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Unity Claims PlayStation, Xbox & Nintendo Will Pay Its New Runtime Fee On Behalf Of Devs

kruis

Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
So thats the reason for the PSN increase....actually probably is one reason.

Nope. Not at all. MS/Sony/Nintendo/Epic/Steam/etc don't do business with Unity, they do business with the publishers/indie developers who want to put their games on their online stores. If Unity wants more money from devs using their software, they've got to figure out the payment details between themselves.
 

kruis

Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
Or raising PS+ fees :-(

Sony won't raise PS+ fees, since they have nothing to do with this mess. If Unity succeeds in demanding more money from devs using their software, then those devs will have to raise the price of their games to compensate for the additional licensing costs.
 

wolffy66

Member
Subs are based on user sales. So Genshin installs 20 mil copies but only 5000 whales pay for it (ignore these Numbers, just an example), Unity would get paid for 5K sales but not for the other millions of users.

That's why they want to change to charge per install.
That's one example and they way they've always made money would be to sell their sub service to Genshin devs. So no matter the amount of installs, genshin was only worth that sub price.
The difference now is they are either just wanting to finally turn a profit with a new revenue stream or they are worried they won't sell the amount of subs.
 

KungFucius

King Snowflake
Its still bullshit. If I install a cheap game again in 10 years the devs get charged out of nowhere for something that isn't making money for them anymore.
Don't forget that you are suppose to be charged PER INSTALL. So with Gamepass you might cost Microsoft money every time you uninstalled to make space and re-installed later.
Yup. I do this on PC gamepass all the time. Heck my PC fucking died pretty much while I was complaining about this. I installed a lot of games on an older PC and will install them on my new one when I get the parts. Why should some dev get charged for that. And sometimes installers run and don't finish. Maybe you forgot to uninstall a game to make room. Dev gets charged twice for that because the Unity CEO is a fucking piece of shit.
 

Dorfdad

Gold Member
So what they are saying is we’re going to charge the platform holder now wink wi k and the platform holder will now raise the price on. The games slightly so after all unity / platform holder will get their money and the prices will be passed on to the consumer.
 

Jinzo Prime

Member

Bro, this lawsuit is going to be insane! Board of Directors have a "duty of loyalty" to their organization. Here is the definition:

The duty of loyalty is one of the fiduciary duties owed by a company’s directors . The duty of loyalty requires the directors to place the interests of the company and the shareholders before any of their personal interests.

If this post is true, then the Unity board violated their duty of loyalty and can absolutely be sued by everyone, including the state.
 
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aclar00

Member
Sony won't raise PS+ fees, since they have nothing to do with this mess. If Unity succeeds in demanding more money from devs using their software, then those devs will have to raise the price of their games to compensate for the additional licensing costs.
The posts were mainly made in jest, but also just pointing out the timing of the recent PS+ price increase and this rumor. Given that Sony said something along the line of continuing to bring great content was the reason for the increase.

There is obviously more to it, but it's a fun anecdotal connection, timing wise anyone. For one, i have now idea how many games use unity and if Sony were to pay this how much would it hurt their pockets on monthly PS+ games l.
 

Fbh

Member
Streaming and service offerings have really upended the economics of gaming. Certainly the business model for middleware providers like Unity has to have been affected, so I'm not entirely without sympathy for them... But damn! Have they made an ungodly mess of this situation!

Honest question: Why thought?
I thought most of these engines work on a royalty based on revenue sytsem like Unreal (who charge a 5% royalty for products that make over a certain amount).

How do subscriptions services change this?
If my indie game made $2.000.000 through sales on Steam/PSN/XBL or I got a $2.000.000 payment from Microsoft to be on Gamepass how does that affect Unity?
Same if my game is F2P but I make $100.000.000 a year on microtransactions, that would still be revenue and the dev/publisher would still owe a percentage of that money to Unity.

The 2 exceptions I can see are first party titles, as I imagine it would be hard to give a specific number for how much revenue a single first party game has made on Gamepass
And bulk deals where Ms/Sony come to an agreement with a dev/publishers to put multiple of their games on their subscription service (as it might not be defined how much they are getting for each game specifically)
 
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Beer Baelly

Al Pachinko, Konami President
FdhaLL-UUAAZTAq.jpg:large
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
Those 5 bastards are bleeding the company dry.
I really don't understand why these bastards CEOs have to earn millions.
Why so much?! Why would anyone agree to pay them ?! Why are they even needed at all. The company is not on stock market anyway?!

They just killed it, devalued it and I bet my ass Unity will be sold soon and that is the whole goal of this crap.
 
How do they enforce this? Their contract terms of use for their engine is with the developer.

This is like me walking into Best-Buy to buy a new laptop and the store randomly decides it's going to invoice my purchase to PornHub. The latter will just tell them to fuck off, as they don't have a contract with Best-Buy and they weren't involved with the transaction at all.

Sony, MS and Nintendo don't have any say in what middleware engine indie devs use. But if Unity tries this shit, I can totally see them just outright banning Unity games on their store, because they're (rightly) not willing to pay for the privilege of the dev's independent choice of middleware engine.
 

Danny Dudekisser

I paid good money for this Dynex!
How do they enforce this? Their contract terms of use for their engine is with the developer.

This is like me walking into Best-Buy to buy a new laptop and the store randomly decides it's going to invoice my purchase to PornHub. The latter will just tell them to fuck off, as they don't have a contract with Best-Buy and they weren't involved with the transaction at all.

Sony, MS and Nintendo don't have any say in what middleware engine indie devs use. But if Unity tries this shit, I can totally see them just outright banning Unity games on their store, because they're (rightly) not willing to pay for the privilege of the dev's independent choice of middleware engine.

