592
Unity backtracks, no runtime fee for sub $1mil or for games on current/old versions
(blog.unity.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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I agree they need to go to rev share, but I don't think restoring trust is really what they are trying to do here. They planned for a good chunk of devs not returning to the engine. Since 80% of users don't pay them anything, and a large percentage of what's left like three hundred bucks (the engine costs several hundred million dollars to maintain) there's not much to lose there., this is likely more about keeping large tier studios and mid tier ones working on mobile games in the ecosystem. They are abandoning their old "seats" model regardless.
I just don't understand this. Godot is fairly comparable in scope and while it is behind Unity somewhat it also has a tiny fraction of the budget. Sometimes just throwing more money at a product does not make it any better any faster.
You're not counting the several millions of dollars required for executive salaries yearly. Those executives are important because how else are you going to drain the life out of the developers who are actually maintaining the thing with useless meetings, bureaucracy, "cultural transitions", and other forms of daily torment?
Unity employs a small army (about 3K) of senior software engineers, that can definitely command upwards of 200K per year, which puts the estimate at 600 million, plus a number of specialists (mathematicians, physicists) for things like cloth and hair simulation, large water body dynamics etc. They maintain compatibility for a huge and growing list of varying hardware devices, computer operating systems, VR headsets, phones, consoles, i think unity games can even run on apple tv, this means they have to get things like floating point operation results reliable on all machines, older x86 processors, RISC chips, etc going back several decades, and even get experts directly from places like Microsoft for features like DOTS C# to native/burst compiler. Most devs don't appreciate just how much commercial game engines handle in the background and make your build process so much easier. It's definitely would take a slew of specialists years to get something basic and usable enough, just to display a couple moving shaded triangles, let alone something robust.
Godot on the other hand while a highly capable engine, is a much lighter weight as by design (Juan L says so himself on the Godot blog). Features like plug and play multiplayer servers, machine learning for NPC behavior, encryption for credit card IAP, either aren't included or havent been implemented as heavily or are only included in the asset store, as a product of a volunteer contributer, as most FOSS software is known to have. Just going through the unity package manager will show off the disgustingly bloated pile of software that is the unity engine. Probably several tens of thousands of packages available that most people will never use.