Unity Live QNA - Casey | Pirate Software | Lana Lux
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ก.ย. 2023
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Reviewed video: • Unity's Marc Whitten -...
By: Jason Weimann | / @unity3dcollege
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Was fun as always!
Nothing has ever done as much to help Godot's open source community as Mutiny's open soar development model.
Godot getting good google trends rn fr
Free and Open Sewer Software(TM)
Bring on Open Source, proprietary trust is something you just can’t bank on.
That’s why it’s continuing growth is unmatched
Solid wordplay
These 4 should do this more often. Such different paths in development/programming. 2 parts sweet+2 parts sour. Awesome.
Love this Bad cop good cop dynamic between Casey and Prime
Casey has good podcast energy.
he has a 15+ y/o podcast called jeffandcaseyshow its really good
jeffandcaseyshow is the best!
The host in the Unity live stream build his own reputation and community around the Unity eco system. Take what he say with a grain of salt.
I love that it was one person at the beginning talking and suddenly there was 4.
I love team development in this season of prime
Decisions - directors board, Responsibility - devs. As always
They definitely didn't actually have their legal team to go over any of this until after the backlash, which suggests the resistance inside Unity to these changes must have been high.
100%
@@orbatos ??? Nothing about their model is illegal. Stupid, but not illegal. I'd be shocked if they didn't send it to legal first, and I'd be more shocked if legal didn't say "Looks good to me!". The PR team is where you'd expect the alarm bells to be rung on this one, but depending on how they talked about it internally they could have accidentally gaslit themselves about what this would do, rather than making an objective assessment.
@@jeffwells641 First, illegal doesn't imply criminality, these are civil issues. Secondly, buying a service and then forcing out competition is actually illegal. Thirdly, violating a contractual agreement in a way that can result in a judgement against you means that you are also violating the law.
@@orbatos Literally none of those things happened, and I never mentioned criminality. The major proof is UNITY IS STILL CHARGING PER INSTALL, they've just added an alternative fee option to be more flexible and more friendly to their small to mid-tier users. WTF are you even talking about? It's like you're in your own little world, inventing whatever you think other people are saying instead of listening to what they actually say.
If they have 7000 employees, at least 3000 of them have to not be doing literally anything...
That’s the nature of vc and stockholder driven dev
If you have 7000 employees and 1,5Bn revenue, and not shipping a physical product, how can you still be in the red???
They have a lot of middle management for many side projects.
they do alot of consulting too @@orbatos
I'm pretty sure Gordon's speech at the last Unite conference said it best.
"I'll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents."
The fact that unity has 7000 fucking thousand employees is just nuts. The issue is, they've been spending money in vc mode, only they aren't a Startup. Oh, also, they git government contracts now, so how much money are they getting from that?
Absolutely they would have deleted that repo when they first started discussing a TOS and monetization changes and realized it could be a problem.
That's a 60 IQ move, not a 200 IQ move.
My take on this, as an analogy is, imagine you have some kind of business deal, and you meet up with the client (Unity) each day for lunch, and randomly one day the client whips out a knife and says
"I'm gonna stab ya"
you say "hold on that's really bad"
client says "yeah I guess so, maybe I won't stab you"
Now the question is, do you continue to meet with them? or do you meet with the next best client (Godot) that doesn't even own a knife
It would be hard to eat, when wearing full body armor
But you don't kinda know the other client yet (Godot), so it's kind of awkward at first. And she's kind of cheap too, always lunch at mcdonalds. But I don't mind eating at mcdonalds.
It's so much worse than this
In your example:
1. The guy who decides stab/no stab actually showed up to explain himself
2. The guy retracted his stabbing plans fully, to "no stab", not to a compromise like "slight cuts to the face"
3. The guy agreed that stabbing is probably bad, not "Sorry that I didn't consult the community more on stabbing"
4. The guy didn't commit to any bold faced lies like "The whole point of stabbing was to make you more healthy". His stabbing intentions were communicated fairly honestly
knife stab man >>>>> unity CEO
@@SolarPlayermaybe the intention of stabbing customers was to ignite a sense of pride and accomplishment?
@@Blob64bit Imagine being at computers
*Denial Of Wallet* is the perfect name for the attack vector. :D
People writing code and desiging systems somtimes think about edge cases like it. Good thing they got involved. Next time maybe reach out before the whole community outrage part. You even employ an army of them.