Presumably, Unity's angle is that platform holders need to pay them or they'll refuse to make engine updates/future functionality available on those platforms. Engine providers do a lot of work with each individual platform, so it's a plausible approach.

It won't work, of course, but they might think it will.
 

Xenon

Member
Microsoft puts the runtime on the cloud and only downloads a single copy. It creates a local copy of its cloud service containing the file so it doesn't require to be downloaded again
 

STARSBarry

Gold Member
So i just realised this mentions an install for the runtime right?

Now hear me out... what if games ran off a disc? Like what would happen if the runtime was never installed and console just read the data off the disc?
 

Danny Dudekisser

I paid good money for this Dynex!
Microsoft puts the runtime on the cloud and only downloads a single copy. It creates a local copy of its cloud service containing the file so it doesn't require to be downloaded again

Well... no, they'd probably tie it to however many server instances of a game are created, which is arguably equivalent to installs. Not that this whole scheme will even get to that point, but yeah.
 
Presumably, Unity's angle is that platform holders need to pay them or they'll refuse to make engine updates/future functionality available on those platforms. Engine providers do a lot of work with each individual platform, so it's a plausible approach.

It won't work, of course, but they might think it will.

It's immaterial to platform holders though. Fundamentally, the choice of engine lies with the devs, so there isn't a logical justification for platform holders being levied to pay for that.

From the platform holder's perspective, devs can use a different engine. And it's in Unity's best interest to continually update its middleware to support all major platforms because that informs its ability to compete against its competitors, e.g. UE5. If they decide to try to stick one over on a platform holder with engine updates, they're actively making their engine less marketable to devs making games for multi-platforms.
 
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Barakov

Gold Member

All three of those guys sound like scumbags who don't know how just fucked they are at this moment. It's telling that even Riccitello(who has own terrible ideas about monetization) knew that this was a bad idea.

Sounds like most of the board are pretty clueless on how to run the company and are putting profits over everything else. Hope they get theirs for this.

EDIT : There's no way any one of the big three would agree with this.
 
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Bkdk

Member
Interesting, this might very well force Microsoft to buy unity outright. They MS’s strategy is to get as many games in their game pass as possible, last thing MS wants is to have unreal being the dominant player with their business strategy, the fees will be so much higher if unreal is left. Game engines is not a competitive field with only very few big players for massive amount of game studios, other forms of in house game engines exist but only suitable for very small amount of titles and only unreal left would likely increase MS’s cost for game pass titles by a large margin in the long run.
 

Ozzie666

Member
Interesting, this might very well force Microsoft to buy unity outright. They MS’s strategy is to get as many games in their game pass as possible, last thing MS wants is to have unreal being the dominant player with their business strategy, the fees will be so much higher if unreal is left. Game engines is not a competitive field with only very few big players for massive amount of game studios, other forms of in house game engines exist but only suitable for very small amount of titles and only unreal left would likely increase MS’s cost for game pass titles by a large margin in the long run.

That would be some seriously genius 4D chess, if the goal was to tank the company, then get Microsoft to over pay for it and save it. The share holders would be escastic. Of course if they go into bankrupcty, that might change things.
 

Squarehard

Member
That would be some seriously genius 4D chess, if the goal was to tank the company, then get Microsoft to over pay for it and save it. The share holders would be escastic. Of course if they go into bankrupcty, that might change things.
Or Microsoft secretly had somebody planted on Unity's board, that suggested they should roll out this tactic knowing it would backfire, and then once they file bankruptcy, and THEN they get bought out by Microsoft on the cheap. 20D Chess!
giphy.gif
 
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IAmRei

Member
IF this is true, I wouldn't be surprised if their motivations are literally destructive, like literally destroy the company as it makes them more money short term and then move the fuck out from it to another victim
and destroy many of smaller competitor (smaller gamedev) in their way
 
Additional afterthought, if the internet was as widespread 30 years ago, is it possible there would be people calling for the heads of Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali following the bankruptcy of Commodore?
 

Cyberpunkd

Member
So thats the reason for the PSN increase....actually probably is one reason.
I can guarantee you this is not the case and this was not agreed with Sony or others, otherwise you would have joint press release. Someone at Unity fucked up and Sony and others are probably preparing a response.
 
So MS, Nintendo and Sony will be charged for the installation fee?

Do the big 3 know about this? I cannot see them being very happy about this.

Why would Unity even go ahead with this idea? The big three could ruin them.
Surely they know, if we know, they know.
 

Bkdk

Member
This situation is interesting. Sony and Nintendo are the ones eating popcorn as they rely most on first party studios and they have in house engine. MS relies somewhat on indies due to their game pass strategy, while apple will have to make tough decision here, they could cut unity off but they would have to deal with Tim Sweeney for their gaming app revenue, or apple would have to create their own engine which will cost them a lot of money and time, also taking risks of messing up quite a bit during the development phase. Apple also dislike charging new service cheap so they will likely face the same complaints once pricing model is revealed.
 
Its still bullshit. If I install a cheap game again in 10 years the devs get charged out of nowhere for something that isn't making money for them anymore.

Yup. I do this on PC gamepass all the time. Heck my PC fucking died pretty much while I was complaining about this. I installed a lot of games on an older PC and will install them on my new one when I get the parts. Why should some dev get charged for that. And sometimes installers run and don't finish. Maybe you forgot to uninstall a game to make room. Dev gets charged twice for that because the Unity CEO is a fucking piece of shit.
I wonder if old Unity games will start to be pulled from the stores? Like how Disney is pulling shows because they don't want to pay residuals.
 
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