Unity's Self-Combustion Engine

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unitys-self-combustion-engine-this-week-in-business

by erickhill • 3 years ago

159 153 3 years ago

icepat• 3 years ago

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?

aschearer2• 3 years ago

When the tide goes out you find out who's swimming without their trunks.

vinyl7• 3 years ago

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.

WJW2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

Sakos2• 3 years ago

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.

troupo2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

The Unity runtime phones home.

lancesells• 3 years ago

I think it would be even easier to charge for tiers of software instead of the rent-seeking until the end of time.

where-group-by• 3 years ago

This would not allow them to monitize free2play games.

BlueTemplar3• 3 years ago

As you can see, they have promised they would not take a cut of the revenue, as well as specified in their license that you would not have to accept the new license as long as you used an old version. Then changed the license and are now claiming that you can't do that.

t0suj4• 3 years ago

Isn't that grounds for a lawsuit?

gmerc6• 3 years ago

Install tracking is impossible. Especially unique install tracking.

troupo2• 3 years ago

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.

solardev5• 3 years ago

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.)

jwells894• 3 years ago

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.

gryn• 3 years ago

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.

timmytokyo• 3 years ago

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.

dotnet00• 3 years ago

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.

robotnikman• 3 years ago

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.

kowbell• 3 years ago

To be fair - Unity did start on OS X and was very early on iOS!

htk2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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?

htk2• 3 years ago

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.

jayd162• 3 years ago

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.

NooneAtAll3• 3 years ago

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

blibble• 3 years ago

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

AussieWog933• 3 years ago

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.

ilc2• 3 years ago

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 ;).

vunderba• 3 years ago

That's because it's not the consumers who are the ones who hold the power, it's the labor force. If you're a conscientious engineer working as a game dev for EA or Ubisoft, you should reconsider your options. It's likely there are plenty of options for one of your caliber.

WJW2• 3 years ago

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.

alangibson3• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

hinkley2• 3 years ago

Seems rife for a new generation of immigrants to sweep in and get shit done.

basisword• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

alangibson3• 3 years ago

"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.

aschearer2• 3 years ago

"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...

solardev5• 3 years ago

Isn't that how ad networks work too?

alangibson3• 3 years ago

Yes, and it's an open secret that they're crooked as a dog's hind leg.

galleywest200• 3 years ago

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...

throw16180339• 3 years ago

I never thought I'd say this, but they make Oracle license audits seem reasonable by comparison.

diego_sandoval• 3 years ago

"Trust me, bro"

mschuster912• 3 years ago

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.

MrStonedOne• 3 years ago

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

brucethemoose27• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

yterdy3• 3 years ago

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.

EricE2• 3 years ago

They are trying to buy market advantage for their Iron Source acquisition - if you agree to use it then the per download fee's magically go away.

fidotron• 3 years ago

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.

mschuster912• 3 years ago

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.

brucethemoose27• 3 years ago

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.

CamperBob2• 3 years ago

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?

spondylosaurus• 3 years ago

"Getting in a stranger's car" also describes taking a regular taxi...

_moof• 3 years ago

When Uber started it was black cars only. Very, very different experience.

Rapzid2• 3 years ago

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.

turquoisevar• 3 years ago

That’s a decent amount of revisionism.

Uber used VC money to heavily undercut the taxi rates, heavily inflate driver pay and decided to speedrun breaking as many laws as possible

As for getting into strangers’ cars, getting in a taxi is no different.

Do you think Uber was able to become as ubiquitous as it is if it didn’t heavily subsidize both sides of the equation and abide by the laws?

I doubt it.

Like you aptly describe now the fares as on par if not more than taxis, because now that they’ve attained dominance over the market by burning VC money, they can squeeze the customers and drivers alike. I’m not even sure if they’re turning a profit yet.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

Yet, do you foresee any way for the taxi industry to make a comeback

Since the taxi industry is far from dead in a whole lot of places, absolutely. In my city, taxis offer a superior experience to ride-sharing companies and they're doing just fine. Uber and Lyft aren't grabbing much market share from them. I've been in many other cities where the story is the same.

dirteater_3• 3 years ago

They have won "market share" I'm not sure exactly which competitors they've undercut in the process? Are there any examples of a legitimate competitor that failed because they couldn't compete on price?

tezza4• 3 years ago

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

nimos• 3 years ago

Any reason to not consider a "web-native" engine(ie Phaser)? Just curious.

tezza4• 3 years ago

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

schemescape• 3 years ago

Or Babylon for 3D.

jarsin• 3 years ago

The original changes essentially shut me down.

