The GPU company that provided the GPU to render the assets also deserves a cut, don’t you think?
Unity continues to lose money as a business. I think it’s fair to ask a royalty fee from more successful games (since their code constitutes a portion of the game code and assets). But they should do it the way Unreal Engine does. A flat 5% after a $1M revenue threshold. There should be a some sort of verifiable export service from game stores like Steam/GOG that report revenue and that can’t be modified by the developer/publisher that the developer/publisher can then upload to Unity report their revenue.
Hey, when your game runs on my PC or console, I am the one paying the electricity bill for your game. Why the fuck do I have to pay for this, when I already bought the game? Isn’t it enough, that we gamers invest real money and our time into your game? We want to get paid, too!
my pc
Game companies:
Our pc
MSFT: my PC, y’all are guests.
At least game engines provide massive value. Yeah they take a cut, but more money would have ultimately been used to produce a vastly inferior inhouse engine. Yeah Unity’s recent move is douchey, buy it’s still miles better than any of the extortion by app stores. No one can tell me Apple’s curation is worth a 30% cut. Ridiculous.
I don’t think any inhouse engine can be fucked up so badly as to be inferior to Unity.
Apple can enforce their 15% (30% if you make more than a million dollars) because there are no viable alternatives. That may soon change in the EU. Either way, they’re not going to lose a dime over this.
People still pay the Google tax because installing apps from websites is harder. The competitors that do pay Google will get tons of installs while the companies choosing to host their own apps get a niche audience. That’s the value of the Google tax.
No one can tell me Apple’s curation is worth a 30% cut.
I mean, it obviously is, otherwise companies wouldn’t be paying it. The difference is that in the case of the distribution platform, it’s worth it not because it would add any value to the game itself, but because of the monopoly of the platform, which provides value to nobody but the platform.
If fhere was a big app store alternative then devs would put their stuff probably on there. Or at least encourage you to use the alternative store.
There is a marginal benefit in search cost reduction for end users.
Based take
funny how we pay taxes to companies destroying the world
I used to just be concerned with taxes to govt destroying the world. Now I think Snow Crash is prophetic.
Yeah but no one wants to pay for development of open source alternatives
It’s worse when you incorporate taxes.
For a $30 game, Devs may only end up getting $10 after store fees (30%) and taxes ( up to 45% after exchange fees.)
What country levies 45% sales tax?
Depending on the ownership of the product it may be classified as personal income not business income so there would be local taxes plus an extra tax because it is foreign income.
What country tax interaction has 45%
Most. Certainly the USA… Add up all personal taxes paid for income from city to county to state to federal. Don’t forget to add FICA - Medicare, social security (and the self employed additional amount), and any extras that may apply.
Quick math… A developer in CA bringing in 250k/yr (gross) is hitting the 35% fed bracket. Total effective tax just to the fed is almost 23%. State tax same shit effective tax rate is about 8%. City tax may apply, adding 1% or so. OASDI is 6.2%. Medicare adds 1.45%. But self employed so double those. And oops, you make too much so 0.9% Medicare additional tax… Add all that and it’s over 46%.
There’s a roughly $100,000 deduction for nonresident personal income tax and depending on the country, they can also subtract taxes paid on that money in their home country.
I’d hazard a guess anyone making more than insignificant money through app sales would have already formed some sort of legal entity to assign legal and tax liability to.
You would hope.
This is why we need to stop the monopolies and oligopolies. Hopefully this will be a great boost to a rival
Rival must be open source, otherwise we’re doomed to be in this situation again. Go Godot!
I would love there competition to be FOSS. However, I will take anything at this point.
Just wait until you hear what the publisher is going to take!
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listen here u little shit
Better yet, graphics driver inserts ads into games . Scary
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If you want to access a built in audience then you can pay you it. I’m not sympathetic to publishers complaining about Google, Apple and steam. If they want to create their own audience, go for it. Amazon and epic are both trying.
Simping for monopolies is always popular lol
It doesn’t even make sense from a free market perspective, since Apple and Google are government created and protected monopolies.
They are absolutely not government created monopolies. You can download other app stores on Android.
Government created?
Yeah that one is a bit of a headscratcher.
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You joke, but it won’t be too long before NVIDIA charges you a monthly fee to use features like DLSSupreme or some features on a card you already own. Then Intel and AMD will follow with something like Quantum threading for CPUs with four threads per core. Want to run more than one thread per core, pay a monthly subscription fee please.
Deep Learning Super Sampling (with sour cream)
Lol I think Intel already tried that
And the thing about Intel’s plan is that it actually made sense. They sold a $3000 CPU for $2000 with an unlock option for $1500 down the line. Hiring someone to find replacements for the CPU, the server surrounding it, the RAM, and probably the support contract, would be super wasteful when they could unlock the CPU for a $500 extra.
These unlocks weren’t for the general consumers, they were targeting companies that buy computers by the thousands.
Even if you don’t buy the unlock, you’re getting a good deal out of these because the extra die space sitting there will help soak up and spread some of the heat, making cooling solutions cheaper.
I’m pretty sure gaming studios would be mostly fine with paying a percentage of the sales revenue to unity too, the problem is that Unity wants a flat fee even when studios aren’t making any money.
That is Unreal’s model.
I’m pretty sure gaming studios would be mostly fine with paying a percentage of the sales revenue to unity too,
I think the real problem is changing the terms of the agreement and making it retroactive.
Yes, the question is what will happen next year and the year after that.
Pandora’s box has been opened.
Exactly. If they are willing to fuck over the creatives like this the best thing to do is to cut their losses and move to a different engine.
No, fuck that. Paying a game engine for the success of my product is asinine. Absurd.
That’s like car companies asking Uber drivers for a cut of their revenues.
Or knife companies asking restaurants for a cut (heh) of their revenues too.
It’s sheer, sheer greed and nothing more.
Well, unity’s business model was always to make it free and then ask for a fee on revenue because it’s easier for small studios. The alternative business model would be to sell a direct license of the 3D engine, which will likely cost in the 10s of thousands.
It’s expensive building a 3D/game engine, they sell one to you.
I’m not saying their latest move is not a real dick move, but it’s normal that they want to be paid for the product they sell. Uber drivers have paid for their cars, right?
I think there should be some different metric, but for a lets say one man firm trying to be next concernedape and fail, not having huge debt is kinda big deal…
Sure, but per download, and retroactively? Absurd.
I like Reaper’s business model better. Yes, it’s audio, and yes it’s simpler, but it makes more sense. “You poor? Pay USD 60. Pay us USD 240 for the next upgrade when you make it big.” Imagine if they said “pay us 0.10 per download.” It would be total bullshit.
I don’t follow the Uber driver having paid for their cars. Yes, yes they have. Just like game studios paid for the offices, hardware and human resources.
Again, I agree that Unity’s move is bad, they’re just forcing people to their monetisation platform and to a per download system which will hurt a lot of studios.
The 3D/game engine for a studio is, in my opinion, the main tool that game studios will r to make their game. Without it, they won’t be able to develop or it would cost them 100 times more. That’s why I compared to the Uber driver’s car, it’s also his main tool for his job. Both cannot expect to have it free.
I mean, people already pay Unity, people already pay Unreal, people have been paying to use proprietary software since software existed
You can always build your own engine, if you think you can do better. Creating a game engine like Unreal or Unity is anything but an easy task, and they should get renumerated for that work. However, a more sensible pricing model than the shitshow Unity did is Unreal’s: The first $1m in revenue is yours, after that, a constant 5% fee. Sounds reasonable to me.
More like if car companies charged dealerships every time someone started their car.
If it weren’t for their shitty retroactive relicensing, I wouldn’t see the problem. It’s not Unity’s fault that the game you made is a flop.
If they only charged studios that made money, every studio would use creative bookkeeping to license IP from overseas holding companies to come up with a loss year by year. Actually, they already do that, that’s how you don’t pay taxes. You’d be letting the megacorporations have the engine for free while indies would need to pick up the bill.
Google doesn’t force you to pay shit. You can sell your game APK by any means you wish. Valve doesn’t demand any money from you either, go to a competitor or host your own game. Apple’s “app store or bust” 15% fee is the only forced fee to access any users. The rest is just luxury.
“But users don’t want my shitty launcher mechanism” yeah that’s why Google and Valve charge money. Setting up a store ecosystem that follows tax rules around the globe and handles distributing huge files is a pain. Feel free to try to do it yourself if you think you can save money.
Unity is being dicks towards studios by retroactively changing the contract. Unreal did that too a few years ago, although they didn’t add an install fee, just a 5% revenue surcharge, that’s why you didn’t hear about it. But let’s be real here, the value for money you get from Unity is massive.
It wasn’t that long ago that you would pay 100k upfront for an engine like Unity. That engine wouldn’t get any updates and you still had to pay per-seat developer costs. Developing engines is incredibly costly, that’s why the rates are so damn high.
Unity is making hundreds of millions of losses every quarter, of course they’d raise prices eventually. They’ve been a loss leader ever since they went public, and before that they weren’t very profitable either. If you base your business on the Uber of game engines, of course you’re going to get fucked over down the line.
Luckily, engines like Godot exist. You don’t need to pay a dime to get an engine. I expect any developer angry about this to start porting their game to the new engine soon. We still have a few months until the payment fee date starts coming up.
