FileMakerFeller

jimh2 said:

daveinpublic said:

So if someone offers a game for free, and it gets 1,000,000 downloads, and it made the developer $200K in a year....

That developer went from only giving Unity $20K total, to now $200K per month. In one year it will cost them 120x more. It will bankrupt them.

That's the fastest change in price structure I've ever seen. Your game went from making you $180K in a year, to costing you $200K each month.

.20 cents a download is not going to bankrupt anyone. 

$0.20 per month for each download over the limit. It's unclear if Unity will keep track of a rolling 12 month period for revenue (I assume they would) and it's even more unclear what they mean by lifetime installs (does Unity track if a user uninstalls your game? If so, how?).

My read is that if you get $200k revenue per year from your app (using Unity personal or Plus) you can have a maximum of 83,333 extra installs before the cost of the engine equals your revenue - fewer if Unity counts gross revenue rather than net of app store fees. Over the lifetime of the app, that's rather limiting. Basically, once you're making $200k pa you should pay for the Pro version of the Unity engine, at which point you don't get charged extra until you hit $1m p.a. in revenue.

Unity Pro is $2040 per year per seat, billed annually. So for an individual developer already making $200k revenue it is about 1% of their income in return for no extra monthly fees on app downloads (until your annual revenue reaches $1m). From a business perspective I think that's reasonable, but it's a significant change from their previous pricing regime.

As @Marvin pointed out, once you reach tens of millions of downloads you're in uncomfortable territory. You can pay for the Enterprise version ("contact our sales team!") or the Industry version ($4950/seat/year) and reduce your monthly fee by 50% but you're quickly going to reach a point where the licensing costs outweigh your revenue. This is the point where I think Unity will have to back down and negotiate a flat fee or a portion of annual revenue with the game developer, otherwise the game disappears and nobody makes money. My instinct is that any game with >10m installs is going to be able to generate more than $1m annually, but I don't work in the industry so I don't know. I mean, I guess if you ensure that you never charge your user base more than $1m annually you won't have to pay anything to Unity, but that means you're not fully exploiting the commercial potential of the game

Unity's approach has got game developers asking if they need to consider a different engine, on the off chance their game becomes a hit. That's a big problem. I'm sure they've got data telling them that most games aren't going to be killed by their new policy, but by not sharing that information and waiting for the developers to fully grok it before making their licensing change they've let fear tell the story.

I found the skit to be cheesy, and not up to Apple's usual standards - but as William himself notes, it was a good idea with a flawed execution. Apple's pre-recorded presentations are starting to annoy me, especially with the way each speaker ends with "and that's [x product]. Now, back to [person]." Such a rote ending leaves the impression that the speaker only had enough energy for their own segment and now that it's over they've fulfilled their obligation, so it's a sequence of ups and downs - why is it that each speaker is not thrilled to see what else is coming up in the event?

The segment by Joz contained an error, too: initially he said that one of the Resident Evil games was coming out later this year, then at around the 69 minute mark he said they were both due out in 2024. Something tells me he recorded multiple segments that were then edited together.

I too think the skit was too long, but it plays to the sense of corporate boardrooms that TV shows popularise: a whole bunch of flunkies ready to step in when the boss calls on them to provide details. I think Apple wanted to present the impression that everyone on the team is whole-heartedly committed to reducing the environmental impact of the company, but I came away wondering why they hadn't just submitted a report and have Mother Nature come in to confirm the details because she was skeptical but impressed. That's the sort of thing that would fit into a 30-second commercial, which this skit could have been. I would absolutely keep the stare-down between Tim and Octavia - that part reminds me of the inside baseball stories of how Tim conducts meetings.

My suspicion is that, like the "Apple at Work" series of ads, there's a healthy dose of how the rank and file employees feel about working at Apple being infused into the skit. There's always pressure, but with enough commitment your very best might just be good enough. The most recognition you will get is "OK. Good job" and then you're expected to get back to work. You have no control over what you're asked to do and your deadlines will change arbitrarily. But what you're working on ends up with planet-wide impact.

Prediction: when the test is completed, the iPhone will pass with flying colours.

It's entirely possible that an insufficient number of tests was run - while it's more work, you can't rely on the results of a test without repeating it from start to finish (including setup and tear-down) at least twice. It's too easy to make a mistake in the setup that you don't notice the first time. If you get one anomalous reading out of three, you investigate further and repeat the entire process again.

John Siracusa will have an easier tie with his reviews now...

8thman said:

I heard today 9/11 that China’s CCP has a publicity campaign promoting Huawei phones over iPhones.
It’s Nationalistic propaganda. Not good.

It’s a stealthy way to discourage Apple products without an outright ban of public use.

Every nation has publicity campaigns urging people to buy locally-made products. Nothing to see here.