A webgl game making > $1m in revenue per year? Which one?

tezza4• 3 years ago

(projected)

cridenour• 3 years ago

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

nightowl_games2• 3 years ago

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.

devit• 3 years ago

It looks like the Godot problem is that Chrome on Apple systems by default uses the native Apple OpenGL driver, which are broken, and can be worked around by passing --use-angle=metal to Chrome to tell it to use the new experimental Metal backend.

So in practice it's probably going to be fixed by the time a new game is released, and otherwise you can tell users to start the browser with the proper command line, or contribute a workaround to Godot yourself.

scott_w• 3 years ago

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.”

Dudester230602• 3 years ago

...but companies don't exist to grow market share. They exist to earn money.

This is not what HN/YC "taught" me...

vertis• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

They clarified it will only be initial installs. Depending on how they’re uniquely identifying that, I guess it could still be gamed though.

berkle44552• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

WirelessGigabit• 3 years ago

You can script a VM that looks different enough each time (e.g. change a Mac address) and install the software. Over and over.

duskwuff• 3 years ago

That's still potentially disastrous for free-to-play games, or games that get pirated a lot.

brucethemoose27• 3 years ago

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.

xwdv• 3 years ago

This is immediately what I thought of when I heard it.

Worse, apparently reinstalling a game also charges the developer.

pests3• 3 years ago

Do you really think Unity will allow one of its customers to bankrupt itself? That doesn't benefit Unity at all.

rfrey• 3 years ago

I'm not sure that "is this in Unity's interest" is still a reasonable way to judge whether Unity will do something.

hnlmorg• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

jayd162• 3 years ago

Not even competitors. When you talk about games, even jilted fans are a liability.

morkalork• 3 years ago

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.

gmerc6• 3 years ago

Anyone who knows what’s going on in the Minecraft server scene knows it won’t even need competitors for that..

There is so much wrong here:

- “Trust us we figured our install measurements” is insane. We all worked on this for decades, it’s a dilemma with multiple axes, one being piracy.

- Everyone in games for a decade or so has been in a company that’s been screwed by publishers or partners on sales. Developers embraced unique activation keys and master servers to stop publisher fraud at least as much as as an anti consumer piracy measure.

- The only tradeoff to install transparency is surveillance and tracking which trades off against piracy. Most developers are not interested in pushing boundaries there.

Trust us with a company that now has broken every single promise they have made… I don’t think so

jmyeet• 3 years ago

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.

BlueTemplar3• 3 years ago

If you have been around more than a few years, you are not a startup any more.

Rapzid2• 3 years ago

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?

brucethemoose27• 3 years ago

They will probably pick up Phil Harrison!

beefnugs• 3 years ago

Let the wars begin:

- Unity itself can hire dark botnets to beef up their profits at any time

- game developers need to start selling with the caveat "5 re-installs included" and of course you change the price to over-sell how many installs the average person does

- game developers are now incentivized to make huge huge huge game downloads for no good reason other than to make people think twice about uninstalling and reinstalling later since it takes so long

- steam and game distribution platforms now need to start limiting re-installs and downloads for everyone, more complexity, more hassle, more bugs

- everyone needs to start running whitelist firewalls again, since automatic private data exfiltration is getting so out of control we need to block all internet access by default now

gmerc6• 3 years ago

This exactly (minus the huge downloads, no point). If they were successful with their “trust us, we can magically figure out number of installs” game; the incentives of the entire industry would be reconfigured to the 2000s of EA downloader expiring your purchase after 5 installs.

We can thank the heavens for Steam to murder that in its crib and we can hope they, still privately owned, won’t be tempted by the ultimate sin here.

dirteater_3• 3 years ago

I see a lot of developers talking about Godot, but I also see developers talking about Linux whenever Microsoft pulls some underhanded shenanigans with Windows and that doesn't seem to have cracked the OS market wide open

This is not even close to a fair comparison.

dirteater_3• 3 years ago

They share upsides, but the major downside that end users tradeoff compatibility with the rest of the software on their system is something Godot does not share.

rwmj• 3 years ago

$2.6 billion – Unity's lifetime accumulated deficit over 19 years of operations, a figure we got by combining the $2.2 billion lifetime debt of its last annual report with the $447 million in net losses it reported for the first two quarters of its current fiscal year.

Anyone know how a start up company can possibly finance such a gigantic debt?

bentt• 3 years ago

I think their actual strategy is to cut deals with vulnerable devs. They are waving a gun around and seeing who flinches.

octacat• 3 years ago

It does as much sense as sites with "Do you want to enable browser notifications?" popups. No sense, sites still do it, regardless of what there users press.

Unity's Self-Combustion Engine

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