Sounds like Infineon may owe someone a new satellite soon. At least if it can be shown that they sent NASA bad parts and didn't notify them in time to prevent this failure.
You see, these contractors tend to hire retired admirals and generals directly out of acquisitions positions and onto their boards. The contracts are written in ways that make it hard to punish shoddy work in a way that doesn't make the government side look bad too, so they tend to let slide what is kept out of sight. After all, if someone makes enough noise, then your contract may end up on the news or even worse, on the hill. If that happens, contracts get yanked, people get reassigned or lose their chance at a kushy spot on a board in a few years. It varies by contract and organizations, some are much better run than others and tend to deliver good quality.
After the fees fiasco, many studios began plans to migrate away. I can't help but believe some will move to Unreal or Godot etc for their next projects.
Unity believes they can make up new charges on already released products that upend business models. A higher but predictable percentage of sales can be appealing compared to that.
Yeah. But they entirely reversed that part and also the new fees/royalty scheme is perfectly reasonable cost wise
> A higher but predictable percentage of sales can be appealing compared to that.
Well again the current model is basically identical to Unreal (besides the per seat license) just considerably cheaper.
Of course the real issue is that they believed that they could actually pull that off in the first place and the trust issue stemming from that. At least they got rod off Riccitelo but AFAIK most the of remaining (extremely incompetent) upper management team is still there..
Goodwill and stability have a value too. If it were me and I was in the position where the retracted changes would have endangered my business, I would have at least someone working to ensure that we could pivot to Unreal or another engine if Unity decided to change courses again. "Fool me once, shame on you, if you fool me you can't get fooled again" or something like that.
at face value, yes. In reality, most indies are fine and will rarely reach 1M unless you had a breakout success (and Epic made it clear that you keep the first million, so it's not like you magically go from $999,999 to $950,000). Most AAA will negotiate heavily and not end up paying the 5% royalty. Likely some mix of a flat fee + a much smaller royalty.
True. But I wasn’t really talking about indies (or not only them anyway).
Also the Unity fee/royalty thing doesn’t kick in below 1 million $ AND users, and above that is somewhere between 0.1% and 2.5% depending on your revenue per user (and also is likely negotiable).
Yeah, no worries, I kept up with all the twists and turns of Unity. I was mostly commenting on the outdated changes that people freaked out over. 1m in revenue is fine, 20% per install fee (which is sketchy to track to begin with) after 200k downloads was ludicrous for an indie, especially on mobile. Meanwhile, it still would have been a cheaper deal for the AAA market than UE (especially if you bought enterprise).
If they bumped that old plan to like, $10m Dollars there would have been a lot less outrage. The AAA studios might have revolted but more behind closed doors, as usual.
> 1m in revenue is fine, 20% per install fee (which is sketchy to track to begin with) after 200k downloads was ludicrous for an indie, especially on mobile.
Yeah. But realistically nobody would have paid that much since it would have been cheaper to just update to pro to increase the cap to 1 mill
The funniest thing is that you couldn’t even use Personal if your revenue was above $200k before the price changes in theory there wasn’t a single developer who would have pay the 0.2$ fee per install it at the time of the announcement.. yet it was the source of most of terrible headlines.
it was such an absurd idea for them to even include it (instead of sticking with the 200k cap as they ended up doing afterwards).
Unreal’s royalty is 5%? With the pricing changes Unity’s is 2.5% or as low as 0.N% if you go with the instal fees.
If each of your developers cost 100-200k or more per year the $2000 yearly license fee is not such a big deal. So for commercial games with at least a few people working on the full-time (and especially if the team is much larger) Unity would still be considerably cheaper than Unreal..
The problem is how arbitrary and uneven their pricing model is. Some users might end up paying considerably more than 5% and some less than 0.5% (even when subscription fee is included).
Unreal also has $1,500 per seat/year subscription option if you want actual customer support (IDK how comparable this is what Unity is offering but that’s another matter).
It depends a lot on your pricing structure too. The lower price your game is, the better Unreal looks. Heck at free/open source you’re paying Unreal nothing and Unity a flat rate so then it’s infinite percent of your revenue.
