of people who shit on
| Ubisoft, EA, Activision etc.
|
| The average person either doesn't know who they are or
| recognises them as the company that made some prior game they
| enjoy.
| blibble wrote:
| gamers can't boycott, that's true
|
| Unity's clients aren't gamers, they're businesses
|
| you'd have to be insane to build a business on unity now
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| ^
|
| Businesses and even solo developers look at their options
| much more closely. They aren't buying a few hours of fun,
| they are choosing the vector for their livelihood.
| ilc wrote:
| Bethesda you know what you are buying into, and at least, it
| is a simple transaction.
|
| You know the game will run like ^$^@% for a while, if not for
| good.. You know the modders will fix it, and smart folks will
| wait for the sales on their titles, because by the time they
| go on sale, they'll be well supported by mods, and less
| buggy.
|
| So.. I'd keep them clear of the other sleazoids ;).
| WJW wrote:
| > The only way out in the end might be to open source the
| engine.
|
| The problem for unity is that it costs a ton of money to
| develop the engine and not enough people pay them for it. Open
| sourcing the engine does not help with that problem and might
| even make it worse.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I don't think that would solve it for them at all. They'll
| still want to lock you in with their services and whatnot.
| Besides, they probably don't have the rights to open source the
| engine.
|
| They should just cap their take at "up to 5% rev share". At
| least at that point there's no worry about runaway costs.
| [deleted]
| scott_w wrote:
| No, the problem isn't trust. The problem is the pricing model is
| both bad and retroactively applied. Given a good number of games
| won't be modified or updated, just sold over time, I struggle to
| see a justification for applying to them beyond "we want more
| money."
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Unity lit money on fire for decades to buy a market advantage
| that overrules the basic economic incentives that supposedly
| ensure free markets work best for customers. It was successful in
| doing that because it's very hard for a sustainable business to
| compete against one that is fine losing billions of dollars.
|
| This right here is the most notable part of the article, and it
| is entirely correct - it has been _for years_. Venture capital is
| fine to use for actual ventures, to create new markets or hell,
| to break into a market with entrenched powers... but when it is
| used on a long time purely to undercut and destroy legitimate
| prior businesses (taxis /Uber, hotels/AirBnB, game
| engines/Unity), authorities should step in.
|
| It's time to revive anti-trust, anti-dumping and other anti-
| predatory politics.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Uber isn't a good example. They came up with a business model
| that literally required customers to get into strangers' cars.
| Eighteen nanoseconds later, the taxi industry was dead.
|
| There is _no_ other possible conclusion to draw, except that
| the taxi industry had it coming.
|
| Fast-forward to today. The venture capital has long since run
| out. Taking an Uber costs at least as much as the taxis ever
| did. Yet, do you foresee any way for the taxi industry to make
| a comeback, except by holding the rest of us at gunpoint?
| _moof wrote:
| When Uber started it was black cars only. Very, very
| different experience.
| Rapzid wrote:
| I suspect it's still cheaper than Taxis would have been
| without it existing especially counting for inflation.
|
| But then, the biggest issue being solved wasn't price it was
| availability. You could call for a Taxi at a craft-beer pub
| in Texas in 2010 and it was a crap shoot the thing ever
| arrived or if it did maybe an hour later.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| "Getting in a stranger's car" also describes taking a regular
| taxi...
| BoorishBears wrote:
| In New York getting a Taxi Medallion took essentially
| getting a mortgage.
|
| It's like picking up food at a restaurant vs some random
| guys house: technically they're both strangers, there's no
| guarantee the restaurant is clean either... but only one is
| a stranger to serving customers food.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I'd argue the opposite, in terms of safety. Rapes and
| sexual violence were (anecdotally) way more common back
| in the taxi days.
| abracadaniel wrote:
| Most didn't own their own medallion, but were employed by
| large companies that owned them.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| No, most were owned by individuals and financed by PE.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/nyc-taxis-
| medall...
|
| > Instead of lending directly, the big banks worked
| through powerful industry players. They enlisted large
| fleet owners and brokers -- especially Neil Greenbaum,
| Richard Chipman, Savas Konstantinides, Roman Sapino and
| Basil Messados -- to use the banks' money to lend to
| medallion buyers. In return, the owners and brokers
| received a cut of the monthly payments and sometimes an
| additional fee.
|
| The big players knew what was happening, they exploited
| individual drivers to quickly offload their liability.
| They weren't directly exposing themselves to the risk.
|
| When prices collapsed PE swooped in and bought them
| outright.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| In 2012 only 18% of Medallions were owner-operated.
|
| https://slate.com/business/2012/06/taxi-medallions-how-
| new-y...
