09-15-2023, 04:51 PM
Nintex dateline='[url=tel:1694555335' wrote: 1694555335[/url]']
Guess this means no more Unity Games on Xbox GamePass.
To be fair the freemium model is becoming unsustainable.
- Selling data to China or ads for kids are off the table because of new EU privacy and digital regulations (and that is still a decent chunk of the market)
- 'Growth' is no longer good enough for investors, they want profits
- Fewer games are being made overall and it is difficult to set-up new game studios in current economic conditions so there aren't many opportunities to sell new software licenses
- After years of heavy competition between Amazon, Google and Microsoft there have been many price increases for cloud hosting recently
Handing an engine with basically free lifetime updates to developers for free without any way to earn revenue from that engine is kind of insane in current conditions.
There was sort of the expectation that if you hit big with your game on a free engine, you would turn around and donate money to the engine guys too but literally nobody does that.
Devs just complain everything is too expensive until the money rolls in.
It’s been 4-5 years since I last paid for it, but Unity was free for personal use, paid for professionals. The Plus and Pro tiers were both paid, I think $600/year and $1300/year, respectively.
One place I worked would not allow me to install the free version on company hardware, even though I would be neither authoring nor creating builds. They would only install Pro, and only allow that if there was budget.
When I worked personal projects, I had been on Pro and tried to downgrade to Plus once my year of Pro was done. Unity wouldn’t allow me to do that, so I switched to personal instead, and they got zero money instead of half a Pro sub.
It’s not free if you’re making sellable items.
It’s just an untenable business model that they further broke without thinking about consequences.