Listen... listen, you know... we are committed. So listen..... we're fully committed to... say whatever we need to say right now so that not all people leave and erm... listen... i need this job. soooooo yeah... many years to come. we love our customers errmmmmm
People will have to choose between Gadot, Unreal, or Unstable
Haha! My daughter work for the RSPCA in an animal rescue center. Baby hedgehogs are so cute. Big up for saving ferrets man :)
Still waiting for that Prime & Casey Podcast...
they were in a board meeting, and it was like this "Well guys, we aren't making any money... what do we do?" 1st suggestion was "Rob the customers", but that wasn't actionable; it was too generic. Which ones? How much do we take? Do we kill them to keep them quiet? Too many ways for it to go wrong. This was how it went for the other ones too. Then finally someone suggested 'runtime installation fee' and they thought that sounded tame enough not to require negotiation with human rights NGOs, unlike practically every other suggestion.
torches and pitchforks beyond this point only.. they shall not pass
too many employees both cost more and also makes your codebase confusing
unity would very likely be profitable with half the employees
All the extra employees are in charge of checking physics math with paper and pencil. Can't let those calculators go.
Start at the top and clear house. I think at this point they are now a sunsetting company.
their 5 executives got over 150 million dollars in compensations in 2021 and 2022. Maybe one should start there and leave actual developers to do their jobs.
@@djixi98 Not disagreeing with you, but Epic Games makes a game engine, a games store and games with half the employees... There is bloat for sure...
Is Prime the ultimate mediator? Does he need to host a similar panel with Rust Foundation and some senior community figures?
This post is not sponsored by the Rust Foundation.
Senior community figures are not necessarily self-appointed figures.
lol, I dare you to change your youtube/google profile pic to the rust logo
There are not 7000 people at Unity working on a game engine. Remember, Unity acquired a bunch of other companies / businesses . There was at least 1000 people working at IronSource, They have two different ad platforms, publishing arm, they had an in-house game division and an outsourcing division. Then on top of that add legal, localised support (for instance in Japan there is a support division for customers in Japan).
The actual game engine team is likely no bigger than 500-600 people.
Q: you obviously made these changes to attempt to fill a gaping hole in your company profit strategy, what happens in a few months when the stakeholders decide to revisit the profit/loss scenario?
1:13:14 They answered that in the stream:
They cannot call it "sales" because they want to count in a "sale" of a Free2Play game as well.
And what would you call that?
"Download" and "Install" do not work because they want to track it only once per user, so they chose the term "first time interaction" (which is basically the same as sale but regardless if the game is free2play or not)
just realized, that someone in chat pointed that out 2 minutes later
the difference between 2.5% and 5% is 25K on the Million
on the pro tier of unity alone if you have more then 12 devs you are paying more money then the 5% revenue cut for the that million dollars
it works out to be for each (million-1) USD in prospective earnings divided by 12 active seat developers* years to make is effectively a break even on the 5%
($-1)/(12d*Ty) ~ 2.5%*($-1)
Dev price per million shrinks in this model, does it not? So the more money your game makes, the more the Pro license is worthwhile relative to total revenue. OTOH, the 5% is flat, and the higher the revenue the more the extra 2.5% dwarfs every other consideration.
So Unity is most expensive for a small dev studio with a dozen or more employees that only brings in $1m per year on their projects.
That's not great, but at the same time, a company with 12 devs (not to mention however many other employees they may have) is not going to survive if they're only bringing in $1 million per year. If you pay your devs the average US wage of $66k per year, that only leaves $208k for other expenses like office space, advertising, server or computer hardware you may need, etc.
That's not to say Unity's pricing doesn't suck for your company - it does, but Unreal isn't any better, so what do you do? Godot seems like a good option, but how much are you relying on the asset library? Probably a lot. Otherwise you've got artists to pay as well, and your problem is even bigger.
IMO, for a company in this situation, 12 devs is too many devs for the income they are generating. They need to cut the number of devs per project - whether that's laying off 'extra' devs, or running multiple monetizable projects at once with smaller teams. 12 devs for $1m revenue just does not seem sustainable.
I am glad you add the other 3 to the discusion, because this is really importen :)
The best game engine i used is [unironically] Source 2 (specifically the CS2 dev tools)
There is like 10 people working on CSGO, and is one of the biggest games of all time, why does Unity needs 7000 employees???
If you get a team of 10 for each feature/service on Unity, there will be a lot less than half of this number.
Kind of gross that they threw a middle manager to the wolves for the c-suite's mistakes.
still sounds like unity is commited towards their new business model. It is already so hard for indie devs/ small teams with steam taking 30% cut on sales. open source software truely does seem like the way forward for this industry
Of course they are, this is top down, and exactly why users should get out when they can.
First I'm glad for the removal of the splash screen in personal, I paid for plus only to remove the splash screen and canceled my account when I was being forced onto Pro for 4x the price.
