Too Much Concentration on Mobile?

I've noticed that Unity has really pushed for mobile development, by getting support for iOS Pro and Android Pro, which is really great.

But is it a bit too overdone?

In the new pricing plan, these features are now integrated into Pro, making it more expensive. This is a great compromise for people who want to develop for mobile. But for those who want to develop for PC, these packages don't matter and just add on more of a price for the same tools they've been using for years.

Of course, no one can deny that mobile is a big, opportunistic industry. But I think that a more personalized pricing plan that concentrates, not only on the budget of a developer, but the type of developer, would really benefit both the community and UT.

What do you think?

 

Yes.

 

No.

 

I think that, in a few years, the distinction between mobile and desktop will become academic.

The important/only distinction will be the input mechanism (touch, gamepad, keyboard + mouse).

I think Unity is just aligning it's technology with where it believes the market is heading.

 

I see what you're saying. But I believe that Unity needs to align themselves in the right direction, while not leaving other developers "in the dust" by requiring developers to purchase packages that they really don't want/need.

 

I don't think it has to do with pushing mobile but rather merging all licenses in to one set to ease the maintenance and update cycles. With everyone having all the same features and running on sub they can push features out constant pace and not reserve them for major releases as feature perks anymore. This is the same reason other companies have done similar things.

 

Why not $75 per month for desktop and $125 per month for all?

 

What is desktop? PC, Mac, Linux, Windows Store, WebGL? is VR included? one of the things has been that desktop license has covered so many things that they probably do cost too much to maintain with old price.

 

That seems as if it could work, but UT could lose too much money.

You see, it cost UT a significant amount of money to obtain these packages.

And if enough people aren't interested in the packages and buy the cheaper version, UT won't make enough of a profit.

 

PC/Mac/Linux with PC/Mac/Linux VR included.

 

Riight. I'm guessing you never developed for mobile.

 

Well, desktop developers get more features - real-time PBR HDR lighting, soft shadows, image effects, deferred shading - things that aren't practical to use and/or are unsupported on mobile.

While mobile developers have been mourning the loss of Beast and moaning about lightprobes being broken since 5.0 launched...

 

Mobile developers have always had to pay for multiple platforms they did not use. It is fairer if it is the same for all. But the price increase for desktop developers is a hard pill to swallow.

And I would say much of the focus has been on desktop for Unity 5. Most of the new features were for AAA development and can be only used sparingly with mobile performance requirements, if at all. Many mobile developers are still using Unity 4 as Unity 5 offers nothing new, and switching causes quite a few issues.

 

So that's one huge set of code to develop and maintain with the old cost especially when VR is expanding with various devices and controllers now and in future.

 

I don't think separate platforms make sense in 2016. No competitors do it. Would be a retarded move.

It might make some people happier in the short term though.

 

This is an interesting idea - however looking at it from the other side of the isle - $75 per/mo for the mobile platforms with no desktop deployment and $125 for all.
Same idea from a different perspective.

+1

 

//opinion
I view VR as an optional peripheral with sdk, not a platform.
PC/Mac/Linux are platforms.

 

Oculus/Facebook would disagree

 

Well VR has required a lot of changes to the rendering pipeline and the controlling scheme is different as you are tracking multiple things from multiple devices. Then even more of them coming in the future with no unified API(?). I might not classify them as platforms but not as a simple peripheral either. There are still things that do not work for VR in the engine and probably there will always stuff that has to done differently to support VR/AR devices.

 

Well, Oculus/Facebook are not operating systems, although Facebook is a web platform.

We're heading towards dictionary argument at full speed.

I define "Platform" as either a physical device or an operating system (or family of them). In order for Oculus Rift to be a platform, it must either run games on the headset without any need of external rendering device/computer or it must be an operating system.

Since it requires a computer, it is a peripheral, regardless of how difficult it is to utilize it.

 

Yeah well my point was not about what type thing it is but rather the complexity of the required effort to maintain support now and in the future. Why I asked what is desktop is was to see what Tyler was thinking it includes when he wanted the old price to remain. For others also WebGL and Windows Store might be part of their vision of desktop.

 

Unity definitely needs to integrate the mobile directly into the base package instead of selling the mobile add-ons separately. The previous cost was $1500 for desktop, plus $1500 for iOS, plus $1500 for Android. So mobile devs had to pay either $4500 up front or $225 per month ($2700/year). That was crazy, especially for mobile developers who did not target desktop at all.

