site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28068 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Fresh controversial gaming news.

If you're not familiar with Unity, it's one of the more popular game engines in use today, especially for Indy developers. It's frequently recommended for it's relative ease of use, and up until now, generous licensing. Even if you're a very casual gamer, you've probably played some games built on this platform like Pokemon Go, Beat Saber, or Monument Valley.

Today, Unity has announced some significant pricing changes. Most controversial seems to be that beyond a certain revenue and install threshold, developers will be paying Unity per install of their game. As in, if you uninstall and reinstall the game, the dev gets charged twice.

This has managed to piss off the usual suspects of game developers, games journalists, and gamers. Many an angry comment written by Dorito stained keyboards are flooding messageboards and twitter about how this is the death of gaming. (Tongue-in-cheek by the way, as a non-game developer I find the pricing model half-baked.)

But what's really interesting is the potential for misuse that I predict will occur for the next controversial game. While Unity has said they'll try to limit malicious behavior, they're providing gamers with the ability to charge developers money by essentially clicking the uninstall/reinstall button.

Any predictions for how quickly we see the first weaponization of this tool?

I've been into adult visual novels ever since I discovered Girlfriend Tapes on 4chan, so what I really hope comes out of this is that developers stop building their VNs on Unity and just use fucking Ren'Py, since so many of them seem to neglect crucial features like "save anytime" and "fast-forward through seen dialog" and "conversation log" whenever they reinvent the wheel.

https://kotaku.com/unity-death-threat-texas-sf-offices-town-hall-canceled-1850838902

possibly an attempt by unity devs to paint their critics as terrorists?

Following the ire it provoked, the company has somewhat changed its tune on the plan, confirming it will “only charge for an initial installation.”

or possibly they pissed off hundreds of thousands of people in a very serious way, and a small fraction of those people are angry and crazy enough to do something stupid.

First time I hear of Unity having money problems. Now I'm worried - I've been playing around with the Engine for over ten years now and it never occurred to me that they might simply go out of business and the whole thing might become unavailable to me.

Zorba (IIRC) once convinced me to try out the Unreal Engine instead and I tried it but balked at the sheer size and mass of the thing compared to Unity's relatively light weight. I guess I'll need to upgrade my hardware and start lifting.

I've likewise been playing with it for a decade. It's been my go-to to try to introduce my nephews to programming. A good friend was just putting the finishing touches to a dev tool he wrote for the asset store; he was hoping to make a bit of money, maybe get himself out of his current job working in a warehouse. My company uses it as our engine, and we're far, far too close to release to port to something else now.

It's shit the whole way round. The absolute, unmitigated, self-destructive fuckery is beyond description.

For those wondering about why the install thing and not the revenue thing I think the only workable answer is that they're thinking about unusual business models and game studios that care more about install base for attracting funders. If some studio creates some mobile app or cheap steam game that makes barely any money but uses that to secure a ton of fundings for a much bigger title Unity wants a piece of that funding because they're getting nearly nothing from the current system.

Don't know if it's been mentioned before but I just saw this on Reddit:

https://i.redd.it/1cx57tluj5ob1.png

Doesn't look like the right link?

Thanks, fixed.

Url should point to https://i.redd.it/1cx57tluj5ob1.png

Thanks, fixed.

I think an underappreciated aspect of this whole situation is that according to https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/U/income-statement , Unity Technologies is losing a billion dollars a year and is already 3 billion in debt, with their total market cap being 15 billion. This is a company that's circling the drain; this seems transparently like a hail-mary play that probably fails but maybe brings Unity to profitability.

Legally, I have no idea how big a grey area retroactive ToS changes are; the fact that Unity's doing it implies that they're not obviously illegal but I'm also aware that, in kind of a brute legal realism sense, different domains of law have judges that feel very differently about contracts where the fine print states "also we are allowed to fuck you in arbitrary ways defined by us, no limits, neener neener"

Like: apparently (based on what I've read in Matt Levine articles) corporate debt courts are really really specifically about the letter of the contract; someone puts in the fine print "also we can fuck you at any time" and the judge looks at it and is like "well, it's in the contract, guess you shouldn't have signed that one" which is in large part because corporate debt contracts are assumed to have been extremely well-vetted by lawyers on both sides. Everyone is assumed to be extremely saavy. My suspicion (not a lawyer) is that this is less true of consumer-facing EULAs (like Unity's); if I have a bunch of reddit posts saying "Unity will never fuck our users who sign this contract" and I have a EULA saying "Unity will never fuck our users. Also Unity, in its sole discretion, reserves the right to amend this contract" and then I do the obvious thing-- amend the contract retroactively to allow user-fucking, and then proceed to fuck our users-- I'm not sure how it would fare in court but it's not obvious the judge would love me for that?

Of course, there's also the legal-realism idea of "Unity probably just settles out-of-court with anyone big enough to challenge them, and hoovers up money from indies that can't afford ruinous court fees". Which is of course deeply unethical and also vibes like they're eating their seed corn (since who wants to go into business with a company that has, historically, not been willing to honor contracts.)

My expectation is that this ends with Unity sticking to its guns and declaring bankruptcy in a couple years.

Unity Technologies is losing a billion dollars a year

I guess I'm not surprised about the changes, then, but I had assumed they were profitable given their established market share and how I had assumed their costs were fairly low. Good developers are expensive, but I didn't think Unity themselves had many costs beyond engine development and some seemingly-trivial web hosting (downloads, documentation, forums).

I know they have some adtech business on the side, but I'm rather curious where billions of dollars of annual costs are going: the statement only shows a billion each for development and administration/sales.

As a comparison, Valve is privately held, also publishes a game engine (admittedly, not the most popular one these days), and despite seemingly undirected management seems generally described as profitable. Although they also run a storefront that pays the bills. I guess Epic (the other major engine-publisher) does too.

Another thing about Valve, since you mentioned them: If I recall correctly, as per Tyler McVicker, Valve actually works (or worked?) in the same building/next door to Unity. Valve has even used Unity for their VR tech demos, and McVicker even once speculated that Valve could have switched to using Unity since it was much more developed compared to their own Source 2 Engine, which even today still lacks an SDK as fleshed-out as the first Source Engine's (and, sidenote, it would benefit Valve to strike while the iron is hot by finally going foward with their old plans to put out Source 2 for free and make it a UGC paradise).

I guess I'm not surprised about the changes, then, but I had assumed they were profitable given their established market share and how I had assumed their costs were fairly low.

I also assumed they operated as a small company funded by license and asset store fees, but I guess they wanted to be more than that and tapped into VC funding and now are looking for huge revenue streams.

It's more Unity's an adtech business with some game engine sales on the side; last I heard they had maybe 2/3 of their revenue coming from advertising. App Tracking Transparency savagely brutalized that business model, sadly, and I think Unity's frantically flailing around in search of a different one.

