Would you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? You started a doozy with this one and then continued to perpetuate it by breaking the site guidelines yourself. Seriously not cool.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

> What a ridiculous statement, thinking you can somehow figure out how I'd reply "100%" just from reading this thread.

Am I wrong? :) I mean, feel free to prove me wrong, were you a year ago thinking about the possibility of Unity dropping a revenue share model completely? Was that a conversation anyone was having anywhere at all? Forget about your personal response, you might not have been thinking about Unity at all a year ago. Fine. Can you find a thread, anywhere at all, advising mobile developers not to use Unity because they might abandon revenue sharing?

I mean, apparently this is a thing they should have considered, right? So do you have an example of anyone, anywhere, considering it?

The closest I can think of is the general advice to game developers not to use proprietary tools period, but I don't think that's what you're suggesting given you're not on here now saying that nobody should use Unity because of the power imbalance.

> If a company makes a product, say physical goods, and the price of manufacturing goes up but the company doesn't increase consumer prices in response, is it the manufacturers fault?

Nothing physically has changed to force Unity to change prices, nor is Unity claiming that's the case. Also yes, in a scenario where you have an agreement with a company and the company changes the underlying prices of that agreement without warning, you would be correct in saying that it is certainly more the supplier's "fault" that a company goes out of business than the company owner. You might claim that the supplier didn't have a choice, but it would be ridiculous to claim that it's the buyer's fault that the prices changed.

And again, I have to keep saying this: there is nothing physical going on here and Unity the company itself is not claiming that they're changing their pricing model in order to cover new costs. Analogies to material costs don't really apply here.

> All pricing models are made up.

Yep. That's... that's what I said. And if you're asking "who's fault is it that the pricing model is what it is" it's probably the fault of the person who created the pricing model.

"Who's fault is it that this book has these words in it? The author's?"

"No, it's the readers' fault!"

Come on.

> Can you prove you're right?

:) I thought so.

The only people making arguments about future Unity changes were Open Source weirdos like me who were warning against proprietary software in general, and we were regularly dismissed and called impractical. Nobody was considering that Unity would drop revenue sharing as a business model. If you go back and look at advice about the mobile markets, this was not a concern on anybody's mind.

Yes, people considered that pricing itself might change, but professionals in industry were not advising about the possibility of Unity changing away from a revenue share model, nor was this ever coming up as a concern in conversations about Unity's efforts to appeal to mobile developers. It's actually fairly easy to tell what people were thinking about Unity's pricing model given how recent the change is -- you can just go back and look at the many conversations people were having about engines.

I'll tell you what you won't see: you won't see a lot of people floating the possibility of installation-based pricing.

> I don't see any evidence that Unity made guarantees that it's historical prices would remain consistent into the future.

This isn't about a pricing change, it's about a change to the entire pricing model.

Nonetheless, you raise a good point. Unity could make arbitrary changes in the future as well. Doubtless, you would agree that it's irresponsible for devs today to use Unity under the current terms given that they have no control over what Unity's future pricing will be and given that pricing changes can be retroactively applied to games that they release before those changes?

Certainly you'd advocate today for the same level of responsibility and caution that you're arguing mobile developers should have had in the past, right? We have no idea what Unity's pricing model will be in 6 months, there's no guarantees in the contract -- and like you say, we need to consider that fact when building a business. So it would be the height of irresponsibility to advocate that everything is fine and the changes are no big deal and developers should just continue to use Unity.

Would you advise Unity developers today to decrease reliance on the engine and to be extremely cautious about building a business on top of a platform that can make arbitrary changes to pricing structures and that can apply those changes to existing products? Sure Vampire Survivors is profitable now, but as you correctly point out, there's nothing in the contract stopping Unity from changing that in the future.

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> So not only can you predict what I would say, you have some sort of insights into Unity's cost structures and what it requires for them to keep Unity updated and competitive?

Scary, right? I'm almost as psychic as you expect mobile developers should have been. ;) In my case it's not magic though, there's a trick to it. I get my information from having being active in game development spaces for a while and being familiar with the conversations that professionals were having about engine choice, and also from reading Unity's own press release and reading their own supplied justifications for why they're making the change.

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> If my costs of goods increase but I keep my prices the same, it's my fault

For anyone unfamiliar with how F2P and ad-supported games work, you can't just increase the cost of purchase for them, that's not really a thing, ad-supported games don't have a purchase cost to increase.

Have you actually worked on a game in any sense or fashion?

Yes, casual web games. Millions of units, high eight-figure to low nine-figure in gross sales. Tens of billions of online game sessions. I helped start an early online gaming site called GameRival.com that's most famous for Gold Miner and powering MySpace Games, and later led engineering for Grab.com (before the domain was sold off for taxis or whatever it is today).

I still run into Gold Miner clones at casinos even to this day.

Have you?

So what's particularly funny about this is that Unity has since clarified that transmission of the runtime over the web via streaming or browser plays counts as an install, and your nine-figure sales compared to tens of billions of sessions would have been impossible to do profitably under these terms. And yet you're still on here defending them and somehow forgot that the F2P genre existed when doing your math.

If this is your background then this conversation is even more ridiculous; you should understand what it means to have more installs than profitable users because that was literally your business model. So why are you having trouble connecting the dots here about why developers would be concerned about these changes? By your math you were making pennies per-session. How are you having trouble understanding why even a 2-3 cent additional cost for each session would be a problem for that model?

We didn't build our games on a platform that required royalties. And when the tools we did use had unexpected cost increases, like Macromedia Flash Communication Server, we built our own to replace them. When the advertising model became untenable, we switched to downloadable purchases and a subscription model.