Now it is crazy in the other direction. Unity is forcing the mobile bundle on all Pro developers, even those who only target PC. I currently have a Pro license of Unity 5 and I use it to develop a game for desktop (PC, Mac, and Linux). I dabble with mobile stuff some of the time, but I don't currently develop games for mobile. In my case, the new pricing is strictly a major price increase. Instead of paying $1500 for a perpetual license and then $750 to upgrade the license every 2-3 years, Unity is forcing me to pay $125/month ($1500/year). This is a big price hike for a lot of Pro users like myself.

What I will likely do is keep my existing Unity 5 Pro perpetual license and complete my existing game in Unity 5 Pro. The game is already greenlit on Steam, but I still have at least several more months of work on the game before I can release it. Then for my next game, I will need to evaluate all of the game engine options. I really like Unity, but I don't $1500 per year like it.

I think Unity made a good choice in bundling the mobile add-ons into the base package, but I don't think Unity should have increased the price of Pro to cover it. This basically amounts to giving the mobile developers a discount on the backs of the desktop only developers.

A better solution would be for Unity to include the mobile add-ons in the base package ($1500 perpetual or $75 per month), and then find a good middle tier solution to shake some coins out of the free users' pockets. The recently announced "Plus" plan appeals to nobody. If Unity rewrote that plan to include the existing revenue cap but allow the Plus users to remove the splash screen, then Unity could convince a lot of Free/Personal users to upgrade to Plus. Then Unity could use the extra income from Plus users to offset the lost revenues caused by including mobile add-ons in the base package.

 

Definitely do not believe they are too focused on it (honestly, the opposite seems to be true). As a mobile developer, a good chunk of the more recent engine features are more desktop based than mobile (lighting in particular), and also bear in mind that mobile is about the third of the industry, as are the console, and the pc. Unity is a very minor player in console (and console isn't a big area for new developers, even the store sides are pretty small). PC is easier (now) to do well with steam, but still a big chunk of the revenue is in the big titles, and there are many more competitors on the tool/engine side.

However, mobile, on the other hand, while still a majority of the revenue is with the top developers, it isn't locked in (like consoles). Mobile is a better overall opportunity for make good revenue for quality small and medium developers, and a much higher ceiling than the other platforms, and much larger market. Couple that with the fact that Unity dominates mobile development (especially for engines), and it would be understandable that they would be very interested in a certain amount of focus being placed there. But, I think it is pretty clear that they aren't (or don't appear to be) favoring mobile over desktop.

I don't have horse in this race. The cost of Unity has always been super reasonable, and still is, for me. Quadruple the cost, and still would be a great deal. But in my (not valid) opinion, getting rid of separate costs for plugins seems like a no-brainer today. (valid method a few years back). The cost increase does seem a little tough, but I also see that since unity is the big player on mobile, if they just cut the additional cost altogether, it would probably be a huge revenue hit. (cutting revenue from mobile devs to a third of what it was before). Dunno, it seems like a necessary move, but not doable without impacting some users. I'm sure it wasn't an easy decision, and it may evolve if not the right move for Unity.

 

Turn the OP on its head. It's always been odd that mobile devs have had to pay for PC features they never use. I'd imagine mobile has been subsidising PC development for a few years now.

The general price increase sucks, as price increases always do. It's still cheaper then Unreal.

I don't think attempting to force monetisation out of the free users would help. I for one would quickly switch engines. LARP is expensive enough, I can't justify another expensive hobby.

 

I don't really think they focus too much on anything at the moment

 

If you release a hit game with millions in revenues, Unity would be cheaper than Unreal Engine. However, if you release a game that generates some money but is not a big hit, then it is not obvious which engine is cheaper.

Here is the text copied directly from the UE4 page:
"The 5% royalty starts after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. Pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization."

With UE4, you can make up to $1000 per month without paying any royalty. With Unity's new $125/month Pro subscription, Unreal Engine is cheaper until your game exceeds $3500 revenue per month. That is the point where UE4 costs exactly the same price as Unity ($125/month).

NOTE: That is assuming the developer was using either Unity Pro or UE4. If the developer decided to use Unity Personal until they hit the $100k revenue cap, then Unity Personal is obviously cheaper than UE4.

