Tag Archives: Gaming

Unity and Enshittification

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Last week, I wrote about Enshittification, which is a great lead into for what just happened with Unity. Unity is a game development engine. It’s a very popular platform and a number of universities use it as part of their game development degrees. Popular YouTuber Mark Brown, of GameMakersToolKit uses Unity in his series exploring novice game development.

Which is rather unfortunate, because Unity has gone and decided to retroactively add a way to claw back value from game developers. They announced it on 9/12, it is a Run Time Fee for every new install of a game. It might not sound like a lot, $0.20 (at the lowest end) for an install, however, if you are a low priced game, because it’s a small game, that could be 1/5 of your revenue. Add in Steam’s 30% fee, you’re already at 50% of your revenue chewed up in fees. The other challenging part of this fee, is that it would apply to every computer an end user installs the game on.

I have a Steam Deck, a laptop, and a Gaming PC. If I installed a $0.99 game on all three systems, the company that developed by game would have lost 10 cents on my purchase. That’s untenable for game developers. It’s not a survivable product strategy. Game devs and publishers would need to charge at least $2.00 for every game to ensure they made money. Which might kill the viability for that game.

In a related cash grab eX-Twitter is contemplating charging a fee for every user on the platform. No matter how much you use the site, it’s now a subscription price. The benefit of that product was always the free association and random interactions on the platform. Another way it’s been enshittified has been the significant growth of Nazi users.

Companies that dramatically change the terms of use, will drive customers away. They will push companies from the platform or potential companies away. The Developers of Terraria, didn’t even use the engine, have elected to fund two Open Source development engines as a result.

I think it’s important for technology companies to take a long look at what the users are saying in response to Twitter, Unity, Google (and it’s Google Graveyard), and Telecom companies. End Users, the life blood of any platform, avoid these companies and their products as much as they. They do not want to be exploited. It’s toxic.

The executive class do like these schemes as they push up the “value” of their products to the stock market. However, this is ultimately at the expense of their long term revenue and value to customers. Working with your customers, both immediate and end customers, will drive value for your business in the long run. Trust lost is lost value. Don’t enshittify your products.

Saving video games from publishers

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There’s big money in video games. No one can deny that, especially now that the definition of casual gaming has changed from Wii type games, to games on your phone that mimic some really old school type flash games (bejeweled for example). One of the largest game publisher is EA, they have been notorious for making both amazing games (BF4), amazingly bad games, amazing games with poor execution (SimCity), and amazing cash grabs (Dungeon Keeper iPhone). However, it’s not alone in trying to destroy gaming.

Zynga made a pretty big run at the title and likely helped shape the current state of our gaming industry. They were the original most successful company in facebook for gaming coming up with Mobwars and Farmville. They’ve been replaced with King.com (Candy Crush) now though and have nearly gone out of business. At one point they had a higher valuation than Facebook.

The point of these games is similar to a casino. Keep you coming back and keep you putting money into the machine. They design games to be addicting and put frustrating blockers in your way to entice you to pay money to overcome those obstacles. They technically are “Free-to-play” but they certainly aren’t “free-to-have-fun”. For example, about a year ago Real Racing 3 came out and to unlock everything with cash, it would cost $503!

The article that got me thinking about this topic highlights a 1997 game called Dungeon Keeper which has been released on mobile platforms. In the game you build a dungeon and try to kill heroes that come through and kill your monsters. One of the things you do is dig out spaces for your dungeon, this used to just take a minute or two in game time. Well, EA did it’s little cash grab option with it and now that same space will take roughly 30 hours to mine out unless you pay them money to speed that up! Here’s a video with a nice little summary of the topic.

Now, we know that this hasn’t been limited to mobile games for some time. It’d hit the hardcore gamers in the form of Downloadable content (DLC) and in many cases would be a $15 or so charge to make the game functional on top of the $50-$60 you already paid for the game. In some cases they’ll also charge you for other visual upgrades and stuff like that.

In some cases the companies are doing it because it’s a beloved franchise and they know people will fork over the money for it even if they’ve vowed to never buy from that company again (BF4 after SimCity debacle for instance). This is because they are able to charge monopoly prices being the only game in town.

In other cases, they are able to charge this behavior because of the addictiveness of the game and the pressure of your peers playing the same game. It’s a casino mixed with keeping up with the Joneses mentality. The worst of the worst and company are pulling in as much money as they can on it. In many cases those games are straight up copies from other companies – or at least the game mechanics are the same.

This has made some people discouraged over the future of the gaming business model. I believe that we have some of the most generous people in the world in gaming. You have the Extra-Life fund raising event, HumbleBundle, and a ton of other things like that. There are also really honest folks out there trying to break into the industry, just look at Steam Green Light, Kickstarter Games (check out KBMOD’s Crowdsourced corner), and just the sheer number of new games and apps that have a single price and are honest about their pricing (this link will take you to a list of games that are pay upfront or honest free to play).

Which makes me think that we have two different type of people running gaming companies. We clearly have psychopaths at the head of the company and normal regular people trying to do right by their customers. I think the hardest thing is, we have honest people working for those psychopaths, which is unfortunate.

What can we do as gamers and employees? Well, if you think your CEO is a psychopath leave; it’s going to be an unhealthy work environment in general. Secondly, if we want to see those business models die, educate your friends on how horrible this movement is for gaming in general and point them to cheaper alternatives that aren’t cash grabs. Help inform your friends that aren’t savvy about this. Send them links to games that are better, more fun, and less vile in their pricing schemes.

If you have any recommendations for honest, safe gaming, let me know in the comments!