The fact that these decisions are coming down from the ex-CEO of EA Games, who was the CEO when EA was voted “Worst Company in the World”, just makes all this even more entertaining to watch.
GamePass and probably most cheap sales are all going up in flames because Unity has hired a demon to lead them into oblivion.
Microsoft learned never to leave an EA exec at the wheel ten years earlier, with the disastrous launch of the Xbox One. You know, the all seeing, all knowing, all credit card charging privacy invader with its hooks permanently sunk into the internet, and a camera you couldn’t cover, like it was some motherfucking episode of Max Headroom. Allow me to say, “Fuck you, Don Mattrick, and the DRM and surveillance-laden horse you rode in on.”
Right. Here’s how it works: Your game is on Gamepass, and a user installs it. Now instead of Microsoft paying you $0.15, then you paying Unity $0.10, Microsoft will just pay us directly the $0.10, and you still get your $0.05! See, it’s a great deal! Everybody gets their money and you don’t even have to deal with the Unity costs! Please, don’t go!!
Nintendo is gonna lawyer up at the speed of God before they’d pay unity a fucking cent.
I’m sorry, but I’d be more terrified of Microsoft. A company worth more than nations, (current market cap puts it about the 10th richest country in the world), and who routinely tells other companies to pony up - and they do (look up a software audit if you want to see a corporate shakedown).
Sorry to nitpick, but I see the comparison of a company market cap with country GDP a lot and it’s a pet peeve of mine lol. Market cap is the value of the company, while GDP is equivalent to the total “revenue” that a country’s economy generated that year. So a better comparison would be 2022 Microsoft revenue vs 2022 GDP of a country.
And gdp is one of the worst ways to measure the economy of the country.
You don’t need to be sorry. I guess I should rephrase my original statement to say Microsoft could buy unity, and the shareholders might not even notice in the quarterly earnings call.
Will they tho?
It’s unclear if Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are aware of this particular change in policy, and whether they’d be willing to comply with Unity Technologies.
Going into a legal dick measuring match with 3 of the most hardcore litigious corps in the tech world.
Sounds smart.
If they aren’t already paying royalties to Unity on behalf of the devs, then I can almost guarantee they won’t be paying royalties in the future. If they are doing that, then the devs might want to double check their revenue, because that may mean that Unity’s been double-dipping on royalties (taking royalties from distribution through Sony, MS and Nintendo, and then taking them again directly from the devs).
It’s like when CDPR said everyone could get refunds for CP2077 without talking to the stores first, then were shocked when Sony removed it from the PlayStation Store.
Yep, although at least that was a pro-consumer move on CDPR’s part. It’s very understandable why Sony wasn’t happy about it, but it wasn’t a shady move on CDPR’s part. Whereas the same definitely can’t be said for Unity right now.
It’s more, you gotta let your partners know before you announce something major. The reason Sony had to pull it was because they only allow refunds after a certain point on defective games, and they can’t sell a game they know is defective. So the only way they could do blanket refunds is if the game is labeled defective, which means they can’t sell it. Giving Sony a bit of a heads up might’ve meant they could have changed their policy, which would have been better long run for consumers.
Yeah, because Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are companies who would never pass those costs back to the devs or down onto consumers. They’d totally bite the bullet on Unity’s new royalty…
Unity are out of their minds if they think this is at all a good move. All they’re going to do by pushing devs away and pissing off the major distributors is inspire the creation/adoption of a competitor.
Oh I don’t think they imply they will cover the costs. More like the only ones to know exactly the installs will be them, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo , and that’s why is done this way. Also to simplify the billing as well they already pay them for putting the game in their respective stores in one way or another.
Of course they could put a remote call that notified back to them in the game engine… and probably will work this way for PC, but probably the console companies might not be too happy about it.
Afaik the engine already phones home for telemetry, that’s why they’re able to count installs retroactively.
