Are unitiys insane pricing decisions affecting ONI and other Klei titles?

[Surrealys]

Hi yall!

Like the title says, since ONI is made with Unity and Unity decided to make the most insane decision I've ever seen, how will this affect ONI and other Klei titles? Do we have word from the devs yet?

Cult of the Lamp f.e. will be deleted on Jan 01st. From what Ive seen other Devs are already stating that they will no longer use Unity in the future and some are stating they will port their game to other engines, which means delays in terms of new content.

[pether]

Unity announcement seems like something that wasn't properly though through, and it surely took eveybody by surprise.

I would assume Klei needs some time to properly plan their strategy now and it might take some time. Unity example shows that it's not a good idea to announce things without thinking through them...

I hope for all the best for Klei and ONI!

[Dracian]

2 hours ago, Surrealys said:

Cult of the Lamp f.e. will be deleted on Jan 01st.

This was a joke by Massive Monster, they will not delete the game on Jan 1st

A lot of topics on steam have this warning :

[Surrealys]

5 hours ago, Dracian said:

This was a joke by Massive Monster, they will not delete the game on Jan 1st

A lot of topics on steam have this warning :

Oh gosh lol - okay then XD

Still a shitty situation for all the devs to be in

Especially since this will hit mostly indy devs...

[blakemw]

There's a few things to check to see how ONI would be effected.

First, does ONI meet the thresholds?

Yes, ONI has sold about 2 million copies, and made lifetime revenue of 32 million. These are well above the thresholds of 200,000 lifetime installs and .annual revenues.

Second: how much would Klei pay?
For that we'd need to know what Unity plan they are using, and how many sales per month. It is likely that ONI is in the 1-100,000 bracket for monthly sales, I wouldn't see it being higher than that unless they release a DLC. That means paying $0.15 on pro or $0.125 on enterprise per install in developed markets, or $0.01 or $0.005 per install in emerging markets.

Technically we also need to figure out how many installs there would be, installs doesn't count re-installs but does count installs on different hardware, I am sure Unity will try to be reasonable around what counts as different hardware (kind of like how Microsoft decides if a computer is the same or different for licence purposes). Some sales have zero installs because the owner never installs or plays the game, this is particularly true when people buy games when they are on sale, I suspect the number of installs per user would be fairly close to "1". (also my understanding is DLC doesn't count, so only sales of ONI matters and not sales of Spaced Out - so if you do think it's a bit more than "1", consider ONI is effectively paying less for people who buy both the base game and DLC)

ONI tends to sell for about $25, maybe that'll go up or down depending on inflation and stuff. But at $25 the unity runtime fee is about 0.5% (half of one percent) of the price, in emerging markets ONI sells for about $8 and the runtime fee would be about 0.125% of the price (1/8th of 1%). By way of comparison, Steam's cut is probably 25% at ONI's revenue level, so for every sale Klei would give about 50x as much to Steam than they do to Unity.

Draw your own conclusions about having to give 0.5% of each sale is going to bankrupt Klei or force them to take a moral stand against tyranny and change game engines.

More seriously, the unity runtime fee is much more likely to significantly impact F2P games particularly low-value "Shovelware" ones (where you make crap and use tons of false advertising to trick people into installing it and watching some ads or maybe pay to remove the ads before realizing the game has no substance), but even then F2P developers are probably spending somewhere from $0.5-1.5 per install in marketing expenses so the unity runtime fee is probably still a relatively small fraction of expenses even for them.

[Lacero]

The real effect here is using an engine where the makers think they can change the rules + fees unilaterally whenever they want and apply them to already sold copies.

That's not a great position to be in no matter the specifics of this particular change.

[psusi]

9 hours ago, Lacero said:

The real effect here is using an engine where the makers think they can change the rules + fees unilaterally whenever they want and apply them to already sold copies.

That's not a great position to be in no matter the specifics of this particular change.

I do wonder what they are smoking to think that they can do that.  One party can't just go and change a contract after the fact.

[Gurgel]

Seems they have started to backpedal rather hard. Will still cost them business and devs will take that into account when selecting an engine now. Such a stupid move. 

[ALCRD]

4 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Seems they have started to backpedal rather hard. Will still cost them business and devs will take that into account when selecting an engine now. Such a stupid move. 

Backpedal? Nah it's just desperate PR talk that translates to "We apologize that YOU are confused. We heard you and we will still shove this pricing plan down your throats but with a bit of sugar on top this time."

They literally pulled off a :

 

 

Which is unbelievable xD

[Gurgel]

Urgh. So even more stupid. Well, does not look like they will have a business anymore in a few years. 

[melquiades]

Oxygen not Included 2, made on Unreal Engine 6 coming soon™.

[ALCRD]

15 hours ago, melquiades said:

Oxygen not Included 2, made on Unreal Engine 6 coming soon™.

I wonder if Godot could handle the kind of calculations ONI does and how well.

[Gurgel]

7 hours ago, ALCRD said:

I wonder if Godot could handle the kind of calculations ONI does and how well.

From what I find, Gedot has C++ support. Using that, near-native multi-threaded performance is clearly possible. The real question is how much Klei would have to port and how many things they would have to re-implement. On the plus-side, most of the calculation in ONI are last-state -> new-state were the order of execution does not matter and parallelism can be done without locking (some stuff is only read and some stuff is only written in a tick, so no synchronization needed). On the minus-side, something like this may mean rewriting most code, implementing a scheduler on top and implementing an interface layer. That could well be too much to make economic sense.

[nakomaru]

There it is. Just like Wizards of the Coast had to lay prostrate before the riotous masses before them, so too did Unity bend the knee.

https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee

[Denis Lebedev]

Changing the game engine automatically throws all mods and the entire mod system into the landfill.

[Gurgel]

23 hours ago, nakomaru said:

There it is. Just like Wizards of the Coast had to lay prostrate before the riotous masses before them, so too did Unity bend the knee.

https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee

Of course, this will not undo the damage. They tried a shameless money-grab and people will remember.