However for me I've already ported one of my smaller projects to Unreal to about 90% completion in 3 days so I think that ship has set sail.
The part I don't understand is if you have the run time fee And the rev share, but you only pay for the lesser of the two, how does that work for F2P games? I 5,000,000 people "installed/downloaded" my game but I made $0; revenue. So does that mean I pay nothing? Surely not but again this is still confusing for confusing sake.
Yes of course you pay nothing. Unless you pay for pro seats
Also you have to update your engine to get rid of the splash screen, which means you say yes to the new pricing.
if you made nothing then you wouldn't pay cause you haven't passed the revenue threshold
2.5% of $0 is $0, even if it applied to amounts under $1m.
Yeah I'm done I think I had another thought, which I can't think of now but obviously my lesser of two statements was wrong.
hey that was cool. I like the show when it's Prime plus friends. Banter init.
Up to a million dollars per application before we get hit by the revenue share, and we don't need to subscribe to tier 2, tier 3, tier 4, or tier 4.1-we've moved to Unreal for our apps and experiences crafted in XR.
He's not a team leader, he's senior Vice president of unity create.
Thats what Vice president means in corpo speak. Its not like politics, each company has a million vice-presidents.
It's likely he's reporting directly to the CEO and is fully responsible for his branch (or team if you want to call it that). He is most likely responsible for greenlighting this and the CEO just nodded it off after they worked it out, so it's not wrong for him to apologise because he's responsible for it.
Make this group chat a regular thing and call it The Quaternion.
I bet under this scheme that presales could be fully avoid the fee if the install occurs on a different billing cycle than the sale.
Self-reporting means you just say "trust me bro" to Unity and unless they can easily tell you're lying they trust you. That's what they have been doing for years on the lower tiers, where there's a revenue treshold that when hit, "forces" you to upgrade, but you need to tell them you hit the treshold.
Regarding how you report "engagements", it seems like on steam for example, its sales minus refunds. On platforms like the play store it seems like its just sales. This last paragraph has some speculation but seems likely.
Yeah I wish they'd been more up to date on what was announced, because there's no 'install' tracking on the current proposal, it's sales for games you pay for upfront and first time downloads to free-to-play. This should be verified against what they eventually put in the written license/terms but that's how it stands for now.
Imagine Adobe charged you for every time someone sees your picture (for the first time) that was edited with Photoshop. You just have to self report the amount, no big deal.
"They talked to large and small customers"
Listening is hard.
The funny thing is it's not that lawyers called up with this at all. The lawyers must be where this fake roll back came from.
"Thank you so much for your feedback. Press any key for runtime fee."
The bottom line that i don't hear mentioned - their money is coming from ironsource and the ad stuff right now.
If you want money spent on the game engine, it has to make money. If it doesn't they can't justify spending too much resources on it.
So either it starts to make money or it starts backsliding even more than it already is vs Unreal.
I was wondering what happened to this live stream
Linda, listen Linda, Listen Listen Linda...
We want more roundtable
50:20 So, wait, it's not that they sell just before announcement, they announce just after they sold? I mean, sounds to me that they have to do these trades in advance, but they can decide when to announce things right?
it doesn't matter if you need to decide a decade in advance to sell, you know why you're gonna sell when you sell. executives/employees can't sell immediately before the announcement but they can decide when to announce so the stock selling is definitely shady even if it's not illegal.
I'm more surprised that there are happy people. If you were designing a business, would you put a dependency on a company that claims to have the right to update their TOS whenever they want, even retroactively? I mean, the TOS today seems fine. But there doesn't seem to be any real commitment to stating that the TOS cannot be changed in the same way in the future.
Based on 2.5%, Unity needs game developers using its engine to make more than 5 billion dollars in revenue a year to make up 100 million dollars a year shortfall. Which is quite a bit. Mihoyo has $3.83 billion in revenue but they can just stay on an old engine version. And they're now always charging the minimum of those two numbers. So it doesn't look good but I guess we'll see how things shake out.
Not to mention the additional cost of the administrative apparatus to basically enforce a somewhat complicated taxation system on game developers. They should be able to do it with fewer people than the IRS, but they also have less experience in that field. I think it's not reasonable to expect the self-reporting to stay forever.
Take a shot every time he says "Feedback"
Does anyone know if Lana Lux started acting stressed out before this shit went down? That would be a good indication that she was not blindsided by the changes, but I am unaware of any data of the sort.
