I can say, unequivocally, if you’re starting a new game project, do not use Unity. If you started a project 4 months ago, it’s worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted.
It’s on developers to sort through these two types of costs, meaning Unity has added a bunch of admin work for us, while making it extremely costly for games like Vampire Survivor to sell their game at the price they do. Vampire Survivor’s edge was their price, now doing something like that is completely unfeasible. Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you’re making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar. As a developer who starts a game under the personal plan, because you’re not sure how well it’ll do, you’re punished, astoundingly so, for being a breakout success. Not to mention that sales will now be more costly for developers since Unity is not asking for a percentage, but a flat fee. If I reduce the price of my game, the price unity asks for doesn’t decrease.
I heard from a friend that, allegedly, Riccitiello sold a load of his shares in Unity last week, almost like he knew those shares would be worth less this week… No idea if there’s any truth to it. You know how rumours can be.
I’m starting a game design degree on Monday, and I know Unity is on the syllabus (though not until later in the year). Guess it’ll be interesting to start the term with a conversation about how useful knowledge of Unity will be long term. Since the majority of graduates from this university go into or start indie studios (due to geography), how Unity treat smaller developers is definitely going to be relevant.
Knowing the sort of person JR is, I absolutely wouldn’t be surprised. He’s a shit human
The reality is that it’s a lot of fuss for a game development company to switch engines but for an experienced individual developer it’s not a huge deal to switch engines. If you learn game development and design today using Unity then 100% of the game design knowledge is exactly transferable and 80-99% of the game development knowledge (depending on exactly what you’re doing) will transfer to Unreal or Godot or whatever else you might need to use later.
It’s like a musician switching from one audio production suite to another. The musical theory stays the same and while the exact details of how to make each bit of software do stuff is different, the actual stuff you’re making it do is broadly the same.
I don’t quite get how the changes are so bad for indies. You must have both $200k revenue and 200k installs before the fee starts ticking on the excess installs. Do indies really sell that kind of numbers?
I can see how the flood of ad-based mobile F2P games are hit, but I don’t feel sorry for those that run that kind of model.
Some do and can you risk to be one of them if Unity takes that much after the first week?
Terraria, a game that got fresh content for years, meaning people were each update reinstalling the game, installing it on multiple platforms etc.