I'm wondering, is there some sort of economic or logistical justification for this fee? Like, does it cost Unity something each time this happens? I had thought that once you develop a game using the engine, then the code is the code, you can deploy it as you wish. Which could be reliant on having constant access to online services or something, but this seems universal for all games. So if you have a chunk of code lying on your SSD that someone pays you to download a copy of, then they install it on their own computers, what's Unity's justification for taking a cut of that particular interaction, given that their input ended once the chunk of code got finished and went gold? Is it just pure rent seeking? It almost feels like Unity wants to insert itself in like an actor earning royalties off syndication, which isn't the most unreasonable thing to try for, but then it seems like these royalties should be taken off the earnings like a tax, rather than off installs, which often don't generate any revenue at all.

The business justification is that he current CEO of Unity formerly occupied a high position in Electronic Arts, and suggested that the publishers should experiment with e.g. charging players for reloading their guns past some point in a gameplay session, when they highly price-insensitive.

Single-player, paid (as in, you pay for them once) games are a rounding error to this kind of a business-brained person. The pricing was made with Genshin Impact in mind, in an attempt to extract more money from Mihoyo (sp?). In a mobile world of freemium games, using "installation" as a measure makes more sense because accounts are revenues are usually tied to that.

I’m not aware of any logistical justification.

It is as you observe: any additional downloads, distributions, surreptitious thumb-drives involve no additional cost to developer or publisher. But this is true of almost all software. Vendors have been trying to capture that value since for ages.

Any predictions for how quickly we see the first weaponization of this tool?

I imagine we'll see a tech demo of a program that just sends Unity the 'I installed this product' code 500 times a second within a few days of that system going into effect.

I'm not sure what the next step in weaponization after that is though, it seems so weird that I imagine the actual nuts-and-bolts implementation will need to be relitigated a dozen times before we have a solid target to consider.

What is the culture war angle to this?

It's the original war, the class war.

The most oppressed minority of all…

But what's really interesting is the potential for misuse that I predict will occur for the next controversial game. While Unity has said they'll try to limit malicious behavior, they're providing gamers with the ability to charge developers money by essentially clicking the uninstall/reinstall button.

Any predictions for how quickly we see the first weaponization of this tool?

I suppose if you do not consider new weapons for the culture war to be part of the culture war, it would be unrelated.

My impression is also that the user base for video games generally trends less woke than the developers, so I would predict this particular weapon getting pointed one way more often than the other, but that remains to be seen.

There is none, unless you want to throw capitalism under the bus for this, which is maybe sort of justified?

Whenever topics of digital business models come up, my default culture war angle is:

This is just a further demonstration that capitalism as currently practiced is not a viable economic method for humanities far future, because it relies on scarcity to set prices through supply and demand, and actual abundance causes it to short circuit in ways that create all kinds of stupid schemes designed to produce and defend artificial scarcity.

Capitalism should remain our default for things that are actually necessarily scarce, but as we increase productivity and move to digital realms that will cover less and less of what we care about day-to-day, so we have to actually come up with an alternate method for handling the creation and distribution of those types of goods.

And we need to not be allergic to that discussion just because 'that's communism and communism killed a trillion people' or w/e.

It's not capitalism that prevents you from sharing the data project that you purchases for no marginal cost with others, it's intellectual property laws. Now if you get rid of those and let capitalism take it's course then you will almost certainly see less of these things invented but you're far from critiquing anything at the heart of capitalism.

What part of

Capitalism should remain our default for things that are actually necessarily scarce,

makes it sound like I'm trying to strike at the heart of capitalism?

This sort of demonstrates my point about 'being allergic to the discussion', whenever you talk about this stuff people assume the old battle lines are in effect and that those must be the 'sides' we're arguing for.

Capitalism (well, free markets) is great in general, I'm just saying it doesn't deal with abundance well because it evolved to handle the distribution of scarce resources. You shouldn't expect it to handle the distribution of post-scarcity goods well, that's not a thing that even existed when it was being formed!

Like I said, capitalism's solution to post-need goods is to impose artificial scarcity; IP laws are one of the ways that this artificial scarcity gets imposed. The fact that without that imposition, capitalism can't incentivize the creation of those goods and they stop existing, is very much a part of my point: that capitalism doesn't have a good solution to this situation.

The real issue here is how to incentivize creation without artificial scarcity.

In theory, the makers of a great game don't care whether they make $50M and a million people play their game, or they make $50M and billion people play their game.

There must be some way for society to get them that $50M without telling those 999 million people they're not allowed to play it. We're not so stupid that this is physically impossible for us to accomplish.

We just have to talk about it and figure it out.

This sort of demonstrates my point about 'being allergic to the discussion', whenever you talk about this stuff people assume the old battle lines are in effect and that those must be the 'sides' we're arguing for.

People assume this because you invoked capitalism for no gain whatsoever. As I've said elsewhere this discussion has happened before with no reference to fundamental economic systems.

Like I said, capitalism's solution to post-need goods is to impose artificial scarcity; IP laws are one of the ways that this artificial scarcity gets imposed. The fact that without that imposition, capitalism can't incentivize the creation of those goods and they stop existing, is very much a part of my point: that capitalism doesn't have a good solution to this situation.

It's not capitalism or markets that doesn't have a solution to this, it's a atomic property of this type of thing. There is no natural solution it's hacks and kludges all the way down.

In theory, the makers of a great game don't care whether they make $50M and a million people play their game, or they make $50M and billion people play their game.

Right, and somethings like price discrimination try to get at this but it's messy. The problem is the same mechanism we use to determine the value of the game is inherent to the scarcity. Something like a government buyout price could be interesting, a studio could opt to sell their languishing IPs straight to the state for some reasonable multiple of the cash earned to date but that's got it's own issues. Again, I'm really not opposed to tweaking the systems in play.

His argument appears to be that Capitalism is why we have intellectual property laws, that the former creates conditions where the latter will always emerge.

But we can insert into IP laws anything we want. Invoking capitalism is purely going to muddy the waters. IP laws are not capitalism, they are an extra-market hack to incentivize the invention of goods that have little to no marginal production costs. @guesswho can propose any other hack they want, and in fact this conversation has happened on the motte without the invocation of capitalism at least once before. The fundamental problem that exists outside of any economic scheme is that some things have high upfront costs, some of which costs are in the form of risk, that needs to be born by someone while the fruits can be endlessly enjoyed by all. IP is actually a pretty elegant solution to balancing these incentives all things considered. I'm happy to listen to other suggestions but we're not going to be talking about capitalism.

I mean, 'the king hires you to be a bard and tells you when and where to play' was one such solution. Not a good one, but there are lots of solutions out there.

My point is that IP laws are a uniquely capitalist solution to the problem, because the whole point of IP laws is to let capitalist price-finding still work on post-scarcity goods.

There would be no benefit to IP laws and artificial scarcity if you weren't trying to achieve that type of price-finding through markets, which is the heart of capitalism.