It was not about feedback. Unity could have gotten all of the feedback in the known universe and it would not have changed the reaction if they still rolled this out as-is. The problem was "your pricing model changes are bad and you should feel bad"
Should I learn Rust or Go?
the interviewer makes this seem more like an awkward date, than an apology from unity.
What they're saying is they're creating a business model that will push out the small developers.
As for that person who is on the Unity Insiders saying they can't say anything basically means that you're more concerned about what Unity thinks of you instead of the community.
Which is a judgement on your character
That's not how NDAs work, they are legally obligated to stay quiet about the information until it becomes public knowledge. That's not a dev siding with Unity, it's them just not wanting to end up in court paying millions just on litigation.
Please, go sign an NDA, leak info and then talk to us about how fucked you are before commenting dumb shit like this.
A decade of ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) overlaps with a decade of Unity bleeding investor cash pretty directly.
Lol, I mean, geez Casey, call me a pedant but I'm kind of curious as to how they are going to track the legitamate installs. I got the sense that Prime did too, lol.
You just say "trust me bro" to them.
a bit late but great Collab, which brings a lot of unnecessary questions.. lets say they do install, what about the user privacy(a studio shouldn't know more than if i bought or not),, and the user data tracking is a bitch especially when u goo across the pond
1:51:47 bye
Jason probably wasn't the best interviewer in this video because he doesn't seem to want to press on any vague responses
1:48:20 lol Amouranth on the twitch search
If this company isn’t profitable what do you expect as end users? This is a folly of modern cheap money. Not a lot of sympathy for the company or customers
This might be an attack on applovin because applovin has plugin for unity3d and unity saw applovin gains with the plugin
It's everything, including an attempt to kill a competitor illegally, and illegal license changes.
Fire 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 employee to boost bonus for bod. 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
58:50 So, he is saying that people should use Unity because of the community. That is just all you need to know that they just don't give a s-hit about the community. They RELY ON the community for people to use Unity, NOT that THEY make good decisions FOR the community.
I love how Marc is talking about making unity financially stable, meanwhile, his total compensation for 2021 and 2022 was 31.673 million dollars. Total compensation for the executive suite, five people total, was 150 million. That is why they are running out of money.
Godot with C# could be almost a drop in replacement for unity, just load project in Godot, fix all the compiler errors, unity references to Godot's and you're mostly done.
There are some nice videos about that on YT.
The architecture of the two engines are so vastly different that you'd probably have to re-write a lot of your engine communication layer stuff.
I had a play with stride about a year ago and it felt like a natural fit for existing c# and/or unity devs.
I'm not buying the sad puppy expression at all.
In 3 years they will chrage per run
100% on calling out the new fee! Its a fee you were not paying before! You are still pating subscription fees + this revenue share! Why didn't they just raise the subscription price, or remove it and go straight revenue based. I think they want to confuse small game devs, because thats their largest user base. And as you pointed out this is not the CEO! Further in to the video seems like the same point was made.
Completely dodges the question about not being the decision maker
This dude is a professional dodge ball player. He doesn't actually answer tough questions
At some point they will stop distributing the pre "2023 LTS" version and the current version wont be available for use. Its not like people can dodge this new fee forever.
bevy engine
Self reporting using their tracking tools which they're no doubt also sending home to HQ and will just audit at a later time. So you'll still be at the mercy of their interpretation. Bizarre.
Poor guy; first thing he has to do is apologise for pissing off the higher ups badly enough that they throw him to the wolves...
blah blah blah, giza da dosh palio!!
Unity is like that hosting company that charges you 10$ a month and asks you to inject their ads into your website.
Cyberpunk
pretty close to in profit if c level got paid less :P
Dude, u gotta do voice acting.
How does unity have 7000 employees? There's no way that 90% of those people are needed. Unless there's like 50 programmers, and like 300 asset designers if they kinda do what UE does and provide free assets as well.
2023 is the year of the rust game engine!
As good talk this was, I feel the sentiment is skewed because mobile development is completely ignored here. 70% of mobile games are developed on Unity (if not even more). There simply is no alternative. All the frameworks, plugins and toolkits already have Unity SDK you can (more or less) just plug in and get rolling. Not to mention the knowledge and talent pool already out there.
Being able to make a iOS/Android build is a far cry from actually having an actually profitable game out there and actually run a business.
He says "Listen!" before every single answer, wtf, that's exactly what we are here for, you suggest we are not listening? Rude.
This Unity Announcement made me lose all trust in Unity as a Company, I hope those people get fired and just maybe then I'll reconsider trusting them again, but until then I'm uninstalling Unity studio, programs & games.