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| Everybody points to uber but uber won against taxis because
| they had an app and taxis had a phone number that often
| wouldn't even accept a downtown cross st.
|
| As a seattlite who got tired of hunting for a building that
| still had a street number just to get a cab on 5th and Jackson
| or what ever I'm glad uber killed taxis
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| In Austin ~2012-ish, we had Austin Cab.
|
| It had an app. It was like Uber, but worse in every way you
| can possibly imagine and _outrageously_ priced.
|
| I don't like an Uber monopoly either, but it doesn't mean the
| status quo was better before.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is exactly it.
|
| It would be like if no pizza place had mobile ordering and a
| new one started that had it; that was the killer feature.
|
| Everything else (I personally believe) was hyped up by Uber
| so that the taxis wouldn't realize what the real competitor
| was until too late.
|
| Now there may be taxi hailing apps, but nobody knows the name
| of them, and they're different for every city.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| This part of the article needs a citation. Unity has been
| setting money on fire, but it hasn't been buying a market
| advantage. It's been burning money on highly, highly, highly
| questionable (at best) acquisitions like buying Weta and Iron
| Source as well an insane hiring spree and then paying those
| people for years for work and churn that Unity never actually
| manages to ship in the engine.
| yterdy wrote:
| The other elephant in the room is that the owner of Unity's
| main competitor is quite a bit larger than it is. I can't say
| that anything Unity _buys_ would give it a market advantage.
| fidotron wrote:
| The immediate follow up question is can corporate support of
| open source projects count as product dumping?
|
| We live in very interesting times while all this unravels.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| > The immediate follow up question is can corporate support
| of open source projects count as product dumping?
|
| It can when the competitors are dead, and the patron yanks
| all funding and support from the project.
|
| I can't imagine trying to prove that in court though.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The immediate follow up question is can corporate support
| of open source projects count as product dumping?
|
| For what it's worth, I'd classify true open source as the
| only exception to anti-dumping laws. If you want to burn
| money to fuck over everyone else, give up your competitive
| advantage.
| Rapzid wrote:
| > John Riccitiello, now there is a guy who is going to attract
| and retain top management and engineering talent!
|
| The Unity board apparently. The stuff that comes out of this guys
| mouth inspires confidence.. In shorting the company. How have
| they not replaced him ages ago?
| jmyeet wrote:
| > Unity lit money on fire for decades to buy a market advantage
| that overrules the basic economic incentives that supposedly
| ensure free markets work best for customers
|
| This is, quite literally, pretty much every consumer-facing
| startup. Uber anyone?
|
| As an aside, the very idea of "free markets" is a myth. Markets
| only function effectively with strong government. Period. Let's
| see how far anyone gets in a libertarian fairy land without
| courts.
|
| ARM's IPO valuation is pretty much based on jacking up licensing
| fees too.
|
| We need to get back to the idea that companies are vehicle for
| generating income without the endless expectation of growth at
| all costs.
| tezza wrote:
| I make WebGL multiplayer games using Unity.
|
| The original changes essentially shut me down.
|
| Yesterday, I just found out Unity has changed their definition to
| exempt WebGL games: a partial relief. I have little confidence
| Unity will stick to their plans.
|
| In between I evaluated all the alternatives to Unity specifically
| about WebGL players.
|
| unfortunately WebGL is either impossible or crippled in other
| engines, frameworks. Further, other engines are like MS Paint
| versus Unity who would be Adobe Creative Cloud.
|
| Here is my WebGL summary:
|
| Godot uses Node trees instead of Entity Component. Porting Unity
| scripts almost impossible because of this amongst other reasons.
| Attempts to weld Entity Component only supported on Godot 4
| but....