My point is that IP laws are a uniquely capitalist solution to the problem, because the whole point of IP laws is to let capitalist price-finding still work on post-scarcity goods.

Ok, but you have said we're probably better off keeping the rest of the capitalist(I do quite dislike this term as it implies a kind of rule by capital that I deeply disagree with so unless otherwise specified I'm substituting in 'Market based system with private property rights) system so unless you're proposing replacing that it does need to slot into a capitalist framework. You've proposed central planning with a distribution which has all the problems of the IP system, just as hare brained of schemes would instantly arise to maximize payouts and minimize costs, but lacks the things you get out of the box by going with a capital compatible system.

There would be no benefit to IP laws and artificial scarcity if you weren't trying to achieve that type of price-finding through markets, which is the heart of capitalism.

I agree IP couldn't work if there was nothing to be gained from ownership of the IP but that's just dumping a contextual system into an abyss that tells us practically nothing. What any system that encourages production which has high upfront costs and near zero marginal costs must have is a way to both compensate people who produce things that many people actually want and discourage the production of things that many people don't actually want. And it's a big bonus if it's not susceptible to waste based on signaling games, i.e. many people might say they want more educational programming but if in reality none of it is actually consumed that's a failure in planning.

Sound like you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Private ownership and free markets are great, and they work just fine in digital spaces.

The important part of those institutions is that they encourage useful forms of production (its not that there is zero waste in production, but of all the economic systems that have been tried, capitalism seems to kick ass at efficient allocation of scarce resources). And even though digital goods have very low or nearly zero marginal cost for production, that is not their total cost of production. If producers aren't getting paid for total cost of production than they aren't making things.

Communism gets labelled as killing a bunch of people, mainly because it was such a crappy economic system. I'm not sure if Stalin or Mao entirely meant to kill tens of millions of their own people. But the lack of productivity from their farming systems meant that was not enough food to feed everyone.

The problem with turning digital assets into communal property is you'd likely kill a bunch of incentives to create digital goods. And yes, right now there are plenty of open source projects where skilled developers contribute to projects for no monetary incentives. BUT many of these developers also have jobs at the companies that do sell software. The existence of a bunch of people with engineering and programming skills is probably directly attributable to the fact that a bunch of companies pay top dollar for this skillset. And they pay top dollar, because they can make top dollar on selling the products.

If you kill the incentive to make software products, you kill the companies that hire lots of developers, that kills the incentive to train and create new developers, that kills the open source software movement. We could probably coast for a generation on current levels of talent. But it would absolutely start falling apart. Especially all the boring software projects that make gobs of money but no one actually enjoys doing.

Incentives can exist jn the world without copyright. People written books, created songs and plays before it after all. Internet allows for even more ways to fund your project while making final product free to download, Patreon and Kickstarter devs make a living this way already. You don't need to be a communist to be against intellectual property.

They make a living partly or entirely because there is some level of intellectual property protection. Pirating exists, but it is mostly done on an individual level in the Western World. In third world countries copyright infringement is often on an industrial scale. A lot of successful patreons gate their content, without copyright protection that gating would last all of a few minutes before someone scrapes their new content and posts it elsewhere.

I find it weird to be on the side of defending intellectual property as a thing. I have lots of reservations about it, and I think there is a decent chance I'd be willing to take the tradeoffs with killing off intellectual property as a thing. But I don't ever deny those tradeoffs. Far less art is going to be produced. On the margin some forms of art and artistry that were supported by moneymaking will be almost entirely gone.

Right, which is why I didn't say we should just move to communism and communal property.

I said we need to come up with a new system that accounts for all these problems (the problem of financially disentangling scarce invention and abundant production, such that we can incentivize invention without relying on artificial scarcity).

And my point was that conversations about trying to come up with that new system are often derailed, because anyone who criticizes capitalism and talks about the need for a new system, tends to get tarred as a communist and ignored.

Admittedly, I could have spent more words explaining that part, I just get worried there's a maximum comment length before people start skimming.

Here is as example of a new system that almost certainly wouldn't work, but shows the types of ideas you could discuss... The government measures how much people spend on all digital entertainment products today, and creates a new tax in that amount. Anyone in the country can download and enjoy any digital entertainment they want, for free, at any time. The revenue from the tax gets split among all digital creators proportionally to how many times their product was downloaded, with some type of pro-rating for how long the experience is or how long it should take to produce or etc., details to be worked out by hypothetical domain-expert philosopher kings.

Again, lots of obvious problems with that idea, it's not the one we'd end up on. But it might still be actually better than the current system of artificial scarcity plus rampant piracy, because I think that model is really really bad, and actually deadly when we look at things like medications that cost pennies to produce and billions to invent.

(and note that these types of artificial scarcity goods also include basically all educational materials productivity software from CAD to Photoshop, industrial secrets to improve production or product quality, etc... lots of things that could be shared freely and would massively improve the world if they were, if we just came up with a way to still incentivize their creation)

Ultimately what I'm really fighting here is capitalist realism - the cognitive bias that, because capitalism is what we do have and because it works better than some other systems we have examples of, it must be the only possible system that could be functional and good. I think capitalism (well, free markets, we don't really need the separate capitalist class) is pretty great, but I don't think it's the final form of human endeavor and I don't think it's teh best we can do across every domain and in every situation no matter what. I don't think it's bad, I just have loftier ambitions.

Here is as example of a new system that almost certainly wouldn't work, but shows the types of ideas you could discuss... The government measures how much people spend on all digital entertainment products today, and creates a new tax in that amount. Anyone in the country can download and enjoy any digital entertainment they want, for free, at any time. The revenue from the tax gets split among all digital creators proportionally to how many times their product was downloaded, with some type of pro-rating for how long the experience is or how long it should take to produce or etc., details to be worked out by hypothetical domain-expert philosopher kings.

You're describing spotify.

Pretty much, yeah, except with taxes instead of a subscription model so that every citizen can enjoy it no matter what.

(you could call taxes a subscription to citizenship, I suppose, then it's mostly the same thing)

That's kind of my point though: this isn't actually that weird or complicated of an idea. Lots of people recognize the problem and have tried various solutions (spotify, patreon, stream donations, advertising/product placement, etc). Lots of the solutions work ok, but they still have a lot of problems because they're just patches on the existing system, which is fundamentally unsuited for these situations.

I'm just saying that finding a universal solution that we can use for all post-scarcity goods (including things like medicines that cost billions to invent and pennies to produce) is really really important, and we should be focused on coming up with that solution (and not fall into capitalist realism where we reject all solutions as impossible or evil or w/e).

Pretty much, yeah, except with taxes instead of a subscription model so that every citizen can enjoy it no matter what.

Spotify being a voluntary interaction makes it far superior in my opinion.