Unexpected changes to supply chain happen. Cost of goods go up, or sometimes even disappear altogether. That's business. It's an absolute punch in the throat that Unity has decided to apply these fees retroactively and with so little advance notice, but the onus is on the game developers to adapt and change their models to the new reality.

There seems to be plenty of outrage without me, so I don't understand why you seem so adamant for me to be sympathetic to businesses that are only profitable with the charity of another company. There's more than enough room for us to have different perspectives.

What's ridiculous is that you seem to think that there's only one right answer or reaction to this, and that it just happens to be yours.

> I don't understand why you seem so adamant for me to be sympathetic to businesses that are only profitable with the charity of another company.

That is... certainly a way to phrase the conversation we've had and it is certainly a way to characterize the complaints that developers have with Unity's changes, as if they're simply looking for charity handouts.

I would suggest that part of the free market and part of Capitalism and part of business is that when platforms make decisions that hurt a lot of developers, sometimes those platforms get criticized publicly for those decisions. That's part of how business works; bad publicity is one of the penalties businesses pay for bad PR decisions.

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Of course you don't have to sympathize with developers, but it's disingenuous for anyone to claim that these changes won't impact developers or that critics of these changes are just ignorant of actual game development practices.

> It's an absolute punch in the throat that Unity has decided to apply these fees retroactively and with so little advance notice

is a pretty different phrasing from how you talked about those developers in your other comments, and it's ironic that you seem to hold such disdain for them given that your own industry experience would not have been possible under the same terms that you dismiss in other comments above as having virtually no impact on the majority of games.

Again, I'm not trolling for sympathy here, I really don't care if you care about developers. It's just not good for you to spread misinformation about the potential impact of the changes or to act like the pushback to the changes is based on inexperience or ignorance rather than legitimate grievances about their potential impact on whether or not Unity is usable for entire segments of the market.

> It's just not good for you to spread misinformation about the potential impact of the changes

Everything being said so far is purely conjecture, and my guess is as good as yours as to how it will play out. People keep talking about all these poor F2P or ad supported games that are going to be harmed, but it's all just conjecture and guesses.

Personally I think app stores are filled with too much trash and I'm not going to be sorry to see some of it go. Obviously it sucks when anyone has to deal a situation that affects their livelihood, but them's the breaks.

Consider layoffs. I've been on both sides of the fence, so I can appreciate the companies perspective of preserving cash flow while acknowledging the hardship it places on those affected, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it or join in on the chorus of outrage that wants to attack companies for what people want to perceive as malice. It's just business, as impersonal as it sounds.

Just as a point of reference here:

> The amount of outrage from people with no P&L or game development experience in this thread is unreal. [...]

> Everything being said so far is purely conjecture, and my guess is as good as yours as to how it will play out.

For the most part no one is calling you out for being mean or not liking F2P games, you got called out for very confidently dismissing worries about the changes as uninformed fearmongering based on back-of-the-napkin math where you forgot about the existence of one of the largest gaming categories on the market, and then doubled down (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37483482, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37485433) when that error was pointed out, and then blamed developers in those categories for not predicting the changes, and then revealed that your industry experience was in those same categories and that your games made the exact same choices about both funding models and proprietary engines/licensing that you were criticizing mobile developers for making.

I'm not trying to call you out for being mean to mobile game devs, I pointed out that "they should have seen this coming" is kind of openly ridiculous to say about an out-of-nowhere TOS change that almost inverts Unity's funding model -- especially given that it turns out you were in the same industry and obviously worries about funding changes didn't stop you from using proprietary engines.

Yes, sometimes businesses fail and bad stuff happens, I don't care what your attitude is about that. But "the universe is chaotic and sometimes difficult choices about funding need to be made" is a far cry from "well why did those mobile devs make the same decisions I made, they should have been more responsible."

> I can appreciate the companies perspective of preserving cash flow while acknowledging the hardship it places on those affected [...] It's just business, as impersonal as it sounds.

So this is not why you were called out, your attitudes towards the amoral nature of Capitalism aren't really the issue, you were called out because a bunch of developers said, "this is going to impose a hardship on us" and your response was "no it's not a hardship, these people don't know what they're talking about, this criticism is coming from people who don't know anything about making games, the new terms look quite reasonable."

And so the shift from that kind of confident statement about how these changes are a nothingburger to "well none of us have any idea what's going to happen" is the part that draws attention. If your original comment had been "it's anyone's guess what the impact of this will be" you would have saved everyone a lot of time.

> has since clarified that transmission of the runtime over the web via streaming

How's that affect twitch streamers?

My guess is it doesn't (they're talking about streaming via a platform like Stadia). Twitch streamers aren't distributing the runtime (arguably Gamepass streaming isn't either, but there is a clear tangible difference I think). Of course, Unity seems to be making this up as they go along, so who knows what they'll claim. But I can't imagine them trying to treat Twitch streams as installs.

So in the same situation where you lambast mobile games for not meeting profitability, you admit you've worked on games that would've fallen into that same situation.

And despite your belief that you were not dependent on any sort of intermediary platform I believe many games on that platform including Gold Miner were made using Adobe Flash, so you were in fact using a platform that could've been nickel and dimed just as much as Unity is now. Except you had the advantage of those games being made at the advent of the internet before rent seeking companies clawed their way into the middle.

The fact that you've been spreading misinformation or being downright disingenuous about many of the points you've been making makes me believe that many of your points are false.