|
| Godot 4+ WebGL does not work on Mac with no plans to change.
| Godot is waiting for Chrome to fix something, no comment on
| Safari, FF, others. One forum poster doing Godot WebGL export
| noticed that the Empty Scene WebGL export of Godot is 17MB versus
| 4MB for Unity.
|
| Unreal 5 does not export to WebGL. However you can use UE 4
|
| UE4 WebGL is not much discussed and the pieces you can find imply
| the output size, and thus customer download time, is
| significantly larger than Unity's
|
| Stride does not export to WebGL.
|
| So UE4 seemed the only other option
| jarsin wrote:
| > The original changes essentially shut me down.
|
| A webgl game making > $1m in revenue per year? Which one?
| tezza wrote:
| (projected)
| nightowl_games wrote:
| Godot 3 on web is solid. I was pretty sure unity web export was
| pretty big. How are you getting 4mb?
|
| We strip out a ton of the code in Godot using a "custom
| modules" file and the .wasm export is much smaller. I think
| it's ~4mb actually.
|
| You should look at defold or play canvas. And Godot 3, compiled
| from source, with just the modules you need.
| nimos wrote:
| Any reason to not consider a "web-native" engine(ie Phaser)?
| Just curious.
| tezza wrote:
| Phaser cannot do 3D games well.
|
| Also, the Unity Asset store has so many great assets for me
| to use.
|
| And 3D tools like PlayCanvas are browser based for their
| editor too. Desktop apps still have a massive edge in
| productivity.
|
| Unity has Timeline, Cinemachine, Particle System editors
| which make detailed tasks possible.
|
| Unity takes care of format shifting your assets into a
| compatible format, saving oodles of time.
|
| And C# is a superior language to Javascript (never use == use
| ===). Visual Studio a better IDE than debug in browser
| pests wrote:
| Maybe for all this work they are doing...
|
| they deserve to get some payment?
| tezza wrote:
| Yes, they deserve payment. I was never going to use them
| for free or try to circumvent.
|
| Under the old system as soon as I got to $100k revenue
| all the developers needed a Pro license at roughly
| EUR1900 per annum.
| martindevans wrote:
| The original plan would have had the developer paying 20
| cents every time someone loaded up their website. That's
| more than "some payment".
| berkle4455 wrote:
| <edit: nevermind, myopic HNers are right as always>
| martindevans wrote:
| That's completely useless for code assets. Even for
| purely art assets they usually come with Unity specific
| things such as prefabs, particle effects etc.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| > Desktop apps still have a massive edge in productivity.
|
| Unity editor is so crashy, bloated, slow and unreliable
| tho. Waiting for c# to compile drives me nuts.
| schemescape wrote:
| Or Babylon for 3D.
| cridenour wrote:
| I wonder if Godex[0] could be a fit for you. ECS based Godot,
| based on 3.x which has much more broad WebGL support.
|
| [0] https://github.com/GodotECS/godex
| troupo wrote:
| No one has mentioned Apple yet. Unity is Apple's exclusive
| partner on Vision Pro (for now at least). I can't see Apple being
| especially thrilled with this.
| solardev wrote:
| I hope this leads to a fire sale. Maybe Apple could buy Unity
| and make it free, period, just to encourage Mac and Vision
| development.
|
| (edit: and iOS! Lol I always forget mobile gaming is a thing.
| Facepalm.)
| gryn wrote:
| If apple buy unity the last thing I see them do is make it
| open source.
|
| I can see them make it apple exclusive and more integrated to
| the apple ecosystem though.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Open source is indeed unlikely, but there's a very good
| chance they'd make it free or inexpensive relative to
| competitors. Plenty of precedent for that in the video
| editing tools they've bought and turned first-party.
|
| They might not kill off cross-platform support this time,
| though. Today's Apple maintains true native (not just "port
| half of the Mac/iOS userland" native) Android and Windows
| apps.
| mst wrote:
| I don't consider it -likely- but Apple do have form for
| "buy a thing to -use- it and who cares if other people use
| it as well" in FoundationDB.
| timmytokyo wrote:
| Microsoft is honestly a better fit given Unity's C# roots and
| Visual Studio integration. But I find it hard to imagine
| Microsoft being all that interested in Unity these days.