I'm just saying that finding a universal solution that we can use for all post-scarcity goods (including things like medicines that cost billions to invent and pennies to produce) is really really important

My point I think is that no such universal solution exists and this search you ask for has been ongoing for as long as this class of high upfront cost low to no marginal cost goods have existed. Capitalism, combined with some regulation, offers a lot of flexibility to tailor specific solutions to specific problems. If you want to say "Hey, we should tweak or even heavily change the regulation component to better achieve our ends" that's a totally valid thing to propose. I myself have a lot of things I'd like to tweak about how IP works in the US. But nowhere in this discussion does some adherence or aversion to 'capitalism' enter the picture.

And my point was that conversations about trying to come up with that new system are often derailed, because anyone who criticizes capitalism and talks about the need for a new system, tends to get tarred as a communist and ignored.

That's because way too many people who criticize capitalism are either vapidly repeating stock phrases, or they think finding new ways to say "Only Marxism can save us from _________" [climate change/racism/police brutality/abuse of copyright/licensing law/neck-bearded gamers] will get them into the Cool Cids Club.

Ok, sure, there are lots of reasons to shut down your critical analysis of what people are actually saying and resort to pattern-matching to canned responses instead. That's definitely how 90+% of normal conversation work, at least.

Not very useful for actually advancing any kind of new thoughts, though.

I'm ready and willing to have a conversation about alternative forms of economic organization. It doesn't mean I won't criticize those ideas. I think you are wasting energy complaining about how a conversation can't be had, when you could instead just be having the conversation you claim can't be had.

Here is as example of a new system that almost certainly wouldn't work, but shows the types of ideas you could discuss... The government measures how much people spend on all digital entertainment products today, and creates a new tax in that amount. Anyone in the country can download and enjoy any digital entertainment they want, for free, at any time. The revenue from the tax gets split among all digital creators proportionally to how many times their product was downloaded, with some type of pro-rating for how long the experience is or how long it should take to produce or etc., details to be worked out by hypothetical domain-expert philosopher kings.

Again, lots of obvious problems with that idea, it's not the one we'd end up on. But it might still be actually better than the current system of artificial scarcity plus rampant piracy, because I think that model is really really bad, and actually deadly when we look at things like medications that cost pennies to produce and billions to invent.

I know you admit there are problems with this, but there are a class of problems that are very important to point out. Practical and implementation issues can often be ignored at first. But one thing that can't be ignored are incentive issues.

When communism first came around everyone was very focused on the technical problems. Like "what is the best way to communally run a farm in the interests of the workers". But they ignored glaring incentive problems like "who gets rewarded for well run farms, and punished for poorly run farms?"

I think your proposal has an incentives disconnect. You are vaguely trying to connect the two through downloads and other proxy measurements. I know you are reluctant to bring up communism, but I have to because this type of proposal is exactly what communist Russia went through. We have historical examples of a country trying to run industries based on some measurements of what is useful about that industry. And the problem with this type of system is so common that it gets a name: GoodHart's Law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

The other incentives disconnect is in thinking that philosopher kings exist. They don't. Real people will be involved in this system. And real people are subject to capture. What happens when the guy in charge of figuring out the measurements owes a favor to someone that would benefit from a change in how the measurements work? This kind of regulatory capture happens so often in the US government. Its not even explicitly corruption. Its just humans being humans. Former regulators get jobs at firms, and then talk with their regulator buddies still working at the regulatory body. It happened plenty in the Soviet System to the point where unless you were a well connected Communist Party insider you would get fucked over by all the other insiders changing the rules, or selectively applying the rules to benefit each other.

The best way to figure out how much someone values something is to ask them how much they want it relative to other resources. Money is a technology for accomplishing this calculation. If the "philsopher-kings" existed and were actually competent I believe they would just exactly recreate money and artificial scarcity. Would you consider the system a failure if it just exactly recreated what we currently have?

Ultimately what I'm really fighting here is capitalist realism - the cognitive bias that, because capitalism is what we do have and because it works better than some other systems we have examples of, it must be the only possible system that could be functional and good. I think capitalism (well, free markets, we don't really need the separate capitalist class) is pretty great, but I don't think it's the final form of human endeavor and I don't think it's teh best we can do across every domain and in every situation no matter what. I don't think it's bad, I just have loftier ambitions.

I don't think free markets work as well without ownership. I am familiar with many different kinds of economic systems. It is my area of interest and study. If there is a new idea about how economic distribution can work, I'd be very interested to hear. The vague outline of what you proposed is not new though. Its central economic planning. It is often associated with communism, but the Western "capitalist" nations experimented with it as well. It tends to fail outside of niche uses. For rather straightforward reasons, some of which I outlined above:

  1. Differences in assigned goal/measurements for producers vs what consumers actually want. Typically results in overproduction of things that easily meet the measurements, and underproduction of things that don't easily meet the measurements. It also often results in poor quality.
  2. Political capture of the planners / philosopher kings at the top.
  3. Information problems and the loss of local knowledge. Central planning often create big plans, but then when local circumstances interrupted the plans there was little ability to adjust.

If you are looking for entirely new economic systems, reading Robin Hanson is your best bet. Most people I've talked with that don't like capitalism and try to come up with something else ultimately just reinvent some form of communism, socialism, or central planning. Capitalism is not the default because people like it. Almost everyone hates capitalism. Its the default because every other idea that seemed even slightly plausible has been tried, and many of them have failed horribly. Its the default because the country that sort of stuck with it and gave it some lip service, did way better than all the countries that said "lets try something else".

So let me start by saying why I do actually think it's very important to litigate whether such a discussion can be had and how it should be had. The reason being that I don't expect anyone on this forum to be the type of world-class expert who could invent an actually workable new system, nor to have the influence and following to get it implemented if they did. We can certainly discuss such thing for fun, but I wouldn't expect them to lead anywhere.

On the other hand, I do think the members of this forum (and similar ones all over the place) have slightly more collective ability to influence discussion norms and memetic patterns around these types of issues. Not much, certainly, I don't think we're going to change the world just because we decide that one type of discussion should be more legitimized and taken more seriously. But I do think we're a lot more likely to be one useful drop in that particular tidal wave of changing the discussion norms to a place needed for a solution to be found, than to be useful in the process of actually discovering and promoting the next economic model the world ends up using.

And I think your response here does somewhat demonstrate the problem with the discussion that I'm trying to call out here. Any mention of government involvement gets rounded off to central planning, any questioning of the capitalist class gets rounded off to no private property, everything gets lumped into the category of communism, the whole thing is dismissed because communism never works in practice.

I think these are in large part cached responses, which get in the way of fairly considering my (admittedly bad and poorly thought out!) proposal. I think they get in the way of discussing actual good proposals, too.

In detail:

I think your proposal has an incentives disconnect. You are vaguely trying to connect the two through downloads and other proxy measurements. I know you are reluctant to bring up communism, but I have to because this type of proposal is exactly what communist Russia went through. We have historical examples of a country trying to run industries based on some measurements of what is useful about that industry. And the problem with this type of system is so common that it gets a name: GoodHart's Law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"... The best way to figure out how much someone values something is to ask them how much they want it relative to other resources. Money is a technology for accomplishing this calculation.