8 months later, my only thing is that Lana mentioned one reason for Unity was the community - but skip ahead 8 months now and most of the tutorials seem to be by Godot folks (myself included, although tutorials are still on the burner) here on youtube anyway. I did a search for unity gamedev and I just saw countless mobile game shorts and a whole lot of crickets otherwise. Maybe I'm not looking for the right thing, but by upload date the first handful aren't in English, and the quality of these tutorials has sunken tremendously. Even the likes of Brackeys has returned to do...Godot tutorials.
So yeah, the community seems to have sailed with flags for other engines. The next version of Unity with the ability to skip the shit Unity splash screen is Unity 6 which comes later this year maybe. It's also going to be crammed full of generative AI which spells trouble for quality and sounds like a lot more garbage mobile games IMO.
They should reject DEI and they'll have money left for making a profit!Edit: while "sustainable" is a good goal, I feel this was converted to a dirty word due to DEI linkage!
Softball interview. No follow up questions, no push back, nothing. Real disappointed.
I don't use unity not because of these price changes but because it has a dog s*** UI and is not anywhere and useful as UE, though most of the work I do I do in blender
1:12:15 I suspect you guys gotten dubiously stuck on the "install" term.
This whole pricing change seems to target the F2P mobile market from the beginning, which is big for Unity.
"Install" is just a term borrowed from that scene to speak its language. When they talk about "purchases" as you propose - they mean microtransactions in F2P mobile business.
They're using appropriate language for whom they're targeting with it. But when talking to others I think they shy away from admitting that Unity is mainly a phone scam vehicle, not to mention that they don't care about you as an insignificantly scarce customer base in comparison.
7700 employee's and the UI still sucks.. only a year ago I had to hack the registry files so I can turn it into dark mode 😂. Looser company puts Dark Mode in a paywall... pure greed
I bet "self reporting" does not mean the dev would report the numbers. I bet it means the installer software will self report to unity automatically.
You're wrong them You literally justsay trust me bro and unless they can really easily tell you're lying they just go with what you're saying. That's how it has been on the free tier all this time.
To be fair, I think devs would still be required to report in. It's just that they'd cross-reference that reported number with their own analytics.
Then call it Per Sale not Per Download, Plus pretending you didn't say re-installs counted at first is done. Giving it away for free is still a sale - its 0 dollars. THEY HAD FEEDBACK! they ignored it, the big bosses wanted more money end of story.
''We think its going to be cheaper for a lot of games'. So your yesman said yes its a good idea and you'd didn't bother to do a cost analysis.
Companies really need to stop hiring people to advise these people on how to speak, they all end up sounding the same and its like putting a stamp saying "Don't trust me" in the middle of their forehead.
i really hated that the chat during this event was completely ignored, completely scripted and suspiciously smelling pre-recorded. there was ZERO conversation
Do you really think they would have allowed public comment with how this has been going?
@@orbatos on the open letter on X it clearly stated :
"*I’d like to invite you to join me for a live fireside chat hosted by Jason Weimann today at 4:00 pm ET/1:00 pm PT, where I will do my best to answer your questions. In the meantime, here are some more details.*"
@@AndreaFromTokyo So I'll ask again, you believed them?
@@AndreaFromTokyo Yes, but the "answer your questions" part is ambiguous. It could also be interpreted as I'm going to ask the interviewee questions that I've seen people wanting answered which would still technically count.
So, I could have questions prewritten down and ask them without also asking things in chat and I'd still technically be right with the wording
This is Normal - Double and triple dipping is what Governments do best, companies do they same.
Bro go fundme and star unity competitor and beat them, a company is nothing if people get together
This interviewer was way too soft on him. For what reason? Unity royally screwed over its customers and after this interview we know they’re not interested in making things right, only how to recover their stock price. So, why not press them on their malfeasance, dishonesty or greed
Unreal: we make games and allow you to use our engine for some share
Unity: we make engine and don’t understand anything about how games are made, we tried and failed
Drop the subscription and make Unity just Unity, no Unity Personal, Unity for Pros, Unity for Grandmas, stop the segmentation.
unity is over for me. A mid-level manager's words have no value. and meeting with the TH-camr who will cause the least trouble. It's just corporate propaganda. Why no press release and presentation? Why is there no one asking questions from the biggest studios... I don't know if it is good, but looking at my work experience while trying to become a developer, I can say that this is just a presentation of a lie. The support in Enreal is very good, there are also free services, which is very important. like messaging...purchasing...registrations for the game... So what's in Unity? We have to go to other companies, connect the API and trust them. Unreal has EOS Game Services free and that's more than enough. And it's FREE on all platforms... unity What if it gets 2.5%, the service fees will already push that figure up a lot.