| They're already attracting intense antitrust scrutiny vis-a-
| vis their attempted Activision-Blizzard acquisition.
| solardev wrote:
| That's a really interesting idea.
|
| I'm pretty sure the Blizivison acquisition went through in
| both the US and EU. Microsoft's not really a huge player in
| gaming; Xbox and Windows combined are still tiny compared
| to the other consoles and mobile platforms. And if they use
| a similar playbook like they did with the acquisition
| (promising cross platform compatibility for a decade or
| so), they honestly wouldn't be the worst stewards.
|
| Today's Microsoft is kinda slow and boring, but that's
| probably the kind of business you want managing a game
| engine. Reliable, stable to the point of being stale, but
| reliable. No sudden surprises that give you 3 months to
| reinvent your last five years of work.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Given the ubiquity of tech debt in Unity I could see Apple
| maintaining support for the current C# version for the time
| being and in the long term, replacing it with a full
| rewrite based around Swift with a temporary C#
| compatibility layer to pull the ecosystem through the
| migration, which wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea but
| could be interesting.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| If Apple buys it, it'll quickly head down the path of
| exclusivity. They'll find some "security" excuse for it
| that'll be enough for their reality distortion field to do
| its thing.
| solardev wrote:
| Is there such a thing as an Apple exclusive game? I can't
| imagine a developer would want to cut off like 90% of the
| market from being able to play their title.
|
| (I think there are a few on Apple Arcade, but I always
| assumed those were sponsored exclusives?)
| fordsmith wrote:
| The issue is not an apple exclusive game, it's that they
| will make the Unity developer experience apple only.
| solardev wrote:
| How could that work? Even the M2 Ultra isn't nearly as
| powerful an actual desktop GPU, much less workstation or
| data center cards. And devs will need to be able to test
| on Windows machines.
| jwells89 wrote:
| There used to be some indie Mac (and later iOS) only game
| studios like Pangea Software (makers of Nanosaur, Bugdom,
| Otto-Matic, and Enigmo among others) but I'm not sure how
| many of those are still around.
|
| As far as bigger studios go, Bungie was a Mac studio
| until Microsoft scooped them up to turn Halo Xbox-
| exclusive instead.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| There used to be plenty of iOS exclusives.
|
| But if you are talking OSX exclusive, yeah, that would be
| kinda insane.
| robotnikman wrote:
| My pipe dream would be Valve buying unity, being a private
| company they would not have to deal with pressure from
| shareholders and they have a good track record with
| developers and customers.
|
| But they already have their own Source game engine so no
| point in them doing that.
| jwells89 wrote:
| That would be quite something. Perhaps this would also result
| in Unity's ad business being shuttered or at least sanitized,
| similar to how Shazam shed all of its third party tracking
| junk after Apple bought it.
| vertis wrote:
| How long until someone weaponises the 'installs' to bankrupt
| competitors? I can see this happening in the already somewhat
| scummy free-to-play market.
| danboy4 wrote:
| They clarified it will only be initial installs. Depending on
| how they're uniquely identifying that, I guess it could still
| be gamed though.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| You can script a VM that looks different enough each time
| (e.g. change a Mac address) and install the software. Over
| and over.
| fragmede wrote:
| I'm sure an enterprising hacker will figure out the http
| endpoint that gets hit at the end of the install, so you
| can just rub a script instead of actually installing the
| game multiple times.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| And gamers are fucked enough in the head to actually do
| stuff like this.
| duskwuff wrote:
| That's still potentially disastrous for free-to-play games,
| or games that get pirated a lot.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| Unity has no incentive to solve this. They'll push it onto
| developers to provide a deduplication in a clumsy process
| after they've already been billed for the month
| kibwen wrote:
| There's absolutely zero chance that Unity can track such a
| thing precisely. To say nothing of their handwavey
| "proprietary data model" that uses nothing more than _vibes_
| to determine how much a developer is on the hook for. It 's
| all corpo-speak nonsense from a clueless CEO who has no idea
| what he's doing.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| "We'll bill you how much we feel like and offer no way to
| reliably measure or control it yourself."