I feel this is kind of unfair to my proposal: the proxy measure I suggest is people actually voluntarily using the thing, which is pretty much how markets work already.

I agree that you can get into Goodhart's law problems if you distribute money based on how many people use/want a thing, but I think they're pretty much the exact same problems you have in current capitalist markets; see the Marvel supremacy, and other trash popular culture.

I agree that price discovery is the best way we have to fairly distribute economic incentives and resources. The problem I'm trying to solve is how to do that without artificial scarcity.

My proposal here was that instead of using money as the scarce resource that people allocate among alternative, we use their time. Entertainment already works this way in practice: more is produced than anyone could ever consume, people decide what to spend their limited free time on. People deciding what to spend their scarce leisure time on is fairly isomorphic to people deciding what to spend their scarce money on; I think you would find the same types of price discovery in such a system.

And I don't think that's really anything like 'central planning'.

I don't think free markets work as well without ownership.

And I didn't say no private ownership of anything, I said no capitalists. This was just a parenthetical not really related to my proposal, so I'll explain more:

I think price discovery through free and competitive markets is a great piece of social technology, which I've already said we should keep in place for all scarce resources.

I don't buy that such a market system requires a separate ruling class of capitalists who own the means of production, while everyone else has to sell their labor to those people to survive.

I think you could have an equally efficient free market economy where everyone owned (individually or in partnerships) the means of production for whatever they produce, where they did not work for anyone else and their labor was not alienated, but where they still produced goods under their own direction to sell on the market.

I think the fact that we call competitive free markets (or sometimes, just any type of trading general!) 'capitalism' is basically the result of very successful propaganda efforts by the capitalists elites, intended to make us identify them personally with all our economic success. I think that's a motivated narrative that has much more to do with politics and power relations than it has to do with economics, and I don't think it's actually true.

I think free markets are the powerhouse here, and the capitalist ruling class are basically riding its coattails and not contributing much.

Capitalism is not the default because people like it. Almost everyone hates capitalism. Its the default because every other idea that seemed even slightly plausible has been tried, and many of them have failed horribly.

First of all, there was a time when feudalism was the best possible economic system, way more productive than anything else anyone had tried. We're not at the end of history yet, there's no reason to think the future can't come up with more improvements just like the past did. And I'm saying that all these appeals to past failures are slowing down that process.

Second, I'm talking about how to efficiently distribute digital goods. No kidding no countries in the 1600s or 1800s or 1950s came up with a good solution for that problem, it didn't exist at the time.

Again, this demonstrates why I think the tendency to round everything off to communism gets in the way of actually discussing the topic at hand.

I think they're pretty much the exact same problems you have in current capitalist markets; see the Marvel supremacy, and other trash popular culture.

This is snobbery.

As is most of what we talk about here.

So let me start by saying why I do actually think it's very important to litigate whether such a discussion can be had and how it should be had. The reason being that I don't expect anyone on this forum to be the type of world-class expert who could invent an actually workable new system, nor to have the influence and following to get it implemented if they did. We can certainly discuss such thing for fun, but I wouldn't expect them to lead anywhere.

Its all for fun around here. We take the fun a little seriously though, and have discussion norms and rules.

And I think your response here does somewhat demonstrate the problem with the discussion that I'm trying to call out here. Any mention of government involvement gets rounded off to central planning, any questioning of the capitalist class gets rounded off to no private property, everything gets lumped into the category of communism, the whole thing is dismissed because communism never works in practice.

I am not trying to be dismissive. But I was only given so much to go off of. And what you wrote sounds explicitly like central planning. I think you'd be frustrated with me if I said we are going to talk about free markets and private ownership, but only as they theoretically exist, and that you bringing up real world examples of capitalism is just you being dismissive. I also believe I kept my criticisms generally theoretical. The one point where I dipped into the practical was to disagree with your claim that the system you proposed is new or novel.

There are people who say "communism sounds nice in theory, but it doesn't work in practice". I am not one of those people. I say communism fails in theory. Central planning fails in theory. The theory of how it fails was predicted before they were ever tried. The people who claimed it would fail in theory lost the intellectual debate in the early 1900's. And countries went on to try those things anyways. And then they failed in practice as well.

I am happy to stick purely to theoretical discussions. As you said and I agreed, this is a discussion for fun, and getting bogged down in historical fights is usually not as fun for me, and much more of a time sink.

I feel this is kind of unfair to my proposal: the proxy measure I suggest is people actually voluntarily using the thing, which is pretty much how markets work already.

Its similar, and the differences are subtle. But those subtle differences are very important.

  1. Resource scarcity among consumers matters because it allows for niche uses that are highly valued by those users. I've found that there are often free programs that can do just about anything I want available online. However, there are also often paid software products that serve the same purpose, and I often find myself paying for the superior product when I need to save time and effort.
  2. The quality of the product matters, and the wrong usage statistics will reward poor quality. If you went by "time spent using a program" you might create horror shows of programs that are intentionally slow, confusing, and hard to use.
  3. Measurements can be gamed. Just like you discussed elsewhere with weaponzing download counters. Imagine devs were paid by the download or the hours used. They would have an incentive to artificially run up those counts (it would potentially require draconian levels of surveillance to prevent this abuse).

I agree that you can get into Goodhart's law problems if you distribute money based on how many people use/want a thing, but I think they're pretty much the exact same problems you have in current capitalist markets; see the Marvel supremacy, and other trash popular culture.

I'm not 100% sure I follow the point you are making here. But I would say to keep in mind that the system you proposed sounds like it might be a fixed allocation. Like collect $1 billion in taxes and distribute that among the software makers. But markets are not fixed allocation. Everyone could get sick of Marvel movies and stop going to watch them tomorrow, and they just spend their money on something completely different. People could get sick of computers and go outside to touch some grass.

My proposal here was that instead of using money as the scarce resource that people allocate among alternative, we use their time. Entertainment already works this way in practice: more is produced than anyone could ever consume, people decide what to spend their limited free time on. People deciding what to spend their scarce leisure time on is fairly isomorphic to people deciding what to spend their scarce money on; I think you would find the same types of price discovery in such a system.

And I don't think that's really anything like 'central planning'.

You are right, in the new digital world this proposal might not end up being central planning. This sort of thing was impossible before. So you had people whose job it was to figure out which products were needed, and then they'd go tell producers what was needed. These ended up being the central planners.

I think there are two scenarios where your proposal ends up being central planning anyways:

  1. People don't want a draconian level of software surveillance on their machines to determine usage hours, and to make sure they aren't just artificially pumping up usage hours.
  2. The political class does not like the distribution of goods, and steps in to "correct" it. For example, lets say no one produces any software that is usable by disabled people, because it is too much effort for too low of a reward from a small number of users. So central planners add boosts in payouts if it is also usable by disabled people.

And I didn't say no private ownership of anything, I said no capitalists. This was just a parenthetical not really related to my proposal, so I'll explain more:

I think price discovery through free and competitive markets is a great piece of social technology, which I've already said we should keep in place for all scarce resources.

I don't buy that such a market system requires a separate ruling class of capitalists who own the means of production, while everyone else has to sell their labor to those people to survive.

I have to let the real world for a minute. Most Americans are capitalists. About 53% own stocks in a corporation. Most Americans are also workers who sell their labor to someone else. Thinking of these as two separate classes often feels a little outdated to me. I suppose in Marx's time it might have made sense to have this division. It doesn't really make sense anymore.

Having to work to survive is the default state of humanity. Tribal people 10k years ago didn't just lay around all day and have food drop out of the sky onto their laps. They worked.

There is a small class of people that does not have to work to survive. That group has been growing as the total amount of wealth in our society has increased. I get the impulse to say 'thats not fair, distribute it so we all don't have to work'. But the raw numbers just don't work out. There isn't enough money among rich people. Even if you said "screw the rest of the world" there isn't even enough money among the American rich to lift the American poor permanently out of poverty. Probably at the point it is possible it won't be necessary.

I think you could have an equally efficient free market economy where everyone owned (individually or in partnerships) the means of production for whatever they produce, where they did not work for anyone else and their labor was not alienated, but where they still produced goods under their own direction to sell on the market.

I would personally hate this, for multiple reasons:

  1. Its highly risky. There are capital investments that often need to be made into production. When the capital I own and the labor I produce are in the same industry its called "having all your eggs in one basket". Its a bad financial strategy. What makes sense is to work in one industry and have stock and savings invested in a different industry that has opposite reactions to shocks in the market. Its not easy to do, but that is the optimal strategy.
  2. I've often disliked some my co-workers. I don't need to like someone to work with them. There is a whole social etiquette for being polite at work called "professionalism". I would absolutely not want to be in a situation where those people were also my boss in some capacity. Worker co-ops can have nasty in-fighting and politics going on. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
  3. I've had lazy co-workers. Shirking is an age old problem. (Real world alert: it was a major problem in soviet factories.) Why work hard when you can instead not work hard and still get paid well? You might say its because they own part of the endeavor, but you also included partnerships. My brother is currently in a business partnership with a guy, they each own 50% of the company. My brother's business partner spends most of his days on the golf course. My brother has a family to feed and can't afford to match the level of effort his business partner is putting in, he desperately needs the business to succeed. The problems with shirking become much worse when you don't have an easily legible way of determining someone's productivity.

The first and third reason are also reasons why a lot of people shouldn't like that kind of system. The second reason might really excite some and scare off others. Depends on how you feel when you hear the term "office politics". If it fills you with dread, then this system would be far worse.

I think the fact that we call competitive free markets (or sometimes, just any type of trading general!) 'capitalism' is basically the result of very successful propaganda efforts by the capitalists elites, intended to make us identify them personally with all our economic success. I think that's a motivated narrative that has much more to do with politics and power relations than it has to do with economics, and I don't think it's actually true. I think free markets are the powerhouse here, and the capitalist ruling class are basically riding its coattails and not contributing much.

Investing capital into useful and productive endeavors is not easy. If you think it is, you must be filthy rich from the stock market.

And the alternative to investing money is consuming it. I almost feel like we've pulled a giant con on the economic elite. We've convinced them that the number in their bank account matters more for their social standing than any kind of actual spending. With the kind of wealth that billionaires have to thrown around, they could be spending it on much more ridiculous things. Trump kinda makes the most sense to me. He had vanity projects, stuck his name on high class but low profitability things like golf courses, used his wealth to stroke his ego on TV, and then used it to run for office and acquire power that wasn't limited by what could merely be purchased. But Trump is not the norm for the ultra wealthy. Many of them hide away, live relatively modestly, and just quietly re-invest the money. And then they pass away leaving the money to their kids who don't have to work for one or two generations.

Again though, most Americans are capitalists and workers. It is ridiculously easy to be a capitalist in America. And it makes sense, capital markets are awesome. Instead of only getting to keep what I earn from work, I can be frugal and have my wealth grow itself. Yes, very people get access to it as well.

First of all, there was a time when feudalism was the best possible economic system, way more productive than anything else anyone had tried. We're not at the end of history yet, there's no reason to think the future can't come up with more improvements just like the past did. And I'm saying that all these appeals to past failures are slowing down that process.

I kinda get the point, but also its wrong. Feudalism was a stable political system in Europe, it wasn't necessarily super productive. But even within Europe the cities were the centers of productivity, and the cities weren't feudal. You are right that history isn't over yet. But I'd heavily bet that the near future is capitalist. And I'd avoid betting on the far future altogether.

Second, I'm talking about how to efficiently distribute digital goods. No kidding no countries in the 1600s or 1800s or 1950s came up with a good solution for that problem, it didn't exist at the time. Again, this demonstrates why I think the tendency to round everything off to communism gets in the way of actually discussing the topic at hand.

Economists have categorized goods for a while, and digital goods fit within these categories.

Rivalrous vs non-rivalrous. (does one person's consumption leave less for someone else. Digital goods are non-rivalrous. So are lighthouses.)

Excludable vs non-excludable. (Can the producer easily stop people from consuming the good. Example: A fireworks show in the sky isn't easily excludable.)

Rivalrous + excludable = private good (most things)

Rivalrous + non-excludable = Common good (the commons. Example: fish in the ocean)

Non-rivalrous + excludable = club good (example: a musical performance in a closed building. But also all digital goods)

Non-rivalrous + non-excludable = Public good (the justification economists give for government to exist is to provide public goods. Military defense is one of the old examples of this. My personal favorite example is asteroid defense.

Economics is an old discipline. Just because some new technology has come along, doesn't mean there isn't already a framework for thinking about it. I don't feel that digital goods are all that unique.

An important piece of history here is that Unity basically made their entire popularity on being the one engine that, despite being subpar to the likes of Crytech or Unreal, had a very indie friendly business model and was much more user friendly in the first place..

It's both why so many indie games use it, why there's a whole subgenre of shitty slop made in it using asset swaps, and why it's grown so popular despite clear technical issues.

This move is essentially turning against the original customer base once you've got big enough you don't need them anymore, what I believe people call "selling out".

Good news for Godot and other FOSS alternatives. And RMS was right again.

Yeah I donno. I think Unity's business model was always to infantilize the "developers" who want to make games, but are so technically incompetent Unity is basically their only choice. Then turn the screws and begin printing money with their captured audience. Especially devs who became dependent on their asset store.

Unity became popular primarily because it's easy. The business model was unobtrusive/invisible to your average less than 10,000 sales and/or never actually publish indie dev/hobbyist. It was icing on the cake not because it was good, because it wasn't explicitly terrible.

This is anecdotal but I was into amateur gamedev at the time it started to get popular and got to know at least two separate people who mentioned to me that they picked it specifically because of the nice licensing deal vs Unreal. It might have been cope or rationalization of lazy technical choices, but it clearly entered into the decision.

As for whether they always intended to tighten the screw, I don't have a clue.

I haven't developed in anything so don't have an educated opinion, but what engine would someone use if they were "technically competent"?

As a rule I hate reinventing the wheel - I suspect you and I may be different in that regard. I have approximately 0 interest in building a game engine from scratch or even some common component support like 2-D menus or whatever.

ZorbaTHut's rant was accurate the day it was written, and an excellent read. I'd argue Godot is getting closer to usability, and Unreal remains The Default Engine Of Choice for a normal team with any serious programming chops unless they have a very unusual use case of very specific philosophy they need to bring.

what engine would someone use if they were "technical competent"?

To the maximal degree, the answer is usually "write your own" or use some very light ECS library to do it. But technical prowess is only one of the factors you have to take into account. What your team already knows, how big it is, what is available that might help what you're trying to build on which platform are all also important.

I donno man. My biases are to hate things more the further away from the metal, and the more layers of abstraction there are. I've never actually finished a game I started making either. Maybe if I were more open to shitty engines I would have.

I will say, I most enjoyed making a game when I was just keeping it simple with C and SDL2.

What OS do you run on your daily driver system?

Always been a gamer first, so I've been stuck on Windows. Win10 currently. But god damned if the enshitification of Windows isn't driving me to Linux when Win10 lapses out of support. I have a spare computer I keep meaning to put Linux on just to start acclimating to trying to game on Linux.

I'm in the same position; but I suspect I'll end up giving WSL a try instead. (I've used Cygwin for decades.)

Modern Windows pisses me off so much. What the hell, Microsoft.

Has modern Windows really gotten worse? These days I basically use Windows as a boot loader for the ~20% of my video games that won't run on Linux or a console, but during the era when I was giving up on Windows it seemed to me like it was mostly improving, albeit not fast enough for my liking. Vista was a step back from XP but it was still way better than ME or original NT; ME was a step back from 98 but it was still way better than 3.1.

More comments

Most people are up in arms about the fact that this charges for any install, not just unique installs. But this seems like a giant nothingburger because nothing in the blogpost specifically says it's not unique installs. Doing (or switching to) a fee per unique install basically solves all the issues people have while still accomplishing Unity's goal of charging per install. Charging for any install is just so transparently abuseable that anyone should be able to see how much of an obviously bad idea it is.

Charging for any install is just so transparently abuseable that anyone should be able to see how much of an obviously bad idea it is.

Actually they clarified - you're wrong, they are charging for any install. Go read the thread on their official forums. It is in fact so transparently abuseable that anyone should be able to see how much of an obviously bad idea it is.

They clarified - you're wrong, they are only charging for the first install.

They've made multiple conflicting statements in different places! When I made my post I'd seen official communications from Unity workers on their forums stating that separate installs would be counted.

That's a policy change, not a clarification. At launch (and as recently as yesterday), they fully intended for each installation to be charged and made clear statements to that effect. Afterwards (2023-09-13), they changed their mind and will implement a slightly different policy.

Do you have a source for this?

It's in the article you linked (among other places):

After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity'sWhitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.)

They said one thing, then they had a meeting, then they said a second thing which is incompatible with the first. You don't "clarify" a statement when you completely negate what you said.

And how exactly do they think they're going to limit paying customers ability to install and reinstall their games? Always online DRM? Force the game dev to include some library so installs can be tracked? And they are going to filter that REST endpoint by unique customer ID? They are somehow going to keep that rest point from being slammed with fake traffic or being trolled by DDOS?

Is their installer going to fail secure and deny you the ability to install the game unless it can call the mothership? This is a complete shitshow even theoretically.

Force the game dev to include some library so installs can be tracked?

The engine already has analytics built in that do most of what's needed to track this.

Sure, but what's the engine gonna do when it fails to contact the analytics servers? (Maybe its launched in a firewalled container or some other DNS shenanigans.). Refuse to run? Nag the players? What a dumpsterfire

I think you might have misunderstood. The one that has to pay is the developer.

End users aren't being charged, so there's no reason for them to mess with firewalls or DNS settings. Maybe a tiny handful might try to support the devs by blocking Unity's tracking beacon, but 99%+ will just hit the Install button as usual.

"You pay us when your product gets pirated", basically. No wonder it's such a popular idea.

If a developer modifies the engine to remove the analytics then they'll be looking at a fat lawsuit from Unity. If endusers or piracy cracking scenes or whatever do it then I don't think Unity will care since most users aren't going to bother.

i checked and the fee doesnt apply to games that arent making at least $200 000 a year or that dont have over 200 000 installs

since you need to be paid for an install in the first place, how is having your income taxed any more controversial than every single other company taxing you for hosting your games on them?

You generally pay for a copy rather than an install, I can install and uninstall my Steam games as many times as I want.

Not for f2p mobile games, most installs are from non paying (or at best ad revenue generating) customers

The developer receives money when the customer buys the game as a one-time transaction. The developer does not get any money when the user installs their game - so if someone has a PC in the office, a laptop they take with them for business and a home gaming PC, after paying the developer once they then install the game three times. If this person updates their hardware or refreshes their OS, this counts as an additional three installs. A game that was sold with unity two years ago and made a profit under the old system is now going to actively lose the developer money anytime someone plays or installs it. Furthermore, there is nothing stopping a bad actor from paying for the game once and then installing it on 500 virtual machines in order to put a competing game studio out of business. For free to play games, every single customer who is not a whale is actively costing the developer money. Releasing a demo? That also now actively costs the developer money. If a developer's game gets pirated repeatedly, the developer will be charged for the privilege!

Yeah, there's no way the swathes of smaller and independent developers who've put time into Unity will ever accept this; they simply cannot afford it, nor will they countenance something like the infamous install limits of Bioshock or Spore (assuming they could even wrangle that kind of DRM capability). Honestly, even the bigger developers would balk at this idea, and no big corporate publisher would ever allow a studio to use Unity for this reason.

I would absolutely love to be a fly on the wall in the meeting where they tell Nintendo that not only are they are going to have to pay them a 20 cent fee every time a Unity game gets installed on a Nintendo platform but that Unity is going to be using their own proprietary way to determine those numbers. There are actually even more layers of broken stupidity to this decision than it seems at first glance.

Realistically I think what happens is Unity goes up to Nintendo and says "please pay me 100 million dollars for all these installs I see using my proprietary methods" and Nintendo is like "i will counteroffer with this Twix bar" and Unity looks at the Twix bar, compares it to the prospect of a lengthy and expensive trial vs the Nintendo legal team, and accepts the counteroffer. Repeat with Microsoft et al.

Eh, I'm sure it'll be fine. Nintendo execs are famously pretty chill.

Any predictions for how quickly we see the first weaponization of this tool?

