ffhhttt

Presumably it would work similar to taxes on cigarettes, alcohol etc. by discouraging excessive consumption and making low CO2 alternatives much more attractive financially.

So the societal cost of banning private jets is approximately zero?

Why is it even worth discussing then?

Because the population will get much older (i.e. much less productive) before it gets much smaller. That going to cause all kinds of massive issues.

Presumably people occasionally still talk to each other

Then IMO they would be a monopoly on iOS in a similar way. You change the default search engine on Android too, most people don’t know how/don’t care/etc.

Now I’m not sure that something you could actually define as a monopoly but they do control almost the entire search market on mobile because they directly control Android and pay Apple huge amounts of money to achieve the same on Safari.

Perhaps (well.. almost certainly) that would disincentivize any of the companies in these industry from innovating at all (if you can’t gain any edge by additional investment since anything you do will be stolen you might as well start stealing if that cheaper).

This would also especially favor large mega corporations as long as they are efficient enough (due to obvious reasons).

So a page full of massive banners and popups?

How would that benefit most consumers?

If you make it clear to the court that you’re just willing to treat the fine as a tax and pay it indefinitely without having any intention of altering your behavior, I’m sure they’ll start imposing other penalties after some time

How would the search business be monetized?

Internet Explorer came bundled with the OS and therefore had a leg up on the competition.

Isn’t Google doing the same by making their search engine default on Chrome, Android and even by paying Apple billions to make the default on Safari?

There is very little non-executive level employees can do to engage or not engage in monopolistic practices. All the decisions that lead to that are generally taken way above so such training would be pretty useless. Insider trading is very different in that regard because it’s something individuals can engage in and (usually) not the outcome of corporate strategy.

So executives, marketing people etc. can say that their products “will crush the competition” and that would be fine?

Moron

Not so much because they might making some incorrect conclusions but because they don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.

everyone else would now be more profitable with Unreal

To be fair only F2P games that makes less than ~$2 per user might be more profitable. For almost everyone else above the 1 million threshold Unity would still be cheaper.

at .20c

Zero of them would be paying $0.2 per instal. Probably much closer to $0.03-0.05.

Nobody could ship games in the Switch using the personal edition and nobody who understands basic math would be paying $0.2 even after these prices go into effect

Why? IMHO it makes more sense for a public company.

27cents

Realistically it’s closer to 3-5 cents per install. Where did you get 27? Even personal/plus is cheaper than that in the worst case (ie. 100% of your users are in NA, the richer parts of Western Europe etc)

Because it’s predictable and and you can trust Epic to not start pulling the rug from under you.

Even with the new pricing model Unity should still stay way cheaper for anyone who make more than $2-3 per user.

re the Pro and Enterprise tier isn't too horrid.

Technically you couldn’t even use Personal or Plus if you made over 200k a year. It doesn’t really make much sense to stay on the personal tier now anyway, as long as you manage to make at least over $10k per developer in a year.

Isn’t most of that from Fortnite and not the engine business?

Technically if your game is not F2P Unity will still be much if your revenue i a couple if millions (even with their bizarre and convoluted per install pricing).

Also I don’t think they have that many people working on the engine (they have less than half the employee count of Unity) and it’s probably subsidized by Fortnite revenue to some extent.

I’m not sure shareholders asked them to over hire since 2019 by more than 2x (conservatively) and start spending billions to acquire random companies without having a clear vision what are they planning to so with them.

That mostly came from the board and the executives. It’s not like shareholders really that many ways to influence company policy that much besides selling or buying their stock

Yeah, certainly. This feels like such a weird model. Many developers will end up paying much less than 1% maybe even closer 0.1% while for others it could be much higher than 5%.

And the worst thing is that they’ll apply it retroactively so that your only choice will be take down the game or pay up whatever Unity asks..

Also most companies with "above AA" money aren't using Unity.

That not so obvious. Ad infested shovelware does make a lot of money.

5% for more than half the cost of development is not?

The same can be said about Unity asking you to pay $0.05 per install (which is massively cheaper than Unreal for any non F2P game)

IMO 5% is totally deserved and justified. In fact it's a bargain and you save money by paying Epic 5% compared to anything else out there.

How? That’s significantly more expensive that Unity if you make more than $2 per user or so.

But for most games Unreal still seems to be significantly more expensive after you actually start making significant money?

goes down a bit, but ad revenue goes up

The ad market is more competitive and very crowded there is no reason to use Unity for your ads if someone else offers a better deal.

Also Unity did try focusing on increasing ad revenue over the last several years, it didn’t work out that well.

leaves everybody feeling great about Unity.

Making their engine entirely free would make most people feel even better.

untapped sources of income to dumber product managers.

Why? Most Unity’s client’s don’t make much if anything at all a few make massive amounts. Due to the fixed licensing model the latter barely pay anything to Unity (e.g. compared to how much they pay storefronts/platform owners/ad networks). If they want to continue growing their revenue Unity has to get more from these customers, there aren’t that many other options.

Han civilization

Sorry. I’m not sure how did I manage to write that, it was supposed to be “civilizations have [thrived]”.

Earth has never been as inhospitable to human life as it's expected to be since any known civilization started,

That debatable and very hard to quantify. Also it really depends on the region, e.g. Europe was probably quite worse than now during the “little ice age” or the 600s (coincidentally the Arabian peninsula seems to have thrived during that period due to higher humidity).

Climate change was the reason many ancient civilizations collapsed, it seems to have been a pretty regular occurrence and we were only be to break out of that circle in the late middle ages/1500s.

I understand/understood the inherent inefficiency. My entire point was that if solar/wind makes up majority of you power generation capacity there will be certain periods of time when significantly more power will be generated than there is demand for.

totally, totally ignoring the fact that it will cost more energy to do the carbon capture and store said captured carbon, than the mechanical work we get out of it

Which is fine if you essentially have free energy during those periods.

Don’t get me wrong, it would only make any sense if carbon capture processes improve significantly but I don’t see how the laws of thermodynamics are an issue if you have an excess of energy you can’t use for anything else (of course other forms of storage might still much cheaper, you can make more aluminum during those times do even less sensible things that carbon capture like mining bitcoin etc.)

kill Unity as an option for F2P games

Will it though? That $0.20 fee seems like a red herring (and not such a big deal unless most of your users are in US, Western Europe etc.) and hardly anyone will pay that much. Why would they?

Anyone who makes over $200k is already using Pro and your per install fee is unlikely to be above $0.05 or so, maybe you van even get it down to $0.03 or $0.02. Which still might be a significant hit for some but that alone is unlikely to kill Unity in the F2P mobile market.

Also considering how much some of these game developers are willing pay for Ads $0.05 can’t be a very significant amount for them.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really like this whole pay per install thing or where Unity has been heading over the past 4-5 years in general but I don’t think these new fees will be such a huge hit for 90%+ or all their clients.