<story><title>Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source</title><url>https://ramatak.com/2023/09/15/unitys-new-pricing-a-wake-up-call-on-the-importance-of-open-source-in-gaming/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DeepYogurt</author><text>&amp;gt; Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like an arcade&lt;p&gt;Any chance you have an example? I can&amp;#x27;t recall an arcade game that had you pay per bullet.</text></item><item><author>linuxftw</author><text>Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like an arcade, which is how video games became commercially successful in the first place.</text></item><item><author>mnau</author><text>A CEO under who EA introduced lootboxes. A person that proposed that when player runs out of ammo could make an easy instant payment for a quick reload.&lt;p&gt;Unity engine seems to flounder under him, despite rather insane headcount (7,703), acquisition spree laden Unity Technologies with significant debt...&lt;p&gt;I am not impressed, not with his ideas and even less with his results.&lt;p&gt;For comparison, Larry Elisson (Oracle) has distasteful business practices, but very profitable.</text></item><item><author>sigmoid10</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think this is a problem of company structure. It&amp;#x27;s solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn&amp;#x27;t have happened. But if you hire the former CEO of EA - a guy with no low level industry experience and who left his last job because of poor financial performance - then this whole fiasco seems like it was inevitable.</text></item><item><author>miragecraft</author><text>The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn&amp;#x27;t track for me.&lt;p&gt;The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes makes less money than this so-called runtime fee.&lt;p&gt;I beg to differ, I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they don&amp;#x27;t want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no revenue share&amp;#x2F;royalty pledge they had earlier, and ironically came up with an even worse monetization scheme.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the only reason this whole fiasco happened is because Unity the company has too many headcounts and has too much expense, and the reason for that is they grew too big, and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth, even if the company is much healthier if it had stayed smaller.&lt;p&gt;Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we ended up here. I think that says a lot.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kyteland</author><text>This guy wasn&amp;#x27;t proposing anything as crazy as pay-per-bullet. There&amp;#x27;s lots of games with limited ammo and you find more in the environment. Even in Doom you might run out of ammo for your favorite gun and need to put it away until you found another ammo pack in the level. This is why Valorant has a knife you can switch to, because if you waste gun ammo you run out on your main weapon. In Fortnite you have to find ammo and weapons in chests, etc. This guy was proposing an option to pay to refill your inventory immediately. But people heard &amp;quot;reload&amp;quot; and assumed something completely different.&lt;p&gt;The real problem with his proposal is it quickly falls apart if you think about it for even a minute. It&amp;#x27;s a classic pay-to-win mechanic. And once something is pay-to-win it becomes a slippery slope and a race to the bottom for the game makers. Every game has some amount of edge cases where you&amp;#x27;re playing only to realize &amp;quot;Damn, I&amp;#x27;m out, this sucks. I&amp;#x27;d pay a buck right now to refill.&amp;quot; But once you add in some options to pay in those scenarios, the game maker has a perverse incentive to no longer make it an edge case. Some PM will realize if they make the rare event 10x more likely they&amp;#x27;ll make 10x more $$$$ and they&amp;#x27;re off to the races. They start messing with the ammo drop rates to create &amp;quot;pinch points&amp;quot; and now your super fun game really does require you to be &amp;quot;paying to reload&amp;quot; and it&amp;#x27;s not fun anymore.&lt;p&gt;This guy was trying (and failing) to present it as a player benefit but the reality is he know exactly where this road lead. It&amp;#x27;s the same place EA games with loot boxes landed in the end.</text></comment>
<story><title>Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source</title><url>https://ramatak.com/2023/09/15/unitys-new-pricing-a-wake-up-call-on-the-importance-of-open-source-in-gaming/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DeepYogurt</author><text>&amp;gt; Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like an arcade&lt;p&gt;Any chance you have an example? I can&amp;#x27;t recall an arcade game that had you pay per bullet.</text></item><item><author>linuxftw</author><text>Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like an arcade, which is how video games became commercially successful in the first place.</text></item><item><author>mnau</author><text>A CEO under who EA introduced lootboxes. A person that proposed that when player runs out of ammo could make an easy instant payment for a quick reload.&lt;p&gt;Unity engine seems to flounder under him, despite rather insane headcount (7,703), acquisition spree laden Unity Technologies with significant debt...&lt;p&gt;I am not impressed, not with his ideas and even less with his results.&lt;p&gt;For comparison, Larry Elisson (Oracle) has distasteful business practices, but very profitable.</text></item><item><author>sigmoid10</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think this is a problem of company structure. It&amp;#x27;s solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn&amp;#x27;t have happened. But if you hire the former CEO of EA - a guy with no low level industry experience and who left his last job because of poor financial performance - then this whole fiasco seems like it was inevitable.</text></item><item><author>miragecraft</author><text>The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn&amp;#x27;t track for me.&lt;p&gt;The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes makes less money than this so-called runtime fee.&lt;p&gt;I beg to differ, I think the only reason Unity went this route is because they don&amp;#x27;t want to be seen to publicly break the promise of no revenue share&amp;#x2F;royalty pledge they had earlier, and ironically came up with an even worse monetization scheme.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the only reason this whole fiasco happened is because Unity the company has too many headcounts and has too much expense, and the reason for that is they grew too big, and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth, even if the company is much healthier if it had stayed smaller.&lt;p&gt;Epic is privately held, Valve is too, Unity is not and we ended up here. I think that says a lot.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>autoexec</author><text>I remember there were arcade games where your health continuously drained and inserting another quarter would heal you. That&amp;#x27;s worse than a per-bullet price because you were losing even when there were no enemies on the screen. 
I don&amp;#x27;t remember the titles because I played those kinds of games exactly once and never again. Total rip off.</text></comment>