The Unity is fee is capped at 2.5% though. For example is your game is $20 it’s between 0.35-0.55%.
> Heck at free/open source you’re paying Unreal nothing and Unity a flat rate so then it’s infinite percent of your revenue
Unless you’re making < $200k then Unity is entirely free (and the mandatory splash screen is not a thing anymore). So really this only applies if your revenue is between 200k and 1 million (which is certainly not an insignificant proportion of the market but yeah it’s really not that clear cut and depends on your situation, also there is a lot more uncertainty in Unity’s case..).
If you make a million dollars with a “few people” then you should probably be happy to fork over 5% (50k). If you make less than that it’s free.
Sure, royalties can outweigh your per dev costs or cursed “install fees”. But that is contingent on achieving massive success. So shrug. It’s a very fair model imo. Not that per seat fees aren’t also fair.
The driving criteria is really not the fees here but the capabilities of the engine and the familiarity of the team. Or, perhaps, the concern that Unity appears to be an ever growing dumpster fire and possibly even malicious business partner.
Laughing a bit at your $200k game devs for an indie studio.
I’m mostly talking about larger studios with at least 15-20+ people (which isn’t even necessarily that many, the mobile freemium shovelware market is huge).
> massive success.
It’s not though. 1 million is really not a lot (I’m of course not talking about small indie/hobbyist developers that’s an entirely different segment).
Also as bizarre as that whole pricing model debacle was in certain cases they actually made the engine cheaper:
- revenue limit is now per project and 200k instead of 200k (so it’s totally free bellow that/no install fees/no subscription)
- no more mandatory splash screen
The royalty/install only kicks in after 1 mil revenue AND 1 mil users anyway. Also for non free games the install fee can be extremely low:
e.g. your game sells for $20 on average and you sell 12,500 per month you’ll only end up paying about $1350 or 0.54%. On a yearly basis that’s extremely cheap compared to Unreal.
> Unity appears to be an ever growing dumpster fire
Yeah, that’s another matter. I certainly am not a huge fun of many aspects of the engine and especially their overall approach constantly shipping new half finished/broken features abandoning them and then replacing with something eve more broken in a couple of years…
That said it’s still a relatively decent product for certain uses and still massively ahead of any alternatives (including Unreal and Godot) in some segments.
> Laughing a bit at your $200k game devs for an indie studio.
I was certainly not thinking about indie developers. Although while indie is a pretty broad term, $100-200k (overall cost per employee) is certainly not at all unreasonable even for more serious indie studios that are actually making money and are in the US (probably even on the low end, I really doubt you could get a fulltime developer for 100k (salary + taxes + overhead even in the current market..)
> e.g. your game sells for $20 on average and you sell 12,500 per month you’ll only end up paying about $1350 or 0.54%. On a yearly basis that’s extremely cheap compared to Unreal.
Plus 40k per year for the 20 devs that you face even if you don’t ship.
But sure, unreal is a bad choice for shovelware and garbage mobile games.
It is a testament to the great work they do that many people believe that IT does not do much. The work required to keep things working without noticible downtime is hardly trivial.
Thanks I work in IT, I'm a dev, and based my comment on both my own and experience and the dozens of peers I know very well in many companies of the world.
And I reiterate, a large parte of our sector does very little practical work.
Yep! The German version contains a tutorial and a manual, that's why it's larger; unfortunately the Wayback Machine did not go back in time (since I last saw this page) to capture the source code from 2002. :)
I emailed the author to see if I could get the source code to update it for a modern platform. Given the amount of link rot since that time it is unlikely that he replies but hope is eternal.
I started the original in an emulator in the meantime, which reminded me that it had a quite slow simulation rate, which is also tied to responding to keyboard commands.
Spirit is very hit or miss depending on the route. I flew from Orlando to Pensacola and back three times in two weeks earlier this year and was delayed an average of 3 hours every single flight. The reported cause of the delay was "aircraft maintenance" although in two cases the aircraft had been at the airport overnight. The pilot explained to us during announcements that sometimes they skip longer maintenance when planes are there overnight.
Otherwise, I've had okay experiences with Spirit prior to this year but I won't be flying with them again since it is shorter to drive than suffer their constant delays.