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| > They clarified
|
| They _backtracked_.
|
| https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-
| ma...
|
| > After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player
| installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would
| result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the
| company would actually only charge for an initial
| installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had
| "regrouped" to discuss the issue.)
|
| This is an important distiction.
| pests wrote:
| Do you really think Unity will allow one of its customers to
| bankrupt itself? That doesn't benefit Unity at all.
| rfrey wrote:
| I'm not sure that "is this in Unity's interest" is still a
| reasonable way to judge whether Unity will do something.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That doesn't seem to bother all the other businesses out
| there who are also the moderators of abuse within their own
| domain. Such as ad networks who include bots with their page
| impression statistics.
| sigmar wrote:
| This is a bit naive. Lots of customers of unity have gone
| bankrupt. Did they retroactively waive the $2000/seat yearly
| pro subscription (5k for enterprise) or any other fees for
| those companies? Of course not.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Not even competitors. When you talk about games, even jilted
| fans are a liability.
| xwdv wrote:
| This is immediately what I thought of when I heard it.
|
| Worse, apparently reinstalling a game also charges the
| developer.
| morkalork wrote:
| People used to pay less-than-reputable businesses for services
| that would spam ad clicks on competitor's search ads, draining
| their advertising budgets. So I could definitely see the same
| "services" for installs.
| Dudester230602 wrote:
| _> ...but companies don 't exist to grow market share. They exist
| to earn money._
|
| This is not what HN/YC "taught" me...
| alangibson wrote:
| Because of ZIRP, there's an entire generation of business leaders
| that have mastered raising money but have no idea how to make it.
| Expect to see many more own goals like this in the next few years
| as they try to figure out how.
| glimshe wrote:
| This.
|
| Also, this entire generation has no problems speaking about
| what make them successful, writing books/blogs about business,
| being keynote speakers etc when they would never be able to
| build a _single_ business without massive financing. This is
| changing American entrepreneurship for the worse - in the past,
| the stories used to be all about someone starting a small
| business with no or limited seed money and slowly building an
| empire from scratch.
| magospietato wrote:
| My concern here is that we've run out of low hanging fruit
| that can be managed by small teams.
|
| Everything is so exceptionally complex these days I just
| don't think it's feasible to bootstrap an innovative business
| from your garage.
| basisword wrote:
| I feel like this applies to consumers too. We have a whole
| generation of people that don't want to pay for anything
| (speaking generally, not just Unity related). People are
| building their businesses using tools that are free/near-free
| and that are losing vast sums of money. It's created a broken
| market both from the supply and demand sides and it's why
| businesses are having to resort to subscriptions. Almost none
| of the people using Photoshop would pay $1000 for it every time
| a new major update comes out, even though they use it daily in
| their business and generate their income from it.
| EPWN3D wrote:
| This is just reality though. I know it really feels "wrong"
| that money was so cheap for so long, but in all likelihood,
| interest rates will return to close-to-zero in the long run
| precisely for the factors you call out.
|
| Business investments are now overwhelmingly software; it
| doesn't take massive infusions of capital to make your
| business more efficient, because efficiency gains are
| achieved through acquiring a copy of an infinite resource --
| software.
|
| Sure software vendors can create artificial scarcity through
| licensing fees, but competitive market pressures will keep
| those down, and the floor of software fees is very low. As a
| result there has been less demand for money than there has
| been in the past. Hence lower interest rates. (Aging
| populations and slowing population growth also drive interest
| rates down.)
|
| In other words, cheap money is an implication of the
| software-driven world we live in, not some sort of moral
| failing. It's not the result of policymakers doing something
| with punchbowls to prop up governments or whatever dumb
| metaphor gets thrown around.
| icepat wrote:
| 2023 has really been the year of established companies self-
| immolating in the name of more money. Is this the result of some
| new business strategy being pushed to high level execs? Or has
| the idiocracy produced by failing upwards finally come home to
| roost?
| vinyl7 wrote:
| End of ZIRP is making them all suddenly have to actually make
| money instead of relying on loans and investments.
| Unfortunately two decades of ZIRP means that none of the
| current leadership knows how to make money.
| aschearer wrote:
| When the tide goes out you find out who's swimming without
| their trunks.
| [deleted]
| WJW wrote:
| Companies have been self-immolating for short term gains since
| basically forever, so that is nothing new. Raising interest
| rates have definitely pushed some long-term money losers over
| the edge though. Rather than subsisting on ever more funding
| rounds they now need to figure out how to make money out of
| their huge "free tier" subscriber base and the quickest way is
| to start charging them money. Predictably, the people who
| formerly got valuable stuff for free are not fans of this idea.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| I think it would make more sense to take a cut of the revenue
| when a game is sold, as that is easier to calculate for the
| developers. I can understand why they chose installs though as
| that's easier to measure for them and they would need to trust
| developers with their revenue numbers as they don't own the
| distribution platform like e.g. Apple does, but honestly they
| could've just used the installation rate as a sanity check for
| the license numbers reported by developers.
|
| As a game developer I would be very wary about signing such a
| contract as I'm sure these metrics can be easily gamed, so anyone
| with enough malicious intent could probably install-bomb my game
| and rack up large charges for me, and in the end I would be
| responsible for proving that those installs were malicious (which
| I imagine could be quite difficult).
| rightbyte wrote:
| Like, you better not make a good game that is installed more
| than once.
|
| Pay-per-install seems like a really bad way to charge dev
| costumers by. E.g. a nice long lived game will be charged way
| more than shovelware, due to users reinstalling when they buy
| new machines.
| Sakos wrote:
| I've installed Deus Ex probably 30+ times since I first
| played it at launch. Hell, sometimes I'll install it, decide
| not to play it, uninstall it, then reinstall it a week later.
| I've reinstalled it like three times this month because I
| can't decide whether I feel like replaying it or not. That
| would basically mean over 10% of the game's original full
| price going towards Unity with ongoing costs in perpetuity.
| That's without distribution (whether brick and mortar or
| Steam) and other costs, and without the developer further
| monetizing the game off of me.
|
| That's absurd.
| qwytw wrote:
| Presumable only one install per unique device counts. At
| least that's what they say.
|
| Not that they even seem to know at this point how will the
| install be even tracked....
| lancesells wrote:
| I think it would be even easier to charge for tiers of software
| instead of the rent-seeking until the end of time.
| troupo wrote:
| > I can understand why they chose installs though as that's
| easier to measure for them
|
| How is it easier to measure? Bundles, sales, re-installs,
| charity events, Game Pass... There are a million ways to
| install a game.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| The Unity runtime phones home.
| starburst wrote:
| It doesn't always phone home, that's the thing, a lot of
| people assume that's the case and that every games built
| using their engine since the beginning does it but that's
| not the case.
|
| The way they calculate the installs is not base on that,
| well unless you enabled Unity Analytics of course, but
| that's not the case on every games and they are going for
| every games ever made by their engine.
| gsich wrote:
| Maybe, but Unity said it doesn't need to for them to
| "estimate" an install number.
| where-group-by wrote:
| This would not allow them to monitize free2play games.
| alangibson wrote:
| > "We leverage our own proprietary data model, so you can
| appreciate that we won't go into a lot of detail, but we believe
| it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the
| Runtime is distributed for a given project."
|
| This is incredible. They've given themselves the right to demand
| any amount of money as determined by them alone.
| aschearer wrote:
| "We won't go into a lot of detail" but they still expect to be
| paid based on the data they collect? What happens when a
| popular game or publisher claims they had X installs and Unity
| claims they had Y? Hard to imagine people will simply accept
| Unity's position when there's real money at stake...
| solardev wrote:
| Isn't that how ad networks work too?
| alangibson wrote:
| Yes, and it's an open secret that they're crooked as a dog's
| hind leg.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| Yes. In fact, Unity merged with a company that sort of
| specializes in mobile advertising: ironSource. [1]
|
| Here is an example of one of their mobile ad products:
| https://www.is.com/mobile-advertising-sdk/
|
| [1]: https://investors.unity.com/news/news-
| details/2022/Unity-Ann...
| pests wrote:
| Considering more than half their revenue comes from
| advertising that is not unsuprising.
| throw16180339 wrote:
| I never thought I'd say this, but they make Oracle license
| audits seem reasonable by comparison.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-09-16 23:01 UTC)