This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they’re switching engines on social media.
That point about social networks is true, but it’s more of a symptom of the internet at large.
Running things on the web isn’t free and most of the major innovation has stemmed from trying to hide that fact from people.
It started in the late 80s with donations to the guy that ran your favorite BBS. But that was not sustainable, so banner ads started showing up, but they didn’t pay out enough. Then the pop-up and was born, but it turns out that people really hate those. So then they did away with them entirely, instead harvesting data about the users to sell to advertisers.
Now, there are basically 2 paths forward. Host your own microservices that connects to a larger network, widely spreading out hosting and storage costs across the userbase. Or, pay a subscription to access a service with the understanding that they won’t advertise or sell your data.
Donations are somewhat sustainable because the per-user cost of having stuff on the internet is super low. So even at $1 USD per month any remotely successful service becomes wildly profitable. People just thought that banner ads would be yet-even-more profitable since they can be applied to everyone who looks at the site, not just regular users.
But in that case, it would be best to do a subscription model of like $10-ish per year.
This would involve an agreement not to sell data, to collect only data with a use demonstrated to be critical to the operation of the service, and a plan to dispose of that data within X amount of time. This also needs a written contract stating that the cost of subscription won’t go more than X% above the user’s pro-rata share of the demonstrated cost of providing the service, consisting of certain very specific purposes (building, servers, ISP, employee revenue, etc.) to avoid cheating for more profit. A subscription service, protected against privacy infringement and price gouging (a profit limit).
If it’s ever going to work this would need to be a government-mandated privacy act. I usually hate government intervention, but this is very much a necessary evil to prevent price gouging.
I only suggest this over donations, because realistically, after upscaling to a global audience, only 5-10% of traffic would be users that choose to donate, increasing costs to around $10-20/month, which yet again lowers the number of people who choose to donate. It stabilizes, but at such a low percentage that it’s unsustainable at a large scale without millionaire donors, and a very small percent willing to pledge $20-30 ish per month throughout the entire product lifetime…