If the changes aren't rescinded/cancelled, we will see every single older unity game removed not just from sale but altered to prevent installation. The costs/benefits with this new system are so incredibly dumb that there's no way to justify using Unity at all - even without assuming purposeful sabotage, the disconnect between revenue and costs is too great. They've actually admitted that they don't have a way to prevent pirate installs from counting, and hitting F5 on a game that's being rendered in a browser also dings the developer for fifteen cents. If a developer makes 2 dollars profit after selling a game, all it takes is a user reinstalling the game 15 times for that sale to actually end up losing the developer money! If a game goes onto Gamepass or some other service, it just immediately destroys the developer's bank account - and don't forget that if it supports something like Xcloud that's even more expensive! They've also spoken about how one of their sources for information on installs is going to come from asking app store owners - which I highly doubt is going to actually work. This either gets cancelled or Unity gets destroyed as an engine and nobody uses it anymore. They're proposing a fee structure so great that even massive games like Genshin Impact would be better off completely retooling and switching to Unreal or some other engine framework.

Makes sense why John Riccitiello sold a bunch of shares before making this announcement!

Makes sense why John Riccitiello sold a bunch of shares before making this announcement!

Just seeing this man's name makes my blood boil a little, even now. I know that EA has been bad for years, no matter who the CEO is, but his tenure had some real sore spots to it (specifically, I believe he was CEO in the same era when EA killed so many beloved studios like Westwood and Bullfrog).

He also called a vast swathe of their developers "fucking idiots" for prioritising making a good game over monetisation strategies! He's another example of someone who isn't just talentless but actually possesses negative talent, riding a wave of golden parachutes as he fails upwards and gets rewarded for bad decisions. Kind of a microcosm of a lot of issues I talk about on the motte generally!

He even compared such developers to Ferrari for their practices, which, while I understand the point he's making about the high-level concepts, is such a weak dunk that it underflows into becoming a compliment.

But FirmWeird, a game that makes a lot of money is a good game, otherwise customers wouldn't be paying for it!

obligatory /s

They've actually admitted that they don't have a way to prevent pirate installs from counting, and hitting F5 on a game that's being rendered in a browser also dings the developer for fifteen cents.

where did they admit that?

In a thread on their developer forum they mentioned that they have some experience with tracking fraud from companies and they're going to be using that knowledgebase/talking to stakeholders - i.e. they don't have an actual way to track this yet. The response from other developers was largely "Your system has big false positive rates and doesn't work well", so I'm looking forward to seeing how they work this out.

Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.

Source, for the curious.

Wow. Thank you for the link. I thought surely this must be some kind of nonsense gone viral, but no, that's "Unity Technologies" @ unity.com, isn't it?

It actually is. That statement may have been superseded by a more recent one alluded to upthread (I haven't looked into it in depth), but they definitely did say that.

wow, i really expected them to be more competent than given credit, but i guess they actually made a terrible system

Epic Megagames must be rubbing their hands with glee right now. They are the developer of the Unreal Engine; probably Unity's only competitor. Either the industry tolerates this change of charge per install and they get to copy it and increase their profits, or they see their competitor take a big hit to reputation and income.

My current speculative work around involves devs using game streaming experiences to limit installs ('a G-force NOW exclusive!'), but this could be 'patched out' of Unity's next TOS/Contract.

You might think devs would just jump ship from Unity to Unreal. But, IMHO, any self respecting dev that is using Unity is retarded in the first place, and is likely to struggle significantly using any other tool.

I mean, I'm no elite game developer. I've aspired. I've dabbled. I written shitty prototypes for games I've never finished in XNA, Unity, C with SDL2, C with GLUT, x86 assembly and 6502 assembly. Unity was by far the easiest, and the worst. If you are doing what it wants you to do, it's literally drag and drop. If you aren't doing what it wants you to do, the work explodes 1000 times, to not just write you own systems, but to stop the built in systems from fucking up your shit. At least that was my amateur experience with it. Unity is a skillset I'm not sure transfers to anywhere else.

But I donno, maybe someone with more experience can chime in. Like I said, unpublished amateur here.

Well, Monument Valley, Kerbal Space Program, Pokemon Go devs may be not self respecting but it seems going too far. Or not truly relevant.

In the same boat as you. Former amateur game dev, mostly in the traditional roguelike genre. Unity is that perfect mix of "I can do 75% of what I want to do really quickly. But the last 25% is going to be wild."

At the risk of pissing off many other developers, it gives me Python vibes in that respect.

Some of the more successful games use parts of Unity then circumvent it for stuff like the actual game engine. Rimworld for example.

That was my experience working in Unity shops. Use gameobject/tick system at a very basic level but actual gameplay handled in custom code. It also provided a useable cross platform build/deploy pipeline in an era where people still cannot make basic business applications that work on both iOS and Android (or are just websites wrapped in a buggy browser app).

ZorbaTHut has a bunch of great rants about Unity, but this one is usually what I link to, because I think the Tide has gotten a lot closer very quickly. GameMaker's a lot more attractive now for simple games doing exactly what the engine wants, and Godot's gotten much better just since he wrote that rant.

Note that he still recommends using Unity in some cases (at that time!).

Good read! Speaking of Godot, they capitalized by announcing their new gofundme today. Good bit of PR.

As someone who has a high level of annoyance with the Unity bug where the edge of the area detected by the mouse is about 5 pixels short of the edge of the screen, I hope this leades to more developers choosing other engines.

I'd wager that the per-install charge is an extreme change they introduced to see how far they could push things. The media and general focus on this particular change means that the other significant changes, which will earn them much more money, receive less attention. If the outrage becomes too much, they can easily roll back this specific change while keeping the others and people will be happy that they, "won," If the backlash isn't as intense, it's a substantial benefit for them.

I believe the potential for abuse you suggest is easily manageable. Even if the per-install charge remains, it's fairly straightforward to make it so that installs only count within a specific time window. An install would only be charged if it occurs 24 hours after the the previous install. Gamers are quick to rage, but it's doubtful that they'd have the patience to continuously install and uninstall everyday.

Even if someone were to create a script that gamers might run in the background to do the install and uninstalling for them, activity like that is pretty easy to detect, especially if done on a scale that could impact a company. Unity is trying to maximize its profits from game creators, but not to the level that it would drive them away from the platform. If behavior occurred at a scale that truly cost the game creator, it would be detrimental to Unity. In that scenario, I'm sure Unity would identify it as abuse, investigate, and likely just knock off the charge against the creator affected.

On top of that games made on Unity aren't usually the ones that incite extreme outrage. The most notable games crafted on Unity are still "midlevel" titles. Games that truly enrage gamers are usually those produced by big-budget companies that mishandle microtransactions (like Star Wars Battlefront) or ones that promise the world and fall apart on release (think Cyberpunk). But games like that titles generally built on custom engines. I can't think of a single game made on unity that has inspired a level of intense outrage from gamers.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats