Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Unity, platforms, lock-in and your future.

cliffski

So Unity has changed its pricing structure, and suddenly its not so cheap, and getting rid of that ‘made with unity’ splash screen is a lot more expensive. Thats no surprise to me. that splash screen is like the packaging that says ECONOMY BISCUITS. Its there to guilt you into not wanting to look cheap. Intellectually do I think a game is less worthy if it has that splashscreen on it? Nope. Emotionally do I? Yup. I’m just being honest. Unity know that, which is why they charge you to get rid of it. bis

The unity licensing scheme allows you to earn a certain amount of money before you have to upgrade. Thats sensible, they want a multi-tiered model, its good business practice. Whats also sensible is how they have done this, ie: make the tool so valuable and cheap it become ubiquitous, then start charging for it once everyone is addicted /locked-in.

I hate lock-in. I hate the idea that the free market is limited by the inertia and invisible walls that portals build up. The company you use to do X should be the best company that does X, not the one that already has your preferences saved or your friends list on it. This isn’t some sort of moral crusade by me, its just efficiency. Barriers to entry in a market place lead to inefficiency, and thus a reduction in global happiness. Just ask anyone whose geographical location limits them to one telecoms or internet provider and see how happy they are.

One of my pie-in-the-sky ideas if I leave game development is to set up what would effectively be a high-frequency trading model for energy at the customer level. Rather than locking us in to dumb contracts for 6 or 12 months to buy electricity at a fixed price, I want the option to negotiate with 100+ providers on a second-to-second basis for each watt of power I use. I also want to build that tech into fridges, phone chargers and car charging. I need my Tesla charged in the next ten hours, but I don’t care when, I’d like to have a bot that haggles for me on the open market to pick a time…

anyway, Lock-in is bad for YOU the consumer. Whenever you are locked-in to a product or store or a contract, you lose out. Every-time you are offered a ‘service’ or ‘feature’ that locks you in more, you LOSE some freedom to negotiate at a later stage. The thing is, few people see it like this. They always think you are getting a good deal. Thats the way this stuff works…until you become a casual game publisher and change 70% royalty to 30% or 20% royalty. Yup, that really happened. And do we even have to go in to how little people earn from spotify?

spotify

It really is worth thinking like this. If you have any lock-in or dependency on a tech or company you do not *own*, then you need funds set aside in a ‘what if they turn evil‘ wallet someplace. Similar to a ‘fuck-you’ fund as an employee, you need that WITTE fund. You are probably locked-in WAY more than you think.

  • If your blog is hosted by wordpress or medium or someone similar, they own a  bit of your future.
  • If your game tech is dependent on steamworks they own a bit of your future.
  • If your game community is based around facebook or reddit, they own a bit of your future.
  • If your whole game runs on AWS then they too, own a little bit of your future.

Most people are nice people, most of the time, but businesses change, people retire, businesses get bought out. News item: Microsoft buy Valve tomorrow. Steamworks is now $1,000 a year. You ok? Facebook now wants $1,000 a year for company web pages with > 100 fans. Still ok? Unity changes to a fixed 25% of your revenue model. You OK? You think this cannot happen? or will not happen? you think all these dotcom companies will continue forever with zero profits just to make your life easier?

Yes, I worry about the future a lot. Thats why I’m still here, still indie, still profitable.

6 thoughts on Unity, platforms, lock-in and your future.

  1. I share your opinion. From a business point of view its too risky if you dont own
    your core tech.

    But what are the alternatives ? As i see it, Unity made a lot of projects possible that
    were out of reach before. Switching to another commercial product like Unreal doesnt solve the issue, as they can change their terms in the future as well.

    I see 3 options:

    1.) Reduce the technical scope of your game project until you dont need a Unity-like infrastructure anymore
    2.) Switch to Open Source Tools only => Godot, Blender, etc.; Here you invest lots of additional time and use potentially less polished tools. At least any milestone you reach cant be taken away from you in the future.
    3.) Dont try to make money creating and selling games. Why enter a market where the odds are so badly stacked against you ? :)

    1. or code your own engine. Its only 3D games with photorealistic styles that are really in *need* of something like unreal or unity. There are plenty of free and opensource 2D engines, and TBH writing your own isn’t rocketscience either. Its amazing how many games you can make with a single engine if you know what you are doing.

  2. ‘you think all these dotcom companies will continue forever with zero profits just to make your life easier?’

    I am shocked by such amounts of naivety… Companies, *by design*, do things for their own profits, not yours.

    The reason you can host blogs, store files, receive and send emails, make/save spreadsheets/documents.images, search the Web, locate something on a map, etc. ‘for free” is because… it is not free!
    One great sentence to be remembered is: ‘When you are not paying for something, you are the product’.
    It providing content to anyone worth nothing? Does not anyone knowing your personality, habits, preferences, views, thoughts have the upper-hand on you?

    These companies know you and will sell you stuff and/or sell this information to others and/or use this information to target you in their services, potentially allowing third-party to reach you easier… by paying the origina company for this service, thus generating a hdiden profit on your back!
    If one way or another you make all this information worthless by crippling their system, it might become more visible they want this lost profit back (making you pay for their services), but those techniques are from another era, where some of these dotcom companies seem to be stuck.

    Please stop saying all these services are free. Your life/data is worth much more than the regular payment they would ask you if they were to make you pay for their services. One of the most innovative & vicious big companies of the current era is making huge profits seamingly coming out of nowhere.
    More than they could ever dream of if they started making their services paid for by the users…

    You are however right on the fact people need to control their lives: keep your data where you have control over them, or accept you might lose it and/or it might be used against you. Business fail as part of their lifecycle (which is currently too long and against nature). Promises like ‘your data will never be lost’ or ‘we are using your data to improve your life’ are adamant lies.

    1984 was not designed to be a user guide.
    Minority Report was not supposed to inspire long-term research projects.
    Post-apocalyptic highly-connected-reality universes were not setting a goal.

    1. Just because free means you are product, doesn’t mean they are making money. 10 years later and Twitter still isn’t profitable.

  3. I don’t get the issue with the splash screen. Customers will only see it after buying the game, by that time you already have their money. I don’t think people will ask for a refund just because of the splash screen.

    1. Unity doesn’t have a good rep among gamers with lower end rigs, so devs want to hide it. Also you want to get players into your game as fast as possible. Less adverts is less annoyance for your players.

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