 

My general assumption with anyone that has the intelligence to run a business also has the intelligence to use personal until they hit the revenue cap.

Under that assumption Unity is cheaper in almost every case. The only time Unity looses is where you have a team making more then 100k, but less then 100k per lisence.

 

So urrr, you get a shader, some more shaders and a few more shaders that were mainly available already in Unity 4.X via the asset store? In terms of the renderer there wasn't there a light pre-pass DR already?

Yeah as @moonjump says, a real fine collection of "AAA" development tools right there in the 5.X cycle... (I'm joking, it's mainly a bunch of shaders that were always about)...

The biggest difference has to be the 64-bit editor, which was sorely needed (and the physx upgrade).

I don't think mobile dev's were the only one's mourning the loss of Beast.! Although Enlighten does have it's pro's as well, not completely dismissing it.

 

Mobile is their strong point, I think it makes sense from a business perspective to focus on that. Unreal is just getting better and better on the desktop side, that seems to be a losing battle.

 

This. For example, look at Windows 10 and UWP. They're explicitly trying to eliminate platform differences.

Plus, I think that the license unification is a good thing. It made sense to begin with when iOS and then Android were initially added as the first non-desktop platforms that they had an additional cost. But now they're just two of a huge number of platforms, and they're the only ones that attract an additional cost. Why?

I wouldn't say that Unity's strength is "mobile" so much as I'd say that it is "cross platform". With that in mind it makes little sense to me to arbitrarily treat two platforms differently to the rest. The transition just sucks for people who don't happen to be using those platforms.

 

No competitors charge though either... For CryEngine it seems like indies are just a side project and for Epic it seems like indies are a serious side project. With Unity it's their bread and butter.
I doubt Epic are making tonnes of cash from the 5 percent royalty, but it doesn't really matter anyway because they are a AAA game studio and licensing the engine to other AAA studios.

I'd also say it's a pretty dumb move to change pricing in the middle of a major release... if they left it until Unity 6 and kept selling 5 for a while the backlash would be much less.

 

As someone else said, the gaps between mobile / PC is forever closing. I've not a clue what Unity are thinking half the time, but if nothing else doesn't it make sense to be on a level playing field with it's competitors?

Also UE's not the only other engine on the market, Stingray is $30.00 a month with no cap and CryEngine is essentially free and being realistic there is NO reason you can't make decent games with either. I came across SR because it was free with Maya LT, then out of curiosity realised it had some major advantages..

Like the symbiotic relationship between the DCC and Stingray, the material editor is the same. It has physx and apex support in Maya LT that instantly transfers between the two.. Let's not even get started on the proper vector based UI, the excellent navmesh middleware and the metric bunch of stuff you don't get in Unity. Oh and for those mourning Beast, guess where it is now? Yup Stingray.

Point being, again there's some pretty cool solutions around today.!

It's not like it used to be even three / four years ago, where the best options for indie's were either Unity or UDK with a 25% royalty cut (and a scripting system hardly anyone understood)..

So irrelevant of the "focus" it's time to level the field.

 

Last time i checked Lua coding in Stingray is crap, and complicated to do simple things. Until they support C# i think it won't work as a game developement suite.

 

Lua has been used in game development for quite well for quite some time...

 

Lua is for scripting, if you need a stronger language that is compiled and more efficient you must go C# or C++ for example. Lua is really far away from C# easy object oriented functionnalities also.

 

So what? Didn't stop the guys who did Warhammer Vermintide did it?

 

You mean Vermintide - Mordheim used Unity.

(You can immediately see the difference looking at screenshots of the two games).

It's also interesting that Mordheim didn't list the engine used in their wiki...people are still largely embarassed to be associated with Unity. The whole splash screen thing is a really crazy example of this.

In the large - charging people extra to avoid being associated with your product is a sign that something went kind of wrong somewhere.

 

Same stuff, different name .. Changed it just for you though . HEHE!

Yeah I agree, there's a fair difference in quality between the two..

 

No separate platforms and subscriptions for those that want them and one time payments for those that refuse subscriptions..in my case on principle to start with and trying to milk me for excess money on the other. I can talk the folks I am doing work for into upgrading my license to pro in a one time payment as I owned 12.x to 4.x pro on multiple platforms.,.but not as a monthly payment amounting to five times